I was sitting out on my porch the other night staring at my chiminea, visualizing flames dancing around several well placed logs and kindling. Unfortunately the flames were a bit of a fantasy and the reality was that there were only several glowing embers, smoldering branches, and lots of choking smoke. What had happened to what had been a slowly burning fire with so much potential to be a beautiful warming blaze?
I thought about what I had done, putting all the key elements in place, all of the sticks and kindling overlapping like I’ve done so many times in the past, and began to move some of the structure around the edges. Suddenly several flames sprung to life and quickly engulfed all the logs at once, becoming the small blaze I had hoped for.
The point here is that you can put the basic things in place for success, sometimes small tweaks or customizations are required to release the full potential initially anticipated.
As a coach, working with many teams, it sometimes requires small changes to get great rises in productivity. The term we use in Agile is Kaizen, and coaches work with teams to help them learn how to be self reliant and recognize that regularly making small improvements can lead to dramatic change.