This brings us to improvement science.
I never had the chance to talk to my grandpa about his work. He was always more interested in hearing about what we were studying in school or what art project or band we were working on. But in understanding Shift’s approach to working with organizations and teams, I’m starting to understand my grandpa’s work.
Leaders in improvement science often say every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does. In other words, a system will only produce different results if it is redesigned to work differently. Having worked in higher education, I know change is a slow process in well-established systems, even when a system so clearly produces inequitable outcomes and needs improvement. However, the pressures of evolving technology, social change, and community needs demand systems to improve their outcomes for the communities they serve.
In the face of these demands, operating at baseline is not enough. Organizations must be ready to adapt and perform beyond baseline when the urgency of our times demand it. We can see the way Covid-19 created an asynchronous and ongoing change in demand, staffing, finance and more. The way we work completely changed. In real time, we saw the shifts in our society test the systems many of us accepted as innate and fixed. As the world begins to settle and pivot, more testing and improvement will be necessary for many organizations’ sustainability.
Continuous improvement addresses the various demands on a system to perform beyond baseline. Shift’s approach to continuous improvement integrates more than a century of improvement science with contemporary human-centered design principles. We believe the people most impacted by a system are best positioned to redesign it. We seek to understand the unique context where a system operates, whether healthcare or early childhood education, to improve systems that serve people in the real world. Improvement with an equity imperative!
I may not be able to sit down with my grandpa and hear about his work and tell him about what I’ve been up to, but looking at his accomplishments filed away in boxes, I can see the evidence of his constant and continuous work toward always making his field and our world just a little better.