Powerful Method to Speed Improvement

For driving real improvement, quickly and efficiently at comparatively low cost, we have experienced nothing more effective than an "Improvement Collaborative." It is most effective when you have a few doing something really well and many more want to learn too.

Here are the main elements:

Partner on a topic 'ripe for improvement'

We partner with a sponsor to customize our collaborative structure. Together, we choose a specific topic "ripe for improvement" and identify organizations that would benefit from participation. Organizations seeking better performance in the target topic send small teams to represent them. Typically, 15-40 organizations participate.

Sponsor provides the context

The sponsor provides the organizational context for the workshop. Typically, the sponsor provides services related to the workshop topic to organizations who are potential participants. The sponsor uses the collaborative workshop to translate knowledge into action in ways that complement traditional seminars, workbooks, brochures, web-sites and other sources of information. The sponsor knows how to find the experts needed to define best practices and key points of implementation.

Experts help define effective practices

We involve people who have specific knowledge and experience in the collaborative topic (content experts) and people who know how to conduct tests and measure impact (process experts). The content experts define a set of practices that workshop participants will use as the basis for tests in their own organizations. The process experts guide participants in design of tests and collection and display of relevant data. We provide access to all of these experts throughout the life of the collaborative.

Linked 'learning sessions' provide deadlines, sharing

Benefits

For the sponsor

The sponsor establishes new levels of service for its client organizations because:

Collaboratives aim at a topic “ripe for change” and seeks to achieve breakthrough, especially improvements that customers of participant organizations will notice.

Rapid-cycle testing and sharing in the collaborative mean actual improvement spread to all participants.

Clear reports of data are key, meaning improvements are easily visible.

Costs are spread among many participants, making per organization cost less expensive.

For participants

Since narrowing the performance gap is important to leadership, the participating teams are excited about developing and implementing solutions.

Most time and testing during the collaborative is spent on site, in the workplace where the best ideas are “reinvented” at the local level, assuring the best fit.

Help from peers and experts is readily available if issues arise in the testing of ideas.

Clear deadlines and peer support keep a focus on who can make the most effective changes.

Learned improvement methods transfer to other issues in the organization.

The network developed lives on after the formal close.

For the environment

Much is known now about how to run our organizations in ways that decrease the impact on the earth systems yet at the same time provide for human needs.

If this knowledge were more widely applied and extended in the near-term, we would begin to relieve some of the pressure on the rest of Nature

As we apply and deepen this knowledge, we also gain time and insights to allow people to redesign our economy so it aligns with the natural systems that sustain us.

Rapid improvement collaboratives help speed these needed improvements.

Learn More: Frequently Asked Questions

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