We’ve talked about realigning the membership, where we intend to get everyone on the same page about how the club works. We’ve also talked about restructuring the organization, so that the positions in the club match what we actually want to do and supports that better than it does now. Doing these two things just by themselves will probably prompt a lot of change around here.

Many people assume beneficial change comes in the form of breakthroughs; magical giant leaps forward that appear once in a blue moon and completely solve everybody’s problems in one go. The truth is, accomplishing genuine improvement in this way is extremely hard. You have to have a big radical idea, and then you have to go to a lot of extra effort to try to figure out how to implement it, then you have to convince other people that it’s a good idea, so you might get the chance to maybe try this idea, and then after however many months that takes, then you have to actually implement it, and then finally, maybe you’ll have some idea if it made any real difference or not. Assuming you even got an opportunity to do it at all.

A better way to make beneficial change is through a series of smaller, more gradual improvements over time. Smaller changes are easier to make; it takes less effort and it’s easier to get people on board with small changes than it is to get them to buy into a big change. A series of smaller changes can be just as significant as a single big change, but also more likely to really happen.

The path to being successful at changing things is to have a process that repeatedly makes small improvements, all the time.

This is what we’re talking about when we say reassessing the situation. We want to constantly look at how things are going, and ask everybody three simple questions:

• What’s working?
• What’s not working?
• What should we change?

The key to this approach being successful is to ask these questions on a regular basis, not as some special one-off big research project. By asking these questions of everybody, it’s a method of getting input from people who actually care about stuff that’s going on, and working with them to actually implement those changes, rather than to impose those changes on everybody from the top-down with some brilliant idea that some people we don’t know dreamed up in a back room someplace.

I’m thinking we’ll have some version of this conversation monthly; we already do reporting monthly, so it’s natural to also review how things are going on that basis. So we can add as a feature in Command where everyone can participate, and then maybe we also have a slightly-more real-time version for the cabinet in some other setting.

It’s a simple enough idea, so I don’t feel the need to go overboard in describing it. But you guys can feel free to ask me all about it. I think in our next HQ post we’ll tie everything together.

Joe