Improving the Quality of Our Mornings

I hit the "answer" button on my iPhone in a panic. My shaky "hello," I imagine, sounded more like a nervous shout than a greeting. At first, all I heard was crying. Then, I heard a sentence that hit me with a heavy thud: "I can't do this."

It's interesting when we look back on the moments that make us change -- an unexpected job offer, a brutal hangover, a surprising number on a scale.

Bridget's trembling, overwhelmed voice at 8:30 one weekday morning created a feeling of helplessness I had never experienced. She was crying, Annabelle was wailing, and I was standing in my bedroom in a collared shirt and a pair of boxer briefs. It turned out, as Bridget has already written, to be just a tough moment in time. But it was the tipping point for us to make a change.

That phrase "make a change" has been an abstract idea for most of my life. Maybe you feel the same way. Other than willpower, how do you actually change something? How do you improve something? Thanks to the job I've had for three years, I've discovered a valuable method. It's called the science of improvement and, during the last six weeks, it's helped change our little family's life. More specifically, mornings have never been the same.

Our mornings come down to one simple truth: If Bridget and Annabelle leave by 7:20, everyone is okay. Everyone gets to work on time, traffic is bearable, and stress is under control. If the dawdling duo leaves at 7:25, 7:30, or heaven forbid, even later, panicked phone calls are a distinct possibility. So how could we make sure they left by 7:20 every weekday? The science of improvement! (If you work at IHI and you're reading this, feel free to stop now and make fun of me relentlessly tomorrow.)

First, we needed a goal or, as improvement folks call it, an aim. (Otherwise, how will you know where you're going?) That seemed easy enough for us. We needed to get Bridget and Annabelle out the door by 7:20.

Then we needed some data and some things to measure. What time did they usually leave? What usually made them late? We spent a few weeks tracking the time we all walked out the front door. (I don't leave for work then, but I always carry Annabelle to the car.) Those data points were helpful, but we needed more detail. If we left at 7:20 one day and 7:30 the next, it wasn't clear why there was a 10-minute difference. So we brainstormed and came up with six other things we needed to measure (these are called process measures) to help us understand why we were meeting (or, more correctly, not meeting) our goal:

• Time out of bed
• Time spent pumping
• Time spent in shower
• Time spent feeding Annabelle
• Time spent preparing breakfast
• Time spent getting dressed

We predicted that if we understood how long it took Bridget to do each of these things, we'd have more knowledge about our morning. 

And guess what happened? We've started to see some improvement. Each week, we calculate, the average time out of the house and compare that to our goal of 7:20. During the first week, it was 7:29, then it jumped up to 7:34 (not a good week), and last week, we hit our goal for the first time. (Hooray!) Here's a chart that shows our progress so far:

We still have a lot of work to do. We've hit our goal only once and now we'll have to find a way to sustain the improvement, which is quite difficult. But simply becoming conscious of the process and understanding that we control it has made our mornings much smoother.

And now with this new-found knowledge, we can run some tests -- getting up earlier, showering the night before, setting a time-limit for pumping -- that can help us get out the door by 7:20. (We'll test all these things with a tool called the P-D-S-A  (which stands for plan-do-study-act) cycle, which is as simple as it sounds.) 

Oh, and for those of you who might be picturing me chasing my wife around the apartment with a notebook, yes, that's exactly what happens. But she doesn't mind because she knows we're measuring for improvement and not for judgment. (There's a huge difference!) 

If you want to learn more about this improvement thing, here's a link to a free online course that will take you about an hour. If you don't want to learn more and think I'm a huge nerd for liking this stuff, that's cool, too.