Читать книгу Navigate the Swirl - Richard S. Hawkes - Страница 21

If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

What is a business? And what does it mean to be in business together?

Sometimes in workshops, I lead a simple exercise: I ask people to jot down on a piece of paper their best definition of a business. It's revealing. The answers that people give tend to be strongly influenced by the roles that they play in the company. So, for example, a marketing person might say “a business is a system for winning in the marketplace,” whereas a product designer might say “a business is an engine for innovation.” People naturally tend to be focused on the deliverables, metrics, and priorities that are their responsibilities. As a result, to borrow an oft-used phrase coined by Michael Gerber, they're used to working in the business but they're unable to work on the business—because they can't even see the business as a whole. Too often, team members don't have a clear picture of the relationships between different aspects of the business and the way they all fit together. In their minds, it is as if the organization is just a big collection of people with different jobs, all working alongside each other—a giant blob of activity and intersecting objectives.

That's not really a helpful way to think. Organizations may be social systems, but in a business context, they're more than just communities of people. A business organization exists for a purpose: to create value for customers. That's what connects the people in the organization and the activities they enact. But when I ask people to describe that overall value creation process—the shared work they are in together with their team and their organization—too often, they come up short. If the people working in a business do not have a shared definition and model of what a business is, is it any wonder that they struggle to align as they go about doing their jobs?

Unless we can visualize our shared work, it is inevitable that we will fall into difficult decision-making, unhelpful politics, unclear roles, redundancies, and inefficiencies. And unless we have a common way to understand the business we're in, we can't work on, improve, optimize, and grow that business together.