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Process Triaging syncs with Ray Dalio’s Life Principles (5-Steps)

I’ve been a fan of Ray Dalio, co-founder of Bridgewater Associates. He recently published Principles: Life and Work is both an autobiography and and exposition of his core values. Mr. Dalio is notably recognized for his emphasis on building an organization that makes great decisions based on radical truth and transparency. Bridgewater is the largest United States hedge fund manager with some $150 Billion under management.

Mr. Dalio itemizes and explains the rationale behind scores of principles. A core set of these principles is his 5-Step Process (about page 260 on my ebook) for improving an organization.  Each step is listed below, followed by how our flagship Process Triage workshop practices these steps.  (I’m not saying PT does these 5-Steps the way Bridgewater does, but we follow the pattern.)

  1. Have clear goals.
    The Process Triage workshop’s prework includes a Process Capability Goal.  It describes what the process we’re triaging must be capable of performing and delivering in measurable terms.  If the process can sustain the goal, it will contribute its share of a larger organizational objective.  The workshop’s executive sponsor assigns this goal’s writing to an understudy (the workshop host) for professional development.  Every improvement the triage team proposes and prioritizes will, if implemented, deliver progress towards this goal.
  2. Identify the problems preventing the goals from being achieved.
    We identify problems — we call them Pain Points, with the most believable, Go-to experts in the process we’re triaging.  They’re hand picked by the host.  Each triage team consists of the most believable, closest-to-the-work performers of the work.  Every pain point must be described in measurable terms — counting how much and how often something happens that inhibits the capability goal.  It’s radically truthful and radically transparent.  Each triager is provided the respect, empathy, and listened-to attention as they identify pain points.  Given each triager sees only a portion of the whole process, they’ll see pain points across the whole process after everyone’s contributed. Their situational awareness and diagnostic insights make all of them smarter than any one of them.
  3. Diagnose parts of the machine.
    Using the ProcessTriage® Protocol, the team examines each pain point and selects the type of solution and sizes its level of effort.  The four solutions are:

    ANALYZE a pain point for a cause that’s not obvious, then triage that cause(s).

    DESIGN
    a best practice (procedure, tool, technology, policy, instruction, etc.) that stops the problem.

    TRAIN an existing best practice.

    ENFORCE a trained best practice.

    The typical, 10-member triage team will sort (not solve), size, and prioritize about 20 improvements per workshop from 30 pain points. Every proposal is believable and has strategic fit.

  4. Design changes
    Each triage generates a Process Triage Profile™, much like a personality profile like Meyers-Briggs or DISC®.  This profile highlights how much best practice design work is needed compared to training and enforcing existing best practices.  This gives improvement leaders a clear-eyed understanding about what they face in reaching their goals.  You cannot scale a process with design issues — you’ll just create crap faster if you hit the gas.  If the focus is training and enforcement, it’s all about people and resource management.
  5. Doing what’s needed.
    The triage workshop’s Host writes the post-triage implementation plan and submits this to the Sponsor. (Our certified facilitator coaches as needed.) This plan should be signature ready and executable when approved.

Radical truth and radical transparency sounds good.  We know it works when we create an expert facilitated space for teams to experience it respectfully and emphatically.

If your core process team welcomes an immersion in this, give us a call.

All of us are smarter than any one of us.

P.S.  The Process Triage Primer (32-pages of the essentials) is published.

 

Catapult your EOS Issues Solving Track with Process Triage

One of Process Triage’s core values with our customers and clients is to Make Touches that Make a Difference.  We listen and look for a moment in each triaging engagement to add something of delightful value, above our expected scope of work.

Sometimes a client touches us back. Like the touch of CEO Tory Schwope  of Schwope Brothers Farms and KAT Nurseries.

Tory’s an EOS Operator, meaning he’s adopted the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS), introduced by Gino Wickman’s book, Traction.  Tory, a visionary, sponsored a triage and tasked his integrator, Jeff King to host it.  I blogged about their bi-lingual triage team here.  (Visionaries and Integrators, the two C-Suite must-have roles are explained in Gino’s and Mark Winter’s book, Rocket Fuel)

To the point, Jeff was responsible for the 90+Day Post-Triage Implementation Plan.  This plan is the signature-ready deliverable the triage host presents the sponsor to request resources for any Big Now project-size efforts and Small Now task-size actions the organization cannot complete.  Jeff’s plan was, frankly, one of the best I’ve ever seen.

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Process Triage Host Jeff King with his triaged process map (Courtesy Schwope Bros. Farms). 

On a parallel narrative, I’m a Vistage International speaker.  Vistage members benefit from guest speakers on about any topic related to running and growing an enterprise.  It’s a privilege and honor to be on the circuit, noting speakers are not allowed to solicit — it’s a pay it forward opportunity with a very modest honorarium.  It’s my practice to chat with the Vistage group’s chairperson to understand where the group is and how I may best tailor my talk on triaging.  I’m looking for an opportunity to make a touch that matters.  One such chair was Will Hindrickson, in the New London, Connecticut area. Will mentioned his entire chief executive group were EOS operators.  So I read up on EOS, read Traction, and suspected there were synergies between Process Triaging and EOS immediately.

Seeking more info on EOS, I asked two Vistage Chair friends in Kansas City, Tony Lewis and Jeff Hutsell what they knew about EOS.  Turns out Tony’s an EOS Operator himself, and said about half a dozen or so of his members were on EOS, namely Tory Schwope.

So I reached out to Tory, and he touched me back.

He knocked me over.

Just — WOW!

He explained How Process Triage Catapults the EOS Issues Solving Track (video clip here).  In EOS pitch-perfect terms, here’s how process triaging supports EOS-minded leaders.

If you’re interested in EOS, Tory’s a case study success. Consider using an EOS Implementer (Tony Lewis asserts using an implementer/coach is the best practice, and their 90 minute overview is without obligation).  I’m a believer because of the quality of Tory and Jeff’s post-Triage follow through.

If you’ve adopted EOS  or are an EOS implementor (coach), and want to add a Moment that Matters touch in the EOS issues solving track, consider hosting our Process Triage Immersion Workshop. I’m best reached by text or email initially. (I’m focused to only answer cell phone calls from those in my contacts list).

Hat Tip, Tory.

 UPDATE / P.S.  1/30/2016

The Process Triage immersion workshop is usually only one-day long and focused on an enterprise’s core driveshaft process.  It generates a prioritized list of solutions to process points-of-pain. These pain points are recurring events or behaviors, as observed by the hand-picked process expert team who live in the trenches of the process– NOT the C-Suite’ers (who sponsor the triage).  It’s the bottoms-up, bought-in list, not a top-down list you have to sell or direct.  These solutions are, in EOS terms, pre-validated, pre-qualified issues with proposed solutions already nominated — in a “Bring me solutions, not problems” approach.  Process triaging therefore drives the Issue Tracking dimension and value of EOS deeper into the organization, towards front line leaders.  The EOS issue tracking method is, itself, a process that welcomes high quality inputs — high quality issues.  That’s why Tory suggested a triage schedule a few weeks ahead of the quarterly pulse.

Not mentioned in Tory’s kind remarks was the process documentation produced by the triage team (as illustrated in Jeff King’s photo above). You can leverage the triage map into your process documentation.

Rosey

Disclaimer:  The EOS Operating System is a copyright of EOS Worldwide.  ProcessTriage LLC has no commercial relationships with EOS Worldwide.
 
 

What is Process Triaging? in 2 Minutes

If you boil Process Triaging down to its first essential deliverable, it’s The List of process capability improvement proposals.  This list is created and prioritized for immediate execution by your hand-picked triage team.

Here’s a 2 minute YouTube® clip about it — What is Process Triaging?  The List

Thumnail

The facilitated Process Triage Workshop offers a number of other value propositions, such as team building, team conflict resolution, and continuous improvement team development.  But the bottom line is it generates the list of improvement proposals that will most certainly improve your operational performance if you implement the list.

 

 

Forests and Trees: The Secret Sauce of Process Triaging

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Scalability describes how much effort is required to grow or shrink an enterprise, noting we usually think about how to grow it.  It’s about how we grow from a few trees into a forest.

We get from low volume, tree-level thinking performed by individuals and heroes to high volume, forest-level thinking focused on processes that deliver the customer experience we desire when we hire team members who thrive doing processes we need to scale.

To be scaleable, we must build a team that is efficient in how it improves processes, and effective in how it finds the best improvement to make next — picking the best trees out of a forest of possibilities.

It requires finding and growing team members that can handle such empowerment.

That’s what process triaging does.

It builds the teams that make processes scalable.

 

 

 

 

 

Not All Bottlenecks Are Created Equal

All bottlenecks slow processes down.  These slow-downs are a problem when they’re on the critical path, the fastest way through a process network. 

However, not a bottlenecks are the same.  It depends upon their cause.

Here are three root causes to look for. Each has very different solutions.

  • Rework bottlenecks:  When work backs up because of errors, the good news is your quality control is working. Fix the inputs, work procedures or technology that introducing the error.
  • Resource or queuing bottlenecks: When work stalls out because you’re waiting on inputs or resources, the remedy is straight forward — fix the supply chain.
  • Waiting for permission bottlenecks: When work stalls out because you’re waiting for approval, such as an inspection or executive’s signature, determine if authority can be delegated. There are obviously proper, reasonable, and necessary checks to make in processes that make high risk decisions, but — remove bureaucratic, non-value added approvals,

What’s important about these three types of bottlenecks is their solutions are not interchangeable.  For example, adding resources to a rework-caused bottleneck will just exacerbate the delay.

Hat tip to Dr. Bradley T. Gayle and the Boston Consulting Group for these insights, from Managing Customer Value.  While a bit dated, these three types of delays have held up very well.

Here’s a helpful chart: Bottleneck Causes & Solutions