Imagine that you are trying to understand someone’s job function. You walk up to them as they’re standing next to a fax machine and ask them to tell you “what” they are doing. They are likely to look at you a bit surprised and say “I am sending a fax.” You might ask some follow-up questions about whether sending a fax is a necessary step in their job and if it is something that needs to happen for them to be successful. They are most likely to say “Yes,” but they are wrong. The “what” that they are doing is actually something like confirming an order or communicating the status of something, while the “how” of what they are doing it is with a fax machine. Once you have successfully disentangled the “what” from the “how,” you can then examine if it matters “how” it is done (my research has shown that it only matters about 20 percent of the time for any given “what.”) You can also ask how valuable that particular “what” is to the overall work set. For a task that has a low value, you should look across the organization to see if that same “what” is being performed repeatedly, and then force a common “how,” either through process or software. You might even consider outsourcing it. For rare, high-value work, you’ll need to go a step further to understand how it’s currently performing. If it is underperforming, then ask what is causing it to do so, whether it’s who is doing it, the process workflow, or the technology, or some blend of those factors that drive the performance. From there you need to carefully analyze where the change is needed to boost performance. Because it’s high-value work, there’s a high risk in making a “wrong” change. So, be cautious.
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