BUSINESS AS AN ORGANISM

"The value of any week is not limited to what we do in it; it's also in what we learn from it and become as a result of it. For this reason, no week's experience would be complete without some kind of evaluation that enables us to process it."

- Stephen R. Covey, First Things First

Our physical bodies are the systems we have the most intimate knowledge about. As an organism, at maturity, we reach a steady-state - this isn't a fixed state, but rather a tendency or disposition. This steady-state is under the influence of what you do, i.e. your environment, eating habits, exercise habits, etc. The collection of all these inputs in our bodies leads to a state of either health or disease. There is no way around this, every input has an effect/consequence, whether we are aware of it or not.

This description is a simplified explanation of our human condition most of us would agree with. Luckily, most of us have a pretty good idea of what we must do to create the state of health we most desire. At any rate, the necessary resources to attain a state of health are available to us all.

Have you ever thought of business as an organism akin to our bodies? The similarities they share? After all, businesses are dynamic are they not? Every action a business takes through their employees has a effect/consequence - that leads to a steady-state we could call healthy or diseased. Or, more specifically, if we're using business terminology - profitable or bankrupt, gaining or losing market share, etc...

The more I've thought about this analogy, the more I feel that it is a very effective model to use while analyzing your business. Let me unpack this useful insight a bit.

One of the most challenging acts of a business is to maximize productivity or see where productivity loss is occurring. Specifically, the ability to clearly view current processes and properly assess the cost of doing business as-is. Once companies have reached a steady-state, all sorts of blind spots manifest. Instances of what Donald Rumsfeld would call "the unknown unknowns," lurk within companies (like a disease) to slowly siphon productivity away - leading to costs that become part of the accepted steady state, until after due time some blow-up or fire occurs.

To go back to the analogy of our own selves, this scenario would be like us consuming high-sugar or processed foods without knowing that they are leading to insulin resistance and chronic body inflammation. For a while it's our steady-state, and we do it mindlessly - not knowing that every mac & cheese bowl we eat is leading us down a road to a highly probable long-term diseased state.

What we do to combat this scenario is to learn - either by our own self-education or reaching out to experts that have a broader knowledge base to guide us to achieving a healthy state we desire.

Similarly, businesses need to become highly-efficient introspective learning organizations, and regularly proactively seek expert review of internal processes, procedures, and systems to ensure that the current 'steady-state' isn't unwittingly hemorrhaging money down the drain. Or worse, leading to a potential blow-up.

By creating a regular assessment of your business system you can continuously improve productivity and ensure that you are taking advantages of things such as technology and best (or better) practices for business health. More importantly this type of internal audit process acts as a risk management tool or an insurance process against business failure. Challenging the status quo thus becomes a best practice in and of itself.