Processes, treat like important recipes.
Treat your processes and checklists like a good chef.
The recipe is a classic piece of content. Organisations that perform well can be likened to good cooks. They follow recipes and processes to get the best possible outcomes. It’s not uncommon for people to think that you need good cooking skills to be a good home cook.
However, after becoming a good home cook with minimal natural cooking skills, I found this was not necessarily so. Instead, a straightforward skill, which has nothing to do with wielding knives and selecting the right ingredients, can help even the least experienced person whip up a great home-cooked meal. That simple skill is reading a recipe.
Why would you want to reinvent something if someone with experience has worked out exactly what you have to do?
With an unending number of recipes available, there is no limit to the simple recipes home cooks can rely on. Over the years, I have accumulated over 150 cooking books full of recipes, mostly about Chinese and Italian cooking, which my family and I enjoy most.
In some businesses, there are unending checklists and recipes to help guide every imaginable process. Sure, there are good ones and bad ones. However, there are just as many reliable checklists that are well-tested, written clearly, and can successfully walk the least experienced person through creating a simple but impressive outcome. You have to know how to pick the right ones.
Keep your purpose, vision, and objectives in mind. Find reliable processes and checklists that suit you, and don’t get too complex before you learn the basics.
Quotable Quotes.
“Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instil a kind of discipline of higher performance”. Atul Gawande