THE POWER OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

The Japanese word that summarizes the idea of continuous improvement is kaizen. This describes a very unique power, the power of believing that whatever you are working on can be improved again and again and again and, in fact, there is no end to the refines, improvements, and shaping that you can bring to that product, service, information, or experience. So you persist, you persevere, you keep questioning what could be better, what isn’t working as well as it could, and you keep revisiting it to improve it a little bit more.

Di Kamp (1996), an NLP Trainer, noted that in today’s world of business where change has become the constant and where a company’s capital has switched from money and buildings and physical assets to human assets—to the human capital of intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness, to have a powerful organization and business, we need powerful, resourceful people.

“The essence of the dynamic, effective and resourceful organization is its dynamic, effective and resourceful people. This requires a re-education of most people in what is expected of them at work. ... We were trained if something was wrong or missing — the deficiency model — and the training was designed to bring us up to standard for the job we were doing. . . . To be effective in a world of constant change and development demands an ability to be constantly learning and developing. It is only recently that concepts such as ‘the learning organization’ and ‘life-long learning for individuals’ have come to the fore.” (p. 18, The Excellent Trainer, Di Kamp, 1996).

Shifting then to a continuous improvement orientation requires that we also shift from a deficiency model for problem-solving to a proficiency model. That is, we shift from merely working on what is wrong or missing to the more creative perspective of wondering, “What could be better?” “How can we improve our current methods, products, services, etc.?” This is the frame for continuous improvement. “Everything can be improved. Nothing is perfect. Whatever we have created can be refined and taken to yet another level.”

What is the power of continuous improvement? It is the power of living life from the perspective of creativity. It is the mental-and-emotional power of constantly looking for new ways and methods for improving things and the excitement of wondering where will the next batch of new ideas come from. And when you think-and-feel from that frame, life itself becomes much more adventurous and exciting.

This frame of continuous improvement also empowers our sense of curiosity, playfulness, experimentation, etc. We are now empowered to recognize that we have a much fuller range of abilities than we suspected and can wonder what other potentials are yet to emerge as we seek to continually improve our knowledge, our skills, our relationships, etc.

As I’ve been learning the power of continuous improvement, it frees me to release whatever I’m working on when I judge it as good as I can do right now. I know it’s not perfect. I may even know that there’s some problems with facets of it, but it is good enough and anyway, life is one big experiment in finding and refining what works and what brings more power and joy to our lives, so I release it. Then with feedback and more practice and more experiments, I learn better, learn more, and so I refine it. I take it to the next level. And so the continuous improvement continues.

I often speak about how that’s what I did with the first volume of Meta-States in 1995. It was only two years later when I discovered the first significant mistake in the book, and by 2000 when I created the second edition, I had found four which I immediately corrected. Those were conceptual mistakes and the truth is that if I had waited until I found all of those mistakes, I still might not have ever published that book. It was through the feedback and sharp questioning and even the skeptical disbelief of some people which helped me to find those errors and correct them.

For the person operating from kaizen (the continuous improvement frame), there are no fatal errors or failures, there’s only more discoveries about what can be improved, refined, and taken to another level of expertise. This is where true empowerment requires responsibility and accountability. Without responsibility and accountability, empowerment is not only reckless and stupid, it can be downright dangerous. Yet when you combine a passion for continuous learning and improvement with responsibility and accountability, with feedback and ongoing discovery, then you have an incredibly powerful way to move through the world. And the synthesis of all of that is creativity, innovation, courage, boldness to move forward, and fun.

Let your progress be incremental ... one small step at a time, one small improvement at a time. Over time, the small steps amount to something significant.

Power of Questioning:

“In NLP the approach is to ask rather than tell. ‘What do you think would make it possible for you to...’ ‘How would you tackle...’ ‘What would enable you to...’ By structuring the questions carefully we can help people to produce their own solutions, which enables them to recognize their own ability.”