Find Your Standard

When I was overseeing the operations of a growing company, we were always trying to find ways to innovate and improve the team. We wanted to be able to scale the operations and to do that we knew that we needed to find better ways to work.

It sounds easy but is very difficult. The challenge is often to avoid change for the sake of change and to find true improvements. Everyone has ideas for changing something on the team. But rarely did that idea translate into an increase in production.

We learned that we had to rely on data. We wanted to get the information and then form insights from that data to tell us if we were improving. This meant that we were making sure we were accountable for the change.

Change for the sake of change was very costly. Our team needed some level of consistency. Constant adjustments created unnecessary stress for them. But without change, we knew we wouldn’t reach our goals. It became about finding the best changes, not trying to balance change.

The key was to use the data to form benchmarks. We wanted to know what level we reached. If we typically saw results in a certain range, improvement meant reaching a higher level, not the same (or lower) level than where we were.

This led to a common question. We would ask, “what is the current standard.” We wanted to know the standard process or procedure. We wanted the standard way that things were done.

We would then match the standard practice with the standard results (our benchmark). This gave us a baseline to judge the changes we made.

Without identifying the standard, any attempt at improvement was feeble. It wasn’t concrete. We prided ourselves on constant improvement but without the standard it would translate to constant, ineffective change.

Once you have the standard, you can then work on innovation. By taking ideas and testing them out you can prove whether or not the idea is better than the standard.

If a new idea proves to be more effective, it becomes the new standard. If an idea isn’t better, then we throw it out and go back to the old standard.

This meant that once we identified our standard, we could keep improving the standard without risk of regression. We know what we could expect with the standard process so we either got better or stayed the same.

This helped us methodically standardize the operations to be able to scale them up or down depending on the current demand. It gave us a blueprint for improvement. It took the risk out of trying new things.

Most people will read this and see how it is applicable to business but won’t translate it beyond the work environment. But this is more universal and can be applied to your personal life.

If you want to improve something in your life, don’t just change and hope for the best. Often that creates a loop of trying and failing. You might get lucky here or there and improve, but it won’t last.

But if you standardize and identify the standards in your life, you can then form the baseline on which to measure against. Then you can try out new tactics without the worry that a miss will knock you backwards. You will always have the baseline to fall back to. As you find improvements, that baseline will increase.

Finding ways to continuously improve is important in life to keep moving forward and bettering yourself. But it isn’t always intuitive and often comes with great risk. By finding the standard and using it as the baseline you can try out ideas, continuously improve, and grow to reach your goals.