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But what if we thought about the application of these Laws here, what might we learn about achieving operational excellence if we thought about standard work as a type of everyday habit as a foundation of leadership? What practical leadership actions could we take to improve here, and help sustain these new habits? If I think of new standard work (eg a protocol, new guidance, new SOP, a cheat-sheet, a checklist, etc) that can be introduced in work settings usually to reduce variation, resolve some safety issues and make things somewhat more productive, then how might these 4 laws work? Standard work (one of the 5 elements of a work cell) can be one of the hardest to ‘sustain’, and often the superficial analysis as to why it doesn’t sustain is ‘leadership and culture’.
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Again similarly to a Toyota Kata routine. smoking is just one example from the public health space that helps us to learn and observe more about bad habits.įourth, Clear breaks down habit formation into several steps, called his ‘Laws of Habit Formation’. I’m also curious what could it mean for exnovation and the reduction and removal of old ways of doing things? How does the identity loss kick in then, how can we smooth that ride for individuals and teams? We all know the maxim that ‘habits are hard to break’. what does that mean for me? What does this mean for transformation and improvement work, and ‘improvers’? What could this mean for new work habits and standard work to reduce unwarranted variation and striving for operational excellence. He suggests that if I write every day as a habit and change my language to ‘I’m a writer’ rather than ‘I’m a manager who sometimes writes a blog’ then my ‘writing habit’ really reframes how I am thinking of myself and opens me up to new perspectives of myself. Third, Clear then connects habits with identity, which is a new idea on me. The gradual – yet persistent focus – on obstacle removal and intentional honing of practice, over and over and over. What I really like here is that Clear connects operational excellence not with breakthrough innovation and step changes in performance but instead with that of mastery and incremental perfectionism. My daughter is currently learning to drive so this makes me think of perfecting the parallel park after learning how to drive. The conscious perfection of the practice ( an idea I have written about before). Second, Clear then connects this idea of automatic and unconscious behaviour with the ability to then use the freed up brain to focus intentionally on marginal gains. I also like this because it reminds me of first and second loop learning.
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I still like this idea of reducing cognitive load, as I can remember occasions when I haven’t noticed what I was doing whilst thinking hard about something else. That is, a habit is to learn something and practice it so well, that it will become second nature, routinised, and then you can let your brain focus on new problems to solve. Here are my reflections.įirst, the book re-emphases the neuroscience research that I was introduced to whilst learning to practice Toyota Kata. And it made me think, why is sustaining improvement so hard, when these habits sound so easy? Some ideas to answer that ‘Why?’ are posed in this book. In particular it has made me reflect on the habits of improvers and the habits of organisations striving for operation excellence and perpetual improvement and the relentless reduction of unwarranted variation in practice to benefit patients. I enjoyed reading it it resonated for lots of reasons. I have just read ‘ Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, a book that had been on my night stand for a while.