Good Observation Skills: the Basics of Military Strategies and Improvements in a Small Business I Part 5
Most of small businesses are chaotic, highly disorganised environment where business owners and employees are surrounded at 360 degrees by a million problems, activities, responsibilities.
Given this complicated, moving and ever changing REALITY, how do you start making improvements towards a more stable and predictable business when you don’t know where to start?
I mention in the previous parts of the article (1, 2, 3, 4) that the 1st step is to start OBSERVING individual activities, facts, information even if they don’t seem RELEVANT and they don’t produce immediate solutions or results. In time these RANDOM observations will get connected in a pattern which will produce the solution as already shown in the previous part of the article.
This is part of the “from specific to general” approach that the military strategist Boyd uncovered and used as a tool for dealing with uncertain and highly risky, dangerous environments.
In addition, this is OBSERVATION process is also part of our natural ability to BUILD order, learn and find solutions since we were children as discussed in part 3.
Let’s see how the observation process unfolded in reality for me.
The process of observation and the observer’s profile
When I started working, I was taking notes on random observations clients’ requests, my interaction with them and from my daily activity.
So, at this point I was split in 2 directions:
1 my rational mind that was recording the data about our customers: random observations, requests and discussions from my interaction with clients. These were facts I was completely aware of.
2 the stress I was feeling from my day to day job, but I was not very aware of because I couldn’t explain specifically why. I could just say: we have a lot of stuff to do, it is busy, chaotic and overwhelming.
The interesting part is that my mind DIDNT make any difference between the two DURING the time I was recalling the day to day activity. Although, consciously I was recording facts and observation about customers behaviour, I was also recalling the images and movie from the WHOLE business: food production, random discussions with the business owners, clients and colleagues, cleaning dishes, lighting some essential oil, the books we had on shelves, running on stairs to bring the food for delivery and putting on shelves, sometimes the food was ready in time for delivery, sometimes there were delays and clients were calling to complain about it etc.
In the beginning the recalling of these aspects seemed to be random, isolated and fuzzy with no specific order or connection among them.
My mind added up more details day after day to the randomness and fuzziness of the activity until eventually it detected a pattern.
Because of the speed that the mind operates with, it will eventually match what they seem to be RANDOM and UNRELATED facts, problems, conflicts in the business. This is because it can jump from what happened today to what happened 1 week before and then back to yesterday and eventually also to the future. This is how you actually get a dream, a big idea, vision and direction for your business. As discussed in the previous post, a vision and idea is just a pattern or a result of an analogy.
In addition, you will also improve your memory and hence, the clarity and sense of control in your business. Uncovering your direction, you will link the facts from your business to it. As a result, you will detach from concepts and use only what is relevant for you not do because of concepts, generally accepted rules.
Because you perceive your activity as chaotic, it is impossible to do this, to connect the dots in your business WHILE WORKING. This is because PHYSICALLY you are in ONE place with the few problems from there and hence, your mind is also ONLY there. As a result, you keep improvising and find yourself jumping from problem to another and eventually feel overwhelmed.
So, stress can be a good symptom because you can use it to direct the focus of your mind to recall you business activity that produces stress.
It was just that consciously I was PICKING up and writing down what I considered to be relevant or that one day will become relevant because they will connect in a pattern and I will have a better understanding of a situation that at that moment was unknown.
This kind of goes with that saying: “there is a reason for everything” or the other one: “there are no coincidences”.
To put it in other words: I was grabbing myself on everything I was getting in touch with during the day.
Many observations seemed random, fuzzy, happening in the same time and coming from everywhere. Others made more sense.
The observer profile
• The observer can be outside the action while the action is happening: this is when you (the observer) is watching something or somebody else working or some business activity is taking place or you can observe customers buying behaviour: it depends how much you are aware of the facts taking place. In the restaurant case, I was observing the customers, the business owners and the restaurant as a whole. As a commercial worker I had the necessary detachment to observe the restaurant activities that I was not involved in.
• The observer can observe herself after the action has happened and retraces her steps: after work I was taking some time to review the restaurant activity and my own too. This means that when you are involved in your own activity, the observation process takes place AFTER the work was performed.
It is about taking the time every day to recall, review the day just like a movie: that is all. This brings you clarity about the overwhelming activity and builds your accuracy about it. It is not about having good memory, but about recalling events, happenings and the activity itself while it is fresh in the mind.
Since the 2nd option is the case for a small business owner, let’s see why you need...
Physical detachment from your work in order to OBSERVE better and get unstuck from running in all directions
While in the action, the most you can do is to acknowledge INDIVIDUAL observations, happenings at the moment you get in contact with them. This is how most people do it. As a result, they see a FACT, an element which they consider an ANOMALY. So, they come up with a brainstormed, improvised solution on the spot (the typical 2 elements pattern: ONE cause – ONE result type of solution).
But if you want MAXIMUM impact, you need to integrate ALL the individual and relevant FACTS you see at a given moment in time. Some facts can happen today at 9:00, next one at 10:00, the next 10 facts between 2-6 pm in your business activity, some facts happened already one week ago and some are permanently there in front of your own eyes.
This is because it is PHYSICALLY impossible to be in the ACTION at 10:00, doing and solving urgent and multitasking problems RIGHT NOW AND at the same time to also OBSERVE, find solutions to urgent problems that happened yesterday at 6 pm and that will happen in an hour and those from 2-6 pm.
However, as a DETACHED OBSERVER (by taking the time 1h/day to watch the movie in your business) it is ABSOLUTELY possible to see ALL these facts as once. Why? Because a picture is worth 1000 words, because your mind can skip in a fraction of a second from one activity to another in your business, from cooking in the kitchen to a random discussion with a client, from what happened at 10:00 am to what happened at 5 pm. But physically this is impossible. You cannot skip from Tuesday to Sunday in a fraction of second. Your mind is more powerful than you can be.
In the restaurant case, I could connect in a fraction of second the crowded days from lunch during the week with the availability from Sunday. While we were running in all directions to serve clients in crowded days, the last thing that we would think of is that Sunday could be an asset to improve the flow of service during the week. It sounds already like a paradox.
The interesting part, you already know all these FACTS. Nobody knows your business better than you. The problem is that because you are constantly in the doing mode and solving urgent problems on the spot that are happening right now, your mind processes them as DISCONNECTED, separated from each other because you see them just while in the action and because each of them happen at different points in time and space. But they are CONNECTED as already proven with the Relativity Theory in this article. That is why knowing is not the same as OBSERVING.
When you feel overwhelmed and run in all directions, your business is just a multitude of 2 elements patterns, cause-effect solutions that are disconnected among each other and you feel disoriented in your own business because you don’t see them. With time, you get caught up and are missing the big picture of your business and hence, the direction.
You can start OBSERVING from any of the following:
1 identify patterns (big or small, good or bad): this means repetitive activities, behaviours, processes that happen on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
2 contradictory, conflicting situations, facts: “need a new employee, but I cannot afford it because sales are too low”. There is information that you dont see yet around this type of conflicting situations.
3 improvise, but KNOW that improvised solutions are temporarily because you don’t know yet what works, what doesn’t and why. That is why, you have to keep recalling your activity on a daily basis to OBSERVE and keep your eyes on the dynamics on your business. Every small decision will cause multiple changes in other elements of the business. What it seems to be strategic today, tomorrow it will become obsolete and irrelevant.
4 write down random observations, facts that you think that might be useful some day. You don’t need to write down everything or every day. It is enough to recall and review the day and watch it just like a movie. Your mind will do the rest by itself.
Bottom line
When you have a chaotic activity, don’t dismiss what they seem random and irrelevant facts and get detached from business standards, rules, concepts, practices because you are still in the process of sorting things out and you don’t know yet what business concept and standard applies to you.
The Relativity Theory proves that sooner or later, some of these facts will get connected in a meaningful pattern and give birth to solutions.
Mihaela Dragan