TWO TYPES OF "THINGS"

As an adult I have come to accept and adapt to the fact that I am rabidly dyslexic, but as a child it was a much harder limitation to accept and adjust to. When I started middle school the first day was the start of my living nightmare in the form of joined up handwriting! This will sound easy enough to the majority of people reading this post but to me it was, and still is an impossibility. To make matters worse an incentive was introduced…….

“When you have mastered joined up handwriting you may start to use a pen rather than a pencil”.

Most of my class were using pens by the end of the first term…. I began a torturous road which lasted almost two years before my teacher gave in and realised I was never going to manage to scribe whole words let alone sentences in a beautiful flowing script.

This was of course terrible for me at that time unlike now where children in a similar situation would just be offered a tablet or laptop with spell check and the problem almost goes away. Something that seemed important is now an irrelevance, ‘something’ that needed to be done well now doesn’t and in today’s fast moving business world I see this scenario repeating itself in much faster cycles. I consider there to be only two such categories as that described above!

The vast majority of activities are “things that just need to be done” where quality is not a prerogative the completion or the ability to move forwards is the important factor. The second are far more critical and fewer in general and they are “Things that need to be done well”.

In my business this differentiation is critical in two ways: firstly, as a small and fast-growing company, we don’t have endless cycles to get things done. We rarely get a second chance at anything and we need to come up with answers before the questions are even apparent, this is just the way it is. With so many activities, actions and pressures on our time we need to work out what to do and what not to do. Even the points we agree on doing need to be prioritised into either just get them finished and out of the way or focus on getting them finished to the best possible degree.

>The second reason this is important to us is that our software solution is based on the premise that we can not only identify where there are capability weaknesses within business processes and operations but also that we can identify which actions should be focused on, how much they will cost and the impact they will have on the revenues and profits. When one first engages with a new company most of us will search for that business out on the web, if they don’t have a website then alarm bells ring. But how many of us actually read through every page or count how many pages they have or looks at how often the news is updated, having a website is certainly an important requirement but, is it one of those tasks that just needs to be done or is it one that has to be done well? This is an extreme example, as quite obviously the better your website is the better the view the world has of the entity behind it and this scenario plays out in all other areas as well.

The answer is often defined by the situation rather than the other way around and boils down to the individual’s preference, ability, availability, external pressures etc.

However, making the right choice and knowing when to change that choice can often make the difference between success and failure in both life and in business. I spent many years of my life trying to improve my handwriting and spelling, I no longer worry about my handwriting prowess or the fact that some days I can’t spell my own name, not because my handwriting or spelling has improved (because they haven’t) but because we now communicate in emails not written letters so no one else even knows I have this weakness and this requirement has moved from needing to be done well into almost irrelevance.