It is good to root out weaknesses in advance
I’m writing this post because the one I published last week had some problems. Last Wednesday, the day after I emailed Choose the Red Pill to my subscriber list, I read through it and found several grammatical errors and some clumsy paragraphs. Also, I thought it was too complex as well as a bit melodramatic at the end. Bypassing my standard protocol of relentless system improvement, I had put the post together at the last minute and sent it out too fast.
I deemed the piece ready-for-public-consumption simply because I wanted it to be. Deluding myself, I violated my own rules about system improvement. (For a definition of system improvement, see page 11 in my book, Work the System.)
This failure inspires me to discuss a half-dozen points about the system improvement process. Here, I will discuss my weekly Work the System blog posts, and a little bit about Centratel, but the points I make apply to any work or personal context in which there are recurring tasks to be executed. Be imaginative. Especially think about your business or job.
I already covered the first point: Root out and acknowledge failure. Don’t muddle reality by conjuring up some dubious silver lining. Bury the ego and face facts: If you screwed up, you screwed up.
Point two: Remember exactly what the task is and what is to be done with it: For example, this blog post is an individual system with a purpose. It is a singular, enclosed entity designed to deliver a message and to entertain. Improvement is what I do to it. (Hence, “system improvement.”)
A third point: Use failures as red flags so action can be taken to prevent the failures from happening again. In fact, assertively seek out failures. Your job is to find weaknesses in your systems and then to fix them.
My cycle of writing a typical 1,000 word post is one week long. On Wednesday or Thursday I spend just a half-hour writing the rough draft. Then, over the next five or six days I spend an additional eight to ten hours tweaking it until it’s ready to post on Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week. I’m relentless in this phase, performing this read-through editing in thirty to forty separate sessions. Between each session, I clear my head by doing some other activity so each read-through is from a different mental perspective. Even then, I’m not done: After the piece is posted and delivered, and over the next few weeks, I’ll go back four to six separate times to further polish it. Point four: Repeatedly execute the system from scratch, each time looking for weaknesses. Thus, 5% of time is spent in creation of the raw product and 95% of time is spent perfecting it. This is working the system!
For any of us, the repetition of various systems is no problem. It’s what we do. We have tasks to execute and so we execute them. But too many people leave it at that, only to fire-kill through work, relationships and life, blindly negotiating the same old problems over and over again. They don’t analyze the source of recurring problems and thus don’t take steps to stop them from happening again.
It’s a good time to say it: System improvement is the opposite of fire-killing.
My process for writing a blog post is a perfect analogy for how I spend my working hours at Centratel. My time is invested in relentless system improvement and I seldom do the “work.” Point five: For the leader, most work is either delegated or automated. At Centratel, I pay the bills, conduct staff meetings and occasionally go back and forth with my management staff on special issues. That’s it, for a total work-time at Centratel of less than two hours per week.
Point six: To arrive at the mental positioning in which every working system is constantly under personal mental review, one must “get” the systems mindset. This is moment-to-moment vigilance in which every work-event is recognized as part of an individual linear system. Once this perspective is hard-wired in the head, one can’t resist reaching into dysfunctional systems in order to make improvements.
So, my weekly blog post is an individual system entity and I fine-tune it over and over until it is as good as I can get it. On my website, today, the Red Pill post is now as good as I can make it for right now, and way better than what it was when I first published it last week. (Go here to read the newest version.) And what I know for sure is that over the next few weeks it will get even better because I’ll read through it several more times in order to root out further weaknesses. I’ll do the same with this post. This writing process mirrors the pattern my staff and I follow in every aspect of the operation of Centratel. Moment-to-moment, each working system is under review. It’s never-ending. That’s why Centratel is fluid, efficient and highly profitable. It’s also why the inevitable problems that arise are road bumps and not earthquakes.
Going “one layer deeper,” the system improvement mentality is an assertively pro-active positioning whereby desired outcomes are achieved by intensely managing the components that produce those outcomes.
In your own life, can you think of important systems that could be perfected via the unrelenting system improvement protocol I describe here? Do you see the stark difference between, a) mindless task execution, and, b) studying and adjusting the components of a task as it’s executed? Do you see that the system improvement mindset is radically different from the conventional take-it-as-it-comes stance?
This brings us to point seven: Which do you choose: a life of fire-killing or a life of system improvement?
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Photo by Nigel Blake via flickr used under a creative Commons License.
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Going “one layer deeper” is good for learning what a system may really be.
Going “one layer higher” is good for understanding what a system really may be part of.
Can’t argue with that. Good point David.
We have an economic incentive to get the work out as fast as possible: search engines consider the age of an article when computing results.
I use a “publish, then polish” process. It took me a while to come to grips with it. My background is academic publishing, where you had better as close to perfect as possible before submitting for review.
Making my peace with it isn’t the same as being completely happy with it. But the world is what it is. Some fire fighting seems necessary.
Systematic improvements: yes. But nothing I feel comfortable writing about yet.
Interesting. We have a half dozen primary rules we follow for getting good SEO results. One of them is to make frequent changes in copy. So, I guess putting up “imperfect posts: to be perfected later” makes even more sense. Then again, the stringers don’t hit every day but it’s my guess the search engines are working toward that end. Thanks Dave.
Nice to hear others end up revising their posts after publishing.
Sometimes I can’t resist tweaking a post. I think of a better example or discover an sentence that could be clearer. That’s one nice benefit of blogs – you can fix your mistakes.
At first I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, like Dave, but now I’m over it.
I’ve really enjoyed reading your emails every week. I make a point to thoroughly read each article and set aside time to do so every week. Your perspective on the issues that you cover almost always fall in line with the systems and methods I use to conduct my personal and business lives.
In this week’s article titled “Your Relentless System Improvement”, I noticed two points that I wanted to ask you about:
“My process for writing a blog post is a perfect analogy for how I spend my working hours at Centratel. My time is invested in relentless system improvement and I seldom do the “work.” Point five: For the leader, most work is either delegated or automated. At Centratel, I pay the bills, conduct staff meetings and occasionally go back and forth with my management staff on special issues. That’s it, for a total work-time at Centratel of less than two hours per week.”
In regards to paying bills for Centratel…do you not use an auto-pay system between your bank and the billing company to automate payment or is there a special reason that you spend time doing this every week for your business? Also, what is your viewpoint on internal meetings for companies? To me, it seems that similar authors with your perspective on automation and efficiency would seem to be against meetings in the fact that they are usually ineffective and can be handled in other ways, such as email or individual contact with your team members.
Anyways, these were just a few thoughts I had after reading this week’s article. I look forward to hearing back from you. Thank you.
Hey Brent. I like good questions like yours. Thanks. My answers to your two questions:
1) Yes, I have been using the bill-payer service at our bank to pay bills (been doing it for, I think, 7 years now). Probably 90% of our payables are automatically sent out (same amount, same date, each month), while concurrently, the same payments are entered in Quickbooks automatically, too. I manually enter maybe 12-15 bill payments per month. No one understands our cash outflows better than me and since it’s over 100K per month, I want to do it. Yes, this is “work,” but in addition to reviewing expenditures carefully, it keeps me connected with what’s going on. Total time per month to do pay bills? Maybe 2-3 hours per month.
2) Meetings. I hold them once per week for three reasons. First, to be connected with my staff and to remind everyone that I am still involved(!). Second, it’s just good to get everyone together because it reinforces that “we’re a team and we’re all in this together.” The very automated communications systems that we use are hyper-efficient but at the same time they tend to isolate us. Also, I am not in the office much. Third, in the meetings we all share what’s up in our various areas of expertise…IT, billing, operations, quality control, R&D, sales, etc. It’s a very good thing for everyone to know what’s up with each other. OK, here’s a 4th reason: I really like my staff and the meetings are fun. If I am out of town, we either teleconference or more often, Andi my COO, conducts the meetings. The meetings rarely exceed 15 minutes but we seldom miss having one.
Thanks Brent.