I know that the majority of you would agree that it’s incredibly frustrating to feel as though our lives have become stagnant. More and more often, people are seeking opportunities which not only align with their values and beliefs but also provide these chances to develop and grow. This is why the topic of continuous improvement has become so hotly discussed in recent years. People are looking into how they can efficiently and productively facilitate their continued growth and self-improvement. This process of learning how to incorporate continuous improvement and development into our life allows us to build motivation and progress towards the goals we truly want to achieve in life. Is this something that you’re interested in? The good news is that, I’m going to outline why continuous improvement is important and how you can strive for it in your life to in order to achieve YOUR unique goals.
What is Continuous Improvement?
Continuous improvement is based on the idea that even when things are good, they could be better. Continually improving helps us to deliver on our goals and better meet the needs of our daily life. For example, finding ways to become either more productive or remove inefficiency from your life could both be outcomes of your efforts to improve continually. Basically, continuous improvements help us to ensure that we’re functioning as efficiently, effectively, and accurately as possible. There are many different methods through which we can pursue continuous improvement, such as through using the Deming Cycle.[1] This plan-do-check-act cycle involves first planning for the change, implementing the change, monitoring to see if that change makes a difference, and then acting on a larger scale if the change was successful. You could also attain continuous improvement through self-evaluation.[2] Despite the variety of continuous improvement methods, they can usually be segregated into either the incremental improvement category or the breakthrough improvement category.
Incremental vs Breakthrough Improvements
It is possible to achieve continuous improvement using only one of these two methods. However, the best practices tend to combine the two.
Incremental Continuous Improvement
Incremental continuous improvements involve making small tweaks to a system as problems and challenges are found. Through this process, we are able to make small changes and corrections without having to review the entire process. For example, imagine that you’re tasked with editing and proofreading a website for the organization you work for every week. As you work through the webpages, each you notice one or two broken links and you update them. This would be an example of incremental continuous improvement. You are making small changes to the website that help it function at peak efficiency without having to review the entire system as a whole.
Breakthrough Continuous Improvement
Breakthrough continuous improvements contrast incremental ones. Breakthrough improvements involve making large changes to a system or process and usually involves a large-scale review. The time and effort invested in breakthrough continuous improvements are larger than incremental improvements, but the results typically generate larger revisions and bring about larger changes more quickly. Let’s return to the webpage example. Imagine that the organization you’re working for has decided to use a new operating system and a new theme for the webpage which significantly alters the design, formatting, and functionality. Now a much larger update is needed than correcting a few links to keep the webpage working efficiently. Yes, you’ll have to invest more upfront to make these changes, but the results will likely yield a significantly updated and more modern webpage.
Benefits of Continuous Improvements
The benefits of making continuous improvements are clear. These practices help you to constantly be better yourself, your team, your organization, etc.[3] Remember, nothing is every perfect and there is always going to be room to tweak and make improvements. Small incremental charges or large breakthrough changes can both bring about continuous improvement. Are your daily routines holding you back in some way? Maybe it’s time to add/subtract a few things and make some small incremental changes to better your life. Or, it could be time to completely redesign your lifestyle to attempt to skyrocket your productivity immediately. This isn’t a complicated concept or even a difficult one to implement once you understand it. But learning about continuous improvement methods such as the PDCA cycle, selecting one which works best for you, and implementing it in your life means that there’s practically nothing you won’t benefit from. So now that you understand what continuous improvement is and how it can potentially benefit your life, it’s time to discuss how you go about incorporating these continuous improvement methods into your daily routine.
How to Establish Continuous Improvement
Though you could try to tackle continuous improvement without a clear process, you will likely be much more successful if you set a plan to follow. The method I’ll outline today is one that we’ve already briefly mentioned, the PDCA cycle. Though this model is often used within companies and organizations, it can also be applied to each unique individual. The steps of the PDCA cycle include:[4]
Planning: Identifying and preparing for the change. Doing: Implementing the change and attempt to improve the process. Checking: Monitoring the results and outcomes of the change. Acting: Implementing the change on a larger scale and applying it to other areas of your life as applicable.
The best way to utilize the PDCA when you’re starting out is by making small incremental changes rather than large breakthrough ones. Smaller changes are easier to manage and you can simply make these changes as problems arise in your life on the fly. No need to consult anyone or seek guidance as you might need to for much larger breakthrough improvements.
Planning Phase: Clearly Define the Problem and Target Solution
Clearly Define the Problem
As problems arise, your first step in this continuous improvement process is to clearly identify the problem. If you don’t define the problem clearly your solution will lack both accuracy and effectiveness. Ask yourself questions such as:
What is the problem here? Who or what is the problem impacting and how is it having this impacts? When does the problem commonly occur? Why has this become an issue now? What are the consequences of this problem? What would the ideal result of overcoming this problem?
Your answers to these questions should help you clearly define the problem in question. Once you’ve got a clear understanding of what the problem is, what its impacts are, and how it’s occurring, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Establish a Potential Solution
Now that you understand the problem, you need to brainstorm some potential solutions and decide which you believe is the best. Now, the solutions that you come up with will be unique to the problem in question. For example, imagine that you’re wasting 30 minutes each morning in bed as you scroll through social media on your mobile phone. There are many potential solutions to this problem. You may decide that you should leave your phone on the other side of the room. You might decide to leave your phone outside of your bedroom each night. Or, you could simply lock yourself out of social media for the morning. All of these are potential solutions. The main criteria for an effective solution should be that it helps you to overcome, correct, and prevent the consequences of the problem from occurring in the future. Your job is to now decide which of your brainstormed solution meets these criteria best. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next step of this continuous improvement cycle.
Doing Phase: Test Your Change
Now that you’ve established a potential solution that you feel best addresses the problem, it’s time to implement it. If you want to achieve continuous improvement, obviously you need to take action! To do this, you need to set up a small trial. If we use the social media example above, a potential trial could be to test your solution for a week. The purpose of the trial is to ensure that you track this issue/problem closely for the designated time-frame. This will ensure that you’re effectively addressing the problem and not shaking your life up a bit and then forgetting about it. Additionally, through monitoring, you can make minor tweaks to your solution throughout the trial period if there are issues with it. This will help prevent you from creating more issues than you are solving. Once the trial phase is over and your small-scale test is complete, you can move onto the next step!
Checking Phase: Review the Trial
Now that you’ve completed your trial phase and have the results you know whether your solution worked or whether it needs more work. If your solution worked flawlessly, that is awesome! However, many times you’re going to find that your solution will require tweaking as additional issues you hadn’t predicted make themselves apparent. It’s just the reality of continuous improvement that not every solution you implement will be a winner. But don’t worry, failure is just a stepping stone. Let’s take a look at this in action by returning to the social media example outlined above. Imagine that you’ve selected the solution to place your mobile phone outside of your bedroom. You believe this will force you to get up each morning and start your day before checking your phone. Now you’re going to run the trial for a week. Initially, the trial went well. However, after the first few days, you noticed that you ended up just grabbing your phone from outside of your room and sitting on the couch to check social media. This causes you to tweak your solution by adding an app on your phone to lock yourself out of social media accounts for the first few hours of each day. Now you return to the trial phase and complete the process.
Acting Phase: Implement and Apply the Solution
Congrats! You’ve identified a problem in your life, implemented a solution, and tweaked it to correct for any unforeseen issues. Now it’s time to implement that solution for the long-term to make a real significant change in your life. How you decide is best to do this will depend on the situation. I find that the best ways to do this are through looking to other areas of your life where this solution could be applied. This helps to engrain it into your lifestyle. For example, maybe you also struggle with wasting time before you go to sleep on social media. If this is a habit you want to eliminate, you can now transfer the solution you just tested to this problem as well. Now that you’ve successfully addressed the initial issue with a solution that you’ve fully integrated into your life, it’s time to start the cycle over. After all, this process of continuous improvement is only continuous if you commit to continually improving different aspects of your life. After you’ve got some experience with the PDCA cycle, you’ll find each subsequent improvement slightly easier to implement. Be warned though, the process can be addicting. Once you start, you might find that you don’t want to stop!
Final Thoughts
Continuous improvement is one of the ways through which you can continually work to better your life. One day you’ll be able to look back at this process you underwent and view it as its own reward. Hopefully, this article motivates you to get working to better your life, even if it’s already pretty good. There’s always room for improvement. If you commit to a process of continuous improvement such as the PDCA cycle, hopefully, you’ll minimize the time you spend looking back on your life and wishing that you had done more. I hope this article motivates, inspires, and provides you with the knowledge necessary to push yourself to reach your full potential as you make small continuous improvements each and every day.
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Featured photo credit: ROOM via unsplash.com
