Every airport is fundamentally the same. At its simplest, it’s a way to connect passengers to airplanes – and then put them back into the world once they’ve landed. Like Chutes and Ladders for adults, the airplane is simply a reality accelerator. You go in the airport door and come out somewhere new (averaging 400 mph while you do it).
The footpaths in these vast buildings are all unique. Yet with experience, it becomes something we can almost manage in our subconscious.
Why? Because the intent is universal and even though there are some new wrinkles, everyone has the big picture in their minds.
Now think about hospitals. Most of us see them as labyrinths with very little rhyme or reason. It seems that the new wing was velcroed on, and elevators are just all over the place from legacy builds of days gone by. In many hospitals, getting to the cafeteria is now assisted by a cell phone app. Because without guidance, you are guaranteed to wind up in a dead-end hallway or an elevator that doesn’t stop at the right floor.
What’s going on here? For the layperson, how a hospital is physically laid out is a mystery. It’s clear that if there is a pattern, it’s only known by insiders.
To the small segment of the population that work in hospitals though, the view is very different. They’re able to look right past the physical layout issues and see a very structured system that has been adopted over the arc of time. They see clear protocols and procedures for patients. They see the system in high contrast and are able to quickly know, by clues given by department, place, time and medical records, precisely where the patient has been, is now and needs to be in the near future.
You and Your Teams
You have “airport” like systems in your firm, as well. The process is visible and etched into your daily behavior: the pathways you walk, the meetings you hold and the communications streams you pay attention to. It’s not only obvious to you, but those who work around you.
You place the right inputs in front of the system and it creates a new product, serves a new customer or sets up a new distributor. For a range of activities, these things are locked in – almost like autopilot.
And that’s a good thing. Investors like consistency and these airport-like activities are the “flywheels” that deliver it.
Every so often, though, you may have a request for something with a different design or a new performance level – perhaps even delivered via a different channel. The ‘airport’ system now chokes.
The key to scalable growth in firms is to build ‘hospital-like’ adaptations that can become ‘airport’ like systems
Balancing Scale and Adaptation
The challenge becomes working the new opportunity in a way that allows you to take advantage of the best of both worlds. The doorway to this “both-and” world is to anchor your adaptation with very clear goals that are informed by the firm’s major objectives that allow any one of the team members to quickly assimilate the “why” and contribute to it on autopilot.
Once you’ve got the big picture pulled together, you can use these four steps:
- Map it – There is magic in visually mapping the current system and any adaptations that need to be made for the new product or service. This allows those members of the team with the larger firm and those on the smaller new use case to productively collaborate.
- Temp it – There is an adage about not pouring the sidewalks for a new building until you’ve opened the doors for three months. This is built on the understanding that no matter how much planning you do, human beings will wear a path in the most efficient and unanticipated ways. Leave as much of the new “adaptation” unfinished to allow for organic learning.
- Explore the edges – In design, we call them “edge cases.” They are the combination of environmental factors that are the most extreme things our system needs to respond to. In our current analogy, we might want to run a simulation of how a new service would respond at 50, 100 and 200% of planned capacity.
- Scale it thoughtfully – By carefully opening the throttle, we can avoid being overwhelmed with feedback and collapsing the system. For something like a new service, we might open it to one geography or sales team first to get the kinks out. When we have built this confidence, we can then open new paths with confidence.
Wrapping Up
The work we do with clients is just that, to help them see clearly whether they are dealing with an airport or a hospital – and to help them rapidly get to a system map that allows them to precisely invest in the right effort, with the right team and plan, to help them get the best of both worlds.
If you’d like to talk more about how this assessment and equipping process works, use this link or reach out to me at 847-651-1014.
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