PDCA

Exactly.

And the engine driving this continuous improvement at Toyota was something called the PDCA cycle.

Plan, do, check, act.

It was a rigorous scientific method for testing changes.

But we can adapt this industrial cycle brilliantly for our own personal development.

Okay, let's test this.

Walk me through what a personal PDCA cycle actually looks like for a normal person in a normal week.

Because frankly, the idea of doing a check phase sounds like I'm holding a corporate performance review with myself, which just sounds miserable.

So treat the refreeze as a checkpoint, not a permanent state.

and leaner PDCA is the one for smaller iterative fixes.

Test, learn, standardize.

Best when you're improving a business process or optimizing a workflow, where learning by doing beats a top-down design document.

i was getting any better and i think this draws from just my own personal as you pointed out i'm kind of that high achieving type i wanted to continuously find a way that i was going to better myself and for me it just was gone i'm i'm sober but i'm that's just this is it i'm just going to be sober and It came to me all at once, honestly.

I got the crazy notion that I could run my own brain through the Deming Cycle, which is used in manufacturing, to continuously improve my thought processes and thereby improve my thinking and lessen my dependence on, you know... going back into use of alcohol and so reducing that.

And so sober stands for stoic, observe, behavior, execute, and restore.

And since it works on a continuous improvement cycle, you're starting out reflecting upon something by actually embracing the stoic philosophers that that are out there uh you know marcus aurelius always comes up for most people as the initial thought uh because he is the most famous of the stoics um being the emperor of rome and the most powerful man on earth 2 000 years ago who was in his tent out on the battlefield, but reflecting about about all of the things that were wrong with him when he was arguably the most powerful person alive at that moment.

Isn't that interesting? So you can put all the Japanese stuff you want on your wall and have all the dolls and all the fanfare and throw out and argue about Genba versus Genba or, you know, which, what's the right way to say it.

You know, you can argue about PDCA versus PDSA.

You can have those pedantic conversations to make yourself look like, you know, something.

You could talk about how much sushi he ate last night.

A little.

I see 5S, PDCA, and 5Ys as scaffolding for a deeper rewrite.

Shifting the inner script from, if I surface a problem, I'm a nuisance, to, finding a better way is my job, and I'll be backed for it.

So we're arguing means versus ends.

We do the experiment.

So it's in the manufacturing world, it's called plan, do, check, act, the PDCA loop.

And, you know, so we do the thing.

We have a hypothesis.

[chuckles] But when you run it on purpose, it actually runs smoothly, and nothing falls through the gaps, and nothing ever gets missed.

Now, you might be thinking that this is the plan, do, check, act cycle that they teach us in safety management, and the PDCA cycle is way different than what I'm talking about in the safety management cycle.

The PDCA was actually created as a generic, like, quality and process improvement loop, and we do run it inside of our safety management cycle.

We don't call it that, but there are pieces of it in there.

But you can't just run a PDCA and think that it, it's covering your whole safety program.

The, the safety management cycle, when it is purpose-built for safety, it captures everything involved in safety, even the day-to-day recurring tasks or the month to month or the week to week, all the things to make sure that you're catching all of your gaps and you're not missing anything.

It includes the people, the behaviors, the coaching.

If you go back to football, actually at the end of the day, I just see huge amounts of correlation.

You mentioned PDCA.

They do PDCA in literally every single facet of football.

Match to match, the player, the individual, they all have their own individual training programs that get adjusted based on how they've been performing.

There's so much science, data, information that's used.