I think it’s a dangerous game to just leave your team to get on with things and assume that if you are not hearing about problems, everything is going well. I regularly pick up my phone in a meeting and call one of our telesales people, a software developer, a finance team member, or even a supplier to ask whether what I am being told is actually accurate or true. My normal finding when I do this is that I am either being given a rose-tinted view of the world or that the person doesn’t actually know what is going on, as they haven’t tested what their team members are actually saying to them.

Watch Out for the Velociraptors

Another way to think about this, if you have watched the original Jurassic Park movie, is the chaos theory that the mathematician Ian Malcolm warns about. He predicts that although the scientists think they have covered every angle for a long-term stable environment for the dinosaurs (which were meant to be all female), the island will instead quickly behave in unpredictable ways, and that it is an accident waiting to happen. Needless to say, the dinosaurs start breeding, and the T. rex and velociraptors escape after the fences fail, leading to a vast amount of chaos and havoc!

In the world of work, this means that any processes you have put in place will, as you are growing your business, inevitably either deteriorate or not be able to cope with the growth as you go forward. They therefore need to be changed regularly to avoid a Jurassic Park situation. In practice, this does not happen unless you have the right mindset and adopt an approach along the lines of the title of this section.

Let me give you a few examples:

• If you write a nice sales letter template for all your new prospects and tell your team that it shouldn’t be changed, within six months, it will soon look like something you can’t even recognize, with appalling grammar and spelling.
• If you agree to a relatively simple software enhancement to the front end of your platform and don’t stay close to the project, you will end up with loads of new suggested functionality and a project that takes five times as long as the one that was originally planned.
• Your marketing team will produce your new Salesforce screens with the information requested in the order they think is best, as tech people, rather than what is easiest for the salesperson to use when talking to customers. They will also probably add twice as many fields as you actually need.
• Credit will change the vetting criteria and reject customers you should be accepting, and/or they will also not be chasing unpaid invoices as fast as you used to.
• Sales will spend too much time calling customers who are either too small or in a customer category with lower conversion rates, etc., etc.

Managers who aren’t happy when you display this constant checking characteristic will almost certainly not be doing testing themselves in the same way, and you will be almost certain to find problems in their areas. Good managers won’t mind, as they will be doing the same with their team and will see your actions as helping them improve systems and processes in their group, rather than a lack of trust in them individually.

Beware the Spreadsheet Kids

Remember that many graduates leaving University or Business School (I call them the spreadsheet kids) often believe that the computer can never be wrong and just present you with data and reports without doing some manual sense checks or applying a bit of common sense. I am always finding cases of supposedly senior or intelligent people (normally from finance) presenting volumes and margins on numerous graphs that simply can’t be right, and expecting me to make very important decisions on the back of them. They normally come up with the excuse that one of the cells in their table has been copied incorrectly!