The Improvement Processes

The Improvement Processes

Most of us want to improve in many different ways. A few have no desire to improve, they are quite happy where they are. In a rapidly changing world they are at risk of being left behind, but that is their choice. On the flip side there are some of us who are compulsively driven to always improve - workaholics. While we do improve, it rarely brings any additional satisfaction. See my thoughts on the role of symbols in addictions elsewhere on this site.

This page focuses on:

the 2 Types of Improvement processes
the 2 Phases of the Improvement processes

First, the 2 types of Improvement - Incremental and Radical.
Incremental changes are small increases in efficiency, typically 2% - 10 % improvement.
Radical changes, which require a different thought process, often shoot for 100% to 1,000% improvement.

Examples:

Cars: If your car gets 25 mpg, (miles per gallon) an incremental improvement would yield 30 mpg, whereas a radical improvement would yield 250 mpg.
Reading speed: If you now read at 200 wpm (words per minute) an incremental improvement would yield 250 wpm, whereas a radical improvement would yield 1000+ wpm.
Typing Speed: My typing speed increased radically when I went from using one finger of each hand to using 2 fingers of each hand. If, and that's a big if, I ever get to using all 5 fingers of each hand it will again improve radically. My fingers may then move faster than my mind.

Second, the 2 Phases - Short term & long term, which I'll be calling the Inner & Outer loops. These 2 phases exist whether we're aiming for Incremental or Radical change. What they have in common is a difference from the Traditional Action Process.

The Traditional Action Process - has these elements:

Goal- Very simply what you want! Often we have multiple goals for a particular action; sometimes those goals are in alignment, sometimes they are in conflict.
Plans - Here you take some generic plans or templates, add the specifics of your goal and come up with a specific plan, which is strategy focused, i.e. WHAT you want to achieve.
Act - Implement your specific plan, which is more tactics focused, i.e. HOW you plan to achieve it.
Results - What happens, whether or not you like it, or predicted it.

If this works, fine; stick with it, keep doing it over and over again.

But if you want to Improve it, incrementally or radically, several distinct steps need to be added. This is my model:

The 3 new activities are Log, Reflect, and Integrate:

Log - The first critical step! To improve you need to review the past to figure out better ways for the future. Logs can be very simple like personal memory. However personal memory can be vague, illusive, and fades quickly. But it is adequate for short-term improvements. For longer-term improvements more stable logging technologies are needed. These include things like audio and video recordings, and transcripts of them. Specific devices like Black Boxes, Gray Boxes, X-Rays, CAT Scans, MRI, fMRI, etc. Video cameras have dropped radically in price, and the media often transcribes speeches and interviews, making these logs available to many more people for their personal analysis.

One big advantage of logs is that you can go back over them again and again, sometimes from a very different point of view.

Even nature creates logs. One mechanism I've always found fascinating is the rings in trees. They can show what happened hundreds and in the case of redwoods thousands of years ago. Rock formations also have this kind of data but it takes a specialist to read it.

Reflect - This is the second critical step. Now that you have a log of some form in front of you, even if just memory, how can you squeeze more knowledge out of it? Perhaps you have a video tape of a tennis match, and you want to help the tennis player to learn some new technique to make his or her game better. Perhaps you have a political speech like a state of the union message, or an elective candidates words, or the therapy session of a client that seems really stuck, what do you do next?
Since this process has many interrelated parts, I've moved it to a separate page.
Integrate- Here's where the benefits come. You need to take your 'Aha' moments, from watching the many re-runs of the transcripts, and Integrate them into the planning templates you use, so in the future when you create a new 'plan', you'll take advantage of your new 'learnings'. Not doing this step is why so many 'insight' therapies fail. Knowing what has you 'stuck' and changing it are 2 very different activities!

To Summarize:

Techniques	Incremental	Radical
Short Term	Practice	Think outside the box. Question Assumptions.
Long term	Reflect & Refine	Experiment Simulate & Test

Note:
If you don't want to change, to improve, nothing on my website or in my workshops will be of any value to you. If you simply Reflect and do not Integrate, you will be like a tree falling in a forest, no one will hear you.

Incremental and Radical Improvement Phases
Nature, in it's wisdom, has 2 alternating phases of change or growth: Incremental and Radical. They involve different thinking processes, and a conscious choice.

An as a special benefit, If you stack the Incremental changes on top of each other you sometimes get the same benefit as compound interest, the results grow very rapidly. Using the popular rule of 72, if you improve 9% a year, compounded, in 8 years you will double (i.e. improve by 100%) your effectiveness.

To understand Radical Improvement, I find it helpful to fully understand the nature of the dynamic thresholds that exist in the real, experiential world. These natural 'thresholds' are where radical changes in behavior most often occur.

At certain points, in our experiential world, ice changes to water, and later to steam. At each of these threshold points a lot of energy is consumed, to produce a change of state. Psychologically. there are also 'states'. like Conscious, Sub-conscious, and Un-conscious. It takes a good bit of energy to switch between these states, but certain knowledge is only available in specific states, or from specific viewpoints.

Examples of alternating phases:

Computers - The term 'generations' was used here.
This may sound boring, and you can skip it if you want, but you may also find it fascinating!
Skip the computer example.
In the first generation we had vacuum tubes, coming from radio & TV, driving the computer logic. They were large, took a lot of energy, but we incrementally improved them. Starting with 3 elements inside the vacuum tube, we gradually added a 4th, 5th, etc. each yielding an improvement. By about 6 or 7 elements we reached a natural threshold, we couldn't really do any better. So, instead of improving the Solution - Vacuum tubes - a few people asked the critical question: What is the problem we want to solve? Well it was electron flow, we want to control or switch a large signal by a much smaller signal, like the rudder on a ship or even the 'trim tab', which is very small but controls the much larger 'rudder' which in turn controls the direction of the whole ship!

Well somebody observed that the transistor, with its 3 little wires did the same kind of thing. With it's 3 wires, 2 were the input and output of the large circuit, and the 3rd was like a 'trim tab' controlling how much or little of the large Input got through to the large Output.

Hence - Generation 2.
Now, we went into an Incremental Improvement Phase, improving on transistors a little bit at a time. We made in addition to computers, radios and many other devices. This Incremental Improvement Phase is absolutely necessary to fully get the benefits of each generation. But again, as described more fully in Dynamic Thresholds we reached a new threshold. You could only physically fit so many transistors on a board. So... instead of improving the Solution - Transistors - a few people again asked the critical question: What is the problem we want to solve? Well it was still electron flow, we want to control or switch a large signal by a much smaller signal, so we created integrated circuits, basically etching your circuit onto a plate.

Hence - Generation 2. And this went on, and on, and on. Small scale integration maxed out and went to large scale integration etc., etc., etc.

Aircraft - In a similar way, I'll be briefer, we started with the propeller engine, and for about 40+ years tweaked it making Incremental improvements like: different shaped propeller blades, different angles, and materials etc. before we stopped improving the propeller and asked: What is the basic problem we're trying to solve? Propulsion! So along came the jet engine, a Radical Improvement, which we've been Incrementally Improving for the last 50+ years. Likewise for the rockets that made to moon journey and the MIR space station possible.

Education - Sadly, little progress has been made here. When I was in grammar school we had 'black boards', in high school, 'green boards', and in college 'white boards'. Very little impact. Subjects were in textbooks, and teachers interpreted those text books in a way they were comfortable with. The notion that different people learn in widely different ways, all valid, was not accepted, except very recently with home-schoolers. Whatever the teacher's style was became correct, and all other styles were WRONG! Professional, but still bullying, labels were assigned to any student who didn't learn the way a particular teacher taught. Labels like learning disabled, emotionally handicapped, ADD, ADHD, cognitively impaired, etc. flourished. I taught for 2 years in special education high schools for these educationally abused/neglected students. Regardless of the subject, the main task was to restore some sense of dignity and self-respect to these individuals after 10 or more years of professional educational bullying.

Today, 2010, the last 20-30 years, there has been some acceptance that different people learn in often radically different ways, something every parent knows, but it has reached very few actual classrooms.

Psychology - Unfortunately, only slightly better than education. I personally define psychology as learning for living. The process is really the same as learning arithmetic, or history, or music, or biology, or my favorite - geometry. But having defined and labelled in both the schools and society, many individuals as 'sick' or broken' psychology created it's own niche, complete with special terms, processes, certifications, mysterious forces like libido, or id, ego and superego, etc., - complete fabrications. While mostly ineffective, but because of the certification process, highly profitable. Unlike education, which when it fails simply leaves you ignorant, when psychology fails, you could be seriously worse off than when you first sought help.

Like education's trivial move from black to green to white boards, people no longer lie on Freud's couches, but now sit in comfortable lounge chairs. One theory is that people are primarily 'cured' by developing a close, sometimes intimate, relationship with their perfect 'certified' therapist, who will then tell them, in great detail how to live their lives.

Recent healing improvements:

Fortunately, in the last 20-30 years several 'therapy models' have emerged which are truly order of magnitude improvements. So-called 'cured' which used to take 3-5 years of twice a week visits, are now routinely resolved in 3-5 sessions, and occasionally in an hour! Unfortunately, only a few of these new technologies* have gained wide acceptance, most, like improvements in education, are never shared, or only very sparingly thru expensive seminars & workshops.

* Recent (20-30 year old) therapy models and techniques include at least:

Clean Language & Symbolic Metaphors - Created by David Grove and expanded and made far more accessible by Penny Tompkins & James Lawley. See: Clean Language & Symbolic Modelling Their website has numerous excellent and mind provoking articles.

DOBT (Depth Oriented Brief Therapy, recently renamed to Coherence Theory/Therapy) by Bruce Ecker & and Laurel Hulley. One of the very few systems that describe BOTH a practice and the theory to back it up. See: Coherence Therapy

EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing, created by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D. This is an excellent Technique which has gained world wide acceptance in less than 20 years. It still lacks, in my opinion, an adequate theory to back it up, but it WORKS, eminently well. See: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique
This process, created by Gary Craig, has yielded results far beyond anyone's expectations, even Gary's. Like me, Gary takes an engineering approach, it has to work, or throw it out. His system has been expanded into many, many areas. Gary, as an individual is, to me, the ultimate idealist & realist. He wants his ideas to 'get out there'. First, he provides a free downloadable manual on how to do EFT yourself. Basic Manual Second, he has some follow on advanced training DVD's, at extremely reasonable costs and copying privileges. See: EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques.

Hypnosis - This has been around for well over 100 years, with a very mixed history. It is extremely dependent on the person who administers it. It can be extremely effective, as in treating MPD (Multiple Personality Dynamic, recently renamed for the 'politically correct' to DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder, but when you have it, it still as painful as ever). Hypnosis is somewhat effective for issues like smoking, overeating, and even, in the right hands MPD/DID, etc. Because it's truly powerful, in the wrong hands, it can be devastating.

NLP - Neuro Linguiistic Programming - This is well developed, and can be extremely effective, but, like hypnosis is very dependent on the individual counselor you encounter. Like Hypnosis, the therapist directly programs your sub-conscious, which can be great, nothing, or troublesome.

TIR, See: Traumatic Incident Reduction
Closely related is: Applied Meta psychology at: Applied Meta psychology

These are most effective when alternated. After a Radical improvement, many cycles of Incremental improvements will flush out the full benefits of the Radical Improvement which rarely happens right away.

To help you find your way around this site, especially if you are new to these ideas, these pages may be helpful:

A Narrative Description is at Founder's Narrative
An outline or summary in slide format is at: Overview Slides
A more detailed map of the various Models, Theories, related articles etc. is at: Sitemap

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Last Updated: Sunday, Jul. 4, 2010 11:59 AM

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