How many of your interactions with clients or customers are devoted to actually delivering the value they came to you for?

How many of them are merely dealing with the failure to do just that?

Here’s a simple example of what I mean:

A year ago a good friend of mine was diagnosed with a medical problem.
The problem was clear and straightforward; the solution was clear and straightforward, tried and tested. Guess how long it took to actually do the solution and deliver the value my friend had gone to the doctor for?

13 months.

They weren’t ignored during that time. There were at least 6 interactions with A&E, another half-dozen with a specialist clinic, several deliveries of drugs and equipment to ‘manage the situation’ while they waited.

All of those interactions were brilliant. The people doing them couldn’t have been kinder, more willing, or more competent, even though they were clearly overwhelmed with demand.

It’s just that they shouldn’t have been doing them at all.

The demand they were servicing is ‘failure demand’ – demand that arises from an initial failure to deliver the value that the customer actually came for.

Fix that initial failure (with more surgeons, more kit, or more day-surgery beds – whichever is causing the problem), and capacity will increase. A&E waiting times will go down, ambulance waiting times will go down, the NHS will stop haemorrhaging exhausted staff. Real productivity will go up.

Why doesn’t that happen? Because managers measure the wrong things*. And too many of them.

There are only two things you need to keep track of in your business:

1. How value flows to clients and customers.
2. How cash flows in and out of it.

Get the first one right and everything else follows.

What about your business? How much of the hard work you and your team do is dedicated to satisfying failure demand?

Why not measure it and find out. Get your team to log every client interaction for a week. Then analyse how many of those interactions service ‘failure demand’ rather than ‘value demand’.

You could be sitting on a productivity gold-mine. You might even find you can take a break.

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Like this? I’m Kirsten, helping micro-business employers like you to empower their teams with customer-centred processes, so you can take breaks from your business without breaking it in the process.

If you’re a small business employer who wants to be able to disappear at will, you might like my free newsletter too.

*of course a cynic might argue that in a privatised health service, that’s exactly the point – look at all the money-making opportunities this failure creates.

Shoutout to John Seddon of VANGUARD CONSULTING LIMITED for putting into words the reason why I do what I do.