Your team need to think systems.

Hello, and welcome to today's episode, my name is Tom Rolley of System IO, I want to share an interesting story that happened to me.

And it's around changing a system.

And it's actually not a business system.

It's a system I have set up at home.

And the reason that it is important, and the reason that you should pay attention to this is that once you get systems working in your business, you need your team to think systematically as well as you.

The reason for this is that when you change a part of a system, it will affect how that whole system works.

Let me give you the example.

Okay, so I get a phone call from my wife, saying, hey, what I want is for you to have your laundry, your ironing picked up every two weeks instead of every week.

Right now, I get my shirts picked up weekly, and there's a $15 fee.

Now she wants to save that money.

She's like, you know what, I want to save $15 a week.

So what I want you to do is to get it picked up every two weeks.

So let's have a look at how the system works.

Right now.

Basically, there are five shirts that go off to get ironed each week.

And I have five shirts that I wear through that week.

And then I wash them.

And on Monday they get picked up again.

Okay, so we've got a total of 10 shirts, it's important, because in that change that my wife just does, like, I just want to say $15, she has failed to think of the consequences on the system.

You see, I don't own 20 shirts and 20 shirts is how many shirts I would need in order to be able to run a fortnightly pick-up system, she actually didn't think of that.

And this is just because she doesn't think systematically, she doesn't think about the implications on the whole system by changing a part of the system.

In her mind who's $15 saved.

To me, it's like, Oh, if you do that, I'm going to have a problem, all of my shirts will be at the cleaner.

And I will not have a shirt to wear.

Like literally the first week that it goes 10 shirts go out.

And I look in my wardrobe and there are no shirts.

Now, this could be compensated, I could buy 10 more shirts, for a total of 20 shirts.

And now 10 can go for one for a fortnight and then 10 can be worn and then swap, swap.

But even in doing that there's a consequence of having to keep up and make sure that the laundry is done if the laundry falls behind and the shirts won't be ready.

But let's say that's not an issue that I'm able to manage that because I can manage it one week, they get washed on, let's say, a Wednesday and a Friday, and they're ready to go on Monday.

So that system probably is going to be okay.

And let's look at the reason for this.

Like why don't you make that change? Well, basically it is to save $15 a fortnight is it worth it? I don't know there is a cost to changing this system.

And in order to pull it off, I actually need to buy 10 more shirts.

The interesting thing is right now I can't actually buy the 10 shirts though like I like a particular brand kind of picky.

It's called Academy they make these really nice linen ones.

That's what I want to expand my wardrobe too.

But for whatever reason COVID or something else, I don't know, you can't buy my size right now, I can't actually buy 10 shirts, and so pulling the sister off just haphazardly or without thought or without consultation with me, it means that things are going to get messed up.

Now, if this is happening in your business.

This is problematic because if your team does not consider the impact of changing processes in a system, then they're not being aware of what could go wrong.

What are the consequences? And find it might be that I have to wear a t-shirt.

Big deal.

Okay, big deal.

But there might be mission-critical stuff in your business that gets changed and someone's like, hey, there's a better way to do this thing.

And so they go and change this thing, but they fail to realize that thing is part of a bigger system.

And in changing that thing, it affects something else that may not have been clear.

And so one of the critical things that I've come to learn is that when I am changing a system, I need to look at all of the processes in that system, preferably have all open.

If there's one process in the system, this is easy, just open that one process.

But if you've got an eight-process system or a four-process system, open them all up.

Particularly if you're moving bits and pieces round to this, make sure that you don't double up.

And this makes sure that you think of the system.

As an entire thing, you can see the consequences have we change x here, that's going to affect y there.

And so you need to know how to do this, your team needs to know how to do this.

And most importantly, you need to have some way of actually documenting your systems in the first place.

Otherwise, this is all a waste of time.

If this is all in your team's head in your head.

None of this will work, you may as well just go to what these you're doing now, which is, you know, just solve the problem, solve the problem, solve the problem, the fact that you are saving the soul solving the same problem over and over and over.

Well, that's on you.

That's your own laziness and refusal to systemize your business.

Yes, it is more work in the beginning, but it starts to pay off.

So take this lesson and see how easy it is just to look at a segment of a system, just one part and think I will make a change here.

And that's a good chance.

But if you do not consider the system as a whole, then you may be solving one problem only to cause much bigger problems downstream or upstream.

So think systematically, think systematically for you think systematically for your teams.

Remember this example of saving $15.

And how saving $15 At minimum meant that 10 new shirts had to be bought.

But most likely, I'm not going to perceive I'm going to have to call them and say keep coming weekly, come on weekly, keep coming weekly, at least until I've got the opportunity to buy 10 shirts, but even then, you know, I kind of like the system.

I kind of like the system as it is once it's up and running.

Yeah, I'm not that enthusiastic to change, particularly for the saving of $15 a fortnight it's just not worth it.

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

I hope you found this valuable, that this method of thinking is valuable.

Have a look at where it applies to your business.

Have a look at the mindsets that you have to change in yourself and in your team.

In order to be able to implement this if you want help.

Head over to systemio.dev.

Alright, I will look forward to seeing you on tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems and processes in your business.

See you then.