The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, Second Edition

Testing and Learning Systems

The Model for Improvement emphasizes an approach to learning that relies on testing changes, preferably on a small scale, and observing whether the result is an improvement. As systems become larger and more complex, the relationship between cause and effect becomes more difficult to understand. Some experts in systems dynamics break the learning challenges into categories or contexts. A simple context is one in which the cause-and-effect relationship is known with a high degree of belief and a well-designed and executed test produces an observable effect. In Chapter One the owners of a cleaning company standardized the process of cleaning bathrooms and immediately observed a better result. The learning challenge ...