The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

There are so many stories regarding AI right now that it feels like a five-alarm fire mixed with a Whac-A-Mole game.

. . . .

And no, it’s not a five-alarm fire. But it is the very important pocket of time wherein a thing needs some form of regulation before we are fully immersed in the consequences and everyone learns the hard way what the saying “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube” means.

AI (artificial intelligence) is defined as“the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.” It is being used in a lot of industries in many ways, and it was already in use before all the recent headlines. So to be clear: what I am specifically talking about is the way AI is being used in place of writers, journalists, and other creatives, and in grifts like where a non-author tricks consumers into buying their AI word salad book instead of the intended author’s properly written book.

There are certain topics in the world of publishing that end up feeling like they just never stop being discussed, one being any version of “Who gets to write what book?” in response to when a writer writes — or is asking how to write — way out of their lane. The thing with that specific question is, as Alexander Chee perfectly explains, “the question is a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice — they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have.”

I keep thinking about this every time (daily at this point) I see people — well-intentioned, I think — saying this isn’t a big deal and everything is fine, because AI will never be good enough to replace writers and authors (insert all creatives). Being that AI is just scrapping all the information that is already out there to toss it into a blender and output something “new,” I am not actually worried that it will ever be good enough to replace creatives. But that’s not the problem for me. While I get where this idea is coming from I feel it gives a very false sense of “It’ll be fine!” and “Don’t worry!” which keeps the conversations that should be had from happening.

Instead, we should be asking: Will those in power care that AI isn’t as good at creating what a human can create when their goal of using it is to not pay actual writers, authors, and creatives? Do scammers care that the “travel book” they put up on Amazon, “written” by AI is garbage that no consumer would knowingly pay for if their scam works into making the sale? If Amazon gets a cut of every sale from buyers unaware that the book they purchased isn’t the book they intended to buy, will they implement something to stop it? How time consuming is it going to be for very real people in publishing and media to have to weed out the flood of AI-generated submissions? How costly will it be for businesses to have to implement ways to spot, catch, and/or stop scammers using AI?

I deeply miss what Etsy used to be and I think a lot about how it went from being this incredible site dedicated to artists to no longer being that: “Etsy went public in 2015. Last year, the company reported annual revenue of nearly $2.6 billion — a more than 10 percent spike over the year prior. Among other issues, these creators see the increase in counterfeiters on the platform as a result of Etsy prioritizing growth over being able to enforce its standards.” It is yet another example that once again leads me to think that we shouldn’t focus on whether AI is, or ever will be, good enough to replace writers and authors.

Link to the rest at BookRiot

PG says that trying to regulate AI at this point in time is ridiculous.

AI research and development is extraordinarily important for national security and all aspects of health and health care.

Given these stakes, it will be a while before legislators and regulators get around to AI and authors.

Besides, absent a book’s creator admitting she/he used artificial intelligence to write a book, how is anyone going to know for certain whether the author used AI to assist in the creation of a book or parts of a book?

Whether an author used AI to create a first draft of a book, then edited the original manuscript to refine what the AI produced?

Whether an author wrote a detailed 50-page book outline to feed into an AI to create the manuscript?

Years ago, I wrote my signature on a piece of white paper, scanned it, and inserted it as a picture at the bottom of my digital letterhead. It’s a perfect example of what Richard Grusin has called the “premediated” sign. Others in academia sign their letters by typing out their names in cursive fonts. Whether Zapf, Apple Chancery, or Lucida Calligraphy, the important thing is that the font gestures to cursive, which has become the avatar of handwritten-ness in digital media today. We make these insertions not because we need to signal our authenticating presence but because formal letters are a genre of writing, with certain expectations regarding not only content but also appearance. A formal letter should conclude with the writer’s name inscribed to look a particular way, whether it’s a picture of a signature or a digital simulacrum of one.

All of which is to say, whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident. In the introduction to the new edited volume Handwriting in Early America: A Media History, Mark Alan Mattes suggests that we can come to grips with what writing is by triangulating between inscription, the people inscribing, and the systems of communication in which their inscriptions circulated. The 16 essays in the collection bear out the expansive potentials of this framework, not only by truly taking on the contingency of writing itself but also by revealing how the same kinds of writing can do radically different cultural work.

For example, almost every essay in this rich volume finds a counterpart or mirror image of itself, underscoring just how relative and relational the meaning of every kind of inscription is. A poem on penmanship quoted and copied by a teacher into an African American girl’s friendship album endorses the value of “polite culture” as a means of advancing in the antebellum Black elite.  A different friendship album, owned by Omaha activist Susette La Flesche, also features an array of handwritten quotations, but they document a tense ethics of obligation between writers and recipient—both are impelled to act in accord with an assimilationist vision of Indigenous self-determination.

While this volume underscores the benefits of historicist thinking about writing, Joyce Kinkead’s A Writing Studies Primer attempts to short-circuit that project by taking the opposite approach: condensing 5,000 years of writing technology around the world into a single, unbroken thread. After visiting museums, libraries, and paper-making firms in the US, Europe, India, Japan, Nepal, and South Korea, Kinkead, a professor of English with a focus on writing studies, synthesized her knowledge and experiences into a book that covers a vast range of topics, from the origins of writing, writing systems, implements, and supports to the history of the book and the printing press, punctuation and calligraphy, ancient epistles, and social media. Each of its 16 chapters concludes with prompts for leading class discussion, hands-on exercises, and a short reading from a source such as the New York Times.

While many of the essays in Handwriting in Early America hinge on Foucault’s idea that writing is a technology of the self—the process by which the individual is formed through various mechanisms of social replication—A Writing Studies Primer is a contemporary example of what this theory describes. And not always for the good. The book leans heavily on ethnographic methods that are almost indistinguishable from the Western gaze. The college student reader—presumably American—is advised in the first chapter to avoid getting “lost in a history that crosses so much time and space” by writing their own biography of themselves as a writer. The student’s story then gives way to Kinkead’s, and the Grand Tour of writing on offer measures all material forms and genres against the yardstick of Euro-American writing norms today—norms that, for example, assume handwriting stopped having a history after the advent of print. But writing by hand did not simply continue to “advance” until it inevitably began to erode; its meanings and the cultural work it performed varied. They still do.

. . . .

Nineteenth-century writing exercises were meant to unite the individual body with pen, ink, paper, and prescribed word, thereby fostering the growth of national subjects. A young boy from Massachusetts, for example, practiced his personal hand by rehearsing over and over again the words “Independence now and independence forever,” the announcement Daniel Webster imagined John Adams to have made upon signing the Declaration of Independence. I am reminded of the stock phrase I see from time to time sprinkled in the margins of medieval manuscripts by readers trying their sharpened pens or simply enjoying the scratch of an inky nib on parchment: “ego sum bonus puer quem deus amat.” I am a good boy whom God loves. Surely some of the boys or men who wrote that were at times naughty, but what is a jingle if not aspirational? As Danielle Skeehan remarks on 16th-to-19th-century English copybooks, “authors often draw connections between alphabetic literacy, the literate subject, discipline, and imperial ambition.” The legacy of alphabetic literacy’s facilitation of empire is a long one, still being written, albeit now in corporate blog posts and emailed memos to vendors on the other end of a supply chain thousands of miles away.

A Writing Studies Primer attempts to supplement and enhance the necessarily instrumental nature of a handbook for composition courses by cultivating students’ awareness of writing as a culturally determined act. This is great. But, teeming with factual errors and underpinned by a triumphalist Eurocentrism, it only embraces the surface relativism of liberal values, which ultimately needs history to be quaint so that the surface relativisms of modernity can emerge as modernity’s greatest distinction. From the volume we learn that books lacked page numbers, chapter headings, and indexes until the 16th century. False. “Islam prohibits images of people in art.” Demonstrably not true. Parchment is of lower quality than vellum. Incomprehensible. The printing press in Europe made scribes “irrelevant.” Incorrect. The entire output of medieval European book production equaled 30,000 volumes. Perplexing. Gutenberg had to hide his work on the printing press for fear of being accused of “dark forces or magic.” I am at a loss

Link to the rest at Public Books

“There is no such thing as a ‘nonpolitical’ bookstore,” Josh Cook writes in The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century. In the age of book banning, publishing industry consolidation, and the pandemic’s lingering aftershocks, Cook’s words ring with frightening truth.

The Art of Libromancy, new on shelves today, taxonomizes the joys, challenges, and disruptions of independent bookselling in 2023. Cook, a veteran bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes from the front lines of the sales floor and the stockroom, dissecting how booksellers evaluate what to sell and how to sell it. From making recommendations to organizing display tables to stocking books by politicians, these seemingly granular decisions are matters of moral urgency; as Cook reminds us, “People use books to develop their morals, support and test their belief structures, come to conclusions about the state of the world, and make voting decisions.”

The massive systemic pressures facing bookstores are enough to make anyone feel powerless, but Cook insists that booksellers have a powerful role to play in advancing social justice and shoring up community bonds. “Person to person, display to display, reader to reader, event to event,” he tells Esquire, “book sales have a real opportunity to shape publishing and the world of books in a way that creates a more sustainable books ecosystem and also a more sustainable world.”

. . . .

ESQUIRE: What are the biggest challenges facing bookstores and booksellers nowadays?

JOSH COOK: The challenges facing society are the same challenges bookstores face: climate change, the threat of fascism in America, the problems that capitalism creates in communities. All of that makes it more difficult to sell books because people are struggling—they don’t have the money they should have for the amount of work that they do, and they don’t have the leisure to enjoy books and connect with the bookish community. We need to have booksellers and readers to sell books, but some parts of our society make that very difficult.

Looking closer at bookstores themselves, one of the biggest challenges is, of course, Amazon. From its inception, Amazon’s goal has seemingly been to put every other retailer out of business, and they got their start going for bookstores. Independent bookstores have made a compelling argument for their readers as to why it’s important and in their best interests to pay 40% to 60% more for a title with them than they would pay at Amazon. That’s heartening—and there have been hopeful shifts in how monopoly and antitrust legislation are enforced in the United States. The next thing is consolidation in the publishing industry. There are five publishers that publish the vast majority of books in English, but that consolidation also applies to printers and wholesalers. If one of these giant companies makes a decision, it has an immediate impact on bookstores.

These systemic problems are enough to make anyone feel powerless, but you argue that booksellers can create change. What can booksellers do to advance social justice in their stores?

The most important thing booksellers can do is always ask themselves, Can I do more with this recommendation? Can I do more with this display? Can I do more with this event? You want to bring great reads to your community, and you want to recommend a book that someone is actually going to buy. But I think there’s space in those conversations, in those displays, in those events, to say, “Is this book a book that makes the world a better place? Is this book a book that also supports my values? Is this a book that’s going to add more to the community?” It’s about understanding that you’re always an advocate as well as a bookseller. For whatever reason you decide to put a book in someone’s hand or place it on display, you’re an advocate for that book. That’s a responsibility, but also a power. Person to person, display to display, reader to reader, event to event, book sales have a real opportunity to shape publishing and the world of books in a way that creates a more sustainable books ecosystem and also a more sustainable world.

In the book, you write, “There’s no such thing as a non-political bookstore.” The choice of if and how to sell books by right-wing writers is one of the most obvious political decisions facing bookstores. You argue that genre can be a helpful tool to solve this challenge. How can genre usefully help us engage with the problem of right-wing books?

Genre is a way of providing context and framing for the books that you sell. Sometimes that’s just letting someone know that one book is more likely to have robots and lasers in it than another book. Alex Shepherd wrote in The New Republic that if fact checking was required in nonfiction books, that would pose an existential crisis for conservative publishing. So if a bookstore wants to represent a broad spectrum of contemporary American political thought, but also wants to say that these books are nonfiction, that’s a challenge. One way you could solve that problem is to add context through genre. “Politicians and pundits” was my idea for our store. I thought we should separate political talk show hosts and politicians from political science. That’s not to say that politicians and pundits can’t write truthful books, but that when you present it in that context, your customers recognize it as something different. It’s hard to know what kind of impact this would have, but it has the potential to produce a really interesting conversation. Genre is just an agreement, and agreements can change.

As book bans surge in libraries and schools, I’ve been troubled to see it expanding into bookstores. What are you seeing and hearing on the front lines?

The biggest threat right now is in Texas, which has basically made it impossible to sell books to schools. This is really important to know in terms of national context. It’s easy to think, “It’s just happening in the red states,” but because Texas is such a huge market, their educational decisions have an impact on educational publishing. I saw recently that Follett was asking its publishers to start pre-screening their books for continued sale in Texas. The impact of that is much broader than Texas.

The most important thing to know about book bans is that people who believe in them will go as far as they can. If they can only get to school libraries and public libraries before pressure or legal systems stop them, that’s as far as they’ll get. If they can get to bookstores, they will; if they can get to publishers, they will. If they can get to writers, they will; if they can get to readers, they will. In the bookstore world, there’s an appropriate level of alarm. I can’t speak directly to the organizing efforts of the American Booksellers Association or PenAmerica, but I know they’re working on it. There are reasons to be really scared, but there are also reasons to be hopeful.

What are those reasons to be hopeful?

No one is treating this as an isolated thing. I also think it’s clear that the vast majority of people don’t support book bans. It’s clear from reporting on the groups leading these challenges that they’re a fringe minority—it’s just that they’re well-funded, well-organized, and committed to imposing their views on other people. Every time they fight and lose, that’s a reason to be hopeful. The question is: how do we get the majority into avenues of power where they can fight back and create the community that we actually want?

Another sea change we’re seeing in bookselling is a rise in unionization efforts. Do you feel that there’s a groundswell among booksellers to join the labor movement?

I do. One of the challenges that bookselling has always faced is the idea of vocational awe—the sense that because you’re working with books, doing community work in the arts, that everything inherent about you and what you do will be positive. That’s just not true and it’s never been true, though it’s been a useful tool for books and other creative industries to convince people to work for far less than they’re worth. During the pandemic, this illusion was punctured. Bookstore owners and corporate America in general said, “I know you’re dying, but go to work anyway.” A lot of questions arose from that—and once you start asking those questions, it’s not hard to ask about wages, working conditions, unpaid overtime, and everything that vocational awe.

One of the great solutions to these questions is, of course, unionizing. As a manager and owner, unionizing is also good for managers and owners, because it creates an empowered workforce—and in a community-heavy industry like bookstores, you want people to feel good about being there. Unionizing also means you’ve got a contract, so there’s no more doubt anymore. There’s no more judgment; there’s no more having to figure things out. Small businesses often have to figure things out on the fly, but for stores that unionize, that’s all hammered out in negotiations, which provides some real pathways better communication, better production, and ultimately better sales.

What advice do you have about how best to patronize our local bookstores?

If you ever get a great recommendation from someone, go back and tell them or send an email to the store. It’s really validating and energizing when we find out that you loved our recommendation. A few other things that don’t cost money: if you talk about books on social media, include a link to your favorite bookstore. Direct links sell more and don’t cost you anything, so it’s a great way to support bookstores without having to buy anything more. Also: if you’re someone who plans well, do your holiday shopping in October. If you know you’re going to spend $100 on books this holiday season, that $100 is great in October for a few reasons. At this point in the year, bookstores might be short on cash ahead of the huge holiday season. Spreading out shopping makes it easier to raise wages, because there isn’t that cash crunch. Something else to consider: there will be people in our stores in December who if we do not help them, they’ll buy a Visa gift card for the reader in their life, so for those of you who are savvy bookstore shoppers, if we’re not helping you in that on December 22nd at 7:45 PM, we’ll have more time and more energy to help those who otherwise would not be shopping with us.

The last thing I would say as a way to use bookstores well is this: take some risks. Walk up to a bookseller and say, “Give me your favorite book,” or, “Give me what I should read now.” Try it, read it. You’ll maybe discover a genre you’ve never heard of before. You’ll discover authors you’ve never heard of before. You’ll get something really exciting, and if you don’t like it, that’s okay. It’s all about being willing to be connected to the community, and willing to support your bookstores and booksellers.

Link to the rest at Esquire

PG suggests that the reason many (most?) bookstore owners resist unionization is that 90% of retail bookstores are financially marginal operations. If unionization results in pressure to increase employee salaries (a major factor in a great preponderance of unionization campaigns) the bookstore is brought closer to bankruptcy if the employees are unionized.

As far as bookstore employees providing genius book recommendations, that’s an experience PG has never had. Of course, PG’s book choices border on the manic. Even he cannot project what he’ll be reading in a week, so he expects he’s different from a great many readers.

Online at Amazon or online at his local library is the exclusive way PG selects his books.

Having just downsized from Casa PG, PG is highly aware of how many printed boat anchors he and Mrs. PG acquired over many years of residing in that house, most prior to the widespread availability of ebooks. Printed books fell under the category of “burdened by too many possessions.”

When leaders consider implementing a structured business process improvement methodology, one of the challenges they often face is explaining to employees what types of opportunities to consider. Usually, there are some apparent needs that people attack immediately. Still, once those are addressed, it can be challenging to recognize the flaws in processes, especially ones you operate every day.

A practical approach for overcoming this issue is providing employees with categories of improvement potential to keep in mind. Sharing a few examples with your team — and asking lots of questions — can help spark ideas, get people thinking creatively, and foster innovation.

Of course, recognizing the opportunities for improvement is only the first step. Next, your team will need to leverage various improvement techniques to implement positive change.

This post breaks down common improvement needs into several categories and then covers several practical tools for problem-solving.

He tried it and was impressed by the response. ChatGPT could have done a better job formatting the matrix as a table, but PG was impressed by the comprehensive scope of the response.

(PG has reformatted the query for improved clarity for humans. ChatGPT doesn’t care about those sorts of trifles.)

Query:

I need your help to generate content ideas.

I’m building a marketing agency for small social media creators, writing daily content on both LinkedIn and Twitter for creators who have less than 15,000 followers but are seeing some decent initial traction.

The goal of my content is to educate that audience about how I can take the responsibility of creating content off of their shoulders. This will give them back more time and also my team will produce higher quality.

To generate ideas, I want you to imagine a “Content matrix” table.

In this table, the X axis contains types of content, meaning ways to expand on a topic. The Y axis contains content topics to be matched with the X axis.

The X-axis has these content types, formatted like this:

[NAME] (explanation on how to use it)

1. [Actionable] (Ultra-specific guide teaching readers HOW to do something)

2. [Motivational] (Inspirational personal or industry stories about people who did something extraordinary)

3. [Contrarian] (Go against the common advice and say something contrarian to the common beliefs on the topic, and explain why)

4. [Observation] (Observe a hidden, secret, or silent but IMPORTANT trend in the topic/industry)

5. [Prediction] (Compare the status quo with a prediction about the future, and explain to the reader why that is) [Y AXIS] The Y axis contains 5 topics I often talk about: 1. Branding 2. Networking 3. SEO 4. Analytics 5. CopywritingChatGPT

ChatGPT Response:

Sure, I can help you generate content ideas using the content matrix you’ve described. Here’s a set of content ideas based on the X-axis content types matched with the Y-axis topics:

1. [Actionable] (Ultra-specific guide teaching readers HOW to do something)
   • “Actionable Branding Strategies for Small Creators: Step-by-Step Guide”
   • “Networking Success: Practical Tips for Small Creators to Expand Their Reach”
   • “Mastering SEO: A Step-by-Step Guide for Creators with Less Than 15,000 Followers”
   • “Crunching Analytics: How Small Creators Can Extract Valuable Insights”
   • “Crafting Compelling Copy: Actionable Tips for Small Creators”
2. [Motivational] (Inspirational personal or industry stories about people who did something extraordinary)
   • “From 100 to 10,000: How One Small Creator Transformed Their Brand”
   • “Rising from Obscurity: Stories of Small Creators Who Nailed Networking”
   • “SEO Success Stories: How Small Creators Won the Search Game”
   • “Analytics Adventures: Small Creators Who Turned Data into Growth”
   • “Copywriting Chronicles: Small Creators Who Found Their Voice”
3. [Contrarian] (Go against the common advice and say something contrarian to the common beliefs on the topic, and explain why)
   • “Why Branding Isn’t Everything: Contrarian View on Small Creator Success”
   • “Networking Less, Connecting More: Challenging Traditional Approaches”
   • “SEO Myths Debunked: Unconventional Strategies for Small Creators”
   • “Rethinking Analytics: Contrarian Perspectives for Small Creator Growth”
   • “Copywriting Simplified: Challenging Complex Copy for Small Creators”
4. [Observation] (Observe a hidden, secret, or silent but IMPORTANT trend in the topic/industry)
   • “Unveiling Branding Nuances: The Hidden Factors That Impact Small Creators”
   • “The Subtle Power of Authentic Networking for Small Creators”
   • “Beyond Keywords: The Unseen Factors Shaping SEO for Small Creators”
   • “Cracking the Analytics Code: Uncovering Patterns for Small Creators”
   • “The Unsung Hero of Content: How Subtle Copy Elements Impact Success”
5. [Prediction] (Compare the status quo with a prediction about the future, and explain to the reader why that is)
   • “The Future of Branding: Predictions for Small Creators in a Dynamic Landscape”
   • “Networking 2.0: Anticipating Trends That Will Shape Small Creator Connections”
   • “SEO Evolved: Predicting the Next Phase of Search for Small Creators”
   • “Analytics Augmented: How AI and Data Will Transform Small Creator Insights”
   • “Copywriting Trends: Predicting the Language of Success for Small Creators”

Feel free to use these content ideas as a starting point to educate and engage your audience of small social media creators!

For PG, the longer query/more detailed AI response was quite illuminating.

The most successful companies are never satisfied with the status quo. They constantly have their eye on the next innovation, the next level of performance. They know the importance of continuous improvement in all areas of the business.

Even if things are going really well, people at successful organizations are looking at what could be improved upon so that they can perform better. They are finding ways to work smarter, not harder, in order to be more efficient and profitable. The most successful companies are always innovating and developing new ways to deliver top-notch quality to their customers.

But this kind of behavior doesn’t just happen. Sure, some people have a natural drive to keep improving their skills and the results they produce at work. But many people prefer to stay in their comfort zones, never questioning the way things are done.

Continuous improvement is an ongoing process of identifying, analyzing, and making incremental improvements to systems, processes, products, or services. Its purpose is to drive efficiency, improve quality, and value delivery while minimizing waste, variation, and defects. The continual improvement process is driven by ongoing feedback, collaboration, and data.

Let’s look at 10 rules for effective continuous improvement:

1. Be Open Minded

An open mind leads to new possibilities. New possibilities lead to new thoughts and experiences. To have an open mind means being flexible and adaptive to new experiences and ideas.  Having an open mind doesn’t mean accepting everything as truth, but rather being open to new possibilities. New thoughts and experiences lead to growth.

2. Start with the 3 “Actual” Rule

Continuous improvement starts with the three “Actual” Rule.

        Go to the actual place where the process is performed.

        Talk to the actual people involved in the process and get the real facts.

        Observe and chart the actual process.

All too often, attempts are made to solve problems without knowing anything about or are not being familiar with a particular area or process -- resulting in a misdiagnosis or failed solution. Answers come from the floor, from the Gemba, where the condition occurs. You need to go to the real place and experience these conditions for yourself before being able to take the next steps.

3. Focus on Process Over People

The most successful organizations understand that the problem is not people failing to deliver, but that their organizational processes or systems need to be improved. If an organization really wants a continuous improvement effort focused on improving its business, it must celebrate the mistakes and errors that result from inadequate processes or systems so they can be analyzed and corrected. Enlightened organizations don’t look for someone to blame; they identify the problems that inevitably arise and encourage their people to expose these issues, rather than cover them up.

4. Don’t Seek Perfection, Try-storm

Don’t spend too much time talking about a solution, try it!! Try-storming encourages the rapid development and test of an idea rather than merely thinking about the possible solutions. It allows people to visualize, touch and further improve on an initial idea. It also models action rather than talk. Often in our desire to design the perfect Future State we forget that the best way to build a process that works is through the iterative process of trying, adjusting/correcting, and trying again.

The process is built on three basic principles:

• It is not important to create perfect solutions.
• Be action-oriented.
• Keep solutions simple.

5. Creativity Before Capital

Don’t substitute money for thinking. In other words, before spending money on a typical solution (buying equipment, hiring staff, working overtime), try using existing equipment and employees.

In reality, even creative solutions may require some investment. Yet, often that investment is quite small in comparison to more traditional approaches. As Lean practitioners, it is our job to minimize waste in all that we do – and that includes the cost associated with solutions.

6. Problems are Opportunities

The workplace is full of problems and we are expected to solve them. Problems often stir up the emotions of everyone involved. When a problem occurs, instead of first exploring how to get the problem to go away, first stop and ask yourself: What is the opportunity here? This is the key to innovative problem solving. It’s understanding that the problems you face are opportunities — no matter how frustrating they appear to be at first. Innovative thinking on how to solve a difficult problem begins when you view problems as opportunities — when you break the barriers of limited thinking that we all have.

7. Focus on the Root Cause, Not the Symptoms

It’s very easy to get caught up in the symptoms of the problem and most problems are incorrectly attempted by suppressing these symptoms. We should resist this temptation! When we encounter a symptom, it should serve as a prompt to dig deeper to get at the real root causes for an issue. There are a number of methods of root cause analysis, including failure mode analysis, fault tree analysis, and fishbone diagrams. For diagnosing performance issues, one of the simplest and most effective methods is the "5 Whys," which is attributed to Taiichi Ohno and his Toyota Production System. This technique simply requires us to ask why repeatedly until root causes are uncovered.

8. Rely on Data, Not Opinions

As the legendary engineer W. Edwards Deming put it, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Without insight into data, people make decisions based on instinct, speculation, or prevalent theory. People are at risk of acting on biases or false assumptions. Now, data driven decision making involves collecting data, performing analysis, and basing decisions on insights derived from that analysis. This provides for accountability and transparency. Basing decisions on data allows the logic behind determinations to be transparent and provides stronger evidence to support those decisions. Data provides context and knowledge.

9. Practice Respect

Show respect” is perhaps the most valuable rule, as people are the goal, not simply the means to an end. Improvements are accomplished by people, not processes. Processes ought to be designed to support people in their accomplishment of specific objectives. Ultimately this means developing people to be who they can be. One tremendous side effect of that development is greatly increased capability in fulfilling their roles, which leads to greater efficiency in accomplishing improvement.

10. There is no destination on the road to improvement

Continuous improvement is a journey that never ends. There will always be a gap between where you are (current state) and where you would like to be (True North). Since there will always be a gap, there will always be an opportunity to improve. The road to continual improvement can be a rocky one with many ups and downs. Failure will occur. It’s ok, the purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. Trying new approaches, exploring new methods and testing new ideas for improving the various processes is exercise for the mind.

Adopting a culture of continuous improvement can benefit both you, your team and your business. Finding a suitable way to begin your never-ending quest toward it doesn’t need to keep you awake at night. Why don’t you start by implementing these 10 rules in order to set yourself up for all the benefits that come hand in hand with improving continuously!

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.