How to find what is holding your business back, without working hard on the wrong problem

01·Where you are now

When something in your business is not working, you go looking for what was done wrong. But a thing that was never done leaves no mark, annoys nobody, and turns up in no report.

Could the problem be not in what was done badly, but in what was never done at all? A mistake shouts: a customer complains, something breaks, a number drops. A thing not done is silent. There is nobody to complain about a call that was never made.

And it costs you, because people work frantically on the wrong thing. Hard work that changes nothing points at a wrong diagnosis.

And even when something is fixed, the moment you decided what to do feels like the end, and it is the middle. A correction gets made, and then people “fail to ensure that it is corrected.”

02·Who's talking to you: Axel Jedlitschka

I built automations for work processes, for myself and for the places I worked

I built work apps for myself and for the workplaces where I worked, and also automations that streamline work processes.

So I am against “We worked hard on it and nothing changed”. Hard work that changes nothing points at a wrong diagnosis. What is supposed to happen every week should be written down, and then you can see what did not happen. That list will tell you more than any report.

Axel Jedlitschka

04·There is a way

The absence list

The booklet's rule: “one can safely conclude the Why is an omission and look for things that should be there and aren't.” Here “Why” is the booklet's word for the real cause, and an “absence list” is the tool for finding it: a list of what is supposed to happen and did not. If you searched and found nothing, do not search harder in the same place. Turn the question round: not “what was done wrong”, but “what was never done at all”.

1. 01A normal week.Write a normal week in your business, in numbers: how many enquiries, how many quotes, how many jobs, how much collected. Without it there is nothing to subtract from.
2. 02Seven actions.Write down seven actions that are supposed to happen every week, even the ones nobody asks for.
3. 03The weekly mark.Once a week, mark what on the list did not happen. Only that. Two minutes.
4. 04The check.For every correction, set a check date two weeks ahead, in the diary, and check five real cases. If it did not hold, the cause you found was the wrong one.

In the evening there is no smoke from the chimneys, at night there are no lights, and at dawn there are no dogs. Three lines, and from them you can conclude the place is deserted, without seeing a single thing that did happen.

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