How to Build an Effective Process

12 Dec 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:09

In this short presentation, the speaker explains that a system’s overall efficiency is not the sum of its parts but the product of each component’s effectiveness. Using a 90% effectiveness example, he shows how adding more components actually reduces total efficiency (90% → 81% → 73% → 64%). The core recommendation is to eliminate unnecessary steps—what he calls “Recapture and Reallocate”—to remove cruft and thereby raise the system’s overall efficiency. The talk emphasizes evaluating each part of a process and discarding non‑essential elements to achieve a more effective strategy for getting what you want.

Chapters

A system, your process, your strategy for getting what you want is made up of the things that you're doing. Nothing that you're— and the thing about systems is we think if we keep adding components, that sudden somehow we'll find the silver bullet, that one missing component, that one missing thing, and that will get us where we want to be. But actually system efficiency is not an additive process. It's a multiplicative process. The efficiency of any system is a product of the efficiency of each of its component parts. If I have something that I do that is 90% effective, which is very, very hard to do, and I add another 90% effective component to that system, I've just reduced my efficiency from 90% to 81%. If I add another component, even if it's 90% effective, I just reduce it to 73%. If I add another component, even if it's at 90%, I just reduce it to 64%. So So one of these things that we're doing with this Recapture and Reallocate is we're removing the cruft. What's your system for getting what you want? And if we just get rid of all the things that actually you don't need, we automatically raise the efficiency of your system.