One of the things that I tell clients when we first start working together is that we’re going to have fun. As you can imagine, many of them look at me quite skeptically. And they often say things like, “Fun. How could what we’re going to do possibly be fun? We’re swamped with work, we have tons of problems, our clients are complaining and now we have to learn all this continuous improvement stuff. It doesn’t sound like any kind of fun. It sounds hard and stressful.” “Trust me”, I say. “After the initial few weeks of discomfort of working in a new way, you’re going to be having fun.” And, inevitably, four to six weeks later, that’s what they realize. Working in ineffective and inefficient ways is frustrating. Feeling stuck with the way things are is disheartening and depressing. Once clients start creating new ways to work that solve customer and internal problems, they say to me, “You know. You were right! This is fun!” And I just nod and smile! Because, truth is, reclaiming your creativity, working together to figure out how to solve problems for your customers and your business and realizing that you CAN overcome obstacles that previously seemed impossible to overcome is engaging, exciting, uplifting and FUN!
