I’m sure you’ve met them. The consultants in the fancy suits. The ones armed with the 50 page PowerPoint deck that they have billed you a week of time to produce. They open their mouths and suddenly you’re left questioning your own understanding of the English language.
Are those real words?
The great physicist Feynman once said, “If you can’t explain something in really simple terms you don’t understand it well enough”. What he meant was simple. It is easy to be able to read the terms and recite them. It’s entirely another thing to have the experience to really understand them.
Here are a few common ones from our industry:
Lean: This is just getting rid of stuff you don’t need that takes up time, space and ultimately costs you money. It means making sure if you need something to do a job, it is right where you need it rather than having to search for it.
Six Sigma: This is just about making processes as consistent as they can be. Every process has some variation. The aim of six sigma is to reduce that if possible.
Agile: (one of my favourite misused terms!): Simply put, this means allocating the right people to a project at the time they are needed to focus on getting to an acceptable (not necessarily perfect) product in a short time so you can make decisions on whether to spend more time and money on it. (Not one pig or chicken was harmed in this explanation…)
All of this without one PowerPoint slide!
Before you go and spend your money on bringing in someone to help you look beyond the pieces of paper that you can get from just a classroom or online. Make sure the people you trust with your business have real experience and can explain to you what they plan to do, why they think it will create value, and do it in a straightforward way that makes sense to everyone.
It’s easy to get the pieces of paper; we could wallpaper our office with the ones our team have collected over the years!
It takes years of experience in real work using those lessons that create value for customers.
