Welcome to the Visions to Excellence Blog. My name is Doreen Milano. I am excited to share with you some observations, best practices, and tips to help support your business.
I aim to give you my perspective as a consultant and as a certified coach, in addition to some insight from David Slaughter. We hope in these blogs you will enjoy the points of view we share concerning management, leadership and how to build your business.
Often, during my visits with potential clients, there appear to be problems that surface. As we begin to explore the sources of these problems, it seems clear that they usually already know they need to deal with these problems before they turn into a crisis.
Typically, whatever the problem happens to be, it also turns out to be the pain point that is most acute today, literally becoming today’s fire to put out. We refer to “the pain point” as consultants as “crisis management.”
In truth, this type of pain can easily become a stumbling block in any organization. It commands time and focus, yet the more focus given to the pain, the less focus awarded to their business as a whole. These kind of interruptions or stumbling blocks even go so far as to eliminate the real possibility of creating best practices keeping your business model on track.
So, how do you transform a blockage from a stumbling block and turn it into a a BUILDING BLOCK? The first thing to realize is that incremental movement is still progress. Not every change needs to be massive as it is rare that there is a need to make massive, swift, even overly dramatic change. Most of the time, solving pain points, turning stumbling blocks into building blocks requires a simple shift in processes. A process shift is usually small, doable, and quick, followed up closely by monitoring any changes made in order to verify the impact of the changes made upon you day to day business.
One key to understanding your business model’s pain points is by taking a look into the five W’s The Five W’s are: Who; What; When; Where; Why. So let’s look at the five W’s a little closer.
Begin by properly identifying the WHO, all the players need to be listed including customers, vendors and employees. List the parts each of these play in creating or causing the pain point. Also list the circumstances that lead to the pain point or problem. Second, WHAT was each of the players doing that contributed to the pain point? Third, you must identify WHEN the pain point occurred and exactly how does the WHEN contribute to the pain or the problem at hand? Fourth, WHERE does the pain point occur? The fifth area, WHY is one to avoid getting trapped inside of. Many times the WHY is simply a set of excuses or validations for the problem. Instead of stopping at WHYconsider asking one more question…What in our thought process made these choices that lead to the pain points acceptable?
By searching and finding answers to these kind of inquiries, you should be able to make incremental movement as you begin unraveling pain point.
Don’t stop asking the five W’s until the pain point is eliminated. It may take several passes before you any your staff have dissected the problem and made the necessary changes to naturalize the pain point but it will work .
The process we describe in this exercise pertains to an important way in which to improve your business called brainstorming, the subject of one of our upcoming blogs.
