My First “Where Were You When?” Moment — 11/22/63

“Where Were You When?” (WWYW) moments bind us together.  They are a generation’s touchstone and cement a shared identity.   My parent’s generation included December 7, 1941 — Pearl Harbor and June 6, 1944 — D-Day.

My first WWYW moment was fifty-five years ago today, Nov 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.  I was nine years old, in the 4th grade, in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico.  It was a Friday.  Mrs. Bulalee Herring was my teacher — a strict but fair teacher as I remember her — a pit bull in a poodle suit.  We had returned to class after the lunch period and she was delayed. (Mrs. Herring was never late, only delayed.)   She had been crying and was very upset.  She instructed us to gather up our things and coats, as school was dismissing early; the school buses were on their way.  She said President Kennedy had been assassinated.

One of my classmates raised their hands and asked “What is assassinated?

Mrs. Herring said he had been shot and killed. She said this would be a very important few days to remember.

Dealey Plaza

How true she was.  We gathered spell-bound around our black and white RCA television and watched. Our village received one VHF channel, KBIM out of Roswell, New Mexico.  We watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.  We watched the president’s funeral procession and John John’s salute.

I was leading a Process Mapping / Triaging session at Sprint Corporation when 9/11 happened.  We gathered around a television monitor in a break room and all the feelings of my childhood’s “Where Were You When” day flooded my emotions.  I sent everyone home, explaining, “This is your generation’s Pearl Harbor. Your Kennedy Assassination.  Clear your calendar and watch it carefully, as it will be permanently imprinted.  It may change the political course of your generation.”  And it did.

My most treasured WWYW moment, by the way, is when I saw a stunningly beautiful young woman tending a breakfast bar in college.  It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was definitely “Someone Really Different at First Sight.”  She’s still amazing after 41 years of putting up with me.

Process Triaging and the Great Game of Business on ForbesBooks Radio

Process Triaging is a supportive, complementary team development practice with branded business operating systems, like The Great Game of Business (GGOB).  We were privileged to host a booth at this year’s annual  Gathering of Games in September, in Dallas.  If you want to know more about GGOB, read the book (minimum) or attend a Get in the Game Workshop (Rosey’s recommendation).

ForbesBooks Radio broadcaster Gregg Stebben interviewed Rosey about Business Process Triaging and how it supports the GGOB.  It’s an excellent overview of process triaging and concludes with how it bolts into GGOB.

We’re a big fan of GGOB and Open Book Management.  It teaches business literacy at all levels of a company.  That knowledge develops entrepreneurship which is the creative engine of American’s future.

Here’s the podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes, just short of 20 minutes long. 

Cindy Meyer welcomes Great Gamer’s at the 26th Gathering of Games 

What an EOS® Level-10 Perfect Score Looks Like

Is it bragging if you can do it?

The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) includes a proven best practice when holding meetings.  Participants grade the meeting at its conclusion on a scale of 1 to 10; 10 being this highest score, meeting or exceeding all expectations.   I’m told from EOS® Implementers that a score of 8 or better is solid work. “Ten” is over-the-top-excellent.

The Process Triage participants scored (below) our all-day workshop as part of the sponsor’s closing remarks.   They are our client’s go-to subject matter experts.  We process triaged one of their most strategically important functions.  The agenda included collaborative process mapping, a Process Capability Goal review, nominating Pain Points  that inhibit this goal, then process triaging these pain points into solution proposals.  Finally,  they ranked these proposals and signed up to mentor their implementation.

It’s an intense day, built on delegating and elevating those who are closest to the work to improve the work flow across the whole team.

For reasons of confidentiality, I can’t mention the client or their process, but here’s a photo of the scores.

By the way, the most successful post-Process Triage improvement implementers are running on EOS®.

 

 

 

EOS® is a registered trademark of EOS Worldwide, Inc.

 

 

Business Process Triaging’s BIG IDEA

It’s that time of year; mid-summer about six weeks from Labor Day (all ready?!). Time to review what I’ve learned from our amazing clients and their triaging teams, as well as reflect on the work of our facilitators.  I’m living that sometimes gleeful, sometimes nerve-racking challenge of growing this little company.  It’s all about balancing a complicated and often competing list of to-do’s while making enough cash to on-board the best talent one can find to delegate stuff you must if you’re going to realize the vision.  It’s a lot of the Happiness of Pursuit

I’m privileged to be a Vistage® / TEC® speaker. My primary topic is Business Process Triaging.   I was introduced and on-boarded to the Vistage® speaker community in 2013 by Kansas City chair Jeff Hutsell, a friend for life.  Next year’s scheduling begins in September and is usually completed by mid-October. The national headquarters has a terrific team of speaker coordinators and asks speakers to organize their topic(s) around what matters most to their C-Suite members: The Key Decisions, The Big Idea, and Think Abouts.

My program targets executives of mid-size enterprises and department heads within large organizations where the service or product’s value chain is complex enough to require a team to perform. One reality in organizations this size is the core process (and the team living it) experience mass casualty events — times when the entire process comes under extreme stress.  It appears to fail, or about to fail in almost every step, as if the entire process is under assault.  Business Process Triaging is all about what leaders and teams do to get and sustain control of the environment.  To find and focus on the best series of tasks and projects to navigate the growth they face.

THE BIG IDEA

Equip your Go-To Team* to handle Maximum Business Process Stress and build a more cohesive, situationally aware, emotionally smarter, business savvy organization while you’re at it.  Business processes break as they grow, so make dealing with it a competitive cultural advantage. Be able to Business Process Triage when it’s needed.

* Go-To’s are your expert task performers and mentors, your believables when you need to know what’s really going.  They’re your high-motor, high-passion, dedicated professionals.

THE BIG QUESTIONS & DECISIONS

Consider your core business process – from customer first touch all the way to service or product delivery to cash:

  • You want a culture of continuous operational improvement driven by those closest to the work, that takes day-to-day issue management off your plate so you can focus on longer horizon, bigger decision stuff.  What and how do you delegate?
  • All hell has broken out across the whole process! Errors! Delays! Rework! What do you do that will settle everyone down right now?  The result must put you on the best path to resolve things and prevent recurrence.
  • You want to sell to a Private Equity investor.  What might you demonstrate about your core process that makes you a compelling candidate?
  • How might you raise your core team’s emotional IQ – that interpersonal empathy that glues highest performing teams together?

After an explanation and practical exercise in process triaging, and a review of a few case studies..

THINK ABOUT…

  • Delegating issue processing in a business process to a team closest to the work.
  • When it comes to core process issues, leverage the wisdom that the team has more situational awareness then the individual contributor.
  • Insisting your Go-To’s also teach, not just do.
  • Insisting on measurement-based issue processing while trusting your Go-To’s estimates.
  • Considering the gap between your goals and your capabilities; the greater the gap, the more likely the process’s design will fail when you attempt to scale.
  • There are times to deliberately sort (triage) before you solve – similar to a medical mass casualty event.
  • Growing enterprises will be under constant core process stress. Embrace it. Design your culture for it. The triaging protocol is a proven skill.
  • The program’s exhibits; just how much process intelligence can you gather from triaging?
  • What is the opportunity value and cost of not having a Go-To team issue processing your core process right now?

So, my shingle’s out for next year’s speaking calendar.  The three-hour talk, exercise, and case study review makes a solid executive staff half-day team builder.

Closing note:  If you’re a C-Suiter and not a member of a peer advisory group, I encourage you to consider one like Vistage®. Reach out to me.  It’s likely I know of a chair in your city.  Email Rosey

An Offer to Process Triage Our Immigration Process … For the Kids.

One of our company’s core values is leaving every customer with a referable quality touch. Every time, every touch.

We also want to give back to our communities.  For example, when it makes sense, we waive our workshop fees if the triaging enterprise helps children.  Like Dr. Melanie Macrorie’s team at Autism From the Start (an amazing autistic preschool) or Lee Nasehi’s crew at Lighthouse Central Florida (vision impaired), or  Denise Gurule’s shop at FeedAmerica San Deigo, or Lonnie Vanderclise and Kelly Wilson’s amazing work at Weave Gotcha Covered, a work release program reuniting moms with their families.

At the writing of this post, there is a media storm about separating one in six children of adult foreign citizens who attempt to trespass into the United States with their minor children* (five of six children were already separated when their parents sent them with, or are trafficked by other adults).

Under current law (decades old), the adults are queued to Homeland Security processing and their minor children are queued to Health and Human Services (HHS), an arrangement codified and enforced for many years. Parents and children are usually reunited promptly (the same day typically) unless an adult trespasser claims asylum, at which point HHS may only care and protect the children for 20 days — likely less than the asylum process. It can get messy, but this separation was entirely the result of the trespasser’s choosing and our amazing American compassion for the downtrodden.  We separate children at the southern border if a familial or custodial relationship cannot be established (fraud), if there is suspicion that the children are victims of human trafficking, or if the adult is referred for prosecution for illegal entry.

So let’s fix it.  We need to agree on what the process is (as codified in the law), then triage it against a capability goal that, if delivered, fulfills our core values.  I will personally facilitate the triage.

What we know from hundreds of Process Triage workshops is any process under siege will benefit from a triage session, similar to a medical facility during a mass casualty event. Triaging determines the type of treatment or solution and queues these solutions to address the most urgent and efficacious first.

So, for the kids, I’m offering Process Triage’s services — our Flagship Workshop to triage the Immigration and Naturalization Process

We’ll need an Executive Sponsor and the smartest, go-to, believable experts who live and work the process.  I have no doubts we can stack a list of implementable improvements of what to fix first, consistent with our national values, responsibilities, and compassions.

* There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant. Immigrant is a status assigned to a foreign or alien citizen recognized by our Immigration and Naturalization Service; a status granted by our sovereign government, and not self-assigned by the person seeking to immigrate or mislabeled by a private citizen or confused media. If one does not have immigrant status, one is respectfully assumed to be a foreign citizen. And one should be treated with the respect, terms and conditions according to our laws and treaties — just as we wish respect when traveling abroad.  If we break another sovereign nation’s visitation laws, we should expect to be treated as they see fit.

 

Process Triaging — Faster than a TQM!

It’s always great to receive Process Triage workshop feedback from our sponsors.  We were privileged to triage with MRI Global, a long-established research and development institution, headquartered in Kansas City.  Tom Sack’s at the helm and offered the following insights after their triage:

We fully embraced TQM to support our efforts to improve processes and continually improve our operations.  TQM proved to be very valuable for us and I am delighted to see the ProcessTriage take the TQM approach to the next level.  Where TQM would have taken us weeks to get to a prioritized list of improvement activities, ProcessTriage got us there in 1 day…while not glossing over topics or issues.  I applaud the ProcessTriage team for creating a robust, thorough and organized approach to process improvement that fits the pace of today’s business environment.

TQM — Total Quality Management is some industrial strength stuff. So to be favorably associated with that body of knowledge, and bringing something more to that party is pleasing.

ProcessTriage — faster than a TQM!

 

A Triager’s Insights about Process Triaging

The Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory University.  From #8 to #4 in the nation.  How ’bout them apples!

While our Process Triage workshop is a one-day intense event, its effects can be profoundly positive when the team’s improvement proposals are implemented.  This is the case with the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University.  We met Dean Linda McCauley in Atlanta when Rosey presented at Vistage Chair Larry Hart’s group in 2014.  Dean McCauley triaged their student recruiting and student life processes that fall, selecting faculty and staff go-to’s as triagers. The initial improvements list focused on these “producer” improvements.   They were followed by groups of student triagers to get a Voice of Customer perspective — “customer’s” improvements.  These students generated a ranked list of proposals as well.  Dean McCauley directed the customer/student list be worked first.  

The Director of Recruiting, Jasmine Hoffman project managed the improvement efforts.  The successes led to Jasmine and Rosey teaming up to present to the Graduate Nursing School Recruiting Association’s annual meeting the following year.  Rosey presented the theory of it and Jasmine presented Emory’s case study results.  That led to us triaging in other nursing schools such as California Baptist (Dean Geneva Oaks), Case Western Reserve (Dean Mary Kerr) and Johns Hopkins University (Dean Patricia Davidson, four processes triaged).  So we’re well acquainted with some of the highest ranked nursing schools in the nation.

We were delighted to conduct a refresh triage at Emory this year. Dean McCauley returned as sponsor and Jasmine served as host.  One of the returning triagers, Arnita Howard, Director of Careers Services and Student Affairs offers her insights:

Process Triage in brief, is designed to evaluate a business process and identify areas for improvement.   When first approached about participating in this “exercise” it seemed more like a way to pinpoint, with incredible detail and specificity, all of the ways that our process fell short.  Two intense days evaluating how we interact with and serve our prospective students from the prospect stage to orientation yielded some incredibly helpful feedback about how we might increase enrollment and convert more of those prospective students into admitted and enrolled members of our community. 

Fast forward to 2018, almost four years later, and we are once again coordinating a triage to evaluate our student life cycle from orientation to alumni.  We have experienced unprecedented application growth as a result of the strategic enrollment initiatives implemented after the first triage in 2014 and now we have to figure out how to manage increased enrollment.  During this second exercise we triaged our student experience and I must admit, I am genuinely excited to participate in a process that is sure to yield a positive return on investment.  Initially, I was skeptical and frankly threatened by what might be revealed by evaluating our business process.  This time, I look forward to hearing from members of our team about how we can transform the overall student experience, thereby increasing our student satisfaction rate by 100%. 

Process Triage challenges you to take an in depth look at the services and/or product that you provide, identify pain points, and then allows YOU to think strategically about how to prioritize improvements.  Arnita Howard

We couldn’t have said it better.

From #8 to #4 in the nation.

Process triaging helps with the right list of improvements. In the right hands, good things happen.

 

 

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.

 

ProcessTriage® – The Primer (Book) Now Available — Woo Hoo!

Well check this off my bucket list!  I’m delighted to announce EOS® implementer extraordinaire Chris White and I have co-authored a short primer on Process Triaging.  It’s a quick 32-page read that skips a rock across the Process Triaging pond, touching the essential points.

We subtitled it “How to Build Repeatable, Sustainable and Scalable Core Processes in Your Business.”  The primer covers how process triaging with your own expert core team — your Go-To’s who live the process works.  It’s about setting the conditions where senior leaders can delegate the day-to-day tactical improvements to those closest to the work. Doing that well drives a powerful, continuous improvement capability.  Chris adds additional thoughts on how companies running on EOS® can apply Process Triaging to deepen their EOS® effectiveness.

If your new to Process Triaging, this very modestly priced primer can get you acquainted with us.

The Process Triaging Primer

So — if you want to understand the essential outline of Process Triaging, this is it!  As always, reach out and request a complementary case study of a company in your industry. It’s likely we have one.

Thanks for a great year!

Just a note to thank some of our 2017 clients for the privilege of supporting their continuous improvement culture.  Logo’s link to their home pages.