What Did You Find?

You’ve made a change or improvement… Did you check the results? What did you find? How did this impact your next actions?

I was working recently with one of my best clients on their annual Strategic Action Planning. We have collaborated over many years on multitudes of initiatives. It is remarkable how much they have advanced as an organization and as a senior leadership team!

When I first began working with them, they were not in good stead. There were many internal and external challenges. Fear of retribution was rampant internally and their reputation had been tarnished externally.

Fast forward a number of years. They are now led by a CEO who is client- and community-focused, they use data to manage and improve (everything!), they consistently implement every strategy they devise and knock it out of the park. I have been blessed to be one of their trusted strategic advisors for many years. It is a treat to experience their dramatic growth and organizational maturity. There really is no limit to what they can achieve.

But what struck me when we were together most recently was how ingrained the mindset of Plan-Do-Check-Act has become within the organization!! It is a powerful mindset, approach, and skillset. And they are reaping the benefits.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA): Simple to understand, but more complex to fully embed across an organization. Immensely impactful once it becomes the “way we do everything!!”

While we were together recently, we were doing a look back on the past year of implementing their strategies and tactics. Evaluating each one in order to set the plan for the year ahead. I found they were not satisfied to declare something completed UNTIL they had sufficient data to validate that the implementation had been successful. Checking after the “Plan-Do” had truly become an inherent part of their mindset, team culture, and way of working. Rather than a check-box mentality of “we launched X, so let’s check it off as done, so we can move onto something else”, they were saying, “but we have not yet monitored it sufficiently to know if it’s fully working yet, so let’s keep it on the Strategic Action Plan for at least another quarter until we can verify with results if it has been successful.”

After this had happened a few times in the working session, I just had to share my joy with them about how far they had come as a senior leadership team. I remember their “younger selves” ready to cross it off the list as soon as it was implemented/launched with no evidence of whether the implementation was effective.

Now, just a few years later, they understand and have fully internalized that “implemented” is more than simply “Do”!! Rather, it is the Do+Check+Act in combination that constitutes a well-executed strategy, project, new service, or initiative of any sort.

Done well, Plan-Do-Check-Act…

First, we must develop a solid and well-constructed Plan involving all of the right inputs and key stakeholders.

Then, we Do what we Planned to do. We deploy the plan — fully, skillfully and effectively.

We Check the results to validate if the Plan and the Do were effective relative to the objective we set out to achieve.

Then we Act on what we find:

If we achieved the objective and the plan as verified in the Check, then we can Act by handing it over to day-to-day management for ongoing accountability and perhaps broadening the implementation to other relevant areas.

If instead, we Check and find that our intended objective was not met or aspects of the plan were not fully implemented, then we Act by examining what more is needed, or what we can learn, or what additional actions we need to Plan-Do. Repeating the cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act until we fulfill the objectives.

Dr. Deming and Shewhart established this cycle decades ago. It has been internalized and operationalized in organizations in pursuit of excellence, as well as many organizations simply seeking continuous improvement of results.

And yet I find so many organizations, and leaders, and teams who are still missing out on understanding and using the simple yet profound philosophy of Plan-Do-Check-Act (or Plan-Do-Study-Act).

As depicted above, once we have implemented an improvement using PDCA, we need to standardize on the new approach — in essence adding a wedge so that when we move on to the next thing, the improvement does not roll back down hill to the former status quo.

I am always delighted when introducing the Plan-Do-Check-Act mindset and philosophy into organizations who have not yet realized its value. Amazed to see what it unleashes!! Curiosity, fact-based thinking, a continuous improvement mindset, a drive for organizational excellence, a preference for data-driven decision-making, and so much more.

While there are “fancier” improvement approaches and “big data” thinking out there, until one masters and embeds Plan-Do-Check-Act into everything they and their teams are doing, they are missing out on unrealized potential.

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Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.