Trading curiosity for consistency

One of the most influential books I ever read was Michael E. Gerbers’s E-Myth Revised, where he introduced the concept of “Working on the business, not in the business”. This is a very powerful concept that talks about how building systems helps liberate business owners from being stuck in the hamster wheel of day-to-day work. 

Remembering how challenging it was for my parents to run their businesses without such systems made me go all in and obsessively work on building systems out of every aspect of the work I was doing.  

And I can tell you that the book held up to its promise. Soon, with the help of a wonderful team, I could free myself up from the day-to-day work of running the business and could apply myself to where I’m strongest.   

However, with 15 years of experience building SwingStep GmbH, there are very important aspects of systems building that I will do differently with MergeLabs GmbH that I want to share with you here. 

If you keep reading, you’ll learn:

• How to avoid trading curiosity for consistency when your team works within systems
• When the system builders move on (and they will), and system users are the only ones left, your organization stagnates. 
• Why early employee onboarding should focus more on mindset than skills.
• Three things I will do differently when building systems and developing teams today

Part 1: How I Think About The Tradeoffs

My professional life has been driven by a singular “why”: helping more people experience “Enriched Environments” — those rich, stimulating moments that leave us feeling joyful and recharged. SwingStep GmbH is a dance company founded with the mission of making Lindy Hop accessible to more people so more people could enjoy enriched environments. 

My strategy was to make dance more accessible to more people by reducing the hurdles of providing high-quality experiences. A major challenge for scale was that it takes almost a decade for someone to become so good that most people joining a class will have a great experience. To achieve my goal of having more people experience enriched environments, I needed to dramatically reduce the time it took for someone to be able to deliver high-quality experiences. So I did two things I believe were not common in our industry: I hired dancers as full-time employees so they could have the time needed to concentrate on crafting amazing experiences, and I tried to systematize all aspects of the pedagogy, choices, and delivery of the in-class experience to guarantee a quality outcome. 

So, where did this go wrong?  

Well, to be honest, when it comes to the original goal of having very inexperienced dancers consistently deliver high-quality classes that our students loved, we achieved that goal. With only 3-4 months of training, a dancer could teach a class that consistently had higher retention rates than what most dance schools could produce. This was very exciting to see and a powerful prerequisite for the business to succeed. 

However, over time, we noticed another unintentional consequence. Our systems did not nurture exploration and curiosity about many other aspects of the dance. Many of our teachers were understandably focused on mastering the program, and as a result, there was less room for self-directed discovery, independent research, and creative expression.

How the story of SwingStep evolved, I’ll leave for another time, but here is what I think you can take with you for your organization, no matter the industry you are in: 

If you ever feel frustrated that your team only does things after you give them detailed instructions, or there is constant firefighting going on, and no one seems to pause for a moment to see what is causing them in the first place, these might be indications that you’ve fallen into the same trap.

If you ever find yourself thinking that your employees or team members should be more independent, think outside the box, or anticipate what’s coming rather than just reacting to what’s in front of them — it’s very likely that the systems in your organization haven’t supported those qualities.

Part 2: What happens to the systems when the system builders move on?

Here’s a dilemma we faced as a system-building organization: 

Let’s set the scene. Imagine yourself in the following situation: 

1. You do the work and learn everything about it.
2. Following the “work on the business, not in the business” approach, you begin to build systems around the work you’ve mastered.
3. You train someone to run that system, and they take over.
4. You move on to the next area of the business that needs a system.

Over time, a pattern emerges:

• You get better and better at building systems.
• Your team gets better and better at following systems.
• You become worse at following systems (because you’re rarely inside them anymore).
• Your team becomes increasingly dependent on you (or others) to create or change systems.

Eventually, you’ve moved so far away from the day-to-day work that you lose the context needed to effectively update or evolve the systems you created. Meanwhile, the organization continues to grow. The industry changes and new technologies emerge. But the old systems — built for a smaller, different version of the organization — remain in place.

The team members who now run those systems weren’t trained to build them and haven’t been developing the skills to question or redesign them. And the people who do know how to build systems are off working on new projects, too far removed from the current reality to make meaningful updates without causing more stress to those who do the day-to-day work.

So, the systems begin to stagnate.

And now, baked into your organization are layers of outdated processes that no one feels responsible for — because, at some point, someone in authority said, “This works,” and that decision froze in time.

This is the hidden cost of not designing for system evolution and not grooming system thinkers within your team along the way.

Part 3: The Unspoken Agreements

At its core, I classify SwingStep’s core competency as a “teaching company for adults.” Most likely because I have such a strong passion for teaching.

I believe this to be true when teaching adults: Adults only learn when they want to and concentrate on it for a prolonged period of time. 

This means that as an organization, you must set up an environment and process that increases the chance that your employees will want what you want for a long period of time. Everything matters: the experience people have with the organization, the onboarding processes, and what you nurture on an ongoing basis. 

For an organization to function properly, all vectors must be aligned. When each employee wishes to direct their vectors in a different direction without regard to the organization’s, the organization experiences massive friction or even ceases to exist. 

The counterintuitive lesson I learned about teaching adults: 

This is an important concept to understand to avoid misaligned vectors, so I recommend you keep reading.  

When most people teach adults new skills, they tend to look at the skills the person currently has and think about what can be the next achievable skills to introduce to them. Then, they design the next suitable skill and work themselves through a full curriculum step by step. And, because the teacher’s desire is probably not to overwhelm the student, the lessons are chunked in small, easy-to-understand sections. So, where is the problem? 

This approach does not focus on the long-term contract that is both consciously and unconsciously established between the organization and the individual. 

When someone enters a new environment, such as a new job in a new organization, this is often the period where they are most receptive to impressions. Their minds are much more open towards learning how one should behave and think in order to fit in, be accepted, do a good job, and contribute positively towards the goals of the organization. 

If the organization does not deliberately design consistent answers to these questions, you’ll have randomly formed answers that people pick up from various experiences they have with the individuals they encounter and the things they see and hear around them in the organization. 

This is one major reason I believe culture and core values are so important to get right in a company. They increase the chance that new employees pick up the same cues about how one can thrive within the organization. 

But here comes the main point: 

It is primarily within your employees’ first couple of months where all these agreements are being established, wether you want it or not.

This one is hard to fathom:

Once this contract is set, it is the individual that defines what the ongoing experience should be like not the organization. This is where so much of the friction comes from.

The experience has set the impression of what your employees can and should expect of you and what they believe you should do in order for them to thrive.

If your onboarding program is about them learning the existing systems, then that is also the long-term agreement. This means that these people are groomed to work in the systems, not developing them. And they will make increased demands on there to be systems and clear instructions at every step of the way. And if something is not working, it is your responsibility to make sure it is there rather than joining you in developing and making improvements. 

But what is important to understand is that we create this expectation and behaviour ourselves when designing the employee on boarding process. 

A principle I used to care a lot about was that I requested my team to first make sure they’ve learned the systems and the concepts I’ve developed, before they start tweaking and changing. I mean, how can the know what to change before they’ve learned it and understood why it’s there in the first place? Right?!

Unfortunately, this also means that my team would spend a very long period of time, perhaps even years, developing their learning skills within my systems and thus learning to expect such systems in the future. The unconscious agreement was exactly this, and not “when you see a problem, see if you can help solve the root cause.” 

Here is the challenge you need to solve for:

In my experience, it only takes two to three months for an individual to start forming this mental agreement about how the ongoing experience should be. You really don’t have the time you think you have to have people first learn skills to the level you need them, before asking them to contribute with the same mindset as you wish of them long-term.

So on one hand, new employees are not skilled and ready to make the kind of contribution you’d expect from them long-term. But on the other hand, if you wait more than a couple of months before they start making that kind of contribution, it will be really hard to get them on board when that time comes.

So what do we do about it?

Three Things I Do Differently When Building Systems and Developing Teams Today:

I still believe that every organization needs to build systems to thrive. Without them, business owners feel trapped in their own businesses because nothing works without them. 

But you also don’t want to turn all your employees into robots that follow systems blindly. I mean, if this is what you need, you’ll probably be able to get it soon. 

Let me share how I’m going about it in three distinct areas: 

Personality: 

There is this important adage: “Work to your strengths and manage your weaknesses.” I learned this by reading Marcus Buckingham’s books, and I follow it to this day.

There are people throughout the entire spectrum of “those who only thrive within existing systems” and “individuals who only thrive when they get to build the systems” but can’t operate within them themselves – and everything in between. 

A healthy organization recognizes what stage they are in, and what strengths they need to nurture to help them get to the next stage.  

A young startup very likely needs to start with people much more tilted towards the “system builder” side of the spectrum, but gradually need more and more people who are distributed alongside the “system working” side of the spectrum to have the organization function in a smooth way, and have the backs of the system builders, and their plates free from the demands of the day-to-day operations. 

However, as the organization grows further and the system builders move further away from the day-to-day processes or departments, you also need people in between. People who are comfortable with working in systems but also have a tilt towards helping make improvements and driving change when needed.

Strategy: 

When building systems, consider building systems that empower your people to be faster rather than being “error-free”. What I mean by this is to avoid providing follow-along templates that basically allow the individual to go through the motions without really thinking and understanding the reason behind it. Basically, whenever you aim to guarantee a certain outcome, you should take that as a warning that you might be painting yourself into a corner. We get tempted to believe that we can guarantee a desired outcome by having people go through certain motions. Well, actually, you will be able to guarantee a certain degree of outcome, but only until it stops working and those with the most experience are no longer able to fix it. 

Rather, build the tools needed to help the person achieve more in less time. Then, invest the time gained in training and developing mastery of the role and the tools. 

Onboarding: 

When designing your onboarding process and early employee training, design primarily for mindset rather than skill. Skill training can and should be included, but only as a vehicle to set the conscious and unconscious contract between you and the new employee rather than purely what skills they need to do a good job they are being hired for. 

Design micro-experiences that take them through the entire flow of “learn what’s built”, “apply what’s built”, and “improve what’s built” within the first two months. Any mindset that is important for the ongoing work and success of the individual inside your organization needs to be at least planted as a seed so that there is something to water and nurture over time. We are not aiming for expert-level execution, that will come with time.

There is a lot within this to unpack, so let me know what you would like to hear more about or reach out for a digital coffee. I love this topic and can geek over it for hours.

My next article will be about the trust-building infrastructure that needs to be in place for system-building to work, so consider bookmarking this website or connecting on any of the social media channels to receive notifications when the next post is up.

Thank you for reading this article.

Ali Taghavi

#systems #onboarding #productivity