Business Beats

How to model a business experience

See the world in slow-motion — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Introduction

Let’s say you’re looking to understand, improve or redesign a business system. As a designer, my view is you cannot improve something you cannot see. But how the heck do you see a business system ?

It reminds me of the Margritte painting: This is not a pipe —

René Margritte’s — This is not a pipe. Source : Wikiwand

This is not a pipe. It a representation of the pipe. The real pipe is something else altogether. It has heft, curves, aroma, stories. The painting has none of that.

So, this is not a building,

Source : wikiwand

And this is not a business system,

source : slideshare

A business system has people, interactions, timing, rhythm, movement — all the things that make it come alive. I call it the business experience to differentiate it from the workflow-ey notion business systems brings up. Now, where the heck is that ?

Business Beats :

The business beat. Credits

The ideas is straightforward. If you could see your business in motion — ideally stop-motion, it would be a great first step towards understanding and eventually intervening and redesigning your business experience.

You can. Consider this — a well running, heck even a running workflow is an engine. It has a rhythm, velocity, timing — and a beat. A beat is a give and take — a handshake in the experience. It can be between humans, between machines or any combination between these. A beat is what differentiates a business workflow from a business experience.

Like a token moving through a machine, value is passed down from beat to beat until it finally reaches the consumer. After, and sometimes before, money — another form of value moves beat by beat and reaches you. A well run business experience does this well without losing value or causing delays. A poorly run business experience does is badly dropping value along the way.

Beat Cards

You model the business experience using beat cards. The cards are derived from production and system theory. Basically any business experience is a combination of resources — men, money, materials directed through processes — machines and methods, bought or sold to markets. In the process of creating value, stocks are created requiring location, storage and transport in order to move that value to or from the consumer.

Triggers and delays orchestrate the beats. Predictable triggers and low delays create a nice flow and good business experience. Unpredictable or missing triggers and high delays creates disturbances in the experience disrupting flows and creating hotspots. A key job when intervening or redesigning business experiences is to identify these hotspots and resolve them.

Here are the beat cards :

Beat Cards

Here’s how you use them :

The Office Mail Room Experience

Consider the office mail room. Everyone knows how it works and have journeyed through it at some point. Our goal was to see if we could guess where the hotspots might be. The whole exercise itself took about 30 min, was great fun to do, and we found ourselves wondering if we could reconfigure how the mail process works in interesting ways.

Here’s an explanation of the modelling process :

Mark End Points

A simple brown paper or chart paper works as a canvas. We marked the two main sub-processes the mail room handles: inbound mail and outbound mail. The experience terminates with you walking away with your mail.

Model Inbound Experience

• The Inbound experience starts with mail arriving via a transport — bike, or truck at the loading bay. This is one beat. The trigger for this was a despatch schedule on the postal office’s end.

• This leads to the Delivery Guy ( usually driving the transport as well ) handing over the lot to the Collection Guy. This involved acknowledging a Receipt and Delivery

• The Collection Guy then temporary stores the lot in a Pile staging area.

• After which the Sorting Guy sorts the inbound packages by a defined sort criteria — in my case by Building and then by employee name.

Note : The Sorting Guy and Collection Guy can be the same person, but this shows that there are two distinct tasks to be done. As the volume increases the suggestion is to separate roles. At lower volumes the Collection Guy can multi-task.

• The Sorting Guy places the inbound packages into suitable pigeon holes. In some instances there may be a second storage area demarcated for large packages.

• The Sorting Guy then opens the Register ( material ), Makes an Entry in the Register ( method ). The employee will sign against this record when collecting.

• Finally, the Sorting Guy uses the Computer, looks up the ID of the employees and sends a “you’ve got mail” note to them.

This completes the Inbound business experience.

Model Outbound Experience

• The Outbound experience begins with a trigger. All processes have triggers and a key step to locate what and where the trigger is. Here is the “You’ve got mail” email from the mail room to the Employee.

• Being triggered, the employee decides to walk to the mail room to collect his mail. However this a method with inherent delay. There is nothing compelling the employee to go over right way. In systems thinking, delays = oscillations. You would expect to find hotspots after this point. This can simply be mail that’s not been picked up for a long time and is jamming up the works.

• When the employee does walk over to the mail room, he needs to provide a trigger to the Mail Room. Here it is the “I got a mail from you” and his employee ID.

• This makes the Lookup guy look up the ID on the computer. This tells him the Building and initials. At which point he looks up the pigeon hole location and retrieves the package.

• After this, the Lookup Guy, opens the Register. The employee signs the register, acknowledging receipt of the package.

• You hand over payment and receive your package. This is a value transaction. A key moment when a promise made to you has been fulfilled and value handed over to you. You in turn initiate a value transaction, either before or in this case after the receiving value transaction where you send value — typically money, but could be attention as well , for example a hand written card, a phone call, a gift — to the other person.

This is the full outbound business experience.

Results and Insights

Our pilot brought out the following results and insights

1. We could accurately place all the elements of today’s experience.
2. We could spot value transactions — make or break moment in the business experience.
3. We could predict hotspots — where things are likely to flare up. The most likely hotspot is right after the employee arrives randomly to collect mail. We should verify this.
4. We could anticipate other hotspots- for example on account of volume surges. We should ask the mail room when they experience it and how they cope.
5. We could play with the business experience — for example what if we changed the timing of steps ? e.g. lengthened the Pile Step and shortened the Pigeon Hole step ? i.e. things were left in plain sight and to be collected with the day and only Pigeon Holed by end of day. Would it make things better for the mail room ?
6. With a little play, we could see variations in the business experience — for example how outbound dispatches are handled . The employee becomes the carrier in the In Process, the Courier is the trigger for the Out Process. Some parts of the process are compressed on both the In and Out Process.
7. We could just as easily do this in situ, in a corner of the mail room and have the folks there co-create the experience with us. It’s colourful and looks like fun to do.
8. We made no distinction between front stage and backstage, to use existing service design terminology. The distinction feels arbitrary at this stage. There are only moments and resources which affect the moment.
9. We realized different triggers can activate different pathways through the business experience. I call them standard and emergency pathways. Standard pathways are regular orders, emergency pathways are rush orders. It’s clear that the reputation of any business experience is built on the emergency pathway, but the reliability is built on a robust standard pathway.
10. We realized that a simple systems diagram, showing stock and flow is indispensable to get on the same page quickly. The simulation is great, but in a pinch the systems diagram and a metaphor explains the essential behavior quickly. In this case : the system behaves like a wind up toy that ingests mails ( inhales ) and then shoots them out ( exhales ) to end consumers.

Systems diagram of the mail room.

More than anything else though, we developed a new appreciation for the amount of work that it takes to keep the mail room humming. It’s a marvel of efficiency in miniature.

After we did this, our desire to go an take a close look at all the tiny pieces that make up the experience was very high. A good sign. This would be a good way to storyboard an existing experience.

Since then we’ve modeled the Hajj Experience, The Career Fair experience and more with excellent results.

The Career Fair experience, with slightly modified cards — context appropriate icons.

Thanks

None of this would be possible if we hadn’t run into Business Origami and Jess McMullen which inspired our thinking. Which would not be possible, if he didn’t run into a Japanese researcher over dinner at Weatherhead Business School, who had seen it at the Hitachi Design Centre. As always, Jess McMullin— thank you for your openness and generosity.

Thanks for reading ! I hope you liked it ! If you did and want others to read this, please clap for me.

Thanks to Neelam Shetye for reviewing this.