Design for Scale
How organisations can design better ways to work, and mitigate problems associated with scale.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
You have an idea, find an international business model or spin something out of an existing business. You work really hard, probably with three to four people who are equally invested in the success of this venture (probably your siblings or best friends). You start making money. Investors start seeing the potential and suddenly you find yourself leading a business that has 30 to 150 employees, in multiple locations and you’re lying awake at 4AM worrying about HR policies, client complaints and whether or not everyone needs to have the ergonomic desk chair.
The business that once felt so familiar and intuitive is barely recognisable and no one is doing what you want them to be doing. If parts of this feels like something you have or are currently experiencing, you are not alone.
In our work, over the years, we have bumped into the effects of these challenges and have been solving them in isolation of one another, until we came across a study done by MIT Sloan School of Management which showed that all these were typical problems that arose as a result of growth. These common (or logical problems) were consistent across all scaling businesses, irrespective of sector or location.
In our work we have discovered that many perceived challenges can be solved, addressed or proactively blocked with intentional design. This is especially true, in our experience, in rapidly scaling organisations, particularly when led by entrepreneurial leaders.
We realised that if these leadership teams had access to the tools necessary to design solutions to these challenges we would save them the 4AM stress sessions and allow them the time to focus on pursuing the things that drives business growth. We started to aggregate all of our solutions, that we had built, designed, developed and coached for our clients. These had been done in isolation and we wanted to see, if we grouped them together, how we might design a holistic solution for scaling businesses.
The below are some of the work and thinking we have done to help organisations design for growth and the ways we’re mitigating some of these logical problems. These are loosely grouped into buckets relating to process and people, customers and communication.
PEOPLE AND PROCESS
Problems with prioritisation:
We realised that the ability to prioritise appropriately is critical for business owners and leaders of complex teams to ensure they use their time and energy on the most important decisions for their business. One of the ways to address this is to design a system for prioritisation.
Using the KANO model, a Japanese technique for prioritisation, as a framework we helped a team we work with to identify a method for quantitatively assessing their to-do lists (or backlog of to-do’s) and create a system for prioritisation, (and delegation) based on quantitative metrics (urgency = 3, growth = 4, admin = 1 etc.) and not the order they were added to the list, that everyone agreed on. This resulted in them applying their energy and minds to the most important decisions and work first and leaving the less significant for later.
Problems with hiring:
As businesses grow, and the need for additional humans to do the work sold increases, hiring practices often boil down to, “can this person do this specific job today” as the maximum criteria for offering someone a position, instead of looking at “what characteristics do we want in our employees and can this person do the job we need to be doing in 6 months or 3 years time”. Where once, the CEO was responsible for every hire (and they intuitively knew who was the right fit), they are now reliant on an HR manager to be responsible for staffing requirements.
Through some critical thinking and assessment, the characteristics and skills necessary in employees can be defined and developed into a hiring tool for HR managers, one that makes explicit the founder expectations, so that HR managers don’t need to try be mind-readers to assess whether or not the leaders of the business will be comfortable with the hire.
Problems from lack of clarity on where we are growing:
Often we’ve seen that the faster a business grows the more opportunities for growth seem to present themselves. If every EXCO, MANCO, board or shareholders meeting seems to end in a debate on what to focus on and when, it means there is a lack of clarity on where the business is growing and which activities will get it there. Be explicit and clear about where you want to be in 6 months, make sure there is alignment and ensure that all stakeholders (and shareholders) agree. Every business school lecturer will tell you that strategy is about trade-offs, it’s not about what you choose to do as a business; it’s what you choose not to do.
Knowing the value of the decisions you make relative to your growth goals will take the subjectivity out of the decision-making process and the debates that begin with “in my opinion we should” will go away. Some of what we have done with our clients includes running stakeholder alignment sessions on growth objectives and out of these developed assessment metrics and decision-making matrices/tools to drive faster decision-making.
Problems around strategic measurement:
You cannot know what you cannot measure, and you cannot measure growth if you are not tracking it against something. We fundamentally believe that every decision made has to have an expected outcome, which should be measurable. Because organisations, especially ones growing quickly, have limited resources available (time and money), feeling your way blindly through the dark when it comes to strategic decisions will deplete these resources unnecessarily.
An example is: If we implement this technology/training/lunch addition etc., it will result in an increase of (insert important metric such as call resolution time/decrease in complaints/increase in energy) by (insert trackable metric, usually a percentage). This will add value to our business because it drives ( insert strategic growth goal).
Some of what we have done for our clients include:
- Identifying indicators that matter and the means to generate data on those indicators to use as baseline.
- Developing ways to experiment with and then implement strategically important activities with built-in assessment measures.
- Creating dashboards and other data capturing tools to assess the impact of these interventions
- Run offsites, designed to assess critically how the business is tracking on a quarterly basis and ensure that leaders and teams leave these offsites with practical actions for the following quarter designed to further achieve the strategic objectives for the year.
Problems arising from not knowing the limitations of the organisation:
Often we find that the people we work with are tired of trying new things and having them fail “we tried this team activity and no-one came; we developed this tool and no one used it” or they implement something successfully but don’t know what made it work. The busier you are, the less time you have to critically assess what in the business limits or enables achieving your growth goals and objectives.
We’ve learned over time that organisations are systems, and these systems are complex, and with complexity comes unexpected outcomes because everyone responds differently. What we’ve found works really well is to run blockers and enablers sessions with our clients, where we use different method cards and other design tools to surface the characteristics of the organisational system — mindsets, attitudes, organisational structure etc., which either act as barriers or facilitators of the implementation of something new. We have also created templates for them to assess the blockers and enablers themselves ahead of strategy sessions and offsites.
Once these have been identified it’s easier to design a way to implement something that takes these system-specific things into consideration and uses them as levers of change.
After doing this, one of our clients realised they would have to adjust their incentive models to encourage use of a collaborative platform, because it required a team to change their behaviour, and the old KPI’s, which encouraged individual performance, were misaligned with this.
CUSTOMERS
Problems that come from not knowing our purpose:
When people get together and start a business they are pretty clear about what they want to achieve personally (usually it involves “MAKE LOTS OF MONEY”) and sometimes they are equally clear on what they want to achieve for society ( improve/connect/enhance the lives of x customers by insert x).
This is often referred to as the purpose or the “why” of the organisation; what you stand for. It is usually an intrinsic feeling that the founder group know without having to articulate. But as the business grows, more people join and the organisation stretches, these people need something that makes the late nights, boring admin and arduous tasks meaningful that counters the negativity which stems from exhaustion. Having an explicit purpose also helps attract the kind of people you want on your team but may not yet be able to afford, because something you stand for resonates with something they value.
Knowing your purpose, making it visible, demonstrating how it is being lived, and designing ways for others to live it is critical to ensuring the meaning of your business remains the same even as you are growing. We do a lot of work on purpose. We run purpose workshops (you can even find our methods on our website), design ways to visualise purpose to staff and customers (books/murals/data visualisations, etc.) and create experiments to develop new habits that embed purpose into the work. At any stage of your business’s growth cycle, having, knowing and living your purpose is necessary if you and your staff want to find meaning in the work.
Problems associated with not knowing the customer:
Knowing who your customer is is essential for growth. People may have an idea about who their customer is but rarely do they spend time building that out, developing a deep understanding about who they serve and why that customer may or may not be connecting with them.
In some of our work with organisations (especially start-ups), we have seen some great customer slides, and usually most slides involve sector/gender/age/information and there are always more than 10 perceived customer segments (one platform business we worked with “ the Uber for x” actually had 29 customer segments they believed they were solving for).
Solving for 10 individual customer groups is very difficult (and a lot of often unnecessary work), so we create personas to help synthesize the customer understanding. We have a variety of methods for understanding the customer but we believe it is essential to understand this in granular detail because understanding the humans who choose to pay for something you provide is critical to ensuring you remain valuable and relevant to them. These personas look at the motivations and needs of the people using your products and services.
Eventually, through research, observation and data analysis we get to about 3–4 core customer personas. Once you have these, you can start to optimise the experience they have with your organisation and enhance the value you offer to them with new products and services.
Problems with not continuously adding value to the customer:
So now you know the customer. You’ve got personas, they’re on the wall and you think cool, we’re done now. Not good enough. You need to understand their experience with your organisation. How they found your business, use your product or service, and what value it is adding to their lives.
If you don’t obsess over continuously improving that journey and increasing the value you add, you may find yourself replaced by someone else who cares more about your customer than you do.
We like to use service mapping, among other methods, as a way to get granular about the customer detail. We spend several days, sometimes, with teams mapping the current customer experience, assessing the value, identifying a more ideal journey and then developing tactics to work towards achieving this ideal.
The customer value is not in the thing you provide, it is in what it allows them to do, and you can only know this if you know them, as well as how and why they’ve chosen your product.
COMMUNICATION
Problems associated with lack of founder communication:
Many of the leaders we’ve worked with did not expect to find themselves leading people. They’re the ideas guys, the money-makers, not the managers. We’ve heard countless leaders complain about how they’re having to do the jobs of the people they hired because they can do it better and quicker (this is especially true with businesses that now have large sales teams). I’ve run out of fingers to count the number of times we’ve heard leaders say that their staff don’t care about the company and their customers. But if they didn’t start the company, and don’t actually have ownership of it, how are they supposed to know and care about the things that you, as the leader are obsessing about. This is where founder communication is often lacking, the teams don’t know you, what you’re obsessing about, where the company is growing and why exactly you want them to work after 5PM to solve a customer challenge even when their family is waiting.
We’ve developed a series of tactics to help founders communicate to their teams in a way which creates meaning in the work and builds a community, even when people are in various locations with different accessibility to the leadership team. We have developed a storytelling narrative template for company presentations to help a less dynamic leader tell a visionary story. For one CEO we created an email template that outlined the key things he needed to share weekly with the company, including who was living the values, why a certain employee’s actions had enhanced the customers experience and how the company was tracking relative to their strategic objectives. It also included some personal things about him, what he was learning, what kept him up at night, etc. and allowed the team to connect to him in a way that would not have been possible otherwise due to the scale of the organisation.
Problems associated with not understanding the culture:
In a previous company we worked with, all new starters spent a day with the CEO and the EXCO understanding where the company had come from, where it was going and how it worked. This included things like fridge etiquette and whether coffee was free always or just with clients. But as the company grew to 100 and then 300 people with a pretty high turnover, the luxury of a full day once a month to spend with new people across regional offices disappeared and with it the transferal of much of what was unspoken about the company that made it so unique.
The importance of onboarding cannot be over-emphasised enough and we spend lot of energy helping companies to do this effectively, designing ways for transferring the non-task related but incredibly important company and culture related aspects to new employees as they start so they know what is expected of them and how things work upfront. We’ve developed onboarding packs, are in the process of designing a training bot for new starters and we’ve made some beautiful culture and onboarding books, that include founder stories and a Week One to-do list, as well as compliance and regulatory information.
Our Toolbox:
Basically, the more is known, shown and distributed throughout the business the more likely it is to have the most important attributes of the founding team embedded into the DNA of the company. We’re in the process of developing individual guides and tools to help leaders start to think about how intentional design can address much of their problems with scale.
Collectively these will form our ScaleUp toolbox.
In subsequent (still to be written) articles we’ll go into each aspect of our toolbox in detail with guides, tactics and tools for addressing these challenges but in the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about our toolbox or to see how we can apply some or all of this thinking to your specific business, contact us at danielle@inquisition.co.za or visit our website to read about the ways we’re making work more human.
