The Improvement Guide Quotes

“change is a prediction: if the change is made, improvement will result.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Changes developed in a conference room often don’t perform as designed in practice.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“We should be drawn to examples of a high level of performance in areas we are trying to improve.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Knowledge of subject matter is essential to make changes that result in improvement,”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Skillfully building knowledge by making changes and observing or measuring the results is the foundation of improvement.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“The concepts of variation create a structure for understanding the key mistakes that people make in dealing with variation. The first is to treat common cause variation as if it is due to special causes and adjust or reset the system, when in fact the only way to improve the system is by fundamentally changing it. The second mistake is to accept special cause variation as if it were all due to common causes and miss an opportunity to fix a problem.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Common causes—those causes that are inherent in the process (or system) over time,”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Central Law of Improvement.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Leverage points can prove especially effective when the change is directed at a constraint in the system (a key idea in complexity theory).”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“Leverage. Small changes can produce significant improvement.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

“We should expect and consider these delayed effects.”
― Gerald J. Langley, The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance