Here is a simple guide (fewer than 10 steps) to making incremental improvements using a scientific approach, whether it be in your personal life or in your workplace.
Through the steps (below), we'll follow two different examples — one related to an agile transformation, and one related to personal health.
1. Define an objective
2. Define possible root causes* for why you or your team are not where you want to be right now with regard to the objective
* Note that in complex adaptive systems, such as human bodies and product/service teams and organisations, there is rarely a single root cause for any given outcome (good or bad), hence the need to consider multiple possibilities which should form the basis of incremental and iterative improvement experiments — fishbone and causal loop diagrams are both useful for this purpose
3. Define a problem hypothesis based on one of the possible root causes (this is now the "problem to solve")
4. Gather the baseline data for the problem
5. Define an improvement hypothesis — an [activity] and [expected result] which you believe to be a small step toward the objective in a measurable way
6. Do the improvement activity
7. Compare the actual results to the expected
8. Consider what you learned by doing the activity (it should guide your next steps)
9. GOTO step 5, unless
If you have any questions on this approach, or need a hand with your lean/agile product development or agile transformation endeavours, please reach out directly to me or my company Hypothesis.