David Jenyns compares a business to the human body: interconnected departments that must work together as systems. He introduces minimum viable systems, the 20% of processes delivering 80% of results, to help businesses function reliably and expose every team member to systems thinking.
This metaphor I love because everybody gets it. The human body is one big system and it's made up of a range of subsystems. Muscular, endocrine, skeletal, respiratory. There are all of these subsystems that go on. Now, the health of your human body depends on the health of those subsystems. If one of your systems is not firing, it will bring the whole system down. If you've got breathing problems, that will cause problems in all of the other systems. They're all interrelated. That same metaphor can be applied to business. And once you realize that your business is a system and there are subsystems that are the different departments and the whole head health of your business depends on the health of those subsystems. That's why I say every problem in business is a systems problem. Because you can drill into the department if you don't have enough leads. You need to work on your lead generation systems. And it's not enough to just think about how each department works independently, it's how it all works together. For those of you who watch my YouTube channel, there was a YouTube short that I just posted the other day with Russ Akoff. And he talked about the importance of how these systems work together to create the result. And independently, parts of the human body don't do anything. It's only when it all works together. If you chopped off your hand and you put it on a table, it's not going to do anything. It's not going to write because it's not connected to the whole system. And if you took out your eyeballs and you put them on a table on their own, they're not going to do anything. They're just going to roll around like it only works when it's in the larger system and the way that things interact. And your business is very much the same. So if I think about this visual here and I'll show you what it is that we're building towards, I talk about this idea of minimum viable systems and this is where I think I'm adding to the work that I'd done previously in Systemology. A lot of people really focused heavily on the critical client flow. And the critical client flow is where you get started. It answers the question, what should I systemize first? But it's not where the tipping point is. The tipping point where we really start to fundamentally change the way that your business works is when we reach what's called minimum viable systems. That's where we identify the most critical systems in each of the different departments. So if we imagine this is your business as A whole. And then we imagine each of these different department here as the subsystems. And then within those subsystems there are little tasks and systems that contribute to that particular department delivering on its promise. So what is the promise of the marketing department? The promise of the marketing department is to generate leads. The promise of the sales department is to convert those leads leads. The promise of the operations department is to fill the product or fulfill the products and services and the delivery of those. The promise of the finance department is to manage money going in and out of the business. The HR department, it's about recruiting, onboarding and managing. So each department has a particular role in making the overall health of your business. So we need to make sure that is achieved. And then what we look to do is we identify what are the systems. If you had to apply the 8020 rule, as in what are the 20% of the systems that deliver 80% of the result for that particular department, we look through that lens in each department to identify those most critical systems. Now, just because you might not document something or you might not identify it, doesn't mean it's going to magically stop happening in your business. You've got great staff, things are already happening. This is not about, at least initially capturing everything. This is just about what is most important. That you want to have something done to a particular standard. And whether you're there or not, it should be able to be completed because you've captured what your expectations are through the systems and processes. Now this will grow and evolve over time, but the reason we want to get to minimum viable systems is because that's when systems touch all departments in the business, which means every team member will have some exposure to systems.
Just a heads up, that clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champions 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.
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