“Once You Stop Learning, You Start Dying”
I’ve always loved this quote from Albert Einstein. It can apply to many aspects of our lives.
But is all learning equal? How to make learning more impactful? How to keep learning what matters? What matters?
Fascinating questions that I’m going to deconstruct in future posts.
First, here are some thoughts on the importance of nurturing a continuous improvement mindset.
I’m not going to talk about the techniques themselves. Many reviews on Lean or Six Sigma methods cover such aspects.
No, what I’m referring to is more the mindset that these methods can inspire to help you improve virtually all aspects of your business and life.
Improvement is not the same as problem-solving
Here’s some good news: your business – or your life – is not all about problems needing resolution.
Of course, there are broken aspects you always need to fix. Still, if you solely focus on problem-solving, at best, you’ll only restore previous performance.
You won’t progress.
To truly improve, you need to let enough room for innovation and risk-taking. So, keep exploring the market problems you and your organization are uniquely positioned to solve. Don’t limit your efforts to what’s just in your wheelhouse.
Apply Your Existing Best Practices to New Domains
Often, new leaders try to bring too much external wisdom into their organization. They’re looking at outside best practices and trying to adapt them to their own business.
The learning curve can get quite long and discouraging. Instead, I’ve seen successful companies look at the skills and capabilities that already made them successful and apply them to new market opportunities.
Examples of such reinvention include massive successes like American Express – from money orders and traveler checks to credit cards – or Amazon – successfully expanding from online bookselling to worldwide eCommerce dominance.
They expanded their existing best practices to new market opportunities and grew.
Conduct experiments in a small and continuous way.
Spotting correct market problems to address and knowing how to best solve them is so complicated that failure is more the norm than an exception.
Yet, suppose you tune your approach and start testing your ideas on a small scale. You’ll be able to reach conclusions faster and with not-so-dramatic consequences for your business.
The key is to conduct such experiments continuously. Then, once you find an idea that seems to work, double down on tuning it and making it shine. Hence, it becomes part of your DNA, and you’ll make meaningful progress.
This approach is becoming the norm for product development in the Tech Industry. The most successful companies, from Google to Apple, have adopted continuous problem qualification, discovery, and experimentation.
I highly recommend Marty Cagan’s book Empowered if you want to learn more about it.
__________________________________
So, step back and think about your approach to improvement for you and your organization:
- Are you more of a problem-solver or an “improver”?
- What best practices do you already master that you could leverage for new market opportunities?
- How are you discovering and testing new ideas?
If you genuinely want to succeed, nurture an environment that celebrates genuine improvement. Make continuous discovery and experimentation a crucial part of established processes. And importantly, accept failure for what it truly is: the opportunity to learn and improve.