Another way to monitor and pursue Healthy Change is to characterize work (at the level of the individual, team, or whole organization) into three categories:  Operations, Innovation, and Fire-fighting.

• Operations = expected work usually done at a regular frequency

• Innovation = expected work that disrupts the status quo and leads to new customer or employee experience

• Firefighting = unexpected and unrepeated work

Your organization urgently wants to put out fires and reduce firefighting (moving from Chart 1 to Chart 2 below). Over time, your organization wants to reduce operational costs (moving from Chart 2 to Chart 3 below).

Within their personal status report, each team member should provide an estimate of the percentage of their time spent on each. Precision is not important. What’s important is that the percentage of time they spend Firefighting and in Operations trends in the right direction at a rate that everyone feels is respectable.