Business owners have (at least) two conflicting mandates: run your business as efficiently as possible, and constantly adapt your business to keep up with (or anticipate) changing conditions. Efficiency is generally perceived to mean consistent, repeatable processes and high profit margins; picture Henry Ford and his assembly line, churning out cars at the rate of 1,000 per day in 1918, at a low production cost. It can also translate to boring work for that assembly-line worker doing the same thing all day, every day. Conversely, adapting and innovating are seen as creative, fun endeavors that help businesses thrive in rapidly changing environments. They’re also seen as disruptive, time-consuming, risky, impractical, and not necessarily profitable. So what is a business owner to do? All of this is true – prescriptive, repetitive work is highly efficient and generates profit, and can also be boring. Constantly introducing new ideas and ways of doing things is an important part of business resiliency, yet change does use up a lot of time, energy, and resources, which increases risk and may cut into profit margins.
Finding balance
I believe that finding a good balance between these competing priorities is the key to a successful business. My philosophical approach to this problem comes from my background in biology. Natural systems tend to have frameworks that are pretty consistent, with variability within the framework that constantly generates and tests new models. For example, let’s look at robins. Most robins pretty much look alike at a glance – they have two eyes, a beak, two wings, two legs, similar coloring… But if you look closely at any two robins, you’ll notice subtle differences in size and coloration. Within the general framework of what a robin is, there is actually a lot of variation. That variation, in evolutionary theory, is what gives the robin species its resilience. If the weather patterns change, or food is scarce, some of those robins will do better than others, because they have better body insulation, or can survive on less food, or whatever the environmental challenge calls for. The whole robin species will survive the challenge because it has enough variation within the species to adapt successfully.
What do robins have to do with your company, you may ask? Well, when you put processes in place, you create a framework, but also leave a little room for creativity within it. The process can be made consistent by creating guidelines for your staff to follow; the guidelines define an outer limit for experimentation. Within the guidelines, give your staff leeway to try out new things, as they’re faced with new situations or challenges. And create a regular evaluation process for ideas that fall outside the guidelines. You may not be comfortable having staff experiment on their own outside the guidelines, but you can work with them to assess their ideas and design a way to test them out without undue risk to the company. Some percent of those ideas will pay off big in terms of company adaptability, or more profitable or efficient ways of doing things.
Role of automation
Another way to approach the balance of stability and change is to automate the consistent, standard parts of the process as much as possible, and invest your staff time in the creative parts, the parts of the process that need to be adapted constantly. A common example is developing FAQs and chatbots for commonly asked customer questions, so that your customer service people can focus on the most challenging, most interesting customer problems that require creative thinking. The same principle applies in any business process; parts of a process are typically rote, and parts require ingenuity. Rather than trying to standardize every part of every process, recognize the parts where creativity adds value to your company, and encourage your staff (maybe within those guidelines or limits) to come up with innovative solutions that help your company adapt to the challenges of a changing and unpredictable environment.
If you’re struggling to find the right balance between the creative, visionary side of your business and the practical, day-to-day operations, schedule a free consultation with Dunathan Consulting to find out how we can help your business thrive.
