CHAPTER 2 Understanding Businesses: The Business Triangle

      If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

      —W. Edwards Deming

      What is a business? And what does it mean to be in business together?

Sometimes in workshops, I lead a simple exercise: I ask people to jot down on a piece of paper their best definition of a business. It's revealing. The answers that people give tend to be strongly influenced by the roles that they play in the company. So, for example, a marketing person might say “a business is a system for winning in the marketplace,” whereas a product designer might say “a business is an engine for innovation.” People naturally tend to be focused on the deliverables, metrics, and priorities that are their responsibilities. As a result, to borrow an oft-used phrase coined by Michael Gerber, they're used to working in the business but they're unable to work on the business—because they can't even see the business as a whole. Too often, team members don't have a clear picture of the relationships between different aspects of the business and the way they all fit together. In their minds, it is as if the organization is just a big collection of people with different jobs, all working alongside each other—a giant blob of activity and intersecting objectives.

      That's not really a helpful way to think. Organizations may be social systems, but in a business context, they're more than just communities of people. A business organization exists for a purpose: to create value for customers. That's what connects the people in the organization and the activities they enact. But when I ask people to describe that overall value creation process—the shared work they are in together with their team and their organization—too often, they come up short. If the people working in a business do not have a shared definition and model of what a business is, is it any wonder that they struggle to align as they go about doing their jobs?

      Unless we can visualize our shared work, it is inevitable that we will fall into difficult decision-making, unhelpful politics, unclear roles, redundancies, and inefficiencies. And unless we have a common way to understand the business we're in, we can't work on, improve, optimize, and grow that business together.

The Importance of Visualizing Shared Work

      If you work in a manufacturing context—in a production line, for example—it may not be that difficult to visualize the shared work of the team or company. You may be responsible for just one step in the process, but the production line itself is a physical representation of all the stages through which the work flows, and the order in which it must be enacted. You wouldn't try to pick up a widget from one end of the assembly line and move it somewhere else, and you're not worried that someone further down the line is going to start trying to do your job.

These days, however, most people don't work in production lines. In today's flat digital work world, most of us are “knowledge workers,” a term coined in 1959 by business writer and consultant Peter Drucker to refer to any person whose job involves handling or using information. According to research firm Gartner, there are now more than a billion knowledge workers globally.¹ And the core challenge for the knowledge worker is finding a way to optimize and streamline their shared work when the processes and products of that work are no longer physical objects being moved from one place to another. So much confusion in organizations comes down to these issues. Things fall through the cracks because no one feels responsible for them. Two people realize they're both doing the same thing. This person isn't talking to that person. No one knows who has the authority to make certain decisions. Or too many people have the authority to make certain decisions. Leaders try to move people around or redesign their org charts to fix these problems, but they don't really drill down to see the system or process that underlie those human roles, responsibilities, and relationships. That system is the business, and unless we get clarity on the business, our best attempts to organize around it will still be scattershot. As Drucker pointed out, in order to be productive and effective, teams engaged in knowledge work must invest the time and resources to visualize shared processes and ways of working, because how else will they be able to easily plan, start, stop, track, troubleshoot, and optimize shared work together?

The challenge of visualizing business processes has preoccupied some of the brightest minds over the past century, and you're probably familiar with concepts like value chains, value streams, Lean, Six Sigma, and so on. All these systems—which represented breakthroughs in management and organizational development—are approaches to mapping and optimizing business processes and workflows. However, many of them come out of a mechanistic, manufacturing mindset. They're top-down methods that a leader or consultant can apply to a system to reduce inefficiencies and increase throughput, but they're not really designed for a knowledge work environment in which team members need to be actively, ongoingly engaged in negotiating and optimizing their shared work. They describe a business workflow, but not the set of relationships and the nature of the relationships that have to be enacted for that workflow to happen smoothly. That's the question that preoccupied me, from my early days as a consultant. Even with my limited experience at that time, I could begin to see how the lack of shared clarity on what people were “in together” caused numerous problems. I was wrestling with this conundrum when I showed up for a consulting engagement one day—and stumbled upon an insight that would lead me to an answer so elegant that it became a staple of my own work and a foundational element of Growth River for well over a decade now. The story of how I came to it is worth sharing, since it highlights important distinctions. It all started out with the sides of a conference table.

The Business Triangle

      I was working with a small business that day, trying to help them understand their workflow so they could get more clarity about who was doing what and how they needed to work together. After discussing their issues for much of the day, it occurred to me that it might help to give them a visual experience of their workflow. The first image that came to mind was the one right in front of me: the conference table. I went around the table and explained each person's respective place in the workflow, from developing their product to delivering it to the customer. The scientist was critical to developing the product but had little interaction with the customer; the salesperson was down the line a bit, ensuring that relationships with customers were value-based and effective; the operations person was further downstream; and on and on. I showed how their business flowed around the table, from role to role, through these various activities. Each was essential and each played a different part.

That session was helpful, and it inspired me to think more deeply about what it means to be in a business together. My conference table brainstorm helped to clarify some of the confusion about roles in the company and it set me on the path to capturing the ways of working that made up that dynamic business system. I asked myself: Is the flow I'm seeing specific to this company? Or is it something more universal? After all, every business had a product or service—be it software, hardware, clothing, food, energy, entertainment, education, and so on. They all have to develop, sell, and deliver that product or service. They each have to manage processes through those sets of activities to deliver value