What is the 'one thing' to be clear on when building out your systems?

What is the one thing that you must be clear on when you are building systems? This is an interesting question because it goes against perhaps some of the interesting wisdom that's out there.

It's like, hey, just record what's being done right now.

And to a degree that will get you further along than perhaps you are right now, a lot of businesses have got nothing.

They're not running any documentation.

They're wondering why there are inconsistent results or work has errors in it.

There are customer complaints, all of these problems coming through.

And they're like, right, what we're going to do is document our systems.

And one of the ideas out there is just record stream record what's going on right now, this will take you further than where you are, and which is having nothing.

But is there a missing piece, perhaps you might just document out what's being done right now?

And again, this is extremely helpful compared to where you are.

But it lacks one thing.

In fact, both of these methods lacked that one thing.

And that one thing is why, why does this system exist? And the answer that you're looking for is, well, what is the result that the system is trying to create, or is meant to create.

And now when you get clear on that, now you've got a standard by which to assess your system.

You see, right now, you may be doing a bunch of stuff that gets you somewhere, but it's not necessarily that targets.

That is the result that the system is meant to create.

And if you're clear on that, even if you then go through and use either of those other two methods, you go through and document in terms of texts, or you video document, in terms of video, you will, at the end of that have a standard, a reason for you to compare, hey, this is what's getting done right now.

And this is what's being produced.

And compare it to Hey, this is what it was meant to produce.

Now, let's have a look at two outcomes.

Number one, it matches to what it's meant to produce great, okay, you have just made a massive step forward in the consistency of the productivity that your team gets through your ability to have bad events inverted commas happen in your business, somebody's sick, somebody retires, somebody leaves, somebody quits.

And guess what, you've now still got an asset for your business, which is this documentation, either in video form or in text form.

And it matches up to what it's meant to do.

Your second outcome could be that you go through and it's not what you actually thought that system was trying to do.

It produced something else.

But now you have an advantage.

And this is called editing or refining a system.

Basically, you've got some documentation now, either video or text, and you've got the required result.

Now you just need to work out a way to go of course.

Where did it go? Of course, if I am in let's use strain locations since I'm in Australia, I mean, I'm in Brisbane right now, and I want to go to Sydney, but I've ended up at is rock have ended up at Uluru.

Where did I go wrong? Well, driving out of Brisbane, I went west instead of going south.

And that's obviously a long way to drive is about four days.

I think it's a four-day drive.

Hopefully, you worked out beforehand that the GPS is like turn south turn south.

And this is almost the experience that you've got.

But it is very difficult if you don't know where you are and you don't know where you going.

Even if you then track that route.

You're like, okay, where we ended up going wrong.

It's very easy.

If you can see what happened last time.

It's very difficult if you cannot suddenly you're in Uluru.

You're in Alice Springs gone.

What how do we end up here? Either we're going to Sydney and then you go back without documentation.

You go all the way back to Brisbane, you start the system again.

But this time you end up in Cannes, you know what happened here? And then you go back you start again and this time you end up in Sydney like great but you didn't document it so you don't know how you get it.

So you go back and now you end up in Melbourne now you end up in Perth inconsistent results because you have no documentation.

But before you begin your documenting experience, whether in the video whether, in text, the number one thing to ask yourself is what is the purpose of this system? What are the results that it is meant to create and that will give you your final destination? You can then go through and document and either yes you got that result or no you did not end, you can begin to edit the processes to get you what you want.

This is very easy in simple systems and I strongly suggest you start there before taking on massive projects or big project changes in terms of how you manage your systems begin with less mission-critical ones so that you get a feel for alright, I can see the result that this is meant to create.

And I can see hey, here are the steps that do that.

Then once you get the hang of that, then you can move to your bigger mission-critical parts of running your business.

If you need some help with that head over to systemio.dev, thanks for tuning in today.

Look forward to seeing our next episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems to create results.

See you then.