A few weeks ago my daughters’ “newsletter” arrived from kindergarten. The format of how it was graded made me reflect on the importance of knowing and letting people know that they can continue to improve.
For each concept, there were two columns: “Achieved” and “Not yet”. How much that simple “Not yet” says! It is not “Not achieved”, it is something that tells you that you are still in process and that you will achieve it.
It also lets you know that they have confidence in you, and that at some point you’re going to make it.
After dwelling on that nice detail, I remembered a situation in which I felt the power or magic of knowing that there is room for improvement, of knowing that there has to be a better way of doing things. This was years ago in a Scrum Master course I did with Peregrinus friends, where a dynamic (like a game) was proposed, which consisted of a team of 6 people passing as many balls as possible from a basket to a bag.
As a restriction, all team members had to touch the ball before putting it in the bag and we had 1 minute of time.
We would have 3 sprints to be able to make improvements between each one.
We thought about the strategy, organized ourselves, got all of us in a round and started passing each ball from hand to hand at full speed until it reached the bag.
In the 1st minute we scored 18 balls.
In the second sprint we made adjustments and scored 25 balls .
At this point, Pato (Gabriel Montero) came and told us that the senior team had managed to score 110 balls in 1 minute. This clearly changed our perspective, if he didn’t tell us this, we might have made a minor adjustment and managed to score about 30 balls. But this was giving us information that there had to be another way, another strategy, or that we were not exploiting the rules of the game to the fullest.
We only had a few seconds to agree on the new strategy and we defined that all members would touch the ball at the same time before it was deposited in the bag. I don’t know if it was the smartest change, but it sure changed how we were doing it in a big way.
With this change I think we scored 60 balls. No, we didn’t get anywhere near 110 but it was still a substantial improvement of more than 100%. The funniest thing is that Pato later confessed that this information was not real (LOL). But look at how knowing that there was room for improvement pushed us to think about the strategy in a different way and to have a much better performance.
This spirit of always thinking we can do better is with us every day at BigCheese. It is not because we are nonconformists, it is not because we are obsessive, it is because although we have achieved many things, there is always room for the “not yet achieved” and apply our creativity to improve it.
“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.”
Thomas Edison.
