Make progress visible

One of the key objectives for those leading long, change projects, is keeping the team motivated.  When your goal is months or even years away, it can be hard to avoid getting dragged down by all the obstacles and weeks of seemingly hard work with little obvious end result.

In their book “Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions:” Rathgeber and Kotter identified a key step in change management: create short term wins.  I was reminded of this recently when discussing the work of Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in their book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work”.  In it they describe how analysis of nearly 12,000 daily diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies demonstrated that making progress in meaningful work was the biggest motivator on a daily basis.

That got me thinking about how we might do this.  How can we create short-term wins and feel like we’re making progress on a daily basis?

It’s not quite the same, however when my children were younger, I was fortunate to hear Marcus Child speak, and one idea I picked up and implemented was a book of ‘reasons to be cheerful’.  Each night at bedtime, we sat and wrote down up to 3 reasons to be cheerful in a dedicated journal with each of my children.  Like many childhood practices, it lasted for a while, and then either life got in the way, or their interest in it waned and the practice stopped.  However, we still have those journals and they now provide a positive trip down memory lane for all of us to stop and feel good for a moment or two when we dip into them.

This concept of a daily journal has also been suggested as a way to demonstrate progress.  By forming a habit of writing down up to 3 ways we’ve made progress each day, we suddenly become more aware of what we are achieving, rather than being overwhelmed by what we haven’t achieved, or have still to achieve.

On large change projects, I’ve used the idea of a ‘progress wall’ where everything we tick off our to-do list gets added to a post-it and added to the progress wall, to remind us all that we are constantly moving forwards towards the end result.

When we stop and look around us, we can see many ways of celebrating small wins and making progress visible.  Whether it is the daily streak on Duolingo (insert your alternative app here) or the charity totaliser that shows the rate of progress toward a fundraising target with mini celebrations as we pass each £100,000 marker.

Gamification has gone a long way to helping us find creative ways to stay motivated.  How can you incorporate some of this into your current project?