The great challenge of post-industrial work is to cultivate happy, high-performing individuals, teams and organizations. Prager’s Law headlines a family of ideas that shed new light on how to address this challenge. It begins with a single clarifying question:

How can we best sustain and scale improvement?

The most exciting part about this approach to improvement is that you can start anywhere in your organization — you don’t have to be the big boss or even see the entire picture to initiate positive change — and the approach is intrinsically creative and collaborative: as you join forces with other change agents the effects compound powerfully.

What is Prager’s Law?

“After you make an improvement, the last thing you should do is more work.”

Prager’s Law

Instead of reflexively demanding or volunteering to do more of the same work, we can use that freed-up time in a variety of intelligent ways.

The following articles begin to flesh out the details of the mechanism illustrated at the top of the page: the keys to starting, sustaining, and scaling compounding improvement.

1. The Virtuous Cycle of Improvement: Improvement in the small starts here.
2. The Motivation Lens: Virtuous cycles not only improve productivity; they also boost morale.
3. Compounding improvement is a lot like compound interest — a financial metaphor.
4. Scaling improvement is not a given. Unless your organization respects Prager’s Law, local improvements will not compound at larger scales.

Getting started with Prager’s Law

Ready to put it into practice? Here’s an overview of how to get started with Prager’s Law by evaluating the situation, set up virtuous cycles of improvement, and starting to implement and spread the scaling pattern.

Copyright © 2019 Daniel Prager. All rights reserved.