This is Part 2 of the 3-part series about breaking down what you do into procedures and then improving on those over time.
Part 1 of the series talks about the intrinsic value of procedures and how to create them easily - if you’ve not read it, click the link and read it. Also, if you can click the “heart” button to like it, that would be awesome.
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I don’t care what aspect of life we’re talking about: personal, professional or business, having procedures can help improve the overall outcomes you get.
Sometimes those procedures are loose, like the procedure or routine that you follow when getting out of bed in the morning and having a shower.
Other times, those procedures might be more formal, such as how you publish and promote a piece of content on your website.
But for the vast majority of things you do, having a procedure is going to make the outcomes more predictable, easier to achieve and over time, improve the quality of the result.
For some people, this just comes naturally - those of us who are more logical driven tend to “get” the idea of processes, but for the people among us that are more artistic in nature, procedures can feel restrictive.
The reality is, processes can help everyone and it just takes a mindset shift to take advantage.
Thinking Procedurally
In the first part of this series, I gave you a simple way of creating procedures for just about anything in your life - as you’re doing something, just write down the steps that you follow from start to finish.
That little exercise triggers a part of your brain that starts looking for patterns.
Let me go off a slight tangent here because this will help you as we delve deeper.
The human brain is designed to recognize patterns and then cheat to save energy when it identifies them.
You might not know this, but our big human brains are massive consumers of energy because cognition is extremely complex.
To reduce the amount of energy required, our brains look for patterns and then fill in the blanks, tahts wyh I can tyep this sentecne lke this adn yu can undersatnd it.
Our brains are wired to gloss over inconsequential things and jump to the end.
Having strong procedures plays into this.
Let me use my shower example again - if you’re like most people, you have a shower ritual that you go through.
You can be thinking about other things while standing under the water and your brain will just go through the same steps to clean yourself that you probably do every day.
Then before you know it, you’re ready to hop out.
Your brain knows the process so well that it doesn’t have to even think about it, your mind and body are just working on autopilot.
It’s super efficient… That’s the value of procedures…
Sometimes…
Complicated and Unwieldily Procedures
I’m a big hockey fanatic - I’m a long suffering Toronto Maple Leafs fan for those of you who don’t know.
Sometimes when I’m watching the Leafs, the cameras will show them coming out of their dressing room and the players always seem to follow the same extremely complex routine of handshakes and gestures.
We’re talking about 20 guys all tapping each other, high fiving, and this convoluted ritual that’s part superstition and part voodoo.
On the surface, that’s the Leafs pregame ritual before stepping onto the ice.
As a casual observer, it would appear to be almost random and somewhat ridiculous, and to a more committed fan like myself, I can see some of the patterns, but trying to keep up with it is still overwhelming.
Or how about going to a restaurant and ordering dinner?
You turn up, someone greets you, they find you a table, another person comes to bring you a menu, they return some time later to take your order, that gets sent to the back where your food is prepared in stages, individual courses are brought our separately (drinks come from a different area), they take away completed course, bring new ones and finally they present you with your bill which you pay and they leave you some mints.
That’s the process for eating a restaurant.
But we inherently know that it really isn’t.
The overall procedure is broken down into smaller sub-processes that when brought together make up the entire procedure.
Chunking Procedures Down
When you take a bigger procedure and you break it down into sub-sections that can be turned into constituent processes, that’s called “chunking”.
Chunking allows you to create more manageable processes that can be integrated into a larger procedure.
The idea is to find some part of your procedure that’s largely self-contained and then treat it like a separate entity.
Going back to our restaurant example - when the order is passed back to the kitchen, the person working tickets “chunks” the order into starters, mains and desserts.
This makes it easier to time your service, but it also ensures that each individual course can be handled individually and given the appropriate level of attention.
In this example, the entire procedure can be handled by individual specialists - the maitre d’ can welcome you and show you to your table, your waiter can take your order, the head chef can manage multiple concurrent tickets while running the pass and the kitchen brigade can be broken down into specialist categories of chefs to focus on the individual courses.
Chunking makes big procedures easier to manage and execute on without overwhelming the people participating.
The Leafs don’t have a single big pregame ritual, each player probably has four or five of their own with different guys on the team - so the whole think is chunked down.
Knowing Where and When to Chunk
Chunking procedures down is a fundamental part of process improvement - the tricky bit is getting the balance right.
I like to look at a procedure and isolate steps or activities that focus on a specific task that is reasonably self-contained.
Effectively, I’m breaking up a big long procedure into a bunch of smaller group sub-tasks that can be run independently.
For example, if you have a procedure for creating and publishing a blog post - you would be able to break up the keyword research from the writing. Those are distinct sub-tasks in the entire process, but they can be done independently of one another.
To further the example, let’s say you have someone who edits your articles and creates the meta-description for them. You could chunk out the step of adding a “feature image” to the post before publishing, but the reality is, that’s probably taking it too far and chunking down to that level adds and element of extra work to the process that ends up increasing the likelihood of things taking longer or an error being introduced.
That’s the key take away here - you want to break your procedure down into smaller, bite sized pieces without entirely disassembling them into a disparate bunch of loosely connected tasks.
That’s both inefficient execute and not conducive to gaining the benefits of focused process improvement.
Improving Your Processes… Marginally
And this leads us into the third post in this series…
When you establish your procedures and then chunk them down into smaller parts, you will be able to gain a bunch of overall efficiencies as I’ve discussed.
To summarize, you’ll get the benefits of:
Shorter, more succinct chunked processes are less error prone
You can more easily scale your process out by having more people execute the chunks independently
You can introduce specialists to do certain chunks of the procedure to increase the quality and overall effectiveness of the entire process
But there’s one big benefit that we’ll talk about next time... By chunking down your procedure into smaller pieces, you can get the ability to leverage marginal gains.
We’ll go into that in more depth in the third part of this series in a couple days time.
Remember, if you haven’t read the first post in this series, click here to read it now and if you liked this post, share it or click the “heart” icon to let me know.
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