Wednesday, June 6, 2012

What is improvement?

People assume they know that continuous improvement is. But many of them are mistaken.

The most fundamental idea behind continuous improvement is that it is improvement of a process, not a product.

Let's say you're putting together a lesson plan. The lesson plan is a product. Should you improve it? Of course, but how can your improvement of this lesson plan be applied to other lesson plans? If you improve your process of creating great lesson plans, all your lesson plans will improve.

If you make a list of your improvements, what should your list look like?

• An improvement is something you've done. Adding a task to your to-do list is not an improvement.
• An improvement to a process is far more important than an improvement to a product. If you need to obsess over a product to make it perfect, you're doing it wrong unless you're also improving your ability to make the next product perfect without obsessing.
• Don't assume that just because you've obsessed over something you've learned from the experience. We fool ourselves then we think that just because we know something today, we'll remember it tomorrow.

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Keywords: continuous improvement