Ep. 157: Continuous Improvement Intertia

Why do even successful agile teams struggle to maintain their improvement momentum?
In this compelling episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock answer this question and challenge the myth that continuous improvement is "just a mindset." Drawing from both scientific research and hands-on experience, they reveal why sustaining improvement is physically and mentally taxing, and why the journey becomes increasingly difficult after the initial quick wins. Through insights from sports coaching and real-world software delivery, they offer a fresh perspective on making continuous improvement truly sustainable.

This week´s takeaways: 

• Continuous Improvement Needs Constant Nurturing
• Small Steps Lead to Big Changes
• Make Progress Visible and Achievable

 Want more practical insights on scaling agile and DevOps practices? Join Peter and Dave as they unpack the complexities of modern software delivery and organizational transformation. Subscribe to Definitely Maybe Agile wherever you get your podcasts, and share your thoughts at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

Chapters

• 0:04 Challenges of Continuous Improvement in Agile
• 9:35 Achieving Continual Improvement Through Small Steps

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, how are you today?

Dave: 0:15

Peter, it's good to see you again. So what are we up to today? So we've had a few topics buzzing around our heads. What do we want to talk about?

Peter: 0:24

Well, so the topic today is and it ties to some of the things we were talking about recently amongst ourselves as well but it's around this inertia that crops up with continuous improvement. I mean, as coaches, we always talk about the need to be continually learning, how we create feedback loops in organizations that are intended to help the organization learn and to take that and say, okay, so this. But the results of this were this how do we change our activities as a consequence of what we've learned? And we iterate through that and we improve, and this is essentially fundamental to a lot of what we do from an agile method and an agile approach.

Dave: 1:05

However, I mean it goes further. I mean, well, lean talks about a continuous improvement mindset. It's all over the place, everywhere, right, peter Sangen? A learning organization? About this over and over again, and yet I think where, to be frank, where this came from, is both of us going. You go back and the learning is gone. They don't continuously learn where they as leaders, teams, organizations, whatever it is human beings, and I think that's something that you know.

Dave: 1:38

being a proponent of continuous learning, we also have to recognize that this isn't a cost free thing. It's not like a mindset that I'm in a mindset where I don't learn and once I get into a mindset where I'm continuously learning, that somehow, you know, life gets better. We continuously learn and there's nothing that's ever going to take us back into the old ways of working.

Peter: 2:01

Yes, and we have talked about that, where we, you, people, will fall back to other habits, other ways of doing. Yes, and we have talked about that where people will fall back to other habits, other ways of doing things, things that they're comfortable with. But it's also hard to maintain that continuous learning to look at things, because it takes work, it takes effort and very often you're not necessarily going to see the benefit of that action that you take. So you're doing something with the hope of payoff, versus oh, I could do nothing and know I'm going to get whatever I currently get, so I know what I'm going to get. In this I've got certainty, which is much easier to cope with than uncertainty, so it makes it much easier to say, oh well, in that case I'm not going to, I'm not going to try.

Dave: 2:44

Well, and I sort of see a couple of things coming in there. What you're describing, what immediately goes into my mind is the research that's coming out about how difficult it is to continually make decisions and that there's a cognitive sort of wear and tear. That we get into it and some of the more recent studies I've seen they're beginning to identify what it is that's slowing down and the fact that there's an accumulation of certain I'm going to just call it compounds for the moment, because I'll use the wrong term and it will be completely the wrong thing. But it's a real thing. It's not a psychological thing. There's a physiology behind it which makes it harder and harder for us to continually make decisions and be cognitively active. So there's that element of it which, on a day-to-day basis, is one thing. But now you go to a team and you talk about retrospectives and you talk about this continuous drive for improvement. Well, even as I describe it, it's wearing. So of course the team is going to struggle with it.

Peter: 3:50

Yeah, exactly Because and even I mean support helps. I mean, like something that's going to make it interesting seeing how different ways of approaching problems and encouraging it and coaching people through like hey, well, what could we try now? Like, what might that look like? But but without that reinforcing of it too, then it becomes much easier not to do it. And as people come in, new people come into an organization and they come in with different mindsets, different approaches, different ways of doing things. They're not going to remember the things that were known in the organization before if there's nothing continually sort of improving that in the organization or embedding that into the organization. So your culture changes over time too. So you have these other impacts that are going to start to dilute or change any kind of focus you might build up as well.

Dave: 4:34

So and I this as you're describing that, this idea that it's a continuous small chipping away thing, I'm wondering. We often talk about quick wins. We look for the low hanging, often talk about quick wins. We look at for the low hanging fruit or the quick wins, and I think there is, as we're discussing this, I'm I'm thinking there are quick wins, low hanging fruit, which are easy. They're a high return on investment. I can get this, this leap forward, for a minimal effort. Once I've got rid of all of the quick wins, I'm, everything is now harder effort. And so you know now my marginal benefit of trying to do something different is getting harder and harder to see coming forward. So that becomes well. You very quickly run out of the motivation. I would think in those cases.

Peter: 5:22

Yeah, because once I've got the things which I can see that are easy to do, once I say, oh well, okay, so the next thing we need to do is to move off that monolith over there. And well, to do that I can take a pattern where I start to split a piece off into some APIs or divide that up. Well, but to do that I've now got to understand what the business processes look like. But the data underlying those business processes is entangled in various different ways, which means I've got to create separate copies of that to be able to split it up. But it's a transactional system, so I've somehow got to cache this and then feed it back into the other system. But I've got latency concerns that I've got to return into the backend and you very quickly end up into a set of patterns where you're going well, this is just very difficult to do.

Peter: 6:03

Now. There are various models and patterns and ways to do this, and I've done it on quite a number of occasions. But when you're first looking at this, it requires investment, it requires some thinking through of how are we going to even approach these problems, and it isn't necessarily easy to see. How am I going to be able to do this in a, in a small iterative chunk where I can learn. How am I going to be able to do something that I can learn from, without it being this massive program of work?

Dave: 6:33

Oh, and I'd actually argue that's not continuous improvement, like that's. That's. How do I? You know, when is the one? How do I eat an elephant? You know one?

Peter: 6:42

bite at a time. How do I take this?

Dave: 6:43

huge challenge and overcome it. And I wonder and I'm thinking to teams and retrospectives and it is very unusual to come into a team that maybe a year or two years before was doing great on the retros and to come back a year later and see them still doing great on the retros.

Dave: 7:03

What normally has happened is it's become routine and they may skip them, or they come in and the engagement is not where it could be. And there's lots of reasons behind that, but one of them is this continuous improvement fatigue, this fallacy that we somehow move to this learning organization. We haven't. We can learn for periods of time, and then we need to reinvigorate that.

Peter: 7:26

So, yes, yeah, that there's something to. We were calling it, uh, refreshers in a meeting recently and uh, and this for uh, for the non-uk I actually brought up you know, you know, refresher chews. They're like these lemon chews with sherbet in them, so I think it's a uk thing, but that's like you do remember it very well yeah, so delicious there, um.

Peter: 7:48

so when you look at like that, that kind of refresher, like you, you need to reinvigorate, you need to, like, um, keep the system going, because otherwise it uh, and because we see the benefits of this. We know that continually improving, continually learning, that brings benefits to the system. We know that this is a good thing, but it will fall by the wayside over time because people aren't necessarily able to easily see the value that they're getting from it and it's due to those people coming in, people changing, and potentially also the piece I was trying to avoid is that they're looking at problems that just they can't see any way to solve it.

Dave: 8:29

And this comes to goal setting. I feel that that Continuous improvement. There are organizations that continuously improve and that's typically because there are very clear incremental, small incremental goals which the teams can then keep momentum on, and the clearest example that I see this is in sports. I've read quite a bit about different places in sports. One of the names that's come up recently is a coach called Frank Dick. It's a Scottish coach.

Dave: 9:01

Frank Dick is just one of the sort of thought leaders, if you like, around coaching individuals and coaching teams. There's this wonderful little video, which we'll try and put in the link, about dealing with just a small school child running their first track and field event so 100 meter sprint or something like this and coming in firmly last. And then Frank Dick describes the conversation about how to reframe it so that they know exactly what their goal is for that small, continuous improvement in the next time they race. And when I hear that and I compare it to how our organizations and our leadership and the environments that we're working in operate, there's a big, big difference and it's such a subtle thing, but really great difference.

Peter: 9:50

You remind me and I think this is actually there's a psychological there's this overreaching piece where we, if we come in as coaches and say, well, you should have fully automated DevOps pipelines that are continuously delivering into production and they're going to work absolutely fine, and the person's going it takes us like six months to put something into production. It's just three months of testing and of the integration. They're looking at you like it's not possible, we can't do it, it'll never be possible. And so there is that. What's the next smallest increment that we can do? What's something that's achievable, that we can see how we might achieve it?

Dave: 10:30

And the thing from the Frank Dick video is and celebrate where you are right now is and celebrate where you are right now, yeah, and and the small change is you are better. And the kind of key message is you're. You're only comparing yourself to yourself, you're not comparing yourself to whatever name big technology company that can release things in four and a half milliseconds. You're in a different place. You've got a different path to walk and let's kind of chip away at that.

Peter: 10:55

Yeah, yeah, for how do we pull?

Peter: 10:57

this together Three things, three things. So we cover a variety of different pieces. One is that continual improvement is difficult to maintain on long term over time, especially without anything supporting it or reinforcing it or bringing the focus back to. What did we learn from this? Hoarding it or reinforcing it or bringing the focus back to what did we learn from this People will, over time, drift away from continual improvement into thinking they're already there, they've achieved all they possibly can, because they can't see what the next possible thing to do.

Peter: 11:32

I think another piece there that we were talking about towards the end was around the small increments. If your goals are understood and are smaller, then it's easier to see where you're going, and I really liked the bit you added in there at the end. But while celebrating where you are, I mean things like look what we've got, look what we've done, look how things are going, and celebrating that and then saying, okay, what's the smallest increment from that towards our goals? What's next? And making sure that, from a leadership perspective, we're not challenging people to get to something that they just can't possibly believe is going to ever happen, and making sure it's something that they can see, that they can say, well, yeah, I could see how we could get there. What's that small piece that we could do? Is there anything you would add to that?

Dave: 12:15

I just think. I think I'd like to sort of summarize just to say we started this conversation saying continuous improvement as a kind of shift in mindset and so on is a fallacy and you can't get there. And yet I feel that, as we got to the end of it, we're beginning to lay out some sort of a structure where it actually can be this continually changing and improving thing I, I've, and that just you know is I felt. I felt I we should pull our attention to that yes, yeah, that's.

Peter: 12:47

You is an interesting point there. We were starting to get into the like, the. There's this part of like. It goes into habit systems. Right, it's where we start to talk about like. What are the like that? Small increments, what's the smallest thing that we could do? Next, that's going to get us to the next place that we want to be and there's lots of ways of looking at that. It's keeping that up over time and ensuring that there's the motivation to do it, which requires a lot of time. Ensuring that we can see the value of the actions that we're taking, because we immediately, we want instant gratification and if we're not seeing that the action we're going to take is going to pay off anytime, anytime, soon enough, then it's harder and harder for us to take that. So if we start to feel that all of the possible things we could change or do are just so astronomically difficult and we can't see how to move forward, then we start to not want to change.

Dave: 13:39

well, and I and and I know we've we've kind of reopened this, so but let me just pause this and hopefully, hopefully this is the final comment. I'm thinking this is change agents and coaches and leaders, where all of a sudden it's opening up how we can work with teams by help of celebrating, by making sure they're comparing themselves with themselves, not with external delivery, external things and creating small enough steps, that overreaching that you're mentioning. Sometimes we're generating the overreaching, yes, how do we kind of accommodate that or adjust our behavior to help teams do that?

Peter: 14:16

Yeah, Awesome. Well, as always, really enjoy these conversations, Dave, and look forward to next time. Don't forget to hit subscribe to all our listeners and you can reach us at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom.

Dave: 14:27

Thank you, peter, always a pleasure Until next time.

Peter: 14:29

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.