Continuous Learning and Improvement

Congratulations! You’ve launched your initiative. You’re helping lead your organization into the future and enabling people to chase their creative dreams. Regardless of the size and scope of your initiative, it’s no small feat. You’ve had to rally a diverse team around a vision; and I am confident you’ve had to slay a few dragons during the journey. But you made it, and it’s perfect. Right? Even if your initiative was perfect when you launched it, things change, and execution can drift over time. We need to be diligent. We need to regularly take the pulse of the initiative and understand how it is performing and whether it is contributing the value we expect. Then we need to adapt based upon what we learn. This chapter explores techniques for learning and improvement that go beyond metrics and measures. It explains how a combination of retrospective, proactive, and introspective learning can help your initiative advance, evolve, and improve; and how they can be used to maintain and confirm alignment and communicate progress. It also includes a discussion of group learning and improvement through summits and off-sites, why they are useful, and steps to take to ensure they are successful and not painful.