Learning Through Experiences

For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about finding improvement opportunities and discerning what to put our efforts in. This week I want to share a few thoughts about building our company’s intelligence through TCUP (Thinking Correctly Under Pressure). Its purpose is to improve our performance – to prepare us for situations we expect to face.

Improving our company’s intelligence has been a large part of our maturation process. The move from having a couple of people with all of the answers to building a team deploying our core values daily is transforming our company.

Intelligence has a couple of basic places where it shows itself – our business processes, our team, and our reference tools. Keeping this in mind helps explain why so much of what we do we want people to “experience” certain situations. Recently the sales team was charged with finding ideas on how to market the company – what key words should we use, what are KPI’s different departments should use, amongst others.

Having them go through this exercise has helped us improve our process, as it showed that the sales team to be responsible for developing their project explanation sheets. It also showed the need of operations and sales to work together to develop these reference sheets that support our pursuit of revenue growth. And finally, having the sales team explore these ideas helped them look at the business from a different perspective.

The end result is we have an improved process, stronger reference tools, and a team of people with a deeper understanding of our business and our industry.

So as exercises and situations head your way, please consider how you can move to simpler processes, run by a smarter team, supported with more relevant reference tools. The situation provides the experience. You all build the intelligence.