Enjoy the how so much that you make time to improve it.
What’s the role of ways of working in today’s working life? I don’t mean a rigid set of steps handed down from above, but the living process shaped by the people doing the work. Most people stress the importance of outcome: the change you create in the world. That’s ultimately what drives profit, not just the thing you shipped.
But much less emphasis is put on how the team works together, and who should own that part. If you only focus on outcome and not on how you work, you’re also not focusing on learning. You can’t control the outcome, but you can control the how. As Mike Rother puts it in Toyota Kata: We cannot leave a process alone and expect high quality, low cost, and stability. A process will tend to erode no matter what.
That’s as true for a factory line as it is for how a team runs its retrospectives: the people doing it have to keep tending it.
There will always be challenges in how the work is done. I firmly believe you need not only to focus on the how, but also to enjoy it; enjoy it so much that you make time to improve it. Not for the sake of it, but because that’s where the learning happens, and that’s what makes better outcomes possible. Easier said when you have the stability to choose it, I know.