Getting Better Means Getting Faster
Improvement is usually about speed and not quality.
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When you are learning a new skill, you get better very quickly. After a while, your rate of improvement slows down until it seems like you’re not making any progress at all. This is called the learning curve, and we’ve all been on it.
The plateauing of progress is frustrating, since you need to put in more and more effort to see less and less improvement. Eventually it’s a struggle to improve at all! This is when people start to give up and/or burn out.
I enjoy learning new skills, ranging from art to woodworking to sports. I find myself on the learning curve very often, and as a result I get frustrated by the plateauing of results very often!
One of the hardest things to see is that improvement isn’t just about a better end result. Often, improvement means you get there faster.
For example, the art I make is not noticeably better than the art I made 2-3 years ago. Despite daily practice, the quality of my art has hit one of these plateaus. However, I can create a piece in just a few hours that used to take me weeks! The quality is the same but my speed has vastly increased.
This is true of teams as well. If you measure your team solely on the quality of their work you might not see continuous improvement every week. If you look at how much effort it takes them you might find a lot of improvement.
This is also why hiring subject matter experts is so important. As a smart, motivated person there are likely few jobs at your company you can’t do extremely well. But no matter how smart you are, you will not be as fast as someone who is an expert at that task. Hiring an expert isn’t giving you a better outcome, it’s giving you the outcome a lot faster.
For example, I’m sure you can file your corporate taxes yourself! All of the rules are published and the forms have checks and balances to make sure you don’t make mistakes. However, it will take you much, much longer than an experienced accountant. You pay your accountant to get it done faster and avoid wasting your time.
That might seem like an extreme example, but it’s true of a lot of things! You can plan your business trips, but an expert can do it faster. You can organize events, but an expert can do it faster. You can design a new website, but an expert can do it faster!
Even in the age of AI, experts matter. An expert in using AI to achieve a task will get it done faster than you learning about it and then learning how to use AI to achieve it. Yes, you can do it. But it’s so much faster to have an expert get it done.
When your team is taking on new tasks, you’ll see quick improvement in the first few weeks. After that, keep an eye on their speed in addition to output to see whether they are improving. You might see a lot more improvement than you’d expect!
And, if not, it might be time to hire an expert.
For more on Productivity, see:
Speed, quality, price. Pick any two.