How far can continuous improvement go without a stop?!
Have you been in a situation where you are in a great team who has established a regular continuous improvement process, you get the benefits out of it by trying out small improvements frequently and at some point you are out of ideas? If you are in such a team, celebrate and share your success stories to inspire others.
As a facilitator and a coach, I have experienced such teams and also some that are not in that stage of high-performance yet and at the same time, they also feel stuck as it is still very difficult for them to come up with new ideas on what to improve on regular basis. Let's face it, it is not always easy to think continually of how you can become better and better individually or as a team. Maybe sometimes enough is more than good enough as well…
If teams are short of ideas, I would recommend in those occasions a more holistic retrospective format: one that inspects either a particular “hot” topic or a longer period of time: e.g. 3-6 months in the past or even since team`s “conception”. I would recommend for such kind of retrospectives to have an experienced facilitator, preferably outside of the team in which case the facilitator can remain truly neutral. Some of my preferred formats for such kind of more holistic reflections are:
Back to the future: a format where the team travels through time in the past, present and future in a creative and fun way
Creating collaboratively past team timelines, engaged conversations on current team health and building together prioritized improvement roadmap based on the pains and gains
Creating a simple physical or virtual scale and through powerful coaching questions move through that scale in a way that creates new insights and creative ideas of what else we can do as a team to become better and better at what we do: e.g. Where on the scale would you place yourself today? What has already worked particularly well in this situation? How would it feel if you are able to move one step higher? What will be different then? etc.
Another recommendation: If/when your team dedicates some time for such holistic retrospection, it might be worth going back to it every now and then: e.g. every 6 weeks, to see how far you have actioned some of the top improvements you decided to work on or even better, include them in your prioritized list of work items, aka backlog, so that you can naturally pick them up from there.
Also, keep in mind that indeed, continuous improvement is a circle and as such goes forever. It is more than an event in the calendar, it is a mindset…
Whether today you strive to do something in a better way than before or you decide to take a moment and celebrate that what you do is more than enough for now, I wish you a wonderful day! 🙂
