What If Growth Is Trying to Tell You Something?

Krys had expected the meeting to begin with questions.

Instead, their organisation was already on the screen.

That was the first surprise.

A week earlier the leadership team had been discussing the customer request that took three days to answer when, by almost everyone's later admission, it ought to have taken an hour.

Nobody had done anything particularly foolish.

That was what made the incident interesting.

The Growth Constraint Audit completed shortly before had suggested that some of the constraints on their growth might not be where they had been looking for them.

The customer incident seemed to be one of those symptoms made flesh.

They had followed it far enough themselves to discover something uncomfortable.

Four capable people, each behaving reasonably, had collectively produced an unreasonable result.

Then came the question that mattered.

Was this an isolated example, or one visible piece of something much larger?

They could have investigated it themselves. There was no reason they couldn't.

Krys had spent part of that afternoon imagining what it would involve.

Someone would need to decide what to examine, speak to the right people, map the important processes, reconcile conflicting accounts of how they worked, establish the economics, separate causes from symptoms and somehow turn the whole thing into decisions the Board could act upon.

They could learn how.

They could probably do it well.

The CEO had looked at the others.

“How long?”

Nobody knew.

Months, certainly.

Possibly a year or more if other priorities kept intervening.

The alternative was considerably simpler.

For a relatively modest investment, their Local Stewards could use the Regenesis Deep Dive Decision-Making Intervention to help them find out in days.

The CEO didn't take long.

“If we're going to look, let's look while everyone still cares about what we've just found.”

Nobody disagreed.

They chose the Deep Dive.

The preparation was less disruptive than Krys had expected.

The CEO spent time with the Steward. So did the Finance Director and the people who knew their identified core processes best.

Numbers were gathered.

Intentions were clarified.

What the organisation said it was trying to achieve was compared with what actually appeared to be happening.

Then came the Decision-Making Session.

Half a day had been reserved, with the rest of the day protected if they needed it.

The Top Team was there, together with several people whose knowledge of the work mattered more than their place on the organisation chart.

Krys had assumed they would spend the first hour explaining the business.

They didn't.

It was already there.

Mission.

Vision.

Values.

Vital Few.

Krys had seen most of the words before.

Seeing them together was different.

Seeing the organisation's actual work beneath them was different again.

Several people were already asking questions.

On the screen were the core processes carrying value through the organisation. The places where decisions were being made. Information moving. Work waiting. People compensating for things the formal organisation barely acknowledged.

The numbers were there too.

For a while nobody said very much.

Then Operations leaned forward.

“That isn't quite right.”

The Steward stopped.

“Show us.”

Operations did.

The picture changed on screen.

Finance challenged another assumption.

They followed the evidence and adjusted that too.

Someone responsible for a customer process said that one of the handovers hadn't existed for six months.

Another person laughed.

“It absolutely does.”

They followed it.

It did.

Just not in the way they thought.

And not officially.

That was when the meeting became interesting.

They were no longer being presented with an analysis to accept or reject.

They were building a more accurate picture together, testing what appeared on the screen against the people who lived inside it.

Nobody held the whole truth.

Finance knew things Operations didn't.

Operations knew things the CEO couldn't reasonably know.

A process owner understood why a peculiar workaround existed.

Someone much closer to the customer knew what happened when it failed.

Put together, they could see something none of them had been able to see separately.

Krys found that unsettling.

And exhilarating.

At one point the Steward turned to one of the process leads.

“How does what you do contribute to the wider goals of the organisation?”

The answer began confidently and then slowed.

“Well, obviously we…”

A pause.

“What do you mean by the wider goals?”

Nobody laughed.

The question went around the room.

Some answers were good.

Some were different.

A few revealed that people who worked together every day were carrying surprisingly different ideas of what the organisation was trying to accomplish.

The Steward asked another question.

“How does what you do fit alongside what other people are doing to create those outcomes?”

That was harder.

People knew their jobs.

They knew their targets.

They knew who sent things to them and, usually, where they sent them next.

Seeing how all those contributions combined to create the organisation's intended outcomes was another matter.

For most of them, even thinking about the organisation in that way was new.

Then a manager began explaining a long-standing approval.

The Steward listened.

“How does that help the people at the sharp end do their job better?”

The manager smiled.

“That sounds like a dangerous question.”

This time everybody laughed.

Then they looked at the approval.

Years earlier it had made sense.

Circumstances had changed.

The approval had remained.

Nobody had chosen to make the process slower.

They had simply stopped choosing whether it still needed to be that way.

As the day went on, small things began joining together.

Ten minutes here.

An approval there.

Information entered twice.

A manager interrupted because somebody else lacked authority.

A customer waiting while work travelled between people who each possessed only part of what was needed.

A report still produced because nobody could remember deciding to stop it.

None looked important enough to trouble a Board.

Taken together, they did.

For years the organisation had been paying for its invisibility in small instalments.

No single payment looked large enough to matter.

Finance began adding them.

Carefully.

Where the evidence supported a number, they used it.

Where it supported only a range, they used a range.

Where they didn't know, they didn't pretend.

The total was still much larger than anyone expected.

Then the CEO asked the obvious question.

“What happens if we fix it?”

That changed the conversation again.

An hour removed from unnecessary work wasn't merely a cost saved.

It could become an hour spent with a customer.

Solving a problem.

Developing somebody.

Making a better decision.

Or creating something that could earn revenue.

And not everything they found was wrong.

One team was doing something remarkably well.

Its people had quietly developed a better way of sharing information and making decisions.

Customer responses were faster.

The work moved with less effort.

Nobody had spread it.

Most of the organisation didn't know it existed.

Krys stared at the screen.

Some of their constraints had been invisible because everybody had become accustomed to them.

Some of their strengths were invisible because hardly anybody knew about them.

The future they wanted contained both.

Things to remove.

And things already present that deserved to travel.

By mid-afternoon the Finance Director, a clever and technically minded person, had accumulated enough measures to fill another dashboard he'd mocked up on his laptop.

The CEO looked at it.

“Do we really need twenty more KPIs to tell us whether we're getting better?”

Finance shook his head.

“We need some of them to understand what's happening.”

He looked back at the figures.

“But ultimately, if we're becoming more effective, we should create more value from the capability we're paying for.”

Krys knew what he meant.

Revenue per Employee.

It was there on the screen.

Not another target to chase blindly.

A vital sign.

If the organisation became better at converting all the capability it employed — human and, increasingly, artificial — into value, RPE would eventually tell the larger tale.

Were they really becoming more effective and growing healthier?

Up was up.

Down was down.

The measures underneath could help them understand what was causing it.

For the first time that day Krys saw the organisation differently.

Not as departments.

Not even as processes.

As thousands upon thousands of interactions through which everything the organisation possessed either became value or didn't.

Growth hadn't been refusing to cooperate.

It had been telling them something.

They hadn't been able to hear it clearly enough.

Late in the afternoon the screen changed for the last time.

The long list had become short.

There were many things they could improve.

But three areas offered a combination that was difficult to ignore: substantial potential gain, action they could begin quickly, and enough evidence to know what they would actually be trying to change.

Each had a recommended element of the Regenesis operational upgrade architecture — a SupraMap — through which the work could be made much more effective.

Nobody suggested fixing the whole organisation.

They didn't need to.

They could begin where reality suggested the greatest worthwhile gains were available.

And find out what happened.

The CEO sat back.

“So what happens now?”

The Steward answered simply.

“That belongs to you.”

They could stop.

They had the findings.

They could simply choose not to act upon them.

They could also take the work forward themselves.

The Finance Director liked that possibility.

“We've got good people. We know what needs attention now. Why wouldn't we just do it?”

It was a fair question.

For several minutes they explored it.

They already possessed the knowledge.

Their people would have to be involved whichever route they chose.

Doing it themselves would avoid further external investment.

Operations raised the first difficulty.

“Who runs it?”

There was a silence familiar to anyone who had watched a promising internal initiative meet an already full working week.

And the ever-present pressure to reduce costs rather than add another activity.

They could solve that.

Then somebody asked how long it would take them to develop the approach.

They could solve that too.

The CEO looked towards Finance.

“What does waiting cost us?”

Finance glanced at the numbers they had spent the afternoon validating.

That question was less comfortable.

Doing it themselves wasn't free after all.

Neither was doing nothing.

The value they themselves had made visible would continue to disappear while they decided what to do about it.

There was one remaining choice.

Ninety days of supported action.

Not a transformation programme.

Not the whole organisation turned upside down.

They would work on the three opportunities the evidence suggested could produce the most valuable early results, using the three recommended SupraMaps and working alongside the Local Steward they already knew.

Krys had one concern left.

“What happens if we're wrong?”

The Steward looked towards Finance.

“Then don't invest.”

Krys wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.

“Sorry?”

“If there's no gain, there's no investment.”

The Steward paused.

“But we don't have to guess. You've spent today establishing what you think the gains are. Let's use those. You decide what you think is genuinely achievable, how confident you are, and then we'll see whether the economics still make sense before you decide.”

Finance was already back in the numbers.

They went through the day's outputs.

Not the theoretical maximums.

The gains they believed were realistically available.

Then they reduced those gains by their own confidence in achieving them.

No heroic assumptions.

No best case.

Then they put the proposed investment alongside them.

Ten to one.

In another area, considerably more.

The larger opportunities still showed gearing of fifty to one.

In one case, approaching a hundred to one.

Finance checked them again.

Then he smiled.

“I think we're discussing the wrong risk.”

The CEO looked across.

“The investment isn't the big number.”

He pointed to what they were already losing.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

They could still choose to do nothing.

They could take everything they had learned and do it themselves.

Or they could spend the next ninety days, with support already available locally, going after the three most accessible high-value gains they had just spent the day validating for themselves.

With the economics positively geared.

And protected.

Nobody from Regenesis told them what to choose.

They didn't need to.

The CEO looked around the table.

Krys realised that the conversation had changed completely since morning.

They had begun the day wondering whether the analysis would tell them anything they didn't already know.

They were ending it deciding what to do about things they could no longer pretend they didn't know.

“When can we start?”

The Steward smiled.

“Would now be soon enough?”

There was a laugh.

“It is one of the advantages of being local.”

Krys looked once more at the screen.

Only a short time earlier they had invested a little to see.

Now they were choosing to act because they could see.

That was a different decision.

And, given what had become visible, it really did feel like their best available Next Rational Choice.

They chose the ninety days.

Next week, the work would begin.

And this time the question would not be what else they could discover.

It would be what happened when they deliberately changed the things that mattered most.