The brutal focus of Productivity

Peter Blake led the NZ America’s Cup team to consecutive victories with a simple mantra: Does this make the boat go faster?

So what would happen if you applied that to your business?

What’s the issue?

In a world of competing priorities, it’s easy to get side-tracked. It’s even easier if you don’t have a crystal-clear vision that’s real, well understood, bought into, and a part of everyday conversation (but see an earlier email on that one).

For example:

Do you push an existing product into a new market or invest in a new product? Do you hire more salespeople or make the product more robust and user-friendly? Is it time for an organisational restructure or do you keep adding to the current model?

In short, you do keep on doing more of the same and more efficiently, or do you change to do it differently and more effectively?

Sub-optimal decisions can be made for a number of reasons:

1. Poor information i.e. a lack of curiosity to fully explore the proposal and its context commensurate with the potential value of the proposal. In other words, the bigger the benefit, the more homework you should do.
2. The more strategic a decision, the more it is based on opinion rather than fact. And opinions can be skewed by the likes of cognitive bias, ‘who-shouts-loudest', a ‘self-before-team’ attitude and ‘conflict avoidance’.
3. The situation changes while you’re making the decision.
4. Squatters’ rights of the status quo. ‘We’ll carry on as is because it’s too hard to evict the way it’s always been done’.

Activities to consider

If you could start your organisation all over again, but with your current resources and clients to look after, and knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

And what’s stopping that from happening? Maybe some of those blockers are practically unmoveable, but maybe some aren’t.

Use Toyota’s ‘5 whys’ to interrogate the foundational rationale as to why you’re doing it this way currently, and to check whether the strategic ‘to do’ list holds up to scrutiny.

If people aren’t all focused on the primary objective, ask yourself whether the cause of this issue is the sheep or the shepherd. If people are drifting off course to follow their own agenda, then it’s probably safest to start with the assumption that it’s a leadership issue.

Try this

Every time you have to make a decision (which includes proactively deciding to do new stuff and passively deciding to continue with existing stuff) about consuming the resources of your organisation, ask ‘does this make the boat go faster?’.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.