Corporate amnesia

Tom Breur

7 May 2013

The road to success is paved with carcasses. You try some ‘great’ idea that doesn’t turn out to be such a huge success as you thought. Companies launch carefully planned campaigns that fail spectacularly, nonetheless. Afterwards it’s often easy to explain why. In hindsight…

The same holds for continuous improvement. It’s a cornerstone of Agile practices. We reflect on our own success in changing working practices (alas, sometimes lack of it L). We learn from it, and do more of it. We make the improvement “stick” by imbuing the entire organisation with the lessons learned. That way, we don’t have to learn again “the hard way” what didn’t work. Overcome corporate amnesia. And prevent the 20/20 hindsight depression (“I should have known better…”).

The question is: how do you make learning from your own change efforts a habit. And then, how do you turn that habit into your default mode of operation. If you continuously improve only a tiny little bit, after a while you do get noticeably better. And better. And even better, yet.

Besides careful planning to avoid having to deal with “implementation setbacks” that could have been foreseen, you can also build sharing of lessons into your “regular” work. By making continuous improvement the norm, it transcends from a deliberate periodic (ad hoc) effort into something you do every day, all the time. Imagine where that might lead you!

You can get there by embedding production and improvement into the structure of your organisation. Disentangle production targets and ownership of improvement. Assign equitable responsibilities across the management hierarchy so that you make continuous improvement the default, rather than a “project”, or “duty.”