I didn't expect this to be an article about education. But it seems to make a lot of sense. I have always felt that bad teachers recognize that there is a problem with their classroom management, however the solutions they come up with aren't great. I also have seen that most bad teachers have common problems. Which would imply that with a pretty standard set of instructions a bad teacher could transform into something better with just a bit of work.
Yes halfway through this article could have been about anything, so broad was the application of the concept, but education was an interesting choice. There are surely many other fields that can be similarly improved.
Just focusing not only on doing your job, but how you do it, the little details, and then having constant feedback and trying to improve constantly, it's an incredibly valuable concept.
Reminds me of first Bush Treasury Secretary John O'Neill's emphasis on safety when he took over at Alcoa in the 80's. It was part of a broader strategy that he referred to as habitual excellence." I first came across it in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, where he provides an interesting account of how it helped mend crippling mistrust between labor and management. Here's a newspaper article that quickly summarizes it:
We've done something like this at my workplace by moving to scrum (with regular retrospectives) and, more importantly, by adopting stricter coding standards together with regular code reviews (weekly as a group and by using pull requests with continuous integration.)
I would have liked to see us extend this to something even more like O'Neill's approach with a greater focus on eliminating production bugs (especially with respect to our deployment practices where unexpected snags abound). But I haven't been able to get management support for that. (Our more critical business function is to keep existing infrastructure humming rather than develop new products so I feel it would make more sense for us than for, say, a startup, but I guess no one like admitting to themselves that their main reason-for-being is to maintain the status quo.)
Nevertheless, all together, the changes have made a world of difference.
