How to improve everything!

Have you ever cooked a meal, and it didn’t turn out as you would have expected?
You may have said to yourself “In the future, I will add more salt” or “I wonder if this meal would taste better if I use sweet Italian sausage next time instead of hot?”
The next time you make the dish, you test out your hypothesis and wouldn’t you know … it was better. Did you know that you just performed a PDCA cycle?

A cornerstone of Continuous Improvement is Plan, Do, Check, Act, or PDCA. It’s the process of making incremental changes, no matter how small, to improve your work, according the J.K. Liker, author of The Toyota Way, the definitive book on Continuous Improvement.

Generally speaking, you want to make sure to do four basic activities:
1. Plan out what you want your target or objective to be and determine how to get there.
2. Do the activity or process to get you there, such as your process or work.
3. Check your results (did what you thought was going to happen, in fact, happen?)
4. Act on your results (do you need to adjust what you did to get even better?)

PDCA is effective because it does not necessarily require a large amount of time to improve on processes when you are already the subject matter expert. It can also be effortless since keeping improvement in front of mind also allows us to recognize areas for opportunity more easily as a normal part of our day.

PDCA can be easy and fun. It does, however, require being comfortable knowing and having others know that you are not perfect and to recognize with everything comes room for improvement.

Questions? email me at astrozuggs@gmail.com