SOLWorld

Sharing and building Solution Focused practice in organisations

Plan:Do:Check:Act. Examining Process Improvement in Solutions Focused

team building and leadership expert michael cardus

Plan:Do:Check:Act model originally credited to Shewhart 

 

Processing Team-Building Activities:

When facilitating a team through a challenge taking breaks to evaluate what is happening during the action and what is the teams next step proves useful.

Individuals on teams when involved in challenges are really close to the problem and taking a Plan:Do:Check:ACT (PDCA) break will create clarity and teach a model of action steps and solutions finding in real-time examples.

Here is how the model works;

Prior to the team-building activity…you (the facilitator) explain the PDCA model and explain that every 3-5 minutes you are going to pause the action act ask the questions that are in the model.  Even if the team is doing awesome every 3-5 minutes the action will stop and we will quickly go through the model.

Here is the model;

Plan

  • Revisit the goal.
  • Explore (quickly) one and only one, obstacle in our way of achieving the goal

DO

  • In reference to the one obstacle choose one and only one action step that can move us closer to the goal.

Check

  • Now that you have have done that one thing what worked?

Act

  • If it worked; Can you do more and continue through the process again?
  • If it did not work; Have you stopped doing it and go through the process again.

 

Try it and let me know what happens.

 

michael cardus is create-learning

Inspired to write this post from reading Toyota Kata

Views: 2080

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of SOLWorld to add comments!

Join SOLWorld

Comment by Hans-Peter Korn on March 16, 2011 at 10:34

Well, this Plan - Do - Check - Act circle is useful for simple an complicated situations, but for COMPLEX situations (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin) this circle is appropriate only when it is very short (maybe from one day to about 2 weeks).

 

And "Plan" in complex situations (where relationship between cause and effect cannot be perceived in advance) is not a very appropriate approach. Snowden's Cynefin Framework (see link above) gives quite useful hints:

Simple: the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice.

Complicated: the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex: the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Chaotic: the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice.

Disorder: This is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision.

 

In Project Management it turned out, that complex situations can be best handled based on "agile principles". See: http://agilemanifesto.org/ and http://www.pmi.org/~/media/Files/PDF/Agile/Agile%20Certification%20...

The most popular framework for it is SCRUM, see http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/what_is_scrum

 

Cheers, Hans-Peter

 

 

 

Badge

Loading…

Notes

Jumpstart into Solution Focus

You want to learn more about "Solution Focus"?

You prefer a "step by step" introduction instead to start with reading some
voluminous books?

You would appreciate to have a complete "helicopter view" on SF after the first step…

Continue

Created by Hans-Peter Korn Dec 25, 2009 at 10:25am. Last updated by Mark McKergow Nov 3, 2014.

Making the most of SOLWorld.ning.com

If you’ve just arrived at SOLWorld.org (the SOLWorld ning group), you may be looking at all the features and wondering where to start.  This note might be helpful…

 …

Continue

Created by Mark McKergow Jun 3, 2008 at 4:55pm. Last updated by Jesper H Christiansen Aug 22, 2017.

Open Space at SOLworld conferences

SOLworld Open Space instructions as it was used at the 2011 conference, by Mark McKergow

Continue

Created by Katalin Hankovszky Dec 30, 2015 at 10:18pm. Last updated by Katalin Hankovszky Dec 30, 2015.

SOLWorld Resources

Welcome to the SOLWorld Resources section.  This part of the site features information about the SOLWorld network, our past events and materials from our previous website.  It will take some time to update all the information, so thanks for your patience. 

Information in this part of the site is 'read-only'.  If you want to start discussions, please go to the Forum or Groups. …

Continue

Created by Mark McKergow May 12, 2008 at 4:08pm. Last updated by Mark McKergow Dec 2, 2022.

© 2024   Created by Mark McKergow.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service