Practice

Practice is repeating a task in order to improve your skills. This doesn’t mean that it has to just be an exercise. You can practice doing good Pareto charts by finding opportunities to use them in real situations.

Practice is characterized by purpose. That means identifying a gap in a skill and coming up with a plan on how to get better. Practice is also very specific. The closer a practice situation matches a real requirement, the more effective it is.

Practice is successful primarily because people retain more when they do something repetitively. Reading or hearing about something isn’t nearly as good as doing something over and over yourself.

In Lean, becoming proficient at making improvements doesn’t happen by accident. Kaizen teams and daily improvement projects provide employees great opportunities to get better through repetitive practice.