Reflecting on Seth Gogan’s ‘How To Go Faster’

Seth Godin pens one of my must read blogs.  Seth was recommended to be by Sean Stormes at 3^rd Door, who was recommended to me by Chris Wood, of Paige Technologies and a Vistage member.

Seth’s May 16, 2015 post titled How to Go Faster lit me up, as he offered five thoughts about improving ones decision hygiene (a crisp clean neologism typical of Seth’s thinking).

I was delighted to observe how aligned the ProcessTriage® Decision Cycle sync’d with Seth’s thinking.  Read Seth’s post, then my remarks on team triaging.

SETH: 1. Make decisions faster. You rarely need more time. Mostly, you must merely choose to decide. The simple test: is more time needed to gather useful data, or is more time merely a way to postpone the decision?

ROSEY: If it’s ‘gather useful data’, and the question is about how to incrementally improve a core process that drives your customer experience and balance sheet, team triaging is an extremely fast way to not only gather data, but delegate the decisions on what to improve first and take the decision off your plate for the most part. It means building a business model that keeps these micro-tactical decisions off your plate but makes sure they’re on the right compass heading.  It’s not enough that YOU have a faster decision cycle, but that decisions that should be made by teams cycle faster.

SETH: 2. Make decisions in the right order. Do the decisions with the most expensive and time-consuming dependencies first. Don’t ask the boss to approve the photos once you’re in galleys, and don’t start driving until you’ve looked at the map.

ROSEY: Team triaging is all about taking on the most capability-improving proposals first, while maintaining awareness of the customer experience and balance sheet impacts.  And the process triage maps we craft in the morning spell out the earliest-finish order of what should be done first, then next.  (I knew I had to write a comparison blog post after I read Seth’s #2!)

SETH: 3. Only make decisions once, unless new data gives you a profitable reason to change your mind.

ROSEY: Nothing to add here. Check!

SETH: 4. Don’t ask everyone to help you decide. Ask the people who will either improve the decision or who have input that will make it more likely you won’t get vetoed later.

ROSEY: This is spot on correct. Every capability-improving proposal that’s generated by our triage team workshops has the buy-in of the process’s expert team and thereby removes any buy-in risks. And by the way we coach our hosts to select the triage team, they are by definition the ones who will improve the decisions on what process improvements to fix first.

SETH: 5. Triage decisions. Some decisions don’t matter. Some decisions are so unimportant that they are trumped by speed. And a few decisions are worth focusing on.

ROSEY: Amen. What we tell our team triage sponsors – usually C-Level business unit owners (P&L or real budget authority) is to not overly concern themselves with any of the triage team‘s two dozen or so process capability-improving proposals individually, but focus on the whole deck. Focus on getting the whole list completed, then refresh the list as soon as practical.

It made my day to see PT’s business model align with Seth’s kind of thinking.