Use Pain Mapping to Focus Your Priorities
Photo courtesy of Daria Nepriakhina on UnSplash
Hey Founder,
I understand you’re having a little trouble with your prioritization. Not knowing what is most important—right now—is one of the most maddening challenges founders and their adolescent companies face. As Patrick Lencioni has written, having too many top priorities gives none of them a reasonable chance of getting the attention and resources it merits.
Doesn't ring a bell, you say? What if I were to add that as a result of this over-under-prioritization, you have found yourself spinning your wheels as your siloed departments came to realize they had to solve their problems on their own, even when doing so put them at cross-purposes with each other?
Don’t even think of denying it. I’ve experienced this phenomenon first-hand and, out of necessity, devised an exercise to engage my entire team in prioritizing our objectives and aligning behind them.
I call it “pain mapping.” And it works.
At one of my former companies where quality and service were the key attributes of our premium brand, we used a “supply chain pain map” to analyze our strengths and weaknesses at every step of converting an order into cash.
To create the map, we used a full-day retreat where we surrounded ourselves with whiteboards and mapped every one of our operational processes: from procurement of our ingredients at the farm level, to manufacturing, packaging and shipping. Each process, no matter how big or small, had a box around it. We used arrows to indicate mini processes within and between bigger ones.
Then, each team leader was invited to go up to the boards and draw an “X” beside a box that represented a problem: big “X” for big problems and little “x” for lesser ones. In addition, we included a dollar figure or “cost” or other relevant datapoint along with the “X.”
I don’t know how many whiteboards we filled with comments like, “This process is a bottleneck and it’s costing us such-and-such.”
It usually took a few hours to draw a complete map. Then, we broke for lunch.
In the afternoon, we returned to the map and started talking about it, knowing that our task for this part of the exercise was to reduce 10 to 20 pain points of various sizes to two or at most three main priorities to work on during the next quarter.
In addition to helping us make better decisions, assessing our internal strengths and weaknesses kept our departments rowing in the same direction. The more data you have, and the more real the pain points, the better the conversation and problem solving you can have.
The biggest benefit of this exercise is the alignment it drives across departments and functions. The final step was to ask each person in the room for their commitment to the new corporate priorities. They had to verbalize their support. This was huge for reducing politics and conflict as we were all aligned behind the right focus.
If I were a new CEO at a company or the founder-president of a growing business, I’d ask, “Where’s our data on our consumers and our industry?” After getting this data, I’d lock us in a room and do this exercise of pain mapping. It’s a critical tool for knowing yourself and doing what’s most important.
How do you ensure your entire company is focused and aligned on what’s most important? If you want to compare notes, ScalePassion is here for you.
Sincerely,
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