There is a moment every leader, owner, or business eventually faces. Not a dramatic one – a quiet one. One day, you look at your process you’ve trusted for years and suddenly realize:
“I have no idea how long this actually takes.”
or
“I don’t know how often this problem really happens.”
or
“I think I know… but have I ever checked?”
That last one is a good one for how true and ubiquitous it is. These questions are not glamorous, they are not tricky, nor are they highly “intelligent”, but they bring about the moment the story changes. And so does the narrative.
The trap we fall into
Many people (if not most) run their business on a mix of memory, gut feeling, assumptions, and whatever the loudest and most obnoxious fire drill of the week is. This approach works – until it doesn’t.
Why? Because assumptions are sneaky, they feel true, they sound true, because they used to be true.
But markets evolve, businesses evolve, teams evolve, customers and products and services evolve. And the data you thought you once knew quietly drifts away from the story in your head. Your own brain is fooling you by running its old scripts it tries to apply to new situations. Guaranteed.
And this is the time where you need to stop trusting your gut and the story and start giving a good hard look at the evidence. Measure it. Quantify it. Get to know the data (again).
A real-world example (that hits home)
Let’s say you run a service business and start seeing issues popping up with low volume. Clients complain, your people complain, clients are not getting scheduled and everyone is always “waiting on scheduling.”
So, having known the business for a while, you tweak the calendar, you buy a new tool, you reorganize the team. You shake things up a bit. This approach worked in the past, did it not? You stick to a tried-and-true method.
Still slow.
Now what?
Then you finally dig into the numbers. You do a proper measurement, you’re laser-focused on root cause, and discover something odd:
• 75% of delays happen before scheduling
• 50% of those three-quarters of delays are due to missing information
• 20% are stuck in approvals
• 10% is rework of prior failures
• and less than 10% is actual scheduling process itself
Sounds familiar? The villain has changed. It wasn’t the calendar, the culprit lives well before it, upstream. How could it be?
Glad you spent all that money and time re-training your people on that new calendar system, eh?
Why measuring matters more than you think
When you measure your inputs and outputs, you are not just collecting data for the sake of having nice shiny dashboards. You are doing something far more powerful. Why? Remember above how the business evolves, people evolve, market evolves, but your knowledge and assumptions about it may not have kept pace? When you measure and quantify, you are:
• Replacing belief with reality
• Replacing “I think” with “I know”
• Replacing frustration with direction
And direction (with a hefty dose of clarity) is what everyone craves, or at least should.
A simple way to start (no spreadsheet required)
Pick one recurring issue, which has bothered you this week, and quietly track it for five days, write down:
• When it happened
• What triggered it
• How long it took to fix (even if poorly)
• Who touched it
• What it cost you (time, money, customer trust, new grey hairs….)
By the end of the week, you will see patterns that were invisible before. They were there, alright. But you did not see them, because your assumptions, and a lack of high-quality data points, prevented you.
And here is another twist: oftentimes, the data reveals a problem you weren’t even looking at. The data helps you expose your blind spots. Take that as an added bonus you did not even ask for.
What changes when you finally quantify things
You stop:
• Blaming the wrong thing
• Fixing the wrong thing
• Investing in the wrong thing
• Repeating that same wrong thing
• Fighting fires you started by, you guessed it, doing the wrong thing
Instead you start:
• Making decisions with confidence
• Solving for the real issue
• Allocating resources intelligently
• Improving the right part of the process flow (that’s a big one!)
• Building a business that runs on facts, not guesswork noise
The fix starts here:
Measure the input.
Measure the friction.
Measure the output.
Measure the cost.
Then, and only then, act.
Because once you see what’s actually happening, instead of guessing what is happening, everything will click in place. And honestly, it’s never a bad time to stop guessing.
When you manage a process, whatever industry it is, there is one cardinal rule when it comes to fixing or improving it (I’ll go into details of this in future posts):
• You cannot fix a process until you define what the process is
• You cannot fix a process until you measure criteria of success
• You cannot fix a process until you analyze what the broken thing is
Only then can you truly, and with full confidence, figure out what the necessary fix is. And if this sounds familiar to you? Yes I’m talking about the Six Sigma DMAIC model here. When you think of it: how can you fix something when you don’t know how the process works, and especially when you are unable to quantify in numbers what your desired outcome this process produces would look like?
Well, you can’t.
If you fix processes without first quantifying what your ideal outcome is you know what you end up with?
Scope creep.
And it is every bit as creepy and bad as it sounds. Nearly every PMP will tell you that unclear expectations, lack of executive support and vague definition of success are some of the most common causes of project failure. If you are lucky you fix the wrong thing, or the project dies.
So, yeah.
It is absolutely counter-intuitive to measure your outcome before you even apply the fix. You’re right, it feels odd. But the methodology here pays off in heaps. Knowing precisely what your goal looks like (quantified) is an absolute necessity.
Need help?
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