The four E's: Engage, educate, execute, evaluate

- To make our journey simpler, we'll divide our work into different phases or elements. It's important to know what you're doing, but more important to understand why you're doing it. For that, let's use a framework, I like to call the four E's. Throughout our journey to continuously improve, you'll have to engage, educate, execute, and evaluate the path before you. We engage with our staff, leadership, and the whole organization to secure support, buy-in and ensure readiness for the changes to come with all voices and perspectives, having an opportunity to contribute to the future. Next, you'll look at how to provide education when and where it is needed. As you navigate towards the future, there may be some gaps in knowledge or skills that need to be closed. In educate, you'll do just that. Next, it's time to execute. This means taking the plan developed during the previous phases and getting it done. And finally, you'll evaluate your progress. What's working, what isn't, and where are there opportunities to further improve. And while these are laid out in a linear fashion, they are anything, but in order for you to truly create a culture of continuous improvement, the need to engage, educate, execute, and evaluate can't only be items on a checklist or boxes to be ticked. To be successful, you need to make this a part of your corporate identity, ingrained into the DNA of your organization. That means, making it a part of how you do business.