I was in a meeting last week when the presenter said something that stuck in my mind.
He was talking about some technical shenanigans related to transforming the underlying architecture for how systems talk to each other (thrilling stuff) but finished with ‘this is not revolutionary, simply evolutionary’. I thought – ooo, I like that.
His point was that in order to transform your business, in order to speed up delivery or to become better at what you do, you don’t need to be a pioneer. You don’t need to come up with the next big thing or try something completely different. You simply need to evolve.
You need to learn from the market place. You need to re-use other people’s good ideas. You need to reflect on what went well in the past and come up with ways of continuing and improving this benefit.
On a personal level you can apply exactly the same principle. Unless you seek to improve and change you won’t – at least not at the same rate as those that do. But you don’t need to try something radical.
You don’t need to search the depths of the Internet looking for the answer. You simply need to embrace the natural process of try something, succeed or fail, learn, go again. Very much like the purpose of sprint retrospectives in agile teams.
Bottom line: in order to improve don’t try to start a revolution, start an evolution.
Over and out.