A3 is a versatile problem-solving method and continuous improvement tool. It’s called A3 because it fits on a standard sheet of paper. Download our free A3 template and you’ll have everything you need to get started.  Why to Use A3 A3 is a step-by-step approach for applying plan-do-check…

Good check-in meeting questions are relevant and evocative. Tactical yes/no questions and status updates are best handled as they arise in the course of day-to-day work. In the check-in meeting, you should dive deeper into challenges, opportunities, and successes. For meeting structure and…

After a year of chaos and disruption, organizational agility is in the spotlight. Organizational agility is the ability to quickly identify and execute initiatives for opportunities and risks that align with the organization’s overall strategy. APQC’s research finds that an overwhelming majority of…

APQC’s research on virtual collaboration shows that the biggest challenges are about people and processes—not the technology itself. That said, there are some really innovative and useful virtual collaboration tools out there. To get a pulse on the latest tech toys (and of much more, of course), I…

Employees have been complaining about painful and pointless meetings for decades. Now that most of us are engaging in hybrid virtual meetings (where some people gather in a conference room and others join in remotely), those complaints are multiplying and growing louder. Why? It’s so easy to…

APQC is small in terms of our physical footprint and number of employees. We deliver services; we have no products that require manufacturing or shipping. So how can we be more sustainable? The go-to idea would be to donate money – and we do donate to charitable causes – but what else could we do…

Three months into 2021, and we’ve got yet another unprecedented event: a massive ship is stuck in the Suez Canal. It’s the first time that’s happened in the canal’s 150-year history, and it’s already creating huge problems in terms of its: economic impact (goods can’t get to market with this…

Storytelling is the number-one way to get people to participate in knowledge management (KM). Most of the time, you can’t force people to “do KM”—and even when you can use requirements and performance goals to make KM a must-do, that’s usually not enough. KM teams need to find and promote stories…

Five thousand upvotes and counting. Dozens of Reddit awards (which, by the way, are purchased with real money). Hundreds of back-and-forth comments full of inside jokes, controversy, and sheer enthusiasm.* No, I’m not talking about the latest viral video or meme—I’m talking about a supply chain…

On January 22, the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina opened a drive-thru coronavirus vaccine clinic. Soon after the clinic opened, computer systems went down, and the lines grew longer and longer. With hundreds of people parked in their cars waiting for the vaccine, the town’s mayor knew he…