Knowledge Base · Getting Started
Where do I start? A 30-day plan for continuous improvement
The book's CI Starter Kit gives one theme per week: Just Open Your Eyes, Pick One Thing and Ask Why, Run One Small Experiment, then Share Your Story. You spend the first week only observing, the second asking why about one small frustration, the third testing a tiny change with PDCA, and the fourth telling people what you tried and learned.
The appendix frames the plan as habit-building, not an attempt to fix everything at once. Each week has a single goal, and each week depends on the one before it.
- Week 1, Just Open Your Eyes: observe your work for 15 minutes a day without judging or fixing, and note what seems clunky, inefficient, or likely to make someone sigh.
- Week 2, Pick One Thing and Ask Why: choose the smallest frustration from your notes and work through the 5 Whys on it with a colleague, aiming to practise the technique and approach a root cause.
- Week 3, Run One Small Experiment: turn that work into one tiny change and test it with PDCA. State what you expect, try it, check what happened, then keep it or try something else.
- Week 4, Share Your Story: tell your team or manager what frustrated you, what you tried, and what you learned, whether the experiment worked or not.
Notice what the plan leaves out: no launch event, no new software, and no project list built in week one. Observation comes before diagnosis, and one finished experiment comes before any wider change. The book's point is that a culture of improvement begins with one person sharing a small story of trying to make things better.
Build the plan in the free course capstone
Related questions
- What should my first 30/60/90 days of CI look like?
- How do I run a small improvement experiment this week?
- How do small improvements compound over time?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Appendix.