Max: 00:07 How do you scale the 4 d’s in your business? And I’m talking about discussions decisions documentation and defaulting to transparency. Okay. So discussions decisions documentation and defaulting to transparency. Holy Grail of course right now for most organizations especially ones that have gone to a work from home, structure is async communications.
Max: 00:27 If you’ve ever been in a meeting where you’re wondering why you’re in the meeting, that’s probably a good meeting that should have been async. The trick with this I have learned is not necessarily coming in from an approach of finding a better tool or better method. So you’re gonna see things I’ve been reading for years. It’s like use email when blank and use Slack when blank and use text when blank and then use this other tool when blank and it’s usually like if it needs to be a long message, use email. But if it’s a short message, use text.
Max: 00:55 And I had rules for a long time for my team that was like, you know, if you needed me to see something and acknowledge that I saw it, send me a text I can respond with a thumbs up to, you know. But the problem with that, you’re solving, cognitive overhead in terms of, oh, I don’t wanna read email because I get too many emails. So I’m gonna push that over into this other thing instead. But now instead of having one thing, I have 2 things or I have 3 things. In our case, you know, we had email.
Max: 01:21 We had our ticketing system. We had Slack. We had, other messaging tools like WhatsApp and signal. We had text message. We had phone calls.
Max: 01:30 We had Google Docs. We had air table. And you’ll you turn around, you’re looking and say, okay. There’s there’s 8 potential holes homes for this, you know, for information. And and where is the information of this company?
Max: 01:41 It’s actually more than 8, by the way. And I had a little freak out about it and just said, okay. We’re getting rid of all of our tools, and we’re just gonna use Google docs and, and ran for a while from a place of everything that we did was documented, stored, communicated, collaborated, etcetera, in a Google doc. So if we had a, if we had a meeting, the meeting was documented in Google docs. If we had a discussion, it was documented in Google docs.
Max: 02:02 If we had a decision to make, it was in Google Docs. If we had documentation, it was in Google Docs. And and by the way, I forgot the 9th tool there was notion. We had notion and then we still had, some confluence laying around. So and a lot of this just became a kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Max: 02:18 This reaction to just this sprawl and disaster of what was going on. By the way, we’re a small organization. We’re not talking about a 1000 people here. You know? And and looking at this and really thinking about how we were scaling operations and processes and systems in different places was how unwieldy it was really getting.
Max: 02:34 And, the productivity, you know, nerds out there, you know, you’d you’d see people be like, oh, you’re using Notion. You should you should use ClickUp. Or using Notion, you should use Monday. Or you should just Asana. Oh, Asana is gonna solve all your problems.
Max: 02:44 You need to be in Asana. And all all that really does is just introduce another layer of problems. Oh, that was a 10th tool was we had Asana. So the secret is not the use of tools and, the secret is organizing and structuring how you’re approaching things. And Stripe, I think was one of the first ones that really showed how to scale email for the organization and and default to transparency by using mailing lists.
Max: 03:10 Now this worked fine for them up to a few 100 employees and then mailing lists were unmanageable for them going forward. It wasn’t an accurate way of of capturing and and disseminating information to the teams. You just can’t scale it past a certain point. And when we took a step back and really looked at this and started evaluating, the goal becomes, optimizing for speed of retrieval. So not like what is the the type of messaging or the speed of messaging or is the email more efficient than Slack or is Slack more efficient than Asana?
Max: 03:36 And do you do you maintain long formats? And, you know, not to say that I don’t Meyer companies that are maintaining their 1 on ones and their OKRs in Asana but is that it that does that help you? So the the point is, as you design these systems and the tools that you’re using for your for your company default to speed of retrieval. Do you know with absolute certainty when I need information? Where does that information exist within your company?
Max: 04:00 Does it exist in Notion? Does it exist in a Google Doc? Does it exist in Airtable? Does it exist? I’m in we can as in Asana, is it here?
Max: 04:07 Is it here? Is it here? There is there’s there’s great foundational work that you can use on this one to really build this out. And the and the best example of it really becomes defaulting the type of information into different places. And really, you should have a tool and tooling for external communication.
Max: 04:25 So if you’re interacting externally to your company, where does that information live? So if you’re interacting with vendors or customers or trading partners or or whatever, what do you use for that? Well, I guarantee you you’re gonna be using email for that. It’s gonna be phone call, it’s gonna be email, and that’s what you’re gonna use. You can put that in email or you can use an overlay to email like a front or, you know, there’s there’s, you know, there’s a few different popular front type tools that overlay on top of Gmail.
Max: 04:51 Or you can do what we did, which is you can just integrate everything on top of your CRM. So anything that is work related and externally related goes into and lives in our CRM, including emails, personal emails in and out, and tickets, customer conversations, distribution lists, etcetera. It all lives in our CRM. Now the next step that we have to take with this is we’re going to take and put, SMS messaging and then integrate that into a CRM as well. So anything that’s externally is gonna live in the CRM.
Max: 05:18 And if you need to find something that occurred with a vendor or with a customer, it’s gonna go look at the CRM and pull it out of the CRM. Okay. External done. So now you need a tool for internal. You need an internal communication tool and you need an internal work tool and then you probably need an internal documentation tool.
Max: 05:31 Okay? So you’re at a place where you need 4 tools and this actually goes with the 4 t’s. Right? So the idea there is have a communication tool that is an internal communication tool that can be scaled and can be searched and can be persistent and can produce healthy habits. Now a lot of companies will default to a chat tool.
Max: 05:50 They’ll use Slack or they use Microsoft Teams and we can get into an argument about whether or not that is a good tool to use or if that’s a good, pattern to get into for your company. Is Slack actually a good pattern? The problem with Slack, of course, becomes retrieval and discussion and intentionality and the ability for people to use a sync. And you have to default on disable a lot of defaults because it’s gonna bring at you all the time. And you need to be able to go back and then look at it.
Max: 06:14 And I’m, you know, I’ve seen notes from people where they’re like, oh, we’re using this add on tool on top of Slack to do AI summarization so I can see what messages were actually happening and I can figure out what conversations I wanna jump into. I would caution you that the moment you start looking at adding another tool on top of an existing tool to solve the to solve a pattern with the base tool you probably don’t have the right base tool in place and you might want to look at different tool. But so the idea with your communication is you wanna be able to have discussions internally. You wanna be able to have, ad hoc conversations. You wanna be able to have community building conversations.
Max: 06:49 You wanna be able to have people just, you know, you know, just chat with each other and and post cat memes or whatever. And you wanna be able to take and then elevate and say, okay, we’ve gone from a discussion to now we’ve gone to work. Right? And so work is project and tasks, and something actually has to be accomplished. So you need to move from a discussion and you need to move into work.
Max: 07:07 And work has an output. Right? You have a defined input, you have transformation, you have output. And the first time you do it, you don’t you maybe know what your input is and you kinda have an idea of what your output is but you don’t really know what the actual, process is for the transformation. And then you start talking about how do you actually create the documentation around that so you should do it.
Max: 07:25 What we’ve done and what we’ve gotten into is we’ve gotten to a really simplistic system where we have a Google sheet. I kid you not a Google sheet, our our AORs. So it’s areas of responsibility. So I’ve got an AOR sheet, lists every functional department within the business, and then lists an outcome, a process task outcome, has a trigger for it. Like, when does this occur?
Max: 07:44 Who’s the primary person responsible for this? Who’s the backup person responsible for it? And what is the link to the documentation? And that link to documentation is a link to a Google doc now there’s a general we’ve created a general handbook so we have a guide that’s a Google doc and the default documentation now is everything goes into this handbook and it goes into that handbook until it becomes a discreet process that has ownership by somebody. And when it has ownership by somebody or a functional area, then it then gets elevated into a specific standalone doc with a link to it from an aor.
Max: 08:15 And the idea behind all of this is to be constricted in terms of how stuff can be recorded and saved. You know, notion for instance you can create pages and subpages and workspaces and areas in a database and a database can actually have content inside of it or the database can then link to another page and you end up looking at a situation where you can have information everywhere and that was my problem with notion which is not having a real clear definition of of how things got saved and and and realizing and finding out that in many cases we had information in triplicate and you didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t right so my freak out and our fix for that was just to go to Google Docs. Right? So it’s searchable. Google Drive has a really good search engine built into it.
Max: 08:52 Do anything specific. You open up your Google Drive and you can search and you can find stuff pretty efficiently, and of course, in conjunction with the AORs with details of what’s going on. So you need a a collaboration and communication tool, right, that allows you to do asynchronous long form messages. You need to be able to do chat. You need to be able to elevate work to a project or to ta or to do’s tasks.
Max: 09:13 You need to be able to track that, you need to be able to produce documentation, you need to be able to do, and trigger AORs. So I don’t care what you use. You can use ClickUp. You can use monday. You can use Notion.
Max: 09:22 You can use, you know, Google Docs like what we did. You can use drive. You can use base camp. There is a there are more tools available to you out there in the world, that you can use, that you could possibly even dream of. And there’s probably, like, 5 created in time that I recorded this video to when it’s gonna be posted.
Max: 09:38 The point there is if you fall into the trap of thinking about this in terms of, like, oh, I have too much email and I want you to email me these things, but I want you to Slack me these things, and I want you to text me this other stuff, and I want you to call me on these things. You’re fall you’re you’re you’re going down the wrong path, and I know this from experience. And you wanna take a stop, and you wanna pause, and you wanna back up a few paces, and you wanna look at it. You wanna say, what information do we need to capture? How quickly can we retrieve that information?
Max: 10:01 And, are we managing this in a in a in a scalable way? And, and again, why are we optimizing for speed of retrieval? We’re optimizing for speed of retrieval because when somebody needs to do work, when they need to find information, when you have a customer that calls you and says, I need this, or I’m having trouble with this or help me with this or how do I do this or you have a vendor that calls and says you know we have an issue with this order or you have you know whatever it actually is that person that receives that phone call that email that chat that text that a ticket, whatever it is that’s coming into your company with needs to be able to very quickly be able to open up to find let me let’s actually back up. They need to be able to very quickly find, what it is that they need, and they need to be able to apply it efficiently. Right?
Max: 10:45 So now, you know, if Bob is the person that normally does this and Bob’s out of the office and has to go to Sally instead, can Sally very quickly jump in and take care of this for Bob while Bob’s gone? If you as the business owner or founder or CEO or fill in the blank title, wanna go on vacation and have a real vacation where people can’t call you and you have to email every morning. You need to have a process in place where people can actually do what needs to be done while you’re gone. So this is all about, again, optimizing and scaling the four d’s in your business, discussions decisions documentation and defaulting a transparency and don’t get tied up with the what tool are we using take a step back and really think about it in terms of can we find and do the work that we need to do in an efficient way and if not do we need to design our systems a little bit differently I’m max Clark that’s a quick thought
