Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. That's why it's always day 1.
Jeff Bezos
Results or process?
The question Bezos challenges the employees to constantly assess is:
“Do we own the process, or does the process own us?”
That is, is the company genuinely aiming to serve customers’ needs? Or has serving the processes’ needs become a goal in itself that is causing friction and diversions from customers?
One example he mentions is the understanding of customer needs, which is at the risk of being replaced by superficial second-hand data, such as market research or customer surveys. Instead, he challenges designers to invest time and live with their products that they can build so in-depth intuition on customer needs that they can invent solutions that the customers had not even realized they were missing.
Another example on too much internal focus can be seen in the attitude towards external trends. If company has drifted into serving it’s own processes, it tends to fight against external trends even when they are obvious. If on the other hand the company owns it’s processes, it can identify when the processes have become a burden that prevents seizing opportunities, and takes actions to update the processes. This difference is easy to say, but extremely difficult to realize in recurring daily work where relying on processes gives the few points of stability in the midst of chaotic urgencies.
The search for opportunities that are beyond the capabilities of existing processes is often efficient to start with a current state analysis, that starts with the very fundamentals of the business and company and keeps asking ‘dumb’ and ‘obvious’ questions. Still, time after time, current state analyses reveal new perspectives that had fallen into blind spots caused by current processes. Often it turns out that the priorities that the company had been busy with before the current state analysis turn out to be just symptoms of some deep-rooted issue, or that the analysis reveals a completely new opportunity that overrides the previous ones.
To succeed in current state analysis you need to
1) Keep the eye on the ball: customers’ needs
2) Be curious and seek to understand the dependencies of different areas: what is root cause, and what is symptom
3) Be bold to develop, even if needs turning the sleeves and challenging familiar structures
4) Be able to identify where best practices could be leveraged from other parts of the company, or even from different industries
5) Be thorough and realistic in assessing what would it take to execute the changes and stabilize them as recurring ways-of-working
Fast AND high-quality decisions
Another force that Bezos sees driving companies into ‘2nd day stasis’ is the slowing down of decision-making. Many companies can make good decisions, but the ability to make them fast tends to decline as companies grow. He lists five mistakes that jeopardize decision-making speed:
1) Same decision-making process to all situations. Fast companies fan use lighter decision-making to smaller, less risky and reversible decisions.
2) Collection of too much data. Often the situation is already clear when 70% of data is collected. The last percentages of data coverage increase the data collection time exponentially, which slows decision-making.
3) Investing in creating a consensus. To sort out all stakeholders’ perspectives slows decision-making, especially in large organizations and on topics that cross organizational boundaries. Decision can be made even if there is no full consensus, and the persons who disagree with it still need to be able to accept and support it, at least until the point where it’s effectiveness can be evaluated.
4) Not addressing profound disagreements. If the disagreements are based on deep-rooted and recurring issues, e.g. conflicting targets, no amount of soft measures such as meetings or metrics will not fix that. If a problem pops up repeatedly, or is caused by a structural issue it should be escalated quickly to get a stabile solution.
5) Sticking to decisions. If company considers decisions to be irreversible, it may lead to thinking that it is worth spending lots of time to make them. The problem is though that prolonged time to make decisions keeps customers waiting and gives competitors a chance to be faster.
Overcoming some of these barriers to decision-making speed requires tools and structures. Mostly though, these can be addressed via leadership, culture and mind-set towards decision-making.