Tag Archives: complicated work

#6 Lean CX Comic – Complicated Work

Lean Comic Complicated Work

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The Cycle Of Complicated Work

There’s a vicious cycle damning your business to mediocrity, and it’s the cycle of complicated work.

Whether it’s a product you sell, a website or app User Experience you are guiding people through, or a task that your team needs to complete, you are wasting some of your most precious resources and losing money as a result, if it’s more complicated than it needs to be.

But the worst part about it is if your work is complicated, there’s a higher chance that you will be so busy putting out fires, and not have the time to actually improve the work itself.  Many managers don’t even know how to design their team’s work for happiness and engagement, but more on this in a moment.

Not only does unnecessarily complicated work take more time, but time costs money, and the increased complexity also drains the attention and focus of your customers and staff.  Research has shown that “cognitive load”, or the brain cycles required to complete a task seriously impacts the likelihood of a person continuing to do something, or making mistakes and setting it aside.

Forming Habits and Complicated Products

That means that complicated things also damn the products you sell into a quagmire of mediocrity.  In his book, “Hooked”, Nir Eyal describes one of the key things necessary for forming a habit.  It is the action your customers need to take, and it should be as easy as possible for them to learn and engage in quickly.

Sure, some customers might put in a larger amount of effort than others, and they might stick with you when something isn’t immediately obvious, but the majority of people – both team mates and customers –  are more likely to leave if the work is unnecessarily complicated.

“Unnecessarily complicated” can actually be quantified, and it has been quantified in the book The Lean CX Score by David McLachlan.  In that book are outlined five key scenarios that contribute to complicated work.  If you remove them, you are many times more likely to enjoy the benefits of happier employees and returning customers.

They are:

  1. Rework, or having to do something more than once to get the required result,
  2. Waiting, or having to wait too long for something to occur,
  3. Excessive Hand-offs, or passing things around between departments, pages or applications,
  4. Excessive Steps, or having to perform too many steps that may not add value, and;
  5. Not getting what they want, or not receiving the actual outcome that was intended.

Lean CX is absolutely the key to designing your work in a mindful way that improves employee engagement, improves customer retention, reduces customer friction and seriously reduces cost.

That means that if you are one of those leaders who wants to improve their results and their team’s engagement and outcomes, but doesn’t know where to start, the absolute best place to start is with the step-by-step process of the Lean CX Score.

I highly recommend you check it out today.

See all the Lean CX Comics here

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