The more simple the solution, the better the solution is

I love the 2 points the Air Force shared in this post: What is the Secret for Continuous Improvement?.  Their "formula" is simple, yet powerful.  I have done this with my youth group for years: we review each of their activities after the fact to make sure they achieved their intended purpose.  As we plan subsequent activities and service projects, we incorporate our learnings from earlier.  I also remind the youth there is no one way to be successful.

Separating people from process

Many years ago I heard a fantastic phrase from Robert Uyekawa: "you should separate people from process."

An example:  The pianist for a church choir was out of town and made arrangements for a substitute during practice.  She reviewed the music with the substitute who indicated she already had copies.  That Sunday, one song the choir had practiced and knew well for some time suddenly seemed very difficult.  Members of the choir quietly mumbled displeasure towards the substitute pianist because she apparently could not play the notes correctly.

The director walked over to the piano and found the copy of the song the pianist brought had a different arrangement.  She had been playing the notes correctly the entire time according to the music she had in front of her.

Robert points out that problems arise not from the people interacting with a process, but from the process itself either creating the problems or allowing them to exist.

When defects appear in a product or service, sometimes the human interactions with the process may have had an influence.  However, is your process for creating the product or delivering the service robust enough to prevent human errors from introducing defects?  Do your policies include disciplinary action for employees involved with quality issues or do you instead have a provision for modifying the process itself to eliminate the potential for future defects?

A beginning to my lean journey

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I began to consciously look for continuous improvement opportunities.  Going back through my memory bank, I can specifically see an instance in my teen-age years mowing lawns.  Motivated to spend more time in conditioned air than pushing a mower in the Texas heat, I looked for ways to minimize mowing time without risking customer satisfaction.  A common characteristic of front yards contains a sidewalk from the mailbox to the front door.  I realized that by mowing the entire yard at one time resulted in passing over this walkway multiple times resulting in wasted effort (my pushing), energy (gasoline) and process (spinning blades) because the time spent on the walkway was time not cutting grass.  A quick adjustment to my mow pattern to work one half of the yard at a time usually resulted in passing over the sidewalk only one time.  Technically still waste in the process, however, my productivity did increase.