How does a single restaurant manage to stay in business? Thousands of restaurants go out of business every year. Possibly hundreds of thousands, if you look at the industry around the world. So how does one manage to survive?
But then let’s take it a step further – how does a restaurant not only survive, thrive, scaling to over 36,000 stores worldwide?
36,000 stores. That’s roughly how many McDonald’s family restaurants there are around the globe, and it all started with a single one nearly 80 years ago. The McDonald brothers made burgers so well, so fresh, and so fast, and so repeatably that their model was able to be scaled to other stores quickly. It could be taught quickly, it could be replicated quickly, and each new store could have success quickly all because of one simple approach: Capturing their process and making it repeatable.
You see, every tiny piece of the process that went into making a McDonald’s hamburger was looked at, written down, and then improved and streamlined until it was the fastest burger at a very low price that could be found anywhere, for a long time.
By making their process so repeatable by anyone who came along, they were able to hire kids still in school, as their first job, and train them in their repeatable process. They didn’t need to hire people with degrees (costing them more) and anyone they did hire had great success at their work because it was made clear and simple.
2018 and Beyond – Scaling Drivers Worldwide
But it’s not just burgers that have a process that can be made repeatable. It’s anything. And when you do this, you can scale your business beyond anything you had ever thought of before.
In 2009, could you have ever imagined that more than two million individual drivers from around the world would all be trained and working towards a common goal? Well that’s exactly what Uber has done, and exactly why it is worth 70 billion dollars today. They used the power of technology and delivered it in an app, error proofing with automatic payments, GPS tracking and simple visual management where you could see exactly where your driver or passenger was. They made the process repeatable.
What Can You Make Repeatable?
Now it’s over to you. Everything can be made repeatable, and everything can be simplified. What are some areas in your business that you just know you need to clarify, write down the steps for, and then make a little bit simpler?
The Lean CX (or Ease of Use) framework shows you exactly how to simplify your work and your customer experience. Clarifying the steps to getting the outcomes you want, therefore making them repeatable by anyone, is the first step to simplification.
Are you unhappy in your job? Do you hate your work? Is your life boring? I’ve got something that you may find controversial, and if this is you I want to say that it’s NOT your fault. Your leader has not intentionally designed your work for ease of use and engagement – probably because they don’t know how.
So the question is – if they’re not going to lead, then who is? And the answer is YOU. YOU are the leader your team needs to get intentional about designing your work for ease of use and engagement, and when you do, no matter what industry or work type you are in, you will start enjoying those 8 to 12 hours everyday we call “Work”.
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Transcript:
David McLachlan: It’s an absolutely beautiful morning in the city, this is gonna be a great ride. But I really want to talk to you about something super important, in fact one thing that we haven’t really spoken about over the last couple of videos is a little thing called designing your work.
Like I said I really want to talk to you about designing your work, and more specifically designing your work for ease of use. So what does it mean to design your work? Well think about it from this perspective. Have you
ever had to call a company, or deal with another department in your company, and you can just tell they don’t really know what they’re doing? You know, they have to redo things over and over again, they have to hand off to another department or another person, there’s a lot of waiting in between steps and the person that you’re dealing with or even a team or another department, and the person that you’re dealing with is just dragging their feet and everything is too hard for them. And all of this grates on the experience.
So pretty soon you’re not wanting to do business with these people or this
company because of all of this extra friction, and it’s quite obvious that they don’t like their job. I’m gonna say something a little bit controversial and that is it’s not their fault. It’s actually because their process and their work has not been intentionally designed for ease of use. Because when you design your process in your work and your job for ease of use you’re making things easy naturally so then it wouldn’t matter these things would be easy for that person to do, whether they were having a good day or a bad day. And we all have bad days but there’s absolutely no excuse for having a bad process.
So why is it important to design your work, and specifically design for ease of use? Well, a recent study found that more than 50% of people in their jobs
actually don’t know what’s expected of them at work. And because of that they’re not doing the best job that they can do. And of course out of those people who don’t really know what’s expected of them at work there’s a higher proportion of people who are disengaged in their work – just like that person we were talking about before who’s dragging their feet and everything’s too
hard. These are everyday people trying to do a good job but they may not
necessarily be able to, because it hasn’t been made clear what is expected. The outcomes and the steps have not been made clear.
Disengaged workers – the impact that has on your business is, their sales rates are lower their productivity is lower. Happiness has a big impact on your bottom line. Now look at it from the other perspective as well. Recent research by Stanford University actually found 35 percent was the difference in results of people who had clear outcomes and people who had not clear outcomes at all. Teams and companies that didn’t have clear outcomes actually performed 35% worse than people and teams and companies that
did have clearly articulated outcomes and clearly designed steps to get there.
Now there’s another study as well that was done on happiness and flow, and it’s by a great man called Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, and in the 1960s he took a thousand people and interviewed them when they found the most happiness
and meaning in their lives and there were a handful of things, but three of
the most prominent were they had control over the outcome when they were doing the task, they had a clear objective when they were doing the task, just like the Stanford University study and just like the Gallup study as well, and the task gave immediate feedback. Now all of these things are actually part of the
ease-of-use framework which I’m going to share with you over the next couple of videos. So everything is starting to tie together all of the research is pointing in a very very very similar direction, and that direction is making sure that we’re clearly articulating things, intentionally designing the work, and
designing it specifically for ease of use.
Now I’m going to go into the five steps of the ease-of-use framework in other
videos but really quickly they are: making your process repeatable so it’s
the same great repeatable process every time, reducing those steps to a customer getting what they want, making it visuals so they can see exactly what to do first time without having to ask, making it impossible to make a mistake and checking in so that we know whether they got what they want or not.
So where do we go from here? A very simple thing that you can do straight up is just simply write out the steps that you take to perform a few of the tasks in your work and then try and reduce those steps so by reducing the steps you are actually reducing the complexity making things easier just straight off the bat just doing those two things alone will have a massive impact on your business and the rest of it comes down to the ease-of-use framework which I absolutely cannot wait to share with you over the next coming videos.
Playing The Leadership Card Game, With Lean Expert Phil Preston
You may have heard about the Leadership Card Deck – an incredible card deck (and associated, collaborative game and ice-breaker with your teams) that teaches ways to increase motivation and engagement within your teams, as a leader. And everyone can be a leader.
You can now buy your very own copy of the Leadership Card Deck to improve the leadership ability of the people around you, from almost anywhere in the world on beautiful linen-card paper. They really are a pleasure to use.
Transcript:
David McLachlan: Hey everyone I just wanted to show you something that we worked on over the last couple of months and it relates to ease-of-use and it relates to engagement and it relates to disrupting companies, creating disruptive companies and all of those things that come from
ease-of-use and making things easy to do and easy to use.
And come out of it is the the leadership card deck which helps improve the
engagement of your teams, that has huge flow-on effects like improving the
profitability and productivity of your people, making people want to come to
work and do a good job and I had to bring Phil along –
Phil Preston: Hello!
David: – because as we’ve been playing we’ve sort of evolved this game from the leadership card deck just by playing it over the last couple of weeks. And the way it’s evolved is really really great, you’re gonna love playing it as well. And Phil’s probably one of the best people to play this because he’s probably one of the most hardcore lean practitioners in the southern hemisphere I would say. He’s had training at Ford, from Toyota guys, he has a manufacturing background but also financial services, formal stuff like Six Sigma and not only that Phil does that as a day job and then teaches lean on the weekends as well, so he can’t get enough of it.
Phil: I am so passionate David.
David: But also so good at it.
Phil: Thank you.
David: And that’s how this sort of evolved over the last couple of weeks.
Phil: I love the game, I’m ready to go.
David: So did you want to walk people through how we’ve been playing?
Phil: Okay, so we started off with the cards, and on each of the cards is – how would you describe it David?
David: Oh it’s just a tip, a bit of research or a trick, how to improve engagement how to get the most out of your teams, that sort of thing.
Phil: So when we initially started playing the game we just picked three cards each and then we would try to make them flow. But the game’s evolved, where we originally thought it would all start off with the root cause and end up with a solution, but sometimes that’s not always the case. Anyway we’ll demonstrate to you how this works.
David: Let’s do it and yeah and that’s why playing with Phil in this manner is such a pleasure because he totally gets it and he gets that improving things just makes the way for making happier staff as well so that’s really one of the greatest treasures that you’ll get out of this I think. So you said take three cards – one two three – and when Phil says you “make it flow”, what we’re doing is we’re just arranging the cards in the order that we believe they fit, and you’ll see you can ask your people to do so and you can use this as an icebreaker for a meeting for any sort of you know improvement situation or a talk that you’re giving, you can use this as a great icebreaker for your teams and get them thinking about improvements before you delve into those things or any other meeting that you’re running and you just have your people take the three cards and read out the cards that they get.
Phil: Okay so I’ll go first – so Not Invented Here. Okay and could you just read that little description there David?
David: Not invented here, the tendency to rate our own business ideas as more successful than other people’s concepts. So it’s just hard for us to to rate other people’s ideas as better than our own, or take them on board even when sometimes they might be better. I think we’ve all been there but yeah that’s a really good one.
Phil: So an unusual mix this time to be fair. So this is a difficult one! So not invented here how do we make that consistent with the view to try and improve that concept?
David: So let’s find the cards that work around, that are similar.
Phil: Okay with this so let’s “make it repeatable”, even though it is a concept and almost the culture of thinking but if we can repeat and embed some form of consistency around that thinking we’ll make it repeatable –
David: – And that helps the not invented here.
Phil: I think so.
David: I’ve got this one, which I want to sort of bring into the mix as well and it’s the curse of knowledge. So once you have knowledge of a particular
subject it’s hard to imagine others not having that same knowledge and I
think I mean where where would we put that before or after not invented here?
Phil: I would put it after yeah.
David: Not invented here caused from the curse of knowledge, solved by making it repeatable in your teams, and then what else have you got?
Phil: To improve the repeatability make it visual.
David: Make it visual so people can clearly see what’s expected of them, that’s fantastic! Is that all yours? Phil’s done already. I’ve got two more – mastery which is when your team is able to be to working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill, it’s an intrinsic motivator and it actually motivates people more than money in some cases so working towards a worthy skill if you’ve put all of this in place then you’re working towards mastery, it’s more
of an intrinsic motivator than than money or gifts or bonuses or rewards in
many cases.
Phil: Yeah that could hover across quite a few to be honest. Leave it there but I think we leave it at the end because that’s pretty much to where we’re aspiring towards.
David: I like it! And lastly sales and satisfaction, as the effects of engagement. I don’t know if you can see that but companies in the top quartile of engagement achieved 10% higher customer satisfaction than companies in the lowest quartile of staff engagement,
Phil: Which leads into mastery because you’ve got autonomy and intrinsically motivated teams.
David: So your team mates are more engaged, they’re happy to come to work, they’re working on something that’s of value to them and now all of a sudden that impacts the sales and satisfaction of the company as well.
Phil: Yeah so you know you’ve got the – you started off with not invented here which is a sort of culture – a cultural waste in a way – you’ve then got the curse of knowledge as well which how would you interpret the curse of knowledge following that one?
David: In that people find it hard to see the value in other people’s ideas
above their own.
Phil: So this is the view together – so make it repeatable then make the thinking repeatable or make the culture repeatable – make the process repeatable – to provide the consistency.
David: And then we’re back into making the process visual, helps people work towards mastery continuously, brings in satisfaction. And see the way that
that evolved was that and this could go any way because all it is is a discussion around the way we think that it should flow and sometimes people play
it differently.
Phil: They do but I think that if you look at the real sort of standout aspects of this, is make it repeatable, make it visual, and then master it. I love it, that’s really good.
Welcome to the first vlog on Lean CX. This will follow my journey as a Customer Experience practitioner and author. I’m making these videos to hone the Lean CX message, and log the process of improving companies, people and myself as I go along.
And where do I get to by the end of this video? That it’s all about Disruptors and Engagement. Hope you enjoy!
There is more – much more – coming soon.
Chat to you then – Dave
Transcript:
Dave: It’s still a bit dark in the morning as you can see, but that sunrise even though it’s not as good now was beautiful this morning! The reason I took you out this morning is that I want to talk to you about something really really important.
(About the Quad Bike Rider) What an awesome job. Now that guy wouldn’t
have any problem with engagement – he gets to hoon around on a quad bike all day! That’s pretty cool.
So I want to show you this – I just got – I just got this back from the printers and what it is is a card deck. It’s the customer experience card deck. There’s a leadership card deck as well and it goes through all of those ease-of-use principles to make your job easy to do and to make your product easy to take up as well. But it all comes down to this – I don’t know if you can see it – but a simple action. And the thing about simple actions is most people when they’re, you know designing their work or trying to get you to do some work or trying to get you to buy a product it’s harder to make something simple to do. It’s actually harder for us – it takes more effort and more work for us to design it in a way that is very very simple. And that’s the point – the framework that I’ve designed makes it easier for you to make it easier for
your workmates and for your customers and doing so has a massive impact on your profit.
So I’m sure these first videos are going to be pretty bad, as I just get up to speed and try and hone the message. Because the message is really clear to
me – we need to make things easy and the easier we make things then the more people are going to do them. Whether it’s our workmates or whether it’s the customers we want to buy a product or our application or our service. So ease of use is absolutely everything and these videos are going to help me hone that message and also show you a little bit of Brisbane City which is an
absolutely beautiful city especially in the morning.
If you can imagine when things are easy to do they’re much easier to buy and
much easier for your workmates to perform so you know the profit, the cost
reduction, all those things flow from ease of use in a massive, massive way and
I just want to log the process of me going along this journey and I hope you
enjoy the series because it’s really going to show you how to create
disruptors and also create engagement in your team.
You can recognise disruptors before they become a reality.
Lean CX is a step by step framework for Operational Excellence and how it relates to disruptive companies and technologies – especially as they grow and are ready to scale.
Disruptive companies are those that can deliver something a customer wants faster, cheaper, with better quality and sufficient brand recognition. Think McDonald’s in the 1950s, the model T Ford in the early 1900s, the Apple iPod in the early 2000s or the iPhone in 2007, Uber disrupting the cab industry, Netflix disrupting DVD hire and Amazon disrupting retail.
All of them have at least three of these four in common:
Engineering Happiness In your Team With Significance and Connection
There’s a funny thing about happiness. We all seem to want it, and yet so many times we do things that we know don’t bring us happiness in the long run, don’t we?
That extra piece of chocolate cake, or spending too much time working instead of bonding with friends or partners (which was, incidentally, one of the top five regrets of the dying). Not exercising or being outdoors enough. it all adds up.
But there could be a very good reason for us missing the mark when it comes to performing happiness improving activities – and that is because the real core needs that drive us are actually conflicting.
In the last card, Leadership Card 19, we saw that we deeply crave certainty in our lives, but also variety. And the more variety we have, the less certainty we have. Well it’s the same with Leadership Card 20, where we crave significance and connection, but the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
Significance and Connection – At Odds With Each Other
You see, to be significant you have to stand out. You have to lead the pack, often be different to others. And people get significance in different ways. They can feel significant by performing really well, earning lots of money, moving up in their career, or they can feel significant by being difficult, causing trouble to get attention, and other ways like that.
But when we stand out and are different, it’s much harder to fit in, to feel that connection and bonding with people in a team, a family, a friendship group or anywhere else.
So while we crave both, significance and connection are hard to engineer together.
Engineering Both In Your Team’s Work
So how do we create both in our team’s work? Part of Lean CX and the Ease of Use framework is a thing called “Checking In”, where we check in with our team members at least once a week, see where we need to adjust, and then focus on their strengths.
Doing this ensures two things – first, we build that connection by checking in, making sure they know they are on our radar as a leader and that we care about their path and their progress.
But then we focus on their strengths, building that significance of individuality, because we are all slightly different at the end of the day and have individual strengths and things we want to achieve.
So check in with your team, and focus on their strengths. Even research from Gallup on employee engagement has shown that it can improve engagement by up to 27%. And employees who are more engaged have higher productivity, sales, profit, and lower absenteeism and turnover.
Give Your Team Happiness, By Meeting Their Core Needs
Happiness. People want it, talk about it, reminisce about it, and miss it when it’s not there. And it can be everything from instant gratification (like a big meal) to deep meaning in a person’s life (like having meaningful work).
Seeing as anyone can eat a big meal or piece of chocolate and get instant gratification, I’m going to talk about the deeper meaning, that you can actually engineer into your team’s work to make them happier, more productive, and ultimately want to do a good job.
In fact, one study I found for the Lean CX Score book showed that people perform around 12% better simply by being happy.
Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs
You’ve probably heard of a few different types of “Needs hierarchies”, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that goes from safety to self-actualization. But in the 1990s Anthony Robbins came up with a deep set of human needs that completely make sense, because they actually conflict with each other.
They make sense because in a way we are all striving for happiness, and the ebb and flow of life, and events that happen over time make it either easy to get or elusive.
The first combination of needs are Certainty and Variety.
Certainty and Variety
We need certainty that what we do will turn out OK. Some people need more certainty than others before they do something, and others need no certainty at all.
The only problem is, having certainty conflicts with our other need, which is to have variety in our life and work. After all, if we have a lot of certainty, doing the same thing in the same way every day, then we don’t have a lot of variety. but if we have a lot of variety – spontaneous things, ideas, and outings – then we don’t have as much certainty.
And yet we need them both for fulfilling work.
How Can We Engineer Both Into Our People’s Work?
Over the years, I’ve experienced a few ways to engineer both of these things into a team’s work. The best ones I’ve seen involve this:
Having clear outcomes, and a clear path or process to get there (certainty)
Allowing (and encouraging) our team to problem solve ways to improve that work regularly (giving variety)
Not everyone is a natural problem solver. It can be hard to work through uncertain territory, and that is why it helps to have a standard process for problem solving and improving our work, making it easier to use.
The Lean CX Score is that framework that improves the ease of use and engages your team at the same time. Using things like a repeatable process, error proofing, visual management and checking in, you can go a long way to building the meaning back into your team’s life and work, no matter what they are doing.
Engineering Happiness, Engagement and Flow in your Team
Leadership is a funny thing. We naturally look up to those risk takers, the ones who “made it”, who did something outrageous against impossible odds, and won. It’s easy to write an article about those guys (and gals), and it’s easy to think “if only I had done this or that, maybe I could have been that leader too.”
But here’s the thing about those high flying, outrageous risk taking leaders – they’re full of sh*t.
They’re full of sh*t because of a very simple psychological principle: Survivorship Bias.
What is Survivorship Bias?
Survivorship bias is our tendency to look at people who have done something against all odds, see them a lot because the news loves their story, and believe it is easier than it really is or that we can do it do, or that it is even more common than it really is.
When the reality is we see more of them because they are the ones who made it, making it look as though it is easy to do and more people are doing it.
Case in point – look at all the people who try out for American Idol, because they can sing. Even just a little bit. Even only in the shower. So they go on the show and they get obliterated by the judges, because real, true, burning talent is a hard thing to find and in reality it takes years and years of hard work. Now look at it from the other perspective – how many of these tens of thousands of people go on to have long, successful careers as entertainers?
Very, very few. Even the ones who “make it” on the show have short lived careers that fizzle out relatively quickly. And yet we see them in the spotlight, while they are there, and we hail them for their seemingly incredible life.
So Here’s What We Don’t Do
We don’t celebrate the grinders. The workers. The ones who are building a solid foundation for their team and engineering an environment that makes them happy to come to work, engaged in the work they do, and feel as though they are working towards something bigger than themselves. And people who don’t make it to the spotlight – the majority of people – are the ones who need that engagement and happiness in the work they do. And that happiness leads to the “Flow” state, where you can lose yourself in the moment, do things effortlessly, and forget to eat.
Engineering Flow in the Work Your Team Does
How would that be, if you could engineer that flow state in your team and their work? Do you think their results would be affected? You bet they would.
And so far we’ve seen a few key ideas in designing our work to create a state of flow in our team. This last one is a key idea not just from Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi, who originally coined the idea of the flow state, but from many other methodologies as well – namely the Lean CX Score, Agile, Lean Startup and more.
This last key idea is fast feedback.
The idea is feedback because have you ever been doing something – making something really special or important, and working very hard on it every day? But imagine this – you’ve worked on it every day for many months, even years, and at the end of that time for whatever reason it turns out it’s actually not the right thing. It doesn’t do what you wanted and nobody wants anything to do with it.
That is what happens when you don’t get fast feedback.
The Lean Startup method is built around fast feedback – creating a Minimum Viable Product, a small product that does just enough to test in the marketplace and see if it works and gather feedback from real customers. The Net Promoter Score is built around fast feedback – if you’re not doing well the customer gives you a score below 8 and you’re meant to follow up immediately to find out more and adjust if you can.
Feedback is almost priceless. It is extremely valuable in business, and yet most businesses are afraid of it.
Asking for, and receiving feedback can be quite tough. It’s tough on our ego, who doesn’t like things rocking the boat. And yet to thrive in business we need to know if our customers aren’t getting what they want, and if it’s not ridiculously easy to get what they want.
It’s Like Playing A Video Game
Finally, I’ll say this: what else has clear rules, a clear objective, is neither too easy nor too hard, and gives you immediate feedback if you’re winning or not?
That’s right, a video game.
And people play video games for hours and hours. They forget to eat. They forget to sleep. Some people become quite addicted to them, which has unfortunate results but it happens for good reason – they are the perfect example of the things that need to be present in order to engineer the flow state.
Do This For Your Own Teams, And Win
So find a way to give your team a process that is neither too easy nor too hard, and that gives them immediate feedback if they are on the wrong track. It’s like a pilot checking in on the flight plan. Are they on course or off course? Are they moving towards their destination? Because if you’re a pilot you need to know. In fact, if you’re a human being you need to know. But most leaders first don’t clearly articulate the process and objectives for their team, or don’t improve the ease of use of that process, and then finally they don’t check in to see how their teammates are tracking towards that goal so they can assist and make changes to the process as necessary.
Objective. Process. Feedback. Improve and repeat. You’ll soon be on your way to your destination when previously you were only flying around in circles.
In the late 60s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 1000 people on what makes them happy. He found a few main things that, when present, can engineer what he called the state of “flow”, when you are lost in the moment, time flies, and you feel like you could do a task forever.
In the Leadership Card Deck we’ve seen a few different studies that have shown that a clear objective can make a huge difference to your team’s results. And creating a clear path for your team with a repeatable process that is easy to use can increase those results again.
But there is more to this story when it comes to increasing the engagement and happiness of your teams. And it’s because of this:
Have you ever been in a situation where what you did had absolutely no effect on the outcome? Take this as an example – imagine you were driving a car, and trying to get to a destination, but when you turned the steering wheel it had no effect on the path you took. In other words, the action you took had no bearing on whether you made it there or not.
A lot of teams are operating like that car ride today, because even if they have taken a step above everyone else and clearly articulated the objective and the process to get there and made it ridiculously easy to do, if your team’s actions have no effect on getting to that objective they will lose interest very quickly. And losing interest is the absolute opposite of a state of Flow.
Working Towards A Clear Objective, With Control Over The Outcome
Mihali isn’t the only one to have found this in his studies. In research brought to light via Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, he found that one of the best motivators wasn’t money or rewards, it was actually a thing called “Mastery”, which he described like this:
“Working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill.”
So we have a fairly ideal set up here, and this is only the start of it. All the research is pointing in the same direction. In Leadership Card 10, we saw that tying outcomes to a higher meaning had a huge effect on the happiness of your team. So if we have a clear objective, where our team’s actions have control over the outcome, and those outcomes are tied to a higher meaning or purpose, then we start to see the ideal situation for engineering happiness and flow in the work that they do.
What Happens Next?
And what happens next when your team can effortlessly perform their work and it is working towards something meaningful? Well, they enjoy coming to work much more than they thought possible. It stops being just about the paycheck. And the effects of high engagement show profit can go up by 17%, revenue can be doubled, absenteeism and sick days can go down by 40%, and much, much more.
Enjoying yourself at work takes a little bit of awareness – awareness that is not taught at school and is not present in most leaders who work their way up through the ranks. But creating this scenario at work has a big payback, and doing even a little bit will show you just how powerful it can be.
How Would You Like To Play Video Games For A Living?
No matter how old you are – teen, millennial, Gen Y, X or Baby Boomer, I can pretty much guarantee there was a time in your life when you played some sort of a video game. Maybe it was on your mobile phone just the other day, maybe it was on one of the original consoles like Atari in the 1980s, maybe it was more sophisticated like the PlayStation or XBox, or maybe it was just plain old solitaire on Windows. The point is, it was fun, and you could easily get lost in the moment (which turned into moment-s) while playing it.
That’s the thing about games. Because of their very nature they naturally engineer the state of “flow” in people participating in it – that state where time flies, you get into a rhythm, and you’re so engaged you forget to eat.
And with the state of flow – it can actually be engineered into your work to make it more game-like in its systems, through the process, the feedback, and the way the work is performed.
It’s Not Quite Playing Candy Crush All Day
Now this doesn’t mean we’re literally playing Candy Crush all day and getting paid for it – when I say more game-like I’m talking about the way the work is structured to engineer the state of flow, and help the work get done with more engagement from your team.
So we’re looking at the mechanisms behind games, not games themselves, and how they are addictive because they create this state in people.
Flow Model – The First Tip – Make it Repeatable
The first part of the Flow Model is creating work for your team that is neither too easy, nor too hard. This means getting right in there and creating the rules of the game – a repeatable process that can be done the same way every time (or used as a guideline for work that is wildly different, complex or creative).
Because you know what? Most leaders never clearly articulate the rules of the game – the outcomes, the path to get there, and regular check ins to see if we’re on that path. Can you imagine playing a game – whether it’s football outside or a video game inside – and not knowing the rules to the game? It wouldn’t last very long, and that is exactly what is happening with your teams.
When creating that work process, it’s also really important to look at the ways we can make it easier to do – to improve the “Ease of Use” of that process. By improving the ease of use we are making it easier for our people to fall into a natural rhythm and state of flow, and not be interrupted by making mistakes, having to check how to do something, having to wait for someone else, or multitasking between too many things.
That’s what we mean in this first step by “performing a task, that is neither too easy nor too hard”.
Most leaders never get to this step in their leadership.
Putting out fires unfortunately becomes a routine part of their day. They don’t understand that you have to engineer the work – design the work – and design it specifically for ease of use.
Now look at it the other way. Your best staff – the ones you love and the ones who “naturally” do a good job. There’s nothing natural about it at all – in order to get good at something, any star performer has simply figured out, most likely through trial and error, the best way that flows naturally for them to do something. They’ve experienced the errors, so they know how to avoid them. They know the sticking points, so they know how to approach them. To learn something – anything – humans have to create and strengthen neural pathways in our brains by doing something over and over.
What I’m asking you to do is to do better for your team. Help them design their work and the process. Make the objective clear and make the path clear, and help make it easy to do before they have to go through all that figuring out themselves.
In doing so, I absolutely guarantee you will see some incredible results.
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