How can I help to instill a continuous improvement culture?

First, in Scrum and agile settings, you don’t want the team to rely on you as a Scrum Master to remind them to improve. Instead you hope to create a culture where ongoing improvement and self-management is regarded as business as usual where people always leave the situation in a better place than they found it.  A culture of improvement consists of trial and error and teams need to be able to experiment, which are learning opportunities regardless of their outcomes. Teams can try phrasing things they want to try or test in hypothesis-driven statements that they implement and measure the outcome to learn.

Second, help the team’s behaviors move from a fixed mindset to, as psychologist Carol Dweck describes, a growth mindset. A team with a growth mindset believes they can learn and develop their skills and abilities making them flexible and open to change; whereas a team with a fixed mindset is comfortable with operating as they always have because their capabilities and qualities are fixed.

Here are some other tips to get started:

• Stay true to the empirical foundation of Scrum and the Scrum values. Use the Sprint as a heartbeat for continuous improvement. 
• Ensure that everyone understands the purpose of Scrum cadences and events. Skipping one or more Sprint Events loses opportunities to inspect and adapt. 
• Lead by example and participate. Be transparent about your actions  and the choices you take to serve the team and organization better. 
• Roll up your sleeves. You are part of the Scrum Team and can and  should work alongside your team members to improve the way you all work and deliver value.  
• Discover and help remove blockers. Blockers to improvement can include behaviors, lack of safe space or team empowerment, technology, processes, external influences and so on. Consistent facilitated team sessions can make these blockers transparent. 
• Be curious about the team’s motivation and their organizational influences. Is failing allowed? Are team members empowered to act? Is this transparent?
• Encourage team members and teams to share their learnings, improvements and failures with each other. You can conduct yet purposeful informal sessions like lunch-and-learns to share insights.