I’ve been asked several times to write a post in the popular Top “#” List format of what I’ve learned from triaging these many years and businesses.  It’s a long list as one can imagine, and what happens in what order depends upon the situation.  But one thing always comes first, when we’re talking about actually improving a business into a self-healing, continuously learning enterprise. We need some light.

By analogy, in the Jewish Bible’s Creation account in Genesis,  the text anthropomorphically presents the process as declarations of ‘And God said…’, and whatever God said came into existence.  The first openly spoken ‘And God said…’ is in Chapter 1, verse 3:

“‘And God said let there be light’,  and there was light.”

This light was not solor or photon-based light, as that kind of light is not added until three steps later, on the fourth day.  So what kind of light was this primordial stuff?

The Sages say this first light was like the light we turn on in a dark room so we interact with the room; to walk around in it and not stumble, or see its dimensions to decorate it.  The first thing we need is to create is that which enables us to have a relationship with what we’re creating. We cannot improve what we cannot see.

When it comes to creating and growing and fixing and improving businesses, we need to turn on this kind of  light.  We must create something that allows us to have a relationship with the management team we need, as well as those who will do the work or handle the technologies that will do the work.

This first creation is The Process Map —  an illustration of how work flows between the enterprise and her customers. The map also exposes how people and technologies interact with each other, such as who provides what to whom. The process map captures the idea of the enterprise and gives us a way to relate to it, and everything in it to us — a two way proposition.

At ProcessTriage®, the first thing we do in our flagship immersion workshop is build this map. It typically takes most of the morning and uses an very fast Action>Result format, examples here, here, and here (different industries).  The style comes from a very fast way to design information systems databases that accelerate business processes (primer here)

Do you feel like you’re in the dark while your trying to fix or improve how things are running?

Turn on the process map.

P.S.  I read an ultra-orthodox Jewish commentary on Genesis 1:3 written during WWII, while the Manhattan Project was underway (the first atomic bomb) that asserted there had to be a layer of energy smaller than the atom, as the atom was the stuff of visible light — fourth day light. The commentary asserted the Big Bang theory was very likely correct and we should expect to find stuff smaller than atoms — the world of particle physics. Who knew!