Thomas Rolley 00:01
rigid systems versus flexible frameworks lessons from the master Keith Cunningham, who was driving in the car today listening to a wonderful book. If you are in business and you haven't got this book, then my strong recommendation is that you acquire it.
And my thoughts, I get in the written form.
Why? Because it's so full of wisdom.
What book is this? This is the book by Keith Cunningham.
The Road Less stupid.
The Road Less stupid.
I mean, what a cracking title right there.
But in there, I'm listening to a chapter about systems.
And Keith is not affair is straight up not affair systems.
He's like, man, if systems were the answer, then United Airlines, the IRS and He give one more example, which I think was Comcast would be the best company in the world.
And He goes, they're not; therefore, systems are not the way.
Very interesting take, very interesting take now.
What struck me was that most people, and you might be one of them, are going to think systems equals rigid systems equals step one, step two, step three, boring, boring, boring, no flexibility, no adaptability, no creativity.
Man, who wants to be in a business like that? Who wants to go to work in a place like that? And what I came to realize was that when I say the word systems, that's probably what a lot of people think.
Just do this, do this, do this.
But in actual fact, I came to realise that what I use is not systems.
Yes, they are systems.
But essentially, it's a systems framework.
And the framework stays the same.
But the system itself is highly adaptable to exactly what I need, what the business needs, and what the work needs to be done.
And more and more, I find myself just taking the best closest adaption that I can see and go, Okay, well, that's close enough.
And then I edit it, change it up and use it.
And it's like, oh, okay, cool.
This is a systems framework.
And it's a very different beast to a system that is rigid and locked down and unchangeable, unforgiving, inflexible, that's no good.
That's no good.
I mean, maybe if you're some massive company, but even then, it's still not much fun.
There's not a lot of humanity, a lot of love in that business when everything's so rigid.
But the framework, having the framework is incredibly powerful.
Like I duplicate the framework, sometimes from scratch. Am I okay? What do I need to create, and drop those in? What's the best guess that I have right now that it's going to produce that? Write those in and go, and suddenly I've got tracking, I've got visibility.
I mean, just having the links to where everything is, is incredibly powerful.
We're going back; we're doing some work today.
And I referenced a product I created before I had the system's mindset.
And my virtual assistant was complaining.
He's like, Dude, I can't find this thing.
Am I? Oh, yeah, yeah, we created that before we had the systems.
And so somewhere in Drive, we use Google Drive for the file store is somewhere in Drive.
So you couldn't you search can't find it.
It's like, okay, it showed up eventually, no big deal.
But as the ability to find things or not find things play out over the longer time term, you're looking at huge amounts of time.
They estimated something like six minutes for most people to get back to the work that they were doing.
Why? Because everything's lost.
There are no links to anything.
We live in a digital world. Why don't have the links?
And the reason that people don't have the links is they don't have the framework that allows those links to be easily found.
They don't have a framework to track the status, so they can see what they're up to.
They don't have a framework that shows the due date, so they can rank priority and begin to plan for and say, Hey, this is a big job.
And but it's due in three weeks.
Thomas Rolley 04:44
We need to start that work.
Now.
I need to get some resources in, and you, as the business owner, be able to see all of the work in your business.
But the difference between a rigid system and a flexible systems framework could not be more different.
And you might say, well, well, what's, what's this framework? I did? Well, I'll give you an analogy.
It's a little like a football game.
If you go to the football game, there are rules.
There's a set number of players, a set field size, and all of those things are set.
That's the framework.
But within that framework, all sorts of magic happen, and all sorts of miracles happen.
And that's why millions of people show up every week to watch something that has exactly the same framework and yet plays out completely different every time.
And this is just like a systems framework.
It's not that every system is the same.
It's the same framework.
And within that, the magic can happen if you need help setting up a systems framework so that you don't end up like United Airlines or the IRS.
And you grab that book and take the lesson.
That is throughout it that the advantage of being small is flexibility.
What you need is not rigid systems.
But what you do need is a robust systems framework.
If you need help with that, head over to systemio.dev thanks for tuning in today.
Hope you got a lot of value out of it.
Look forward to seeing your next episode as we continue this powerful journey into systems creating results.
See you then.
