Why process documentation experts don't mind if a system doesn't even 'work'.

Why process documentation? Experts don't mind if a system doesn't even work? What does that even mean? Shouldn't they be very concerned and very worried if a system doesn't work? Well, let's have a look at it.

Welcome to today's episode. My name is Tom Rolley.

I'm coming to you from the hinterlands behind Byron Bay.

My family has come up here and we are relaxing at Hosanna farm stay.

It's pretty cool.

And I was running up here yesterday, I want to show you this come check this out.

This is pretty funny.

This is golden.

Let me see if I can show it to you.

There it is.

Check it out.

The Golden money pig.

Like, seriously, totally random, no idea what it's doing here.

Let's have a look at the view and check out the view.

And there's even a little Psalm here as well.

Let's come over here.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Guys see that? The Lord is my shepherd.

He restores my soul.

So a little cool place to discover myself yet.

So let's talk about this idea of process documentation.

The system doesn't work.

What am I thinking? Why would I not even care about that? Well, it comes down to a deeper question.

And that is, are you willing to get it wrong? Why on earth would you be willing to run a system, execute the processes and not have it work? Surely it would be a better move to get it right, get it perfect, and then go live? Well, here's the problem.

Here's the problem.

This actually happened to me.

So today, an email goes out to my list for my band.

It's called doctors of devotion.

It's a Kitaen band.

And it's exactly the same copy as last fortnight ago, other than my team did change the title of the event.

So this one's called Let's go higher.

The last one was called spring when your kid Tom, but the rest of the copy was the same.

And why is that? Well, the process documentation said just copy it and run it again.

Now He sees a great idea.

Yeah, it's okay.

I've definitely seen it promoted as an idea why because most people's open rates are not going to be 100%.

There's no way that 100% of people are going to open that email.

And so there's only a small chunk of people that would even recognize, and the pace of change is so fast these days that even if it's exactly the same, they're not going to recognize it.

They're like, Oh, man, I have a vague sensation of this.

Check this out.

I canceled a credit card and did not remember it at all.

So I called up like a week later, I call up a hey, I need to cancel a credit.

And they're like, Dude, you canceled a week ago.

Would you hear that got thunder coming?

I'm like, I don't remember doing this at all.

And yet, it must have been me.

No one else is going to have access to that card.

So just in the pace of life, the stress, the strain, the amount of information coming in.

And right now the number of rules that were meant to follow, at least here in Australia, it's overwhelming.

And so whether an email is exactly the same or not.

It's really not that important.

What is important is that it went out that it got done.

Why? Because I get the feedback.

This is what you should be after as well.

When you run your systems.

You want that feedback because it will tell you whether it gave you the results that you want or not.

Do I want the same email copy to go out every time? No.

So I'm going to need to make a change, I'm going to have to look at that system, look at the processes and go okay, what needs to change.

And what was evident when I thought about it was that well hang on.

If I'm going to have an opportunity to write some different copy, I'm going to need to extend the time frame to allow for that process to happen.

So right now, let me run you through what happened on Monday, were present, we've got the constant in about two and a half weeks last Monday, it deployed, the system got done, the emails got sent, and the concert will be on the 14th of October.

But if I want to have a new copy for that concert, what I want to do is basically allow an extra two weeks in front.

So instead of it being the fourth Thursday in a fortnight, I'm going to Thursday in a month.

Now, what does that mean? Well, that's got some implications.

That means I'm going to have two concerts running at once one for Thursday in a fortnight, one for Thursday in a month and that's going to be a rolling system.

But putting in that extra time gives me an opportunity to review the copy Have a look at what emails we're going to send.

What else do we want to put in that to encourage people to come along? Can you see what's going on here? Can you see the importance of why I'm okay with having a system not work? Because it gives me the feedback, it gives me the opportunity to look at, hey, well, that's what did happen.

And I don't want that result, I'm going to change something in the process documentation.

And I'm going to get a different result.

Now, am I guaranteed? Am I guaranteed that next time is going to work? No, there's no guarantee on that.

But I will enhance my chances.

And I will only know if that system now works by running it.

Have a think about this, the only way that you can get the feedback to know whether the results that you wanted are the ones that the system is creating is by running it.

This is not just for running an event this is across the board.

Every single system in your business will generate results.

If you and your team follow the instructions.

And you will get that result.

In some systems, you might be flexible.

You might you know what, as long as it's in a general ballpark of this result, I'm happy.

Okay, great.

You might not need the exact level of detail was someone's it step by step by step.

They're just like, Okay, I'm just going to do the big processes.

Some of your sales guys might be like, this is the like, you know what, I'm good with this, I've done it 50 times before, great, you need something of track that is very high level, you don't want your sales guys going in and looking at my new sheet.

But if your tech teams are doing that, then you're going to have some problems, you're going to have missed automations, you're going to have links that don't quite work, you're going to have the wrong pages, the wrong dates, the wrong tags, your systems that write your sorry, your software that runs your business will have errors.

This happens all the time, I was looking for a new bookkeeper.

And they had me as I clicked on the link, they took me through to the landing page.

I'm like, great, they're giving me a booklet about traps.

For bookkeeping.

Unlike great, I sign up and nothing came.

They didn't send me the email.

Now immediately I have an a worry, in my mind.

I'm like, man, they promised the book.

It didn't show up.

Now I've got debt.

If that booklet had shown up, I'm like, great.

You guys are tight.

I want someone who's doing my books to be on point.

That's the problem that I've got right now.

Like when I do my books, I'm not trained in bookkeeping.

Yeah, kind of picked it up.

But I don't want that.

Why? Because I found errors.

My accountant was like, dude, you've got a couple of errors here.

You got to go fix these up on my man.

I don't want to have errors.

I want my books to be tight.

And so I go to the web, and I type in whatever my search term was, these guys come up, and they don't deliver the book.

Why? Because that system is broken.

That system is broken.

So I let them know.

I'm like, Hey, fix it.

And they're like, yeah, we'll send it to my great, okay.

So they send it to me, and it's cool.

But that doubt comes in.

And unfortunately, this is really common, like most businesses are going to struggle with these systems and processes.

If you're a multinational, you're running purely on systems and processes.

But in small business, you can get away for a long time, perhaps growing and growing and growing with your team until you can't.

And at that point, it particularly if you've got momentum, and your business continues to grow, but you have not sorted out your systems and processes, you will run into problems, you will plateau you might significantly decline.

Why Because managing people is really difficult, and it doesn't scale.

But managing processes do.

That's why it's so valuable to be able to run a system and even if it doesn't work that gives you feedback for what needs to be changed.

So hey, not only do you know that this isn't giving you the result that you want.

It also shows you what you do need to change.

Alright, that's all I got for you today.

I'm going to go hang out with my family.

I'm super stoked about that.

They have a cool slide into the lake here, which the kids love.

It is generally a very relaxed and joyous experience.

The cool thing about up here is that there's actually reception so I'm going to likely shoot it from here tomorrow.

And I hope you'll join me then.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

As we continue this journey into the power systems create results.

You need some help head over to systemio.dev, otherwise I look forward to seeing you tomorrow as we continue on this adventure. See you then.