No matter who you talk to, change is difficult. We’re just 30 days into the new year and already people are failing at the commitments they made to themselves on January 1. These were important enough to get their attention and hold it long enough to decide to do something different. No one got up on New Year’s Day and said, “Let’s make a list of things I’m never going to get to this year.” They spoke with hope, with determination, with a new leaf.
People woke with strong voices: “This is the year I’m going to -----.” “In 2025, I want to ------.” These were bold statements, as well. Call them stretch goals. Stated publicly, you may not see it that way, but New Year’s resolutions are always difficult. Pressing. And because they are difficult, we wait until the beginning of the year – our every-365-day-new-beginning – to push ourselves to do them.
Where is there change in your business? What’s affecting your team the most? What’s becoming the biggest challenge for you this year? This is the thing that you should have on your resolutions plate for your business.
Many teams collaborate to build these goals together. Using a system like Petra Coach, EOS, or Scaling Up, they identify the things that are holding them back and they push on those as goals for the next year. This is meant to plug the gaps – the weaknesses – in the business to make it stronger from the inside. Sometimes, however, these changes are pushed by someone outside your organization.
What happens when your customers ask for something different? This could be that your current customers ask you to do something unusual. (“Because you did that so well, do you think you could do this, too?”) Maybe you find new customers that need new things. Shifting markets are often the start of work challenges for the teams we work with.
When you ask your team to do something new, there’s a training curve there. That training is both to learn the new task and, somewhat, to forget the old one. If your team deals with a lot of variability in the work they do, this becomes increasingly difficult.
It might seem that paper is the way to go here. Give the team a printout of what you need them to do and mark it up. This couldn’t be farther from the truth if you expect that change to continue in the future. One time, just one time, giving them a redlined sheet might capture their attention. The second and third time? Maybe less so.
Paper gives you no way to track the work reliably. Even if it keeps up with your team during production, it is difficult to keep and reuse. Those are expensive lessons – the ones you learn again and again (and resolve to fix once-and-for-all every 365 days).
The more change you have – people, materials, work, jobs, quantities, customers – the more likely it is that you need a system to help you get through it all. You need a system to manage the daily (hourly) changes that are occurring that you can’t possibly keep up with. This is especially true if a goal of yours for this year might be to move ahead of demand a bit with a more made-to-stock system so you can meet customer demands quicker.
We’ll finish this series by talking through volume changes. Like changes in work, volume is a real issue.