The other day I read Mr. Sun Bo's book "Best Practices Extraction", a very thin book, but after reading it, I had a feeling of enlightenment. The book puts forward a simple and clear framework to organize the best practice extraction process, which is highly operable.
The so-called Best Practice, or experience extraction, refers to the process of extracting the hidden experience of experts within a company, and structuring it in such a way that it becomes something that newbies can learn.
The book gives the example of a senior airline terminal duty manager who has a lot of experience in dealing with passenger complaints during large delays, and is able to turn big problems into small problems; while ordinary counter staff often don't know how to deal with angry passengers, and as a result, things get bigger and bigger. Therefore, airlines want to extract the manager's valuable experience, so that all front-line employees can learn, there will be great value.
Why specialize in "extraction techniques"? It's because often the experts know how to do it, but they can't say it clearly or don't say it to the point, and even some of the experience has become part of his instincts to "hide" it. Therefore, how to set extraction goals, so that experts actively participate in the important hidden experience to ask, and finally organize these contents into a convenient tool to use, is what this book to say.
Mr. Sun mentioned that many charts and graphs would be used in the final structured presentation, and that during interviews, some experts were so engaged that they would write and draw on the whiteboard themselves, but there is no picture reference in the book.
So what are some of the sessions where visualization can be used? Here are some examples.
Clarifying business requirements, using the Business Model Canvas and Impact Map
The first step in extracting a project is to figure out what the business pain points and requirements are. Sometimes, as in the airline example above, it's clear what the needs are, so it's straightforward to find out which expert to ask what; otherwise, you might have to talk to the business leaders to figure out their challenges and needs, and the book lists some questions, such as:
What's the profitability model of our business unit? How do we make money?
What are our business goals for our division this year? (quantitative and qualitative descriptions)
What are the factors you can perceive that are detrimental to reaching the business goals, internally, externally, superficially, underneath, operationally, resourcefully, talent-wise, etc.?
Many of these issues can be reflected in the Business Model Canvas, but the point is how you use the canvas to discuss them, not just fill it in.
An example (I'm making this up): my friend Lao Chen owns a Cantonese restaurant, and of course he wants to boost revenue and reduce costs. Let's look at the canvas of his business model. Of course the restaurant makes money by selling food and drinks to customers, and the value proposition might be something like "we want to provide good, inexpensive Cantonese food", which is probably nothing special.
But if you think along the lines of the third question above, this table can help you gain insight into some of the issues, such as: in the Revenue Sources column, if we break down the restaurant's different revenue items, we'll find that the proportion of "Kitchen (stir-fry)" is more than 70%, "Siu-mei (cold cuts)" about 20%, "Siu-mei (cold cuts)" about 20%, and "Siu-mei (cold cuts)" about 20%. (cold dishes) is about 20%, and less than 10% in the liquor department"; liquor revenue is an important source of profit for the restaurant, and it needs more than 30% to be profitable. This may be a point of opportunity for improvement.
In the cost structure, because Lao Chen's restaurant emphasizes the real material, the cost of ingredients is more than 30%, and because the number of repeated servings is not high, resulting in the cost of food waste can not be amortized. Here is another point of opportunity.
Another example is that the Chinese restaurant is very dependent on the skills of the chef, the master chef can obviously make the quality of attracting customers to come back, so it can be said that the restaurant is the key resource, but it is easy to bully and arrogance, the management of a certain degree of difficulty. This is also a point of opportunity.
So the consultant has to help Chen find a place where he can make an impact. This time you can use the influence map to do some screening. Not all problems can be solved through experience extraction, which is only suitable for those known problems, and the solution is relatively stable and replicable. The book proposes several situations that are most suitable for extraction:
The core talent of the enterprise has a high turnover rate
Some specific positions in the enterprise need to replicate the talent in bulk
The composition of the enterprise's personnel is different, and there is a gap in the background (the need to quickly learn from each other and integration)
The enterprise is the industry benchmark, and wants to build the industry standard
The above three problems, in order to increase the revenue of the liquor industry, the company has a lot to do, but it is not a good idea. The problem, to enhance the income of liquor, can be through the package bundled sales, can be discounted promotions, but also through the extraction of the experience of the store manager (sales promotion experts), so that ordinary waiters also learn how to sell liquor in the guest order time.
As for the problem of wasted ingredients, it is necessary for Chen to work with the chef to improve the menu, which is not something that can be done with experience extraction.
Finally, the management of the master chef, perhaps Lao Chen can learn some communication methods, more likely to find a few more spare tires, or with equity, dividends to the master chef bound. These are not what experience extraction can do.
2.? Depicting the scene map, using affinity diagrams or mind maps
Half a day's discussion with Lao Chen, finally sorted out where their needs are, and then pick a work task that is suitable for expert experience extraction, the next step is to Clarify the scene in which this work task occurs . According to the book "characters", "channels" and "activities" these dimensions - these dimensions are just a starting point, not a requirement.
During their discussion, they also found that the store manager not only knows how to sell drinks, but also advises customers on how to mix and match dishes, for example, if four people are dining, what cold and hot dishes to order, and what tastes good. What cold dishes, hot dishes, flavor / texture combinations, and will not let the customer feel that he is hard to push the high-priced dishes, on the contrary, the ordinary waiter in the order will only be frozen there to ask three, so this is a worthwhile and suitable for experience extraction work task.
3. In the extraction process, the flexible use of "process", "relationship" and "contrast" three kinds of diagrams
Clearly the business needs, depicting the scene of the work task, it is possible to enter the extraction process. The book proposes three main practices: reading experts' working documents, personal interviews, and expert workshops.
The interview is the most important approach, because what we want to extract is the hidden experience of the expert, especially the cognitive steps of how he receives information, thinks, and makes decisions when he is doing a certain task, which can only be obtained through face-to-face communication.
An expert workshop is more suitable for the same type of task, where there are many different experts in the organization, and the workshop format allows them to collide on the best practices.
The book proposes a SPAS framework:
a.? The first step in the extraction process is to listen to the experts share stories , for example: in the old Chen's restaurant, we interviewed the store manager Aqiang, first let him say some of the ordering process often encountered problems, so that he first warm-up, and then bring the interview to the specific ordering of his unique experience. It's helpful to record key points on the whiteboard at this time, roughly following the "story curve" to record, in particular, to catch those difficult problems, places of conflict, which can bring out the hidden experience of the expert, and to pay attention to the original set of scenarios related to .
If a team is summarizing its experience, it's good practice to use History Mapping. It's a good idea to do this with the diagram in front of you, talking about it as you draw it, so that you can stimulate associations.
b. From the beginning of listening to the story, the consultant should know how to summarize for the expert, and gradually pieced together the expert in a scenario of the operation process, here is very much like the "user story map", because the expert may be talking about an approximate stage, but also may be talking about a specific step, so through the map on the movement of the height of the sticky note, you can reflect this hierarchical difference. So by moving the sticky notes around on the map, you can reflect this hierarchical difference.
c. When a scenario is about to be extracted, the consultant needs to review the validity of the extracted content, not enough to be supplemented by the expert, and in particular the consultant needs to guide the expert to state the challenges encountered by novices in each step and how the expert overcame these challenges. This can be organized with a simple comparison chart, and the expert's considerations can be expressed in a relationship diagram.
d.? Even if you do record, what you record and write down on the spot will still be messy, so you need to structure it as soon as possible after the interview, and this is where the various charts and graphs come in handy.
4. Output into different charts and storyboards
Extracted from the experience of the experts, there are five more common forms of dissemination:
a. Job operation process and treasure:
In the old Chen's restaurant, the consultant will be the manager of the ordering experience of the Aqiang refined into the customer ordering process, how to enhance the sale of alcohol, how to give customers advice on the dishes with the PPT, he put the customer ordering process, how to enhance the sale of alcohol, how to give customers advice on the dishes with the PPT, and so on. In Lao Chen's restaurant, the consultant has distilled the ordering experience of the store manager Ah Qiang into "customer ordering process", "how to improve wine sales", "how to suggest dishes to customers" and other PPTs. Lao Chen hopes to successively distill the various operational experience into a big treasure book to help the restaurant expand into a chain store.
This operational process is best demonstrated with photos or even video, if there is no way to recover a scene, with hand-drawn illustrations can also be.
b. Training courses:
Whether it's 1-2 days of face-to-face classes, 1-3 hours of micro-lessons, seminars, etc..
c. Post coaching:
The consultant also prepared a coaching material for Lao Chen, and later new store managers can join in accordance with the steps of the coaching material to train the waiters, which regulates the words and actions of the "masters", different "masters" teach out waiters. This will standardize the words and actions of the "master", and the waiters taught by different "masters" will be the same. Counseling materials should also help managers to guide employees in different stages, after the task of self-reflection, while giving feedback.
d. Auxiliary tools:
Mainly handy templates, checklists, worksheets, talking cards and so on. Ah Qiang prints the words in the "customer ordering process" into small cards, and each waiter is issued one, so they can review at any time.
e. Cases:
Cases use storytelling to bring out the challenges and solutions in different scenarios, with emotions and details, which is the best carrier of best practices. After making the case, you can distribute it to your employees to read, or you can use it as a seminar for everyone to discuss. Although Chen's restaurant is small, there are some stories worth sharing, such as: how they held a birthday banquet for his mother for a demanding customer, arranging special dishes and arranging decorations everywhere; in the end, the birthday banquet was so successful that the family became a loyal customer and introduced many friends to the restaurant. This is a "how to exceed customer expectations" success story.
Beware of fake experience extraction
Experience extraction looks great, but are there any pitfalls? Of course, there are, for example: a salesman his performance is very good, you go to interview him to listen to him talk a lot, the original performance of his performance is because of his relationship with the customer is very iron, which can not be replicated. In addition, good performance of sales, technical ability is very strong experts, but also worried about "teaching students, starving master," so pay attention to the company's performance appraisal mechanism, it is best to set up some incentives to encourage experts to share their experience, on the other hand, to praise the experts, or to let a group of experts have a "masters! On the other hand, we should praise the experts more, or let a group of experts have the enthusiasm of "masters". Mr. Sun mentioned this several times in his book, and I recommend this article by Mr. Pang Tao on WeChat: "Sales experience extraction must be avoided to land the 8 big pit".
Summary
"Best Practice Extraction" in the book is the most important introduction to the one-on-one expert interviews when the operation process, and the introduction of the expert seminar is not too much, Mr. Sun emphasized the need to maintain a large number of experts to participate in the enthusiasm, as well as in the seminar arrangements for different subgroups so that the experts more stimulate each other, the opportunity to learn, and here to guide the technology can contribute to the practice of a lot of things, of course, in the "Visual thinking is even more useful in scenarios where there are a lot of people and no clear answers.