The Back Story...

Behind every business is a story, a series of inter-connected experiences. Two early childhood experiences in particular sparked curiosity and set me on a lifelong learning journey that prepared me for success in the workplace and in business.  

Science Books

Our family kept a set of World Book Encyclopedias in the den.  My Dad loved science, my Mom was a nurse, and our neighbour was a doctor. I was captivated by the volume on the human body. It contained a printed page of a skeleton and a series of transparent overlays. Each transparency introduced a different layer of information, a system entirely different from the last: the circulatory system, the organs, the muscles and tendons, and finally the skin.  I was spell bound by how the layers fit together and how the human body could not function if any layer was missed or impeded.

This experience impacted the way I see things. All things.

From about grade four I learned to see the world in layers. That’s how I learned to look beneath the surface of workplace problems to examine the inter-dependent components of the business and identify root cause. Deep thinking is something I do quickly and easily because I’ve identified various layers and assembled the appropriate toolkit to help reveal them to others.

As an adult I learned that business is as complex and inter-connected as the human body. It’s critical that adjustments be made in the right system. If your rib is out of place you may think, “Hey, I need a chiropractor”, but if muscle tension is what pulled your rib out of alignment, the chiropractor can put it back into position but it will pop out the moment you sneeze. If you fail to diagnose the root cause of the problem, you can get caught in a never-ending loop of chiropractor adjustments when five acupuncture treatments might permanently release the muscle tension causing the problem in the first place.

I applied this layering principle in the early 1990's when I was a manager at Canada's largest commercial fishing harbour. At the time computers used MS DOS with the flashing green prompt (no intuitive windows environment yet). To take charge of $50 million in properties I mapped the buildings, wharfs, shorelines and water basins. The basic skeleton of the property. Next I created a series of transparencies to "layer" in emergency access routes, loading zones, cranes, fire extinguishers, and show property uses.  I re-created the way I'd learned about the human body two decades earlier. 

The #1 mistake smart business owners make is they misdiagnosis symptoms as the problem. When that happens they apply a linear solution to a non-linear problem. For instance, business owners often misdiagnose slumping sales as the problem instead of seeing it as a symptom of a deeper problem. If the root of declining sales is the delayed impact of poor customer service, the business spends money and hires more people and the problem is not solved at all. In that case hiring more salespeople is a linear solution and a misdiagnosis. 

Seeing systems gives you x-ray vision.  

Pinball Wizards

The second incident sharpened my hearing and ability to recognize patterns.

​My Dad owned a business called The Brass Hub Inn in Radville, Saskatchewan, population 1,200. With rooms for rent on the upper level, the main floor had a coffee shop, pub, fine dining lounge, and a pin-ball arcade. As you might imagine, a room full of pin ball machines in the 1970’s attracted teenage boys to the arcade like a magnet. We packed them in like sardines after school and on weekends. The arcade billowed cigarette smoke and was electrically charged with light, sound, testosterone-infused drive to get top score.

​The business office was directly across from the pin-ball arcade, concealed behind a large mirror made of one-way glass. From the sanctity of the office, I listened to the clacks and dings of pin-ball machines for hundreds of hours.
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One machine in particular captured my interest. A slot car race track with scoreboard sprawled the surface of a table and was covered by a large plastic dome. The steering wheel and controls were located outside the tamper-proof dome.

Over time I started to differentiate sound patterns between players. High score players had more of a rhythmic sound. It was rather intriguing to me. I found the rhythmic patterns held my attention and were strangely soothing in their predictability.   

I was deathly shy as a child and avoided the pin-ball arcade like the plague. One night after the doors were locked and the place was quiet I walked over to the race car game with a handful of quarters to test my theory about rhythm patterns. Instead of steering the car with eye-hand coordination, like everyone else, I focused on replicating the rhythm and sound pattern. The numbers on the scoreboard went up and up. I beat the all time score on the machine by a mile.    

After the boys exhausted their search to find out who put the high score on the Turbo Drive, someone asked me if any new players had been in town. Not wanting to be found out, I told them nobody had been in recently. As far as they were concerned, it was an unsolved mystery.   

From these early lessons two things became second nature for me in every job I’ve held, project I’ve managed, or business I’ve run. The first is finding the rhythm and flow in doing the work the business does. The second is looking beneath the surface to see the network of inter-connected systems that makeup the business. 

Effectiveness and high performance has a rhythm to it. Whether it’s lead time, production flow, or a sales cycle, timing is everything. There is an underlying pattern and rhythm to any productive work flow. Even creative projects! Once you find the groove it’s easy to ramp up production while keeping quality and efficiency high. Exceeding the optimal cycle burns people out, increases risk of injury, or leads to employee turnover. Not striving to find that sweet spot stunts the growth of people, performance, and profit.   

As a result of these early insights, I love work! And I love business. I’ve sold jeans, managed inventory, swabbed decks, graded exotic seafood, skippered a boat, coordinated loading and dangerous goods permits for container ships destined for Japan, negotiated complex property leases, and owned multiple businesses. When I’m in my discovering and inventing systems, I even get a kick out of loading the dishwasher!

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The moral of the story is…if your business isn’t performing as well as you’d like, a proper diagnosis will save you time, money, and frustration!​

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