What’s breaking?

As an ops guy, one tool I’ve developed to help me maintain good process is to regularly ask, “What’s breaking”?

Looking over a given process, I scan through each potential pain point one by one, and I assign each a color: green (ok!), yellow (getting close to breaking), or red (broken). Then I step back and look at all of the colors in the dashboard I just created.

A surprisingly practical place to try this out is while running. Running is one of those wonderfully uncomfortable activities in which your intellectual brain has to overcome a lot of “please stop!” requests from your emotional brain.

When I’m running, as soon as I hear the first “please stop!” I do this:

• Lungs/heart: Green
• Quads: Green
• Knees: Yellow
• Calves: Yellow
• Ankles: Green
• Feet: Green

Sometimes, when you have lots of yellows blinking at you, it can feel like things have gone red. But by isolating each potential area of pain, you can get a clean read on your actual status. You can keep on pushing through the yellows and feel good about your greens.

Sometimes things actually turn red. If you find a red — something is broken—then you should stop and fix it. There’s no shame in stopping for a red.

This is a useful approach for other things in life as well. Feeling depressed? Go though things that make you get un-depressed: Sunlight, exercise, sleep, social contact, human touch. Any reds? Drop everything, go fix it.

This framework is most useful for things where the pain points are obvious. I was the GM at Twice. One of our major KPIs was warehouse throughput — how many units we could list on the site each day. Units = min(stations, trained people to work those stations) x station output/hour x shift hours. (I’m oversimplifying a lot, but suffice it to say, we knew the equation). At a given time, a big part of my job was seeing what was green / yellow / red, fixing reds and trying to get ahead of yellows.

This is obviously not a novel framework and probably goes by a bunch of other names (you might even just call it “triage”). But the simplicity of the question — “What’s breaking?”—and the colorful visuals have helped me quickly navigate many broken processes (and many runs).