Wednesday, March 14, 2012

How quickly do you learn?

Many of us keep making the same mistakes over and over. We often make a habit of making the same mistakes. We date the wrong people, we're habitually late for appointments, we put off projects for too long, we reach too far for a ladle of gravy and it drips on the tablecloth...these are a few among many common habitual mistakes. When we make mistakes habitually, we are failing to learn from our experience.

In an organization, each mistake represents a gap in knowledge or execution. The process is imperfect. But the mistake has provided an opportunity: to span the knowledge gap or to perfect the execution. Every mistake gives us the opportunity to learn.

Embrace mistakes! Seek out the imperfections! They are our friends! They are our path to improvement. Given a mistake or imperfection, we now have a specific problem to solve, a specific answer to find or a specific experiment to run. We can improve!

Once the answer has been found or the experiment has been run, put the new knowledge to work. How? Make plans and processes explicit. Then improve the processes as more is learned.

Who else needs to know about this discovery? Share the learning. And if you don't know who in particular needs to know the new answer you've found, share it to a wiki or a database or even just a knowledge base of articles in a shared folder that others can search.

Then do it all again. Learn more quickly than anyone else. It's the one true defensible advantage.

Posted at 12:00 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: continuous improvement, habits