Why do we make New Year’s Resolutions? Every New Year I wonder some of the same things.
What’s so special about the beginning of a new year; is the 24 hour block of time on January 1st all that different from any other 24 hour block of time?
Yes; but perhaps the 1st is ideally positioned to make it an ideal time to initiate change.
Many stats show that most of us fail to keep our resolutions, many before the end of January.
Yes; but a challenge is fun!
Let’s dig deeper. Our lives and our world tend to be cyclical. Years are not based on an arbitrary length of time, but rather a cycle of the solar system. This and other cycles provide structure and predictability that is both comforting and challenging.
Doesn’t every sports team (regardless of the sport) hope to do better “this season” and strategize about making the cycle of the season work to its advantage? One thing common to most of the world’s religions is directing believers through cycles of seasons, celebrations and practices in order to become better believers. I’m engaged in a faith community which follows a cyclical pattern of “liturgical seasons” and have noted this cycle is conducive to change. Whether in nature, sports or religion, cycles are conducive to principals laid out by the American Psychological Association (APA) for making change.
- Start small
- Change one behavior at a time
- Talk about it
- Don’t beat yourself up
- Ask for support
This time of the year is a great time to think about resections for the future, as we enter into this next cycle together.
And rather than highlight a specific resolution at MAX, I would like to draw your attention to the cyclical nature of our Exact MAX software upgrade process which is very conducive to incremental and progressive change. This is most obvious in the fact that MAX gets incrementally and progressively better via the resolved issues and enhancements included in each of our new software releases. Our quality assurance, infrastructure, and software release preparations all get better and better through the same incremental change.
An example of a small change with a big impact was something we started doing a few years back: including a PowerPoint describing the resolved issues and included enhancements for each release. It seems like a very simple thing, but this change resulted in improved MAX documentation. It also prompted the now standard practice of offering live web rollout presentations for every new release, which many of our customers find helpful in preparing for MAX software upgrades.
So I leave you with this thought: What cycles in your business can you harness to bring about incremental and progressive change?
