How To Lead A Quest. Fox Jason

organisations today simply would not function without clever systems. Systems keep entropy at bay.7

      Whenever we've got multiple, interconnected patterns happening, we have the opportunity to create systems to increase our efficiency and avoid wasted effort.

      I use, and love, a heap of systems – one being the software I'm writing this book with, and the operating system that nests it. These complex systems were developed by very intelligent teams. Short of an ecosystem or the human body, few systems are quite as complex.

      But not all systems are of such a high order.

      Take the typical sales sequence, for example. I've chosen ‘sales' because it is a fairly universal function within any business or organisation – even if your organisation or business unit doesn't sell products or services for money, value is still generated and a currency of exchange is still at play.

      The typical sequence looks like this:

      1. First, a business needs to generate leads (‘leads' being code for ‘potential opportunities'). Assuming you are doing something of value, generating leads could look like advertising, marketing, public relations or networking. In my world, leads are generated as a consequence of doing great work with clients (which generates referrals), sharing fresh research and insights (via my ‘making clever happen' museletter), speaking at conferences, running our own events, and publishing research and books like this. Each of these activities is also a collection of patterns – but they form part of this bigger sales sequence.

      2. Once leads are generated, they need to be qualified. If your organisation trades entirely online, your situation may be that the customer is self-qualifying, and your focus is on enhancing conversion. But if your organisation is service-based, or you engage in business-to-business sales, you likely need to qualify your leads. This means sorting out the valuable opportunities from the dead ends. In my world, we scare the tyre kickers away with our fee guide.

      3. Next comes the nurturing. Some sales cycles are incredibly short, and as such, minimal client nurturing is required. A sales rep might know the typical questions that prospects have about a product, and be able to easily call upon the right answers for these questions. Other sales cycles are incredibly long, and require a lot of client nurturing. An example might be a large organisation adopting a new piece of software for tens of thousands of their employees – it's a big decision. Eventually, with enough nurturing prompts and the right frequency of positive interactions, clients are ready to consider investing in the work.

      4. Then comes the pretty proposal. Once prospective clients are primed and ready to buy, some sort of proposal or agreement is required. This may be something automatically generated, like a software license agreement, with pricing structures that scale in proportion to the number of users. Or it could be manually generated. I used to spend a heap of time on these (mainly on design and layout), but over time we had developed enough confidence and experience to be able to recognise patterns and present proposals that frame our methodology and value (without getting bogged down in detail).

      5. Then comes doing the work. And providing the value (although of course, you'd want to be providing value before any proposal is submitted). This nests a whole heap of systems and patterns too. Patterns, patterns everywhere! But sometimes we have good systems to corral them into something manageable.

      And that's kind of how we make sales happen. Each step nests its own level of complexity but, not to worry – we have a system to manage this complexity. If you're a small business, your system might look like a spreadsheet that lists the current status of particular opportunities. If you're a bit more advanced, you might be using customer relationship management and/or sales pipeline software as your sales system. Thanks to these systems, we can track where various opportunities are at, and can ensure we are investing the right effort in the right folks at the right time.

      But this is an incredibly simple example of a very small and agile thought-leadership practice. As things scale up, things get much more complex. Multinational corporations live on the other side of this spectrum, and need to embrace a broader mix of systems in order to coordinate efforts on a global scale. These may include systems for performance reviews and compliance, inductions and on-boarding, communications, professional development, succession, distribution, legal considerations and disputes, and so on.

      And these systems work too – 80 per cent of the time. Until the world changes and they become irrelevant.8 In these cases, fortune favours those who are able to adapt to new systems. But this only happens if we have viable alternative options beyond the default.

      Hey, here's another element of default thinking – and something found within many systems – templates.9

      TEMPLATES

      ‘I'm glad you love Jason's doodle'. This statement came from a virtual assistant I once employed, in response to a senior HR director's email.

      The response created a mighty awkward situation, but let me explain the details.

      The HR director had just written to express their gratitude for a closing keynote I had recently delivered at their annual conference. In this keynote, I shared some of my visual notes from the event – ‘doodles', one might call them. The plural is important.

      Around the same time, I had developed some systems to guide my virtual assistant through the complexity of my business. Virtual assistants were all the rage back then, and my business hadn't matured to the wonderful point it is at now where I have a closer and more experienced local team (in real life, not just virtually).

      But yes, I'd read Tim Ferriss's fabulous book – The 4-Hour Work Week – and I was set to live the dream. I thought that, once I had a virtual assistant, everything would get easier. It didn't. It required me to establish some really good systems, and unpack my default thinking into a whole heap of default templates to live within these systems. These templates included simple things like email responses – including what to do if someone important emailed while I was out of the office or overseas:

      Acknowledge their email [as in, say something nice about something they've mentioned] and then explain that I'm out of the office until [specify day and date]. Offer to be of assistance if there is anything they need urgently.

      And so back to my doodles. After my presentation, the client mentioned via email something to the effect of, ‘the audience loved Jason's doodles'. But alas! My template did not capture the nuances of such things as the distinction between one's doodle and the doodles one sends through after graphically recording an event.10

      Anyhoo, I thought this was a good template for a fairly repeatable task. Templates are the physical bits that make up a system and, when they work, they save us a heap of time by minimising any unnecessary duplication of effort.

      For example, beyond some basic html, I don't know how to code. I wish I did, but I don't just yet. But, thankfully, website templates exist – which means I don't need to bear the cognitive burden of learning to code. I can use a template and save a heap of time and mental angst.

      In an organisational context, performance reviews are a fairly common phenomena. The common intent behind performance reviews is to periodically assess an individual's productivity and efficacy in relation to a set of pre-established criteria and organisational objectives (defaults). Additionally, the process may be an opportunity to review the employee's aspirations, goals, strengths, weaknesses, learning opportunities and behaviours.

      But what tends to happen is that everyone is busy, and these performance reviews become simple box-ticking activities that do little to improve things. Whole industries are designed to provide box-ticking solutions for performance reviews. In these industries, instead of having meaningful conversations, managers can simply generate a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goal, and employees can then proceed to show incremental progress towards that goal. Again, this is fine for formulaic work with predictable outcomes – but it's horrendously limiting for any organisation or leader looking to do

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Or, at least, they attempt to – but entropy relates to increasing disorder (the higher the entropy, the greater the disorder) and disorder will always win, in the end.

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Or, in some cases, organisations and their leaders grip onto systems that no longer serve the business model – which is akin to gripping the railings of a sinking ship.

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Let's just pause and reflect on how bad that segue was.

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I'm sure I could add some pun using the word ‘graphic', but I'll resist.