Nothing changes until you decide to make a change.
Ten years of doing innovation and process improvement work led me to where I am today.
Spark Academy Miami Dade County
Last month, we celebrated ten years of Peak Academy for the City and County of Denver.
This month, I’m celebrating year one of running my own company, Change Agents Training.
I never could have imagined being here 10 years ago.
In fact, I started this expedition into the world of system transformation more than 10 years ago when I first learned about the Lean Transformation program at Denver Health.
In the last decade, one thing remains constant.
If you don’t want to change…nothing… no amount of cajoling, yelling, fighting, convincing or poking will get you to change.
The number 1 barrier to innovation is and always has been…you.
Black Belt Graduation Santa Barbara County
I don’t want this decade in review to sound like a self-help column, but here’s the deal.
15,000 people have moved through some, part, or all of our training.
The program that started in Denver reached Florida to Pittsburgh to Santa Barbara to Canada and all the way to the Republic of Palau.
The Republic of Palau
What I’ve learned is it comes down to something as simple as this:
Trying something new is the only way to make your service or process better.
If you will not try something new, then nothing will change – and you will be caught in the Innovators Paradox.
What’s the innovators paradox? It’s when you’re too consumed with your current state of affairs to take a step back to see what is happening in your work, and how you can improve it.
If you never create the time to revisit your service, you will never find the time to catch up.
Consequently, you will find yourself in the innovators paradox.
If you don’t take the time, you cannot make the time.
Sound familiar?
A few months ago, I got to work with a group of Human Resource professionals in a large city.
The team had been typing and retyping Management Performance appraisals and reviews forever.
After moving through our training, the team was able to cut more than 50 hours of work out of the process.
The best part? Out of more than 1200 reviews, fewer than 20 were entered incorrectly.
To say that this team was reluctant to change would be an understatement. The fear of making the process worse nearly paralyzed them.
Nevertheless, the team made a massive transformation when they took the time to lay out the process and identify all the places that caused pain, rework, and straight up errors!
Without looking at this problem in a different way, the team would not have changed.
They would have been stuck in the innovators paradox.
As James Clear puts it in his book Atomic Habits, “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
When we decide to focus on making something better every day, we create daily habits that will transform our services and our lives.
Peak Academy 10 Year Anniversary