David Jenyns compares a business to the human body: each department is a subsystem, and failure in any one cripples the whole. He recommends identifying 10-15 mission-critical processes per department, documenting them, then using dashboards to find bottlenecks. This frees owners from firefighting to focus on growth.
I quite like the metaphor of the human body. Like, the human body is a system, and within the human body there are these subsystems. There's the cardiovascular system, skeletal system, respiratory system. There are all of these systems. Now, what happens if one of those systems is unhealthy? Makes the whole body unhealthy. It brings down the whole system. What happens if one of these critical subsystems in the human body fails? You die. Business is the same. Your business is a system. There are subsystems underneath it. There's a marketing system, a sales system, a delivery system, a finance system. What happens if one of these subsystems is not healthy and delivering on what it needs to deliver for your business? It makes the whole business unhealthy. What happens if one of these subsystems fails? What happens if marketing doesn't deliver any leads to the business? No sales. Business dies. What happens if sales doesn't convert? What happens if the operations team don't deliver the work? So your business is a system, there are these subsystems underneath it, and we need to identify, applying the 80/20, what are the mission-critical systems that if the marketing system didn't do these tasks, it wouldn't be able to deliver the leads that the business needs to survive. Find what they are, go to work on those. We call that the minimum viable systems. And it's the tipping point in the business. Sometimes people read Systemology and they think, ah, I just gotta get the critical client flow down. The true tipping point is at minimum viable systems. That's when you have 10 to 15 systems in each department that are critical for that department to deliver the result. Once you get that in place, that means systems touches the entire organization. All of the team have some level of exposure to system and process., and that ends up becoming the tipping point. That's what you want to work towards. We're going to move to the final step in systemology, which is optimize. Bit counterintuitive for a lot of people because it's at the end. A lot of people try and do it upfront. That's what makes systemology different. Systemology is about system capture. What are you currently doing? Let's make it repeatable. Make that the minimum standard. Get everybody up to that level. A lot of other process improvement methodologies— Lean, Six Sigma— they come after Systemology, which it's in the name, they're process improvement methodologies, which pre-assumes you have a process to improve. Yet a lot of small businesses don't yet even know what their process is. Huge wins can be gained in your business just by making it repeatable. Then once you get to here, we try and build up a dashboard, and we become systems-driven, and we realize that every problem in business is a systems problem. Then you look at the dashboard and you go, oh, I'm not getting the results I'm looking for here. I'm not getting enough leads. Okay, well, let's go to work on our lead generation systems. Okay, the next bottleneck in my business is Delivery, okay, well let's go to work on the delivery systems. And then you start to let the systems and the business guide you for where you go to work. It's not that when you get systems in place all of your troubles and woes disappear. What happens is you start to work on higher quality problems. A lot of business owners when they get started, they're solving the same low quality problem again and again and again and again. They're getting asked the same questions from staff, The same questions from clients. It's the same issues that keep popping up. Solve the problem once, put a system in place, and then move on to a better quality problem.
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