The Four Whys
Paul DiModica in his book “Value Forward Selling” (pages 26-27) outlines the three (3) whys that anything is done in an organization:
- Increase Income
- Decrease Expenses
- Manage Business Risks
In the Flow Leadership Framework, we added a fourth item to Paul’s list:
- Do the right thing
Some people will argue that the fourth one should be put first. I understand that view. However, I chose to put these in the order of ease of measuring. Measuring both Risks and Doing The Right Thing are more difficult because they are more subjective and abstract than measuring real numbers.
If there is no profit, it is not sustainable.
We also updated income to revenue and expenses to costs to reflect the Four (4) Whys in Flow:
If your personal “why” is not linked to your team, product and/or organization, then you need to do some deep soul searching.
This disconnect is one of the key reasons that we see between 64% (US) to 85% (Globally) of team members that are either disengaged or actively disengaged at work. Between 14% and 18% are actively working against (sabotaging) the organization’s Vision, Mission and Purpose. No organization can afford to have pools of poison this large and expect to survive!
People need to shift their mindset and think about how they, personally, are contributing to the “Why” of your organization. If your value-add doesn’t exceed your cost, by multiples, no organization will keep you around for long … you’re dead weight. That’s a brutal, but necessary, fact to understand.
In this post we show how these four whys link directly to Purpose, which is one part of Flow’s definition of Culture (third on this list):
As shared in an earlier post, the $223+ million performance delivered by the teams using Flow has been carefully documented for 26+ years:
If you’re not using Flow, why?
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PS Here are the associated links to this blog post for:
#culture #scrum #agile #pmi #pmp #kanban #lean #flow #scaledagile #transformation #change #transform