CANI – Constant and Never Ending Improvement. One of those mantras that I picked up in Google, one that stayed to become a part of life. While it came to me from Google, it's apparently a Japanese concept called 'Kaizen'. Sounds rather simplistic, but you imbibe it, and it can have a mind blowing impact on life.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
CANI - In Greater Detail
This is for those who kind of got used to longer posts, and came back on CANI with…What was that? Didn’t understand only….Need elucidation... so here it is.
The picture's a sidetrack...more as a cute 'Can I?'
To go back to the CANI, Constant and Never Ending Improvement, I read somewhere this analogy of a Movie vs a Speech, which might fit here.
Producers spend crores or millions on a production, create a movie, then put it out, and then wait for public reaction, the outcome...be it success or failure. There's not much they can do once the movie's completed and out there. With a movie, you have one chance to get it right. You either make your money or you lose it.
A speaker, in contrast, gets ample opportunity to improve a speech. With each new speech, you get to try out new ideas or methods, watch the reaction, make changes, test them, and then repeat the process until you have a nicely finished product. In fact, that's not even true. With a speech, you never have a finished product. With each new delivery, you're provided one more opportunity to make improvements.
In life, we somehow seem to develop this life-is-a-movie attitude, maybe because of school. We work on our projects or exam papers, hand it in, and pray for a good grade. It’s about grades at every point, and then we’re moving onto the next project, the next class. There’s no time or opportunity to polish anything done.
Unfortunately, when it comes to producing a noteworthy product, polishing is everything. Just ask professional writers and they'll eagerly tell you, 'Writing is rewriting'
Now, Life is like a speech, not a movie. We're almost always given a chance to rework our projects. A chance to continuously improve on what we've learnt and what we do. It just takes the awareness and guts and humility to do so.
Apparently, before Woody Allen did his most popular stand up routine on TV, he had put together ten jokes and tried them out at a local club. One joke survived. Then he tried out ten more and then another ten until he had the 'effortless' set he had before he did TV. Allen understood that he wasn't producing a movie, he was giving a speech—and a speech can be easily tested and improved until the finished product looks effortless.
Understanding this idea gives us perspective, and hope. It frees us from the frightening challenge of 'getting it right the first time', or for that matter even the second or the third. We learn that there's always scope to learn and improve.
In Google I've seen this done with everything, within the Org and also with products. A product is launched in beta version to faithful users for a good while and then built on, and even after launch, iteration and improvement is a constant. I learnt to do that even with regular presentations or project summaries. The first one would always go out as version 1, and from then on its about building on it.
Now this applies not just in what we do, but in how we are too.
We seem to have fairly rigid images of ourselves. Especially when we find ourselves in sticky situations, we like to justify it saying, well, that’s the way I am…Main Aisa Hi Hoon. What we typically do is.....'that's how I'm made'.... 'that’s the way it is'..... 'that’s how everyone lives'.....Like finished product kinds. But is it?
I'll say it one more time: life is a speech, not a movie.
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