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A phrase we hear more and more these days is, “trust the process”. One famous example was with the NBA’s Philadelphia 76’ers whose ‘process’ of tanking numerous consecutive seasons to receive high draft picks to then construct a great team had plenty of fans (and critics). However, what the 76’ers example proved was that there is no such thing as a “perfect process”. In fact, a process is about the never-ending journey of productivity.
Processes are a constant up and down swinging arc of three concepts. These are optimization, automation and outsourcing. Whether we do these consciously or not, any process we set up in our business should go through these three stages. A good process, not perfect though, does these three things in that exact order also.
In the first stage of optimization, it’s crucial to differentiate between what is and is not working. When we can create a mental ‘pros and cons’ list in our heads, this is when we are looking at what is and isn’t optimal. To further optimize what we do, we then need to have others in our team do it too. At this point though, it’s important to get people to learn what is optimal, rather than be told what is the optimal way of doing something.
Training often occurs during the optimizing phase of developing processes, which is a poor decision. When people learn and are…
