David Jenyns (speaker) explains Systemology as a method to free business owners from day-to-day operations by capturing existing best practices and turning them into standardized, accessible systems. He positions Systemology as the step before process-improvement methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma: rather than improving an existing process, Systemology first captures how things are actually done and makes that the new standard. Core activities include 'listing' and 'listening' to identify and extract best practice, then storing it so other team members can perform tasks in a key person's absence. He advises Systemologists to clearly define scope with clients, avoid over-detailing in early engagements, and focus on delivering strong results in the first three months to build trust and future work.
Chapters
The dream that I had about Systemology, this idea of freeing all business owners worldwide from the day to day operations. You learn a little bit about that in the story as you go through the book. And for me I experienced it firsthand. Then I started to do some consulting, then I started to work with those businesses and watch that transformational change. And then I said, oh, we've got something unique here. We really need to bottle this to solve this problem for business owners. And that's what ended up birthing the Systemology book. And there are some things about Systemology that make it quite unique. I think when I compare it to a lot of previous process improvement methodologies that came before it, things like Lean and Six Sigma and some of the other methodologies, and you hear it in the name it's all about. They talk about process improvement, but that pre assumes you've got a process to improve and then what Systemology is actually the step just before that. It's about capturing best practice, it's about capturing how they're currently doing things and then that becomes the new standard and we're bringing everybody up to that level. So it's that step before some of those other methodologies. And again it's that real key distinction that makes it quite unique and actually makes your job as a systemologist. It's really about listing, listening, it's identifying that best practice and extracting it out and then getting it in a location that then other team members can be able to utilize and be able to step in and take over a task. Whether or not a key person there is, is whether or not the key person is there or not. I think sometimes where a lot of people go wrong with Systemology, when they first start with some of their clients, they might overthink things, they might put too much detail in, they might over commit to the work that they're going to do within that first three month engagement. And I'm going to give you some tips and tools to really make sure that you clearly define the scope of works for your client. Get really great agreement up front, set the expectation for the client so that they feel great about the experience and the problem that you're there to solve. And if you get them a great result in those first few months then and if you enjoy working with them, you might sort of work with them well into the future. But your initial piece and a lot of what we're going to talk about through the training we're going to go through now is how do you deliver those first three months when you're working with a client and and how do you make sure that you really under promise and over deliver on that. And if you do that, I know you're going to find systemology both personally rewarding and then also financially rewarding. It is great. Especially I know a lot of us are business owners and you've felt the struggle personally, you know what it's like. I really feel for business owners and they have a special place for me being a business owner of how hard you have to work to get a business off the ground. You just got to grind through it. And a lot of people, you've got to be a special kind of person to be a business owner and to stick with it and to really make it work. And then a lot of business owners get stuck and what we do is we help them get unstuck to move through that level of hey, I've got a great product or service, I can get great results. We get repeat business and people refer to but I'm tapped out, I'm maxed out. I'm a center cog in this machine that I've built and I don't know what to do. And we get to come in there and really help them solve that problem.
