Our Own Medicine

Over the last 12 years, I have spent thousands of hours held up in conference rooms, battling with employees adamant about the wildness of their process delivery.?

???Hours, hours, and hours.?

We created thousands of artifacts that demonstrate individual process flows, each decorated with colorful post-it notes and markers.?

As a facilitator, I learned to navigate those conversations and downward spirals into fun and

exciting discussions about what is possible to change.?

We hacked these meetings all kinds of ways, from silent process mapping to Google Docs to Miro boards.

Today, with advances in technology, those thousands of hours are quickly vanishing.?

I know what you’re thinking.?

This isn’t where I tell you that AI is the wave of the future and you need to be ready to adopt it.? (Don’t worry, I saved that for the next newsletter.)?

Instead, this is where I let you know that our company has spent the past year diving deeply into the ways we can improve our process improvement techniques.

So many of our friends in the process improvement world still force subject matter experts into classrooms and conference rooms to battle it out in order to create gorgeous yet indecipherable process maps.

These unreadable artifacts create a false sense of transformation.?

Making change in a process isn’t about making pretty maps; it is about actually changing the process.?

And creating flatter, less complicated, and simpler processes.?

Recently, I worked with a permitting department whose stated goal in their work with me was to: “Help us demonstrate to the Mayor how complicated the permits are.”

Our goal shouldn’t be to explain how complicated these processes are…

…our goal is to remove difficult process steps and create simpler process flows.

Removing complexity is the goal.?

As a continuous improvement person, I have to ask myself:?

How am I facilitating, teaching, and coaching in ways that improve over the years??

What am I doing to change my teaching approaches?

Am I removing waste in my own processes?

If our projects are still following the old style of rapid improvements (five days in a room to fight it out)—did I, as a practitioner, follow my own advice??

There are many answers to these questions.?

A part of the change has to be moving away from the windowless classrooms and into simpler discovery discussions.?

Creating less time-consuming workshops where employees do not feel like they are being held hostage for days and coming out with a new roll of paper with a bunch of taped up sticky notes.

How can we change this dynamic??

What can we do to engage, empower, and listen to our customers as they move through changing their processes?

We have to taste the sourness of our own medicine.?

We can’t preach one thing and not apply it to our own lives.?

Because if we’re saying one thing and doing another, our lack of integrity shows?

We have to be self-aware enough to take our own medicine—no matter how sour it tastes.?

Without self-awareness, bad habits in our personal lives thrive.?

And without self-awareness in our work processes, bad habits at work become so daunting that we’re afraid to go to work on Mondays.?

When our processes start to change, we can change too.?

And when we’re self-aware enough to improve our work processes…

…our Sundays suddenly start to feel less scary.?

P.S. To end on a cliffhanger, I have an exciting announcement next month—so stay tuned.?