Systems Champion Academy - Sneak Peek

So let's talk about the act of doing an extraction. Okay, people like Dave and Rob, who's also here, myself, we've had the opportunity to do hundreds of extractions with people, but also in the space that we work in, we get to see a lot of other people doing extractions as well. And there's a bunch of different frustrations that can occur when you're doing the actual work of an extraction, because on face value, and when you're experiencing in the earlier stages, the process can seem quite tedious. Potentially complex, and it will feel quite clunky when you're doing it, particularly before you haven't earned your wings yet or anything like that. And the thing is, there's also a bit of fear that creeps in because if it doesn't go well, that it could actually potentially end up being a bit of a waste of time, and you might even have to do it again because you didn't get a really good version. And then that can start to compound because it can probably even start to be a bit of an annoyance for the team. You're trying to get this good stuff out of their head, and they're just getting a little bit annoyed with you taking your time, things being clunky, especially if you have to do it twice. And the fear is that you'll even potentially annoy your team to the point that it actually starts to reduce their buy-in rather than increase their buy-in, which is the worst possible result. Just a quick question. Who here has actually had an extraction where things haven't gone well?

I want to jump in. I want to hear. Tell me. I saw Summer, your hand went up there.

Let's hear some of the horror stories.

How did it not go well?

Honestly, it hasn't been that bad. I feel like we're in a semi-unique position that I'm the system's champion, but I'm also the person who knows how to do everything. So I can just sit there and churn out these videos by myself without bothering people usually. But if I do need to involve someone else, then it tends to be awkward and they're not quite sure how to explain in a way that's fluid. Or if I interrupt to ask questions, I might derail someone. Or sometimes we might have technical difficulties if the person is offsite and their internet goes down and it's just, you can't really control that type of thing sometimes.

Love it. Love it. I've experienced a few of those. Jenna, I think your hand went up. Have you got any stories? Maybe some Sam stories while he's not here?

While he's not here, just get it all out. No, we had one system where we use Asana and we have it, we use the template, the systems for creating systems. And so I had it all assigned really nicely and it was gonna be a little bit different. We've done a few systems of them doing it on their own. And then I was like, this, I put in the description, this is gonna be an interview style. We're gonna do this a little bit different. The girl's okay. And then we're set up to do it. She ghosts me, didn't show up to the meeting. I was like, okay. So the next week we did it again and we were scheduled to do it, and she sent me a video of her already doing the system without the interview. And I was like, okay. And so she posted it, and I'm— I was out of town or something. And then the lady that was supposed to do the second review, she's like, this is crap, I'm going to do it my way and redo the whole thing. And it was like just chaos. It was just terrible. And Sam was like, I don't know what's going on. I'm like, I don't really either. So it's streamlining our system has been a little bit of a journey. But yeah, people just thinking they know what we want and then not following directions has been a struggle.

I like it.

I like that. I saw another hand or two go up.

Who—

has anyone else got any other ones they want to share where it didn't go right? Has anyone forgotten to hit the record button? Oh, there we go, Jim.

So the very first extraction I tried quite some time ago. I didn't fully appreciate the genius of the pre-extraction form, and I didn't even know about extraction scripts. And I had a conversation with this lady and we turned it on and she talked for 14 minutes and talked everything the business does, and I couldn't get her to stop. And so I'm like, okay, this isn't going to work. And realized that perhaps you had a very good reason for creating the pre-extraction form. And maybe it'll be a good idea to use it.

Yeah.

So I've been a very diligent user of it since then. And guess what? It works a lot better. But it taught me if you talk a lot about scope and if you don't put guardrails, oh my God.

Yeah, that's some really good—

Trouble ensues.

I love that. And even now, one that always gets me is sometimes when we fall into, are we recording the task actually being done in the moment? Are we talking about the task being done? And are we doing a, an overview high-level system where we talk through, we're just giving the key steps, or are we getting down to the nitty-gritty on exactly what needs to be done? And having the knowledgeable person and the systems champion or the person recording it very clear on what that is to then sometimes rein it in, let alone sometimes I've recorded something and I've just gone, I don't even know if that's usable. It's— and that still sometimes happens where it's just really clunky, but it's going from 0 to 1, I think, is key. The first system is the worst system.

Rob?

I just wanted to share some of the experiences I've had over the last 4 years working with clients trying to do an extraction. And sometimes they get too detailed, as Jim was saying, but sometimes they don't know enough about what to say. So I break it down and just say, just give me a 30-second to 1-minute overview. Of that process. This is the name of the process. This is why we have the process. This process is important because— and that's the end of the process.

That's it.

So stop there because the details will come later. But start with a quick little overview of as if you're speaking to a 15-year-old kid who knows nothing about your business. Explain it like that. And then it starts to settle into the what, who does what, by when, and the details can come in later. But start with a simple little overview just to get that ball rolling.

Yeah, love it. Excellent.

I jumped in on you there, James, so I got a bit excited. I wanted to normalize that it's quite normal for extractions to go bad, for people to make mistakes. It still happens.

I feel that if we— I think we need to have a pub night with a bunch of systemologists to swap battle stories. Medical emergencies, people having panic attacks, having tantrums and throwing laptops across the wall. Just, we've got some good ones. But what Dave said, it's normal. Okay. So yes, you need to just get in there and start doing it. So when we look at what we really want out of an extraction experience though, we want it to be simple. Yeah. This is the beauty of Systemology is it's simple and ideally even informal. And wouldn't it be cool if it could actually be a little bit fun, right? Because what you're really looking for is you want to have an experience where everything goes to plan. To the degree that it actually is over and done with quicker than you expected. That's a great experience of an extraction. And you really want to get to the stage that people are happy to help because it's frictionless for them to help. And the more frictionless it is, it's easier for people to put their hands up and say, yeah, yeah, I'll chip in and help with that. And you really want to aspire to get to the point that your extractions are done first time perfect every time. When I say perfect, I shouldn't say perfect, they're done good enough first time, every time. And it's easy to work with people to the degree that they see they're just happy to contribute. And there's a great example. Now, I don't know, Dave, whether we're even able to share this into the room, but this was from a past cohort. Now, to set some context to this, there was a suitably trained systems champion, right? There was a suitably primed knowledgeable worker. Okay, great. They kept the conversation simple, and the core thing here is they had no excuses. Samantha, who did the extraction, was in the Philippines. I can't remember the team member's name, but he was in Sydney. They did not let Ben stop them. He was simply walking around on a meeting with a camera turned around, pointing out where he was walking in the yard. They were talking about logistically when they unload things. They were out and about. They had a decent 4 or 5G connection or Wi-Fi connection for the warehouse. And they're just walking through and she was asking him questions. Oh, what about how that happens over there? Oh, we don't have to worry about that because that doesn't always happen. It only happens in these circumstances. Great, let's just focus on this part. Really, the key thing to pay attention to here is this is the power of handing the extractions off to the right people and setting people up for success. Okay? What I want you to focus on is what do you need to get a good extraction? A good extraction, realistically, you take care of your inputs. You take care of your inputs, because if you take care of the inputs, basically the outputs will start to take care of themselves. Okay, there's a couple of different elements of the inputs, but one of the ones is the tech, right? We had a great example, Jenna, you were talking about the struggles of the tech side of things before. But even before you get into where's that file, where's that in that folder and things like that, last, last time we met, we were talking about Choosing the right recording software. So you should already know the answer to this because we ideally got you to make that decision last time around. But having suitable recording software that will work for your situation. I think some of you were mentioning about what happens when you have an internet connection that's not working well and maybe you don't necessarily have good data and it might get dropouts and things like that. You need to be reliable, right? I've even done extractions where I've had— we couldn't get a good enough connection for phone data, and it was good enough for a phone call. And so we just got the person to record the actual extraction on their phone, and we just talked through it verbally. I couldn't see what was going on, but I could just listen in and I could just ask good questions. So when we're looking for good recording stuff, it's suitable for that situation. So the next one, and this is becoming increasingly important, is having a decent microphone. Okay, so if we're looking at the different range of options we're looking at here, keeping in mind that good inputs create good outputs, we're looking to get a really high-quality extraction here. Okay, so when we're talking about a high-quality extraction, we're trying to get that transcription that gets squirted out at the end. And a good quality microphone, it might be a proper desktop microphone or one like Dave's got on his screen, it might be to that extreme. Stepping down from that level, you can see Jim's got a headset on, so it keeps the microphone quite close to his mouth, and sometimes they'll even filter out noise from around it. That's great for one person, but you need to be thinking about what if you've got 2 or even 3 people in the extraction? How are you going to make sure that you're getting good quality audio from every person? So do be thinking about that. A dedicated quality microphone is way up the top, Headset would probably be the next one down. The next one down from that is starting to get into maybe things like webcams. Now webcams can be great because they're there, they're already turned on when you're recording with your camera, but also that's when the quality starts to drop down because they're a little bit further away from your mouth and they might be picking up a bit more background noise. It's starting to get lower in terms of the quality, but depending on what the environment's like, and we'll talk about the environment in a minute, depending on what the environment's like, perhaps that will actually suit that particular extraction in that day. And probably the last one is I would encourage you not to— if you've got— if you're doing extractions and you're using a laptop or something like that, please don't use the laptop microphone that's built in. Yeah, unless you've got the latest and greatest laptop that's got an amazing microphone, it's probably not going to be good enough to get a decent quality transcription at the end. Because that's the goal here, is to get a decent quality transcription. And other things you need in terms of tech The webcam, it's not particularly important unless there's something that you're showing on the camera that you really need to convey the quality of what you're doing with high attention to detail, holding it up close to the camera or something like that. So pretty much any webcam will do. In terms of getting that microphone to give you a good transcription, you need to probably think about what is the transcribing software you're using. There is a fairly decent range of what is available these days, and quite a lot is pretty much included. Dave, I think Google started auto-transcribing their videos maybe only about a month ago. Not for old videos, but stuff that you put into Google Drive, you can go buried in the settings and you can actually find the transcription, the closed captions for a video. And things like Loom, they also do their own transcriptions these days. I would say that's probably the first level, and there's probably a few levels after. You can get better quality transcription software like Descript is another one. I personally use Otter, and some of these ones are getting really good at— they actually know who's speaking. And if you've got a particular accent or there's a certain type of way that you speak, then it can actually start to listen for how you say things and you can actually correct it. And so if you go into the transcript afterwards, it learns that if I say a word like this, I'm actually saying this word, not that word. But look, horses for courses. You don't need to go out and spend more money on more transcription software and things like that if what you've got right now is suiting your needs. But you just need to make sure you've got one that's it's going to match the level that you need. So that's the topic about the technology that you might need to make sure that you're getting good quality inputs. What about things like the environment and the circumstances? I've talked about having a webcam before and maybe having a bit too much background noise. Making sure the environment is quiet. This is not just for getting a great quality transcription at the end, but there's been a number of times that I've been listening back to a video recording of me interviewing a customer and trying I'm trying to pick out of their brain certain things, and there's been people in the background that have walked in, had a conversation, and just a couple of key words didn't come through because the microphone picked up on the other person and not the person who I was talking to. And that's actually just a couple of key words has really made it quite hard to work out, were they inferring this thing here or that thing there? So making sure you've got a quiet environment, This is part of that priming we were talking about. We'll make sure that you don't have any echo and you get a great quality transcription. But also when you're listening back afterwards that you can actually clearly hear what that person's saying and you don't have to second-guess anything. That's one part about the environment. Another part is about the circumstances around when you're having it. And this is very much around that priming that we talked about last time. Think about, let's say you've got your team will typically knock off at 5:00 PM. From your business. If you're having an extraction at 4:40 or 4:45, and you know that person maybe has some personal commitments, maybe they've got to go pick their kids up from somewhere, or they've got to go to the shops before they've got stuff afterwards, how— what's the headspace of that person, do you think, when you're actually talking to them when they've really got a hard stop? When you're going through and scheduling, be selective. About when you're scheduling, okay? Set people up for success by making sure they've got a clear headspace, they don't have any really full-on deadlines that are due. You want to have them in the mental space that they can actually divulge all this information about this process that you're looking to extract from them. So set them up for success by making sure they've got the time and the headspace to do it and do it well.

Just a heads up, that clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champion certification program. Which is the world's first and only program for Systems Champions to help you build a systems culture and develop an AI-first approach and roll it out inside your organization.

To find out more, head over to systemology.com/systemschamp, and I'll see you in there.