SOPs aren't recipes that kill creativity. They're how small businesses get consistent results without the owner doing everything. The speaker explains why treating them like rigid rules misses the point entirely.
If you're someone who thinks standard operating procedures are pointless, then what you're really telling me is that the time and attention of the people in your business has no value. You see, SOPs are like recipes. They give you a series of ingredients, they tell you the steps to follow and make it really easy for anyone with reasonable skill to achieve a set outcome. And in my experience, a small business will have anywhere between 200 and 500 of these recipes, that is two Martha Stewart cookbooks. Now, could you just memorize the hundreds of things your business does? You certainly could. But there's a reason why baking and cooking competition shows. When they make people create things without a recipe, they call it a challenge because it makes things needlessly hard. Something you'd only really do for a TV show and not something you'd want to do for any other reason. Because why would you purposely make your life harder? And this gets us to the heart of why the SOPs are pointless crowd are sadly mistaken. They think SOPs are about taking human creativity ingenuity and limiting it, boxing it up, saying, no, you can't do that, because that's not in the policy. Who would ever say that about following a recipe when you're cooking or baking? You wouldn't. So why would we believe this to be true when it happens in business? Well, I think it's because in some businesses, in some instances, there have been instances of limiting freedoms through standard operating procedures. But in small businesses today, that is a choice you are making that is not the fault of the tool itself. Itself. That's like saying, hey, my food didn't turn out well. All recipes are terrible.
