Incremental Excellence

by Eddie Pipkin

We want to get better at everything we do, so we’re susceptible to grand plans for change. Audacious goals can fuel a surge of energy around new habits and revised approaches. But such a flurry of activity can flame out, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes with a pitiful whimper. What seemed like a glorious leap forward turns out to be based on a strategy that was unsustainable. Real progress is often far less dramatic; real progress is usually of the slow and steady variety. Incremental excellence is excellence that lasts.

The definition for incremental is “increasing gradually by regular degrees or additions.”

The principle is to add something on (or to make changes) bit by bit, so that each individual addition or change isn’t much to get excited about, but cumulatively, over time, one can look back and take pride in steady progress. It’s that steadiness that makes the difference, the focus and discipline to do a little more and a little better. The tenets are simple and straightforward but pay powerful dividends:

We add on a small thing (or change a negative to a positive – this can also mean giving up a bad thing).
We do this on a regular schedule.

We are trained by the influencer economy to go for a moon shot every time we’re motivated to make a change. Whether it’s the self-help authors who are pushing old-school printed books or influencers who are hawking products on their YouTube videos or increasing their “likes” by promising “one simple trick” to help us be better, stronger, or more successful, the industry of lifestyle optimization encourages us to go all in on big changes fast.

This can lead to predictable disasters in the lives of individuals and institutions. We’ve all seen it, up close and personal, a gutsy playbook of drastic changes executed with passion, but unworkable over the long haul. Gyms make millions off the promise of a “new you” every January (when people are in the mood for audacious resolutions). Local churches launch bold visions, recruiting members to invest their time, talents, and funds in the next big thing. Some people do stick with the gym, and they really do find a new lifestyle of fitness and health. Likewise, some local churches really do prosper from the energy and direction of vivid visions. It can take a wholesale shift in approach and attitude to bring change that matters. If there is an authentic expansive vision, because the timing is right and the thirst for change is real, individuals and churches should leap on that bandwagon and ride that wave. And if things are so desperate that only a bold re-imagining is going to move the needle, individuals and institutions should roll the dice. Shaking things up is sometimes the only path forward.

But most of us, most of the time, find ourselves somewhere in the middle, not in a season of bold adventure or in a period of doom and disaster. We’re doing okay. We don’t really have any major complaints. We just want to do better. We want forward progress without drama. We want growth without undue pain and pressure.

This is where incremental change comes in.

We can’t have growth and progress by maintaining the status quo. On the other hand, we don’t want to rock the boat until we tip the boat over (all apologies to The Hues Corporation). We add one healthy habit at a time, or we change one bad habit to a good habit, or we do the hard work to give up a bad habit, or we do one thing a little bit better by adjusting a practice. Imagine if we made one such adjustment per week. One positive change alone doesn’t seem like much to celebrate, but looking back on the previous 12 months and remembering 52 accomomplishments, we can see that the cumulative improvements are a big deal.

It’s a manageable quest. An attempt to change too big a thing too fast is intimidating and stressful, but breaking that big thing into 20 small things makes it conceivable. We can integrate the one incremental change into our regular routine, too. We don’t have to reinvent our life all at once in a way that is disruptive. This is good for our state of mind, and it’s good for the people around us.

Also, because each additional change is small, we have more time to judge its impact. We can course correct if the change turns out to be too much or disappointingly ineffective. We can easily go back to what was working (in retrospect) better before, or we can tweak the new thing in a way that makes it work the way we thought it would.

Such a process gives us plenty of time to figure out exactly what our priorities should be. We might make a list of 50 changes we should be making, but one of the hardest next steps is figuring out how to prioritize them. Small steps / smaller changes mean we have more flexibility in determining what order in which to undertake them. It’s a more flexible approach, easily adjusted if circumstances change mid-journey. A good sequence means each change is continually building on the foundation that makes the next change possible, until we find ourselves in a higher, more secure place than where we started.

In order for this process to work, we are required to be reflective and disciplined. We must have a clear mandate for what the new change / adjustment will be and the time frame in which it will be undertaken, as well as a process for evaluating how it went. Just as it’s easier to add a small change, the reflective process is also easier and more manageable. The stakes are inherently lower. The moments when we come up short are more easily laughed off as we prepare to try again. And, of course, the cumulative effect only pays dividends if we are able to add new thing, new habits, new efficiencies while also preserving the previous changes.

At the end of any given day with its trials, challenges, and tribulations, we can, if we are pursuing incremental change, look back and say, “Well, at least I did that one thing today that I set out to do. I can be proud of that.”

As leaders within our local churches and other institutions, we can pursue patterns of incremental change and encourage our teams to practice this philosophy of growth:

Make incremental change a thing to be overtly celebrated.
Encourage people to practice incremental change as individuals, and brainstorm changes they might implement in, for instance, the next week.
Do the same process with your organization! Rather than saying, “We need to overhaul our membership connections strategy (a noble, but complex goal), what if we just started with, “I’m gong to call or text one person I haven’t seen in a while tis next week.”
Practice breaking down large goals into a series of stepping-stone incremental changes.
Think about what a process for evaluating incremental changes will look like, how progress will be recorded, and how small successes will be celebrated.
Make it a point to periodically take a look at major gains over longer time frames. Share your observations with someone who is invested in you and your story.
Celebrate other people’s incremental efforts. Encourage them on their path forward!

Have you already been practicing the power of incremental change in your own life or with your own organization? Share some of the valuable lessons you have learned in the comments section and offer up any questions you have about the value of this strategy. (If you’ve always wanted to leave a comment to a blog, but never done it before, that might be your small challenge / change for this week!)