As a child, when I watched the cartoons of the unfortunate Wile the Coyote chasing the Road Runner, I had a mixed feeling. On the one hand, I was happy that the Road Runner got away with it, on the other I was frustrated to see all Wile’s attempts failed, always one step to the goal.
Then I realized that Wile, although brilliant, with his inventions accelerated by the phantom ACME (Amazon “ante litteram”), made a methodological error from episode to episode: he never learnt from experience.
Never an episode in which Wile refined a device and improved its effectiveness. Its last failure was immediately followed by another completely different and disastrous option.
Meditating on it, we sometimes behave like this also in corporate world. We focus on “best practices” and often forget that we learn much more from failures that teach humility, perseverance and – more importantly – continuous improvement from method implementation, constancy and measurement through the engineering of specific KPIs.
It could sound trivial but the statement “if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it” is the basis for any performance improvement. Let’s tell Wile.
That’s all folks!
@Ezio Aprile
#chibencomincia #innovation4value #management
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