One of the traps for the inexperienced Improvement Science Practitioner is to believe that applying the science in the real world is as easy as it is in the safety of the training environment.
It isn’t.
The real world is messier and more complicated and it is easy to get lost in the fog of confusion and chaos.
So how do we avoid losing our footing, slipping into the toxic emotional swamp of organisational culture and giving ourselves an unpleasant dunking!
We use safety equipment … to protect ourselves and others from unintended harm.
The Improvement-by-Design framework is like a scaffold. It is there to provide structure and safety. The techniques and tools are like the harnesses, shackles, ropes, crampons, and pitons. They give us flexibility and security.
But we need to know how to use them. We need to be competent as well as confident.
We do not want to tie ourselves up in knots … and we do not want to discover that we have not tied ourselves to something strong enough to support us if we slip. Which we will.
So we need to learn an practice the basics skills to the point that they are second nature.
We need to learn how to tie secure knots, quickly and reliably.
We need to learn how to plan an ascent … identifying the potential hazards and designing around them.
We need to learn how to assemble and check what we will need before we start … not too much and not too little.
We need to learn how to monitor out progress against our planned milestones and be ready to change the plan as we go …and even to abandon the attempt if necessary.
We would not try to climb a real mountain without the necessary training, planning, equipment and support … even though it might look easy.
And we do not try to climb an improvement mountain without the necessary training, planning, tools and support … even though it might look easy.
It is not as easy as it looks.