Trust The Process Or Blow It Up: How To Know It’s Time
Photo by TJ Dragotta on Unsplash.
For four years the Philadelphia 76ers were the National Basketball Association’s worst team – and it wasn’t even close.
From 2013 through 2017 the Sixers won 75 games and lost 253, for a combined winning percentage of 22.9 percent.
That’s bad – not Cleveland Browns bad, but terrible by almost every other measure.
There was an upside to all those losses: The Sixers got high draft picks – lots of them. After those four abysmal seasons the Sixers picked third, third, first, and first in the NBA draft, which netted them highly talented players like Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons.
That outcome – winning by losing – was one of the end results Sixers General Manager Sam Hinkie was looking for as he encouraged patience along the way.
“Trust the process,” he’d say after another 45-point blowout. “Trust the process.”
And the process seemed to be working. Last year Philly won 52 games, lost 30, and made the NBA playoffs. The Process – now a title-cased part of the lexicon – seemed to be unfolding just as expected.
That is, it was unfolding as expected until two weeks ago, when Philadelphia traded to Minnesota two key pieces of The Process, forwards Dario Saric and Robert Covington, for 29-year-old, perennially disgruntled All-Star Jimmy Butler.
“Philadelphia blows up The Process,” the headlines bellered, ignoring the fact that trading two up-and-coming players obtained by being bad for an established All-Star could just as easily be part of The Process, once the team was on the cusp of greatness.
We’ll see how this right turn on Process Boulevard plays out, but as we watch here’s a question: How far do you go with The Process in your organization before deciding to blow it up?
Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash.
We all have capital-P Processes in our organizations, and many of us are deep in trust with those Processes. However, just as every coach is hired to be fired and every product has a defined lifecycle, every process has an end date.
There are no hard-and-fast rules that will tell you when it’s time to abandon your Process; so much depends on your industry, organization, culture, key metrics, and the processes themselves.
Also, no one’s saying that your Process has to involve winning by losing. That’s best left to the general managers.
However, here are some general thoughts on when to dump your Process, and when to hang on tight.
When to dump The Process
When it’s a canned solution
We all work with outside vendors. And they all claim they’ve helped businesses just like yours scale Kilimanjaro blindfolded, and they’ll do the same for you.
Well, maybe. An outside vendor is going to propose a process that first and foremost makes sense for their business model and secondarily makes sense for you. If you have a beer pocketbook, forget about tasting the champagne. It ain’t gonna happen.
Sometimes a cheap canned solution is all you need. However, when it’s not, when it feels like your canned solution is too canned and your CSR only calls at renewal time, bringing things in-house might be better.
It’s not easy. Some institutional processes, like a customer-relationship-management platform, can get baked into your business, and even though they’re a poor fit they can be very hard to dislodge. And without better options ready to go, organizations may not want to go through the trauma and expense of transition.
In the end, most organizations will favor the expediency of staying the course over your pain and suffering. The burden of proof is on you to convince them otherwise; better start pulling together evidence now.
When it’s a short-term response to an old issue
Too many times I’ve seen a process that was put in place to address a crisis stay in place once the crisis passes, with no adjustments to account for the changed environment.
A perfect example is a restrictive social-media policy imposed after an inappropriate message was published. Listen: If the crisis has passed and everyone’s learned their lesson, the bonds need to be loosened. You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to accomplish simple tasks when the reasons for those hoops vanished years ago.
Look at what you’re doing and why, especially when it comes to corporate and companywide communications, and see if there aren’t better ways. I’ll bet there are.
When measurements tell you to
Because you’re a good marketing team, you measure everything within range. You know what’s working and what’s not. And when you have a benchmarked record of a process not delivering the goods, you bring out the dynamite.
One caution: Make sure your findings are corroborated by several different measurements taken from different perspectives. A single metric isn’t enough.
When you have legitimately better options
Processes, like products, have lifecycles. And technology, bless its pointed little head, keeps coming up with better ways of doing things. When there’s an obviously better solution out there, don’t give in to corporate inertia. Show how the new process is better and go full Alec Guinness on the old process. It’s time.
When it’s holding you back
The Sixers made a move because the we’ll-win-tomorrow approach was taking too long, players weren’t developing as expected (especially 2017 first-rounder Markelle Fultz, he of the ugly free throw), and there was an immediate opportunity to win by going off-Process.
That’ll happen. A slow-but-steady product-development process, like you often see in insurance, can run afoul of technological changes or space disruption.
Taking the opportunity doesn’t mean you don’t trust the process; the process got you to this point. And tomorrow may bring a new process to trust.
When corporate goals change
If an organization makes a high-level decision to exit a space or pivot towards a new opportunity, there’s not much you can do to save a process that was geared toward the old ways.
Document what you did, learn your lessons, and have a heck of a wake: That’s about it sometimes.
Photo by DiAnte Squire on Unsplash.
When to keep The Process
When it hasn’t been in place long enough
It’s strange: Organizations run on inertia, yet when they try something new, the second it doesn’t perform exactly as expected they want to ditch it and try something else.
If you’ve just made a round of process-related changes, or if you haven’t yet implemented the full program, that’s no time to turn turtle.
Here’s a hint: when you’re debating whether to change direction early in the process, review the documentation that convinced you to go this way to start with. What’s changed? What hasn’t?
The last thing you want is to come off like a graduate of the George Santayana School of Marketing and repeat the same scenario that played out three years ago just because you forgot why you did what you did.
When measurements say to keep it
Again, you’re a good marketing team; you measure everything. You’ll know when it’s time to abandon ship. One month does not make a trend; sometimes not even a year makes a trend.
If you’re not seeing strong, sustained, multichannel evidence to the contrary, stay the course. When that evidence appears, you’ll know.
When the problems it’s trying to solve haven’t gone away
If you document a problem and implement a process to solve the problem, the only reasons to ditch the existing process are if you came up with a better process, or if the problem went away.
Can you tweak a process as a problem evolves? Absolutely. But there’s a big difference between tweaking and ditching, and a partially solved or evolved problem is no reason to ditch. If the problem’s still there, the process should be, too.
When there aren’t better alternatives
To return to the CRM example, if the best CRM option out of a bad lot is the one you have, sorry, but that’s the one you should stay with.
Saying, “This stinks; we’re getting rid of it,” without having a better option ready to go is the height of irresponsibility.
As long as there are organizations there are going to be big-P Processes. Your smart management will help create Processes everyone can trust.
And that’s how winners are built.