American productivity is declining because organizations have the tools but lack structure to improve continuously. One model deliberately creates short-term instability to force breakthroughs, then quickly restores standards to keep releases reliable.
American productivity is dropping relative to the rest of the world, according to the surveys I've read recently, which pisses me off. Right. We have the tools, but sometimes we get into that mode of overvaluing one versus the other, or not having a structure in place that allows us to take advantage of that stability, right? To be able to hit the dates and to release with quality while still continuously improving on top of it in a safe and regimented way.
So a lot of the— it's easy to say things like that.
But it's the key is when you actually— it's time to put a solution in place. How do you, how do you actually do it? How do you actually allow somebody to improve without taking risk?
Yeah, it's a, it's a great point. I think the, the continuous improvement model that I'm— that I like to think through, that I like to talk about, it's much like you described, where you want to create instability, because You've gotta have a breakthrough.
Mm-hmm.
But then you have to follow it quickly with the right standards and create stability fast. Ride for a little bit, get things settled down, reduce the variation, and then prepare for the next step function gain. And then again, work to, to drive stability. And really you can measure that through, at least from my experience, you can keep an eye on the variation. And when you reach an acceptable level of variation, you know, now it's time to make that next breakthrough. But I think you have to be very intentional about that sort of cycle as you've described. Otherwise, you either stagnate or you have too much instability, and there's some balance in between.
