Improve Something Today (Page 7)

Learning

Starting a new project? 3 things to figure out immediately

A child is squatting down on a rocky beach and staring intently into a stream. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

The things I do before I do anything & why they’re worth the effort.

I’m starting a new client project next week. Now, I’ve been at this for a long time—it’s consulting project #74 (& yours could be #75!). Along the way, I cobbled together a short checklist for the first days of a new engagement.

Here it is:

understand the project,
understand the client, &
understand the work.

Sounds simple—and it sometimes is—but I’ve watched skilled people create problems for themselves by rushing in. Hell, I’ve been one of those people.

Understanding the project

Take as given some sort of plan or statement of work or agreed-upon outcome—which is great, but not what I’m interested in up front.

Instead, the very first thing I wonder is: who wants the results of this work to be good (also, what might ‘good’ mean for them)? And the second thing is: who is worried it will be bad (and what are they worried about)? I might host a premortem in order to get people talking specifically about the bad things that might happen. This helps me suss out who cares about what, and who else should have been included that hasn’t been (yet).

I am also drawing pictures in order to answer questions like: why this work? and why now? A round of ecocycle planning can bring this to light. Another approach is to map the value chain, which will reveal some dependencies, possibly hidden, and clarify what’s super important and what’s not.

Understanding the client

How does a client want to interact with the consultant or the consulting team? ← You would be amazed at how often consultants do not ask this.

I follow Jerry Weinberg’s advice (“Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients”) but it’s an invitation, not a demand. Some clients want to work “at the elbow” and participate in the mess from beginning to end. Others want to check in weekly, or monthly. Dial this in and you’ll know whether to work with the metaphorical garage door up or down.

When getting to know a new client, I will pay attention to what they react to in materials (documents, plans, etc.) and what it’ll take to get good feedback on those materials. I remember the client for whom we did a full style adherence pass on even the roughest drafts and sketchiest ideas before putting thing in front of them—because otherwise we’d get a sequence of comments about images being imperfectly aligned and nothing else. And that’s OK—giving thoughtful feedback is hard and people are busy. Sometimes clients, or their teams, need an idiosyncratic feedback container & review process (example) in order to elicit the right kind of notes at the right time.

At the same time, I figure out how to make myself easy to fire. I recently ended a project 2 months early due to my client’s budget getting jerked around. This came at precisely the worst time: I was close to wrapping up, but not quite finished. Even so, I was able to hand things over in an orderly way. I’d kept things organized as we went, so the various transitions (or “knowledge transfers,” to use the unlovely jargon) were easy to make. I could focus on communication and relationship and problem-solving, rather than scrambling to claw half-baked work items together.

An old consulting boss said she never wanted her clients to create a dependency on our services. There’s always more work to do, and people mostly remember how they felt at the end of something, no matter how miserable the middle portion was. Being easy to fire means that I can always find time at the end of a project—even when they end early or suddenly—to make the ending nice and calm and appropriately bittersweet for everybody.

Understanding the work

Finally, I will begin to indulge my curiosity. Not just in the work specifically entailed in the project, but in everything surrounding it. This is the fun part! It’s also where, as my friend Andre says, “every project is a lean project.” I start this by going to where the work happens, and spending time with the lowest-status people doing the work, and paying attention. The point is to learn the process, notice where it breaks down, and find the places where success hinges on tacit knowledge.

↑ Read my field guide on the 6 MISSED wastes for more on how to do this.

When people tell me things like “we don’t have a process“ or “every x, y, or z is different,” I’ll break out a work-unit routing analysis (WURA, sometimes also known as product-quantity-routing or PQR analysis) worksheet and become a student of the variation I see and hear about. This gets me on the way towards sorting things into value streams or some other aggregation.

Despite the experience or expertise that the client presumably hired me for, in these moments the value I bring is that I can look with a beginner’s eyes and wonder with a curious mind.

Last but not least: doing the project

But that is—as they say—another story, and shall be told another time.

Continuous improvement

Open space technology, principle 3: “Whenever it starts is the right time”

A stand of trees somewhat precariously leaning out over the water. They are grown into a sandy, slowly eroding embankment. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Each moment prefigures the next. But in certain moments, a huge change can begin.

I’ve been visiting these particular trees for years. Each time, I wonder: is this a view of perfect stability, or of a system building up potential until it changes—collapses, in this case—into something new?

There’s tension, and strength.

When I visit these trees I also see Stewart Brand’s pace layers:

Figure by Stewart Brand, in his book The Clock of the Long Now.

Some things move faster than those trees: animals, water, me, you. Other things move slower. If you sit with this, it might become beautiful.

And then we go to work, where projects are atomized and boxed and shuffled around in tidy intervals, even though “whenever it starts is the right time.”

New beginnings are sudden

Transformation happens when it’s going to happen… and when it’s time, it happens fast, noisily, and irreversibly, like a tree falling.

As a sandy bank erodes and trees slip into the saltwater, we tend to see that as a loss. The tides and the weather and the climate got to ‘em.
When a group of people get to a moment of shared insight and identity and possibility, we tend to think that’s good. The choreography and structure and careful engagement got to ‘em.

Either way, what happens is a sudden shift from one state to another. The visible shift is a result of accumulated actions over time.

Not everything starts at the same time

Seven years ago I tossed out the “house of Lean”—with its ossified, layered columns and foundations, it was a powerful vision poorly communicated.

Instead, I taught for a while from this doodle:

A shearing layer model of a house, with CI concepts as the foundation, ways of thinking as the exterior structure, and collection of tools as the interior "style" elements. — Figure by Brian Kerr. Old thinking but I stand by about 50% of it.

(These are shearing layers, after Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.)

What I liked about this figure is that it helped people sort out their approach to continuous improvement as a collection of things that start and stop and change over time and at different rates.

These days, I get people to the same point using ecocycle planning:

An eco cycle planning template, showing a figure-eight loop from birth, through maturity, to creative destruction, and back to gestation. At each state there is a drawing of a tree growing from an acorn into a large tree and then being harvested or burned at the end of its life. — An ecocycle planning template, from a document shared by Fisher Qua.

I’d prefer to work from a picture of trees growing than from a schematic of a little house.

For me, creative destruction is not “plowing” or the little controlled burn in the image above, but rather a huge tree slipping off and down into the tide, where it will drift and—at its own pace—break down and provide shelter, enrich the food web, become the beginning of many things. Whenever it starts is the right time.

Open space technology series:

“Whoever comes is the right people.”
“Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”
“Whenever it starts is the right time.” → now reading
“When it is over, it is over.” (forthcoming)

August 30, 2024: Edited for length.

Continuous improvement

Disconnected improvement events fail. What to do about that

A child is in a nine-foot kayak, floating in shallow water. The kayak is tethered on a long run of rope to a buoy. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Instead of drawing a box around the problem, tether it to something important.

Most continuous improvement events fail. I am curious why.

Today’s reason for failure is disconnectedness.

Earlier in my consulting days, I’d say “yes” to any one-off continuous improvement project that came my way—things like sitting with a new group to do an A3, or hosting a half-day event. I figured that if folks had a problem to fix and a sponsor willing to let them to work things out, it couldn’t possibly hurt, and might even help.

The events themselves were always fun. It’s fun to gather people together for a few hours and enable them to learn from each another in surprising ways. It’s fun to go where the work gets done and notice weird things happening there, to fix problems, to enjoy snacks and coffee and the company of others.

But I became dissatisfied with the success rate. Here’s what happened:

Sometimes the events worked.
Ideas arose, people made changes, the changes stuck.
Sometimes they sort of worked.
Maybe there was a short-term change for the better, but then things reverted back to the way they were before.
Sometimes they didn’t work at all.

And this is the problem:

Everything is interdependent. We’re all connected. To pick up a particular piece of the muddle and draw a tidy rectangle around it and work on it in isolation is to miss nearly everything.

The ideal

Ideally, specific lean interventions are part of the daily work. In one classic formulation: Work = Job + Kaizen. Ideally, they are supported by leadership through a management system. Ideally, they are broadly understood and intelligible by passersby within and without the organization.

The strongly OK

But if that ideal condition does not exist (it very rarely does), now what? Should you say ‘no’ to everything? Or say ‘yes’ to everything and hope that some of it sticks?

My move—and it’s a pragmatic, or ‘strongly OK’ move—is to connect continuous improvement activities to something that is already valued and understood by the organization. This connection is what you can establish at the outset, and cling to after an event is over.

It’s the hook you hang the continuous improvement hat on.

So, in a ‘strongly OK’ world, try to connect continuous improvement work to (from most to least preferred):

Safety, quality, or satisfaction—for customers, employees, or suppliers. Must be quantifiable.
Business value—show how the current condition is costing the company money. Must be quantifiable, and something that is already familiar and meaningful to people.
A executive’s important initiative. But initiatives don’t last long, even the important ones, and some people will not be on board. This is a weaker connection than it might seem.
The organization’s mission, vision, or strategic plan. These things probably exist under a thick layer of dust. They’ll motivate continuous improvement to the same extent they motivate anything else in the organization—very little. If your organization is the exception to this rule, then move this up to the top of the list.

By connecting a continuous improvement event to one of these, and making that connection strong and broadly communicated, you increase the odds that the event—or its results—won’t float away.

June 10, 2024: Edited for length.

Facilitation

4 favorite Liberating Structures for continuous improvement

Weird flowering moss on an very old wooden shed. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Getting specific about facilitation methods & how to incorporate them into the work.

I’ve previously shared an introduction to Liberating Structures, the methods that filled the “facilitation gap” in my own continuous improvement practice. These 4 Liberating Structures have been most important to my continuous improvement practice.

During planning

Ecocycle Planning—an initial conversation that can help an uncertain or newly formed team figure out what to work on. Starting with a portfolio-level listing of major systems or responsibilities, people locate each of those in its overall lifecycle. The resulting ‘ecocycle’ is a big picture of things that need fixing, things that could be skillfully closed down, and things that need to be nurtured into further growth. There’s your schedule of continuous improvement projects.

During an improvement activity

TRIZ—a scavenger hunt for existing system behaviors that produce bad outcomes. Purposefully designing a broken system is fun. Then, insight comes when people look for similarities between the bad system they’ve imagined and the way things get done today. TRIZ lets groups see how their collective work is both interrelated and necessary—and where there is room for creative destruction.
25/10 Crowdsourcing—a machine for generating bravery, starting with the question: “If you were ten times bolder, what big idea would you recommend?” The activity ends with a tantalizing presentation of the weirdest ideas that were elevated or supported by the whole group. There will be a few ideas you can go do right away, ‘ten times bolder’ premise be damned.

Afterwards

What/So What/Now What—a group closing reflection and commitment. Can scale up or down, but this is the smallest possible closing that helps people make sense of what happened and to decide what’s next.

Look, they’re all good

There are dozens of Liberating Structures. Even if you are familiar with some of them, others will be new. I encourage you to seek them out. For example, I only started using Ecocycle Planning in the last year or so, but it has already gotten me out of a couple real pickles.

November 14, 2024: Edited for length.

Meditation

The world of silence: marking Disability Pride Month

Being a hearing-impaired person whose job is to listen. Quiet, noise & rest.

Quiet isn’t. Here’s what I mean:

You write sitting in the back garden, where the barest breeze is enough to rustle the limbs and leaves of the fruit trees, to raise a little hiss from the tall grasses, and to awake a larger, fuller breathing from all the trees beyond. You hear the chittering of birds jockeying for position at the feeder, or the occasional squabble of gulls or crows. A fence gate clacks, a vehicle revs, an airplane passes low on its return to base. You hear the sound of your fingers hitting keys on the keyboard, even though you use the quietest keyboard money can buy. You hear your breathing and the rustling of your linen shirt. You hear your teeth grinding, which is how you know you’re lost in thought.

That’s quiet. It’s active, it’s noisy, it never stops. Even in a perfectly still, empty house there is an ongoing tumble of things to hear.

But—there’s something else entirely. Take out your hearing aids, set them aside. So much drops away. The breeze becomes a pattern of pressure and temperature on your skin, in your hair. This is the real silence, the silence that opens up once you shut down all the hissing, buzzing quiet. For a little while, you don’t have to worry about how much work it is to listen to people. You don’t have to adjust position, posture, device settings at the beginning and end of every single conversation, forever. You can unhook the 20% of your awareness that is held to listen for voices, always standing by to begin the energetic work of listening.

Being tired

I am usually tired after a day of work—especially onsite—because listening to people is hard.

On the one hand, I love listening to people, because people are interesting, and listening is one of the best ways to learn about them (the other best way is watching). And my whole thingy of reducing suffering and wasted effort across an organization depends on getting people to speak with one another.
On the other hand, listening to speech is something that so far as I can tell comes easily to most people, but is a lot of effort for me. Reading is easy. Listening is hard. That’s just the way it is.

Being lucky

I’m lucky that I was born where and when I was, and to be part of a supportive family with resources. I started using assistive technology when I was a toddler. The pile accumulates and updates as I age: fewer knobs, more touch-screens. My first hearing aids were unlovely wasp-like devices to catch and boost sound in delicate little curves mirror-matched to my hearing loss. Machines for converting an expensive, wasteful heap of disposable batteries into speech, music, the clatter of life. Over the decades the hearing aids have become accessories to everything else—to the car, to the computer, to the iPad. My iPhone doubles as a discreet little roving mic to pick up what you’re saying in that noisy cafe. You put your phone on the table for whatever reason. I put my phone on the table to hear what you say.

Being a talking animal

As a child I read Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”:

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

I read Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it.

For most of my life, I thought this was the project: to obliterate the silence of the world, offensive in its mere presence, by filling it up with speech, and to use speech to do good things. To speak for the earth, since (after Rorty) the world does not speak, only we do.

Being comfortable

In 2022, I sat a silent meditation retreat for a week, my first time practicing at that duration and intensity. It was an important experience, and I also complained about it a lot. The first day or two or three I really struggled as I found myself alone in our very quiet family cabin. The longer I sat the more noisy and rattly it all became. At a certain point I pulled out my hearing aids and that made all the difference. I could rest.

The silence I expend so much effort and money to dispel became exactly what I now wanted to sit with. I couldn’t hear the daily chants or the heart sutra with my friends in the Zoom sangha, but that was OK—I knew what we were saying. On that retreat I realized how much work I put into listening, even when there is no need to hear, or nothing to listen for. That silence produced stillness, and in sitting I fell away from the logics of attainment and progression that had haunted me for decades (and still do).

I used to get deeply unhappy or funky when I couldn’t wear my hearing aids for whatever reason. But these days—here’s my secret—the instant I am alone, out they go. I want the world to be safe and lovely and a place of liberation and flourishing for everybody, and I feel somehow closest to that world when I am in the world of silence. I also want to sit and talk with people and listen to them all day every day—to chat ceaselessly with my friends, to gossip with everyone at work, to learn what my past clients are up to, to listen to one child give an artist’s statement for his most recent tongue-preserver-and-colored-pencil apparatus, or to, at nighttime, listen to the other child practice his violin, or to Liana singing and playing guitar.

They say the body is a city with nine gates.

Two of mine happen to be a little finicky.

I truly believe that if I could begin again at life with a body that could hear better, or more typically, I wouldn’t go for it. While I might have an easier time and have fewer large out-of-pocket expenditures, I just don’t know what it’d be like to live in the world of hearing. It’s a wonderful place to visit. But the world of silence is where I began and where, I think, I will end. It’s the underlying fact of my life. And I have a good life; I do good work.

It’s on that basis I embrace disability, and my disability, and—this month—disability pride.

Happy birthday to the ADA.

July 2, 2025: Edited to add the following dismal 2025 coda. ↓

Dismal 2025 coda

As I revisit this piece from 2023, I stand by everything in it.

But a few updates are in order:

In 2024 I was lucky enough to do another week-length silent retreat and reconnected with that deep silence. I am so grateful for that experience.
Just last month, in June 2025, I paid cash out of pocket for newer, fancier hearing aids. Rule-making by Joe Biden’s FDA increased the range of options available to me and dramatically decreased my costs.
And as I write these words on July 2, 2025, Republicans in the US Congress are scrounging together the remaining votes they need to pass the ‘big beautiful bill’ containing (in addition to every other awful thing) numerous specific attacks on services, protections, and basic health care for people with disabilities. This is a particularly intense moment in that regard. But today, this week, this season, is also part of their larger, ongoing project of excluding, denationalizing, and dehumanizing anybody that doesn’t fit into their specifically chicken-hearted, incoherent Christian Nationalist nightmare vision. It is in this context that we celebrate Disability Pride Month this year.

Facilitation

Using Liberating Structures to facilitate continuous improvement

You’ve gathered everyone together around a problem. Now what?

“Five conventional structures guide the way we organize routine interactions and how groups work together: presentations, managed discussions, open discussions, status reports and brainstorm sessions. Liberating Structures add 33 more options to the big five conventional approaches.”

So much of continuous improvement comes down to gathering a small group of people together (ideally with snacks) and opening a space so that everybody can decide what to do next.

The Lean books and teachers I learned from taught me what needed to happen—the observations, diagrams, analysis, ideas, and plans—but couldn’t convey how to get all this to occur within groups of people who were happy, unhappy, skeptical, annoyed, burned-out, eager, curious, tired, distracted, in pain, lost in thought, worried, hungry, or optimistic.

Facilitation is its own separate skill.

Like the other so-called “soft skills,” it is hard as hell.

But eventually, Liberating Structures gave me the methods I needed.

No new thing under the sun

Each Liberating Structure is a recipe for a small, generative group interaction. Flip through the collection and you’ll find short definitions and plenty of examples, along with detailed, insightful facilitation guides.

As you explore, many of the formats and activities might seem familiar—and for good reason. Very little of this work is original, which is why nearly all of it is useful. For example, the What, So What, Now What? Liberating Structure is one particular expression of a device you might have seen in academic or business writing (as Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference) or in community development (my teachers at the Institute of Cultural Affairs call it ORID, an unlovely contraction of “objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional”). The point of this particular Liberating Structure isn’t to be innovative, but instead to give just enough structure to help a group to listen and reflect on its shared experience. And it, like all the others, is offered with attribution and links to further reading to satisfy the eggheads.

Most of the Liberating Structures are small, with time commitments beginning at around 15 minutes. As you practice them, you may find yourself planning events by chaining a sequence of Liberating Structures together. There’s even a Liberating Structure for having group plan its own event—what my friend Dan calls choreography, but the Liberating Structure is called Design Storyboards.

And Liberating Structures are a great boost to continuous improvement efforts because they loosen up hierarchies and create new ways for people to learn from one another. This is an important part of Lean, and it’ll happen eventually—but some carefully deployed Liberating Structures can help things along. Some of the structures, like Ecocycle Planning, fit directly into the portfolio planning and management systems that sustain continuous improvement over time.

Getting started

The stuff is available online and is free to use. Read up on the Liberating Structures web site, starting with the LS Menu.

I recommend the excellent, free LiSA app for your phone or iPad. (LiSA also runs on recent Macs.) LiSA is great for quick reference, as well as for working out an agenda using a chain of Liberating Structures.

Beyond that, the very best way to learn Liberating Structures is to watch, do, and teach. (It’s also the best way to learn anything.) For this purpose, my friend Alyssa recommends this monthly international, online meetup.

Big changes, small changes

It’s only fair to let the Liberating Structures folks have the last word. Because what they want is what I want, too:

“We want everyone to learn to foster big changes by inviting people to make small structural changes in how they work together.”

Improve Something Today

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