Any process that does not have provisions for its own refinement will eventually fail or be abandoned*
- W. R. Corcoran
Corcoran is probably correct --- but how would we know? There are a lot of processes out there, many have been around forever, many oldies still effective. But, I take his point: change, adapt, or fade away to either obsolescence or irrelevance.Of course, naturally changing demographics takes care of a lot of this somewhat automatically. New organizations, people new to organizations, and young people without the baggage of experience all tend to reinvent.
And, why not? The wheels of today are far superior to the wheels of ancient times. Can you imagine taking your chariot in to have the wheels balanced? Not likely. Perhaps the wheel does need reinvention from time to time.
Of course, we digress: reinvention is not exactly refinement, which suggests tuning on the margins. Refinement is more about lessons learned, feedback, TQM metrics, and the like, all aimed at weeding out the ineffective.
Of course, if you are locked into some kind of maturity model or ISO certification, refinement is no small matter, as changes must find their way into documentation, training, deployment, and so on.
Nonetheless, I get it: change, adapt, or fade away to either obsolescence or irrelevance.
Quoted by Glen Alleman from "The Phoenix Handbook: The Ultimate Event Evaluation Manual for Finding Profit Improvement in Adverse Events, Nuclear Safety Review Concepts, 19 October 1997."
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