Start. Somewhere.

Everywhere I have been employed has resisted change. A pretty normal situation really. People like to be stable. Consistent. 

Change represents fear, discomfort, and risk. We humans love to avoid all three of these things. I am no saint when it comes to avoiding uncomfortable change. I fight with the scale in my bedroom, I dislike hard phone calls, I should really eat better.

Business like life includes similar avoidance. Cold calling is awful, yet it can lead to new relationships. Optimizing process takes time, experiments, and potential mistakes. Asking questions about why we do work in one way and not the other is no guarantee we will find a better solution.

Change

is not easy

Change

is risky

Change

cannot be avoided

Change

is constant

None of these maybes represent a reason to not do the hard thing. What I have learned in the last 20 years of different business activities, is you have to do something. The same is never the answer. The same won’t allow you to grow. We don’t even stay the same day to day, why would expect and require our work to do so?

What am I getting to? I called this starting somewhere. What I’ve put together from the failures, mistakes, and restarts of each project, idea, or adventure I’ve taken is a way to determine your starting place. Where you start is important. It can determine your success or failure. Where can dictate if you see results now or in the future. Where can be a catalyst to other improvements in other locations.

Start. Somewhere. Is a way to look at, well, anything, and get going. Let me elaborate. The first step, as defined by many a self-help or business development author, is to figure out “why”. This particular why is not area specific. This why is all about you, the organization, and why it exists. If your organization has a quality policy, mission or visions statement, start there. Break that why into something where you can identify every customer you serve.

Lets dig into customers a little before we go further. Customers exist inside and outside every organization. The quest for the whys of the organization is not complete if it cannot speak to the internal customers too. 

Once your why(s) are well defined, consider where you want to begin. Where is critical to long term success. If you’re running a multi-line assembly plant and want to get into some sort of process improvement, a good idea is to start small and figure out scalable solutions. Where is key here. Once you decide where, then get into those whys.

The best way to figure out the where is a flow chart. Make a high-level chart of the organization. The customers you noted before, plug them into the chart. With the flowchart, break down the most probable and useful place to begin your improvements. Following this decision, make a detailed flowchart of your chosen line/facility/space.

The next flowchart needs to be detailed. It should include crucial elements like process time, applicable procedures, who the next customer is, does this activity add value to the product or service related to the final external customer? The components you input here will influence your ability to identify actions you can make. 

Do some homework from this post and next post I’ll get into “how” and why it is a big deal.