Quick Fixes

The small improvement anyone may make to their own work, reported so others get it too — and the same words name the repair that treats a symptom and hides its cause.

The canon's sense is the good one, and it is a grant of authority. Everyone doing the work is encouraged to keep looking for better ways to do it, and every member of every team must be empowered to make the changes required to get a little better every day. Not propose, not request — make. Then report the result to co-workers and to the wider body, so that a fix found once becomes available everywhere (Continuous Improvement · A Day Well Lived · Knowledge as commons · Improvement log · Learning By Doing).

That is load-bearing because the alternative is the ordinary arrangement, in which the people closest to a problem are the ones least permitted to fix it, and improvement has to travel up and back down through people who cannot see it (Subsidiarity · Sovereignty At Every Scale · Zero Blame Environment).

And the same phrase names a real failure mode, which is why the page is worth having rather than folding into its neighbour. A quick fix can be the repair that makes the symptom go away and leaves the cause running — and it is more dangerous than doing nothing, because the signal has been removed while the problem continues (Root Causes · The Anti-Patterns · Patterns of Death · Every Defect Is A Gift · Pain (as signal)).

The distinction between the two is a single question, and it is cheap to ask: did I fix the thing, or fix my view of it? A genuine quick fix is small, local, reversible, reported, and leaves the cause visibly addressed. A false one is small, local, unreported, and quietly makes the next person's diagnosis harder (Possibility Of Reversal · Transparency · Communication Debt).

The reporting is what converts one into the other more often than any rule would. A fix said out loud can be checked by someone who can see further (Second reader · Play by Play · Retrospective).

Also called: small improvements Stands on: Continuous Improvement · Learning · Sovereignty At Every Scale Opens onto: Root Causes · Every Defect Is A Gift · Improvement log · The Anti-Patterns · Knowledge as commons · Retrospective · Zero Blame Environment · Tightly Coupled Learning and Action In play: the table and the daily work — the standing permission to improve what is in front of you, and the check on doing it badly Sources: Quick Fixes (root page, stub — the empowerment clause and the reporting expectation, drawn from the integrated-delivery inheritance) · Continuous Improvement, Root Causes (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: Quick Fixes Open: The canon carries only the positive sense; the symptom-hiding sense is named here because the phrase carries it everywhere else and a reader will arrive with it. · The page mentions incentives for implementing and reporting fixes, and nothing in the canon says what those would be.