What's your process?
Chad Bareither
Helping Manufacturing & Operations Leaders stabilize costs, expand capacity, and grow profit.
Social Media has become a primary platform for professional athletes in snowboarding, wakeboarding and surfing to demonstrate their skills and become a brand ambassador for their sponsors. The content they put out is mind-boggling; pushing the bounds or human capabilities (and reason). We often ask a simple question, "How do they do that?" I grew up snowboarding and got pretty good over the years. Even I am tempted to wonder how they are that skilled. When I know that they became that skilled. There was hours and years of progression and failures behind that 15 second video loop you forward to your friends. Relentless video capture, then review and diagnosis. There was an underlying process of each attempt and reflection.
Whatever your profession is (assuming you're not in the elite percentage getting paid to ride a plank of wood), there is still a process that you execute to perform your work. Too often we are more focused on results than the process. If, as leaders, we have tunnel vision on results, it does not account for variation in our input or stability/capability of our process.
Inputs may vary in Quality, Cost, or Delivery. The process may not be well-defined or well-controlled. In both cases you get varied results. An exclusive focus on the output/results creates a scenario of adjusting process to account for input variation.
We need to become students of ... FANS of ... LOVERS of our process.
Professional athletes of all disciplines likewise follow processes to achieve their results. Bigger, more complex plays of maneuvers build off of more basic steps of increasing difficulty. That world-class performance and those world-class results didn't just happen. Building and refining processes, learning and reflecting from mistakes and failure, enables us to know what conditions (inputs) to look for and steps (processes) to take to get the results we want.
Do you know your process? Do you love your process? If you don't love your results (output) it might be time to look upstream in that equation.