Adopt New Ideas Quickly and Retire Failed Ideas Swiftly

Here’s a great article for the Harvard Business Review about process improvement, where they come from, and quickly adopting new ideas and quickly killing ones that don’t work as planned.

The article: Three Things Your Company Can Learn from a Bottle of Water

“In fact, the research for our book Repeatability shows that more than 80% of companies are too slow to adapt to the changing demands of their markets. But the relative handful that do learn rapidly hold interesting lessons for all of us. These companies work with their front-line employees to create repeatable routines that foster continuous learning, improvement and adaptation. ”

“3 lessons learned:”

1.  Set simple targets, and assign clear owners
2. Codify the tools that work
3. Create platforms for best-practice sharing

We’ve adopted this strategy within my teams.  We work collaboratively with the resources doing the work.  They are the best one’s to make recommendations.  We adopt quickly and retire swiftly.  Not all ideas are going to work, but the few that do will make a big difference. Creating an environment of continuous improvement from anyone in the organization is critical to your business success.