Leading the Process: The one vital business measure which cannot be measured

There is only one thing in business which sets successful businesses apart from an unsuccessful one: and that is BUSINESS VITALITY.

An organisation with a high Business Vitality (or BV for short) will exhibit certain measurable characteristics:

• The majority of its customers will be happy.?
• It will have a vibrancy and energy about it that encourages others to join it.
• It will charge enough for its products and services to make a good return.

It will also be resilient, most likely having had some shocks in its earlier years which will have made it more clear on what its priorities are and what values it aligns with. Some call this agility - but the word Agile has become somewhat over-used with the Agile Movement (see my previous article). So I prefer the word resilient.

Yet trying to measure BV itself is a bit like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. By only focusing on what we CAN measure, we miss the full, complex dynamics that drive a business's underlying health and capacity for growth. Quantitative metrics can’t fully reflect the cultural, creative, and strategic vibrancy which come together to form a successful, thriving and resilient organisation. BV can be relatively easy to see and feel virtually impossible to measure. Because it can move and shape-shift like the weather.

When I start working with organisations, I use my intuition to sense where the business vibrancy lies. It is normally quite patchy. Like the curate’s egg. Good in parts. But you can see it. You can sense it. You can virtually smell it! And when I get a whiff, those are the areas I start trying to get to know first. I will find someone (who is not necessarily one of the most senior people in the organisation) LEADING THE PROCESS. Their sub-process(es) will be well relatively well-managed, and people who operate it will be on the whole positive and rounded. Those are the people I start to nurture as they will have the necessary vitality to become the seeds of change.

And then there is the opposite of those vibrant (BV+) places. The places which are not vital (BV-). They have much less energy and will have numbed feelings with a virtual smell of mould. The people here turn up just to get their salary in a waiting pattern to leave the organisation. Communication is poor and full of blah-blah and morale is low. The leaders are not leaders at all. For they are used to LEADENING THE PROCESS.

Processes become leadened for various reasons. More often than not, the person or team. The original designers might even have been inexperienced consultants who had no interest in whether there was vibrancy and flow in the process. They have long moved on.

Here are some of the other attributes of a leadened process:

• There is a lack of vibrant vision and leadership. People are still applauding their past victories without preparing for the future. They are digging into their reserves and mortgaging the future. Just as the Romans did when they increased the number of public holidays in the dying Roman Empire.
• There is a tiredness, a greyness and a lack of energy which gets everyone down and has an impact on morale and staff retention.
• The processes are not well documented (or the documents that do exist have no bearing on reality) and past attempts to bring life back into the system have frustrated those who tried, they left many things started but not completed.?

When I start supporting a new leadership team, identifying and nurturing BV is critical. One of my favourite metaphors (or plays on words) is to say it’s simply a matter of taking the EN out of leadENing and start LEADING. For sure, mistakes will be made. But if they then add that superfluous “EN-” to “-ERGY” they find the new EN-ERGY needed to transform the old, leadened process into a vital one where they can start LEADING THE PROCESS, not putting even more lead into it!

It reminds me of a time very early in my career when I was trying to pull together a complex programme (called INCA) across a big organisation (BT). A mentor of mine at the time, \vivian John Bussey said to me “Lorne, if we want this thing to fly, it would help if you stopped trying to put lead in the wings!”

It sounds simple, and it is! If you play with the magic of words and seek out the ways of the alchemists, you can turn LEAD into GOLD!

#leadingtheprocess #businessprocessimprovement #businessprocessdesign #businessacumen #businessvitality #businessdevelopment