About

People often leap without looking

Most businesses fail not from the lack of a good idea (or product), but the lack of robust supporting processes and infrastructures wrapped around that idea that inhibits fulfillment. Immature processes make them vulnerable and the root cause often boils down to process vulnerabilities caused by not knowing. This seems like a big waste to us!

Small businesses (range of +/- 5 to 50 employees), face many challenges. Typically, they do not have the time, experienced people, abilities, extra resources or infrastructure to properly respond. It can quickly turn from “follow the plan” into a “fix things as you can” change process.

Then, when an issue or problem shows up, solving it seems to turn into a prioritization juggle assigning limited resources to make a difference in a competitive environment.

This frequently results in a Catch-22: You need more resources to develop more robust infrastructure, tools and methods required to be successful; however, if you already had that infrastructure in place, you could more easily obtain those needed additional resources.

Too often, small businesses—even those with a great product—are pressed to act quickly without a full view of all that is required to build a business around that product or service.

People often become overwhelmed by work

Leaders may find themselves compelled to work “in” the business itself as opposed to “on” the business—a subtle, but important, distinction about what part of the business gets attention, or not. Tactically urgent tasks are given priority over the larger strategically important mission.

Given that, human nature gradually accepts a pattern—focusing on the crisis-of-the-day soon becomes a normal and accepted behavior. Higher-level (systemic) thinking gets sidetracked, deferred, and tossed aside into the dark shadows where problems grow even larger and more difficult to fix later. At the end of the day, well-intentioned but exhausted leaders and workers might be forgiven for believing all their “fixing” work was necessary and beneficial.

By creating the VIA·Business diagnostic assessment, Vector Reports has flipped the typical script. We don’t focus on what you’re doing well, instead we show you what you may not have previously seen or even known about so you can address it.

Surfacing process constraints

Vector Reports’ founders cut their professional teeth on the systemic study and application of lean engineering, manufacturing and support systems. Vector Reports operates from the philosophy that identifying, reducing and ultimately eliminating waste in organizational systems pays benefits well beyond simply the cost savings.

If accepting wasteful actions (such as not knowing about or ignoring critical processes) is built into a business model, employees and team members are encouraged to exaggerate estimates and to increase cycle times, inventories, and work in process. This spawns untruthful relationships (dysfunctional work cultures) which hide problems and reduce trust all along the value chain. This builds into complex social and business process that turn into a form of rewards—people actually get paid, inadvertently, to maintain the current state. And in the end, no system built on maintaining the status quo can survive over time. Change must occur. The challenge is making change easier to do than the status quo.

Revealing business insights

For very small businesses, Vector Reports’ recommendations and solutions don’t let perfection get in the way of good progress. Growth journeys are an iterative and integrated learning process toward success. All recommendations are based upon generally accepted good business practices—the absence of which can derail fledgling and small businesses.

Vector Reports assessments are a cost-effective means to rapidly obtain a set of prioritized recommendations that, once understood and implemented, will help an organization deploy and benefit from much more mature business processes.

Low diagnostic cost gives businesses and helping organizations equal access to opportunity and quality—especially those with limited resources. Historically underserved communities—who, in the past may have confronted biases and inequities due to location, size, ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, or other factors—can now easily avail themselves of this world-class virtual consulting support.

Even before getting the detailed report recommendations, simply the act of taking a VIA·Business assessment is a learning experience. Assessors have remarked, 

We believe the best value in hiring a skilled consultant comes from targeting their applied expertise on solutions, not on lengthy get-to-know-you research or misapplying their expertise on the wrong issue. We submit there is no more cost-effective way for a small organization to apply the “80/20” improvement rule than using a VIA·Business diagnostic report in combination with an expert / counselor.

Consultants and mentors receiving a VIA·Business diagnostic report from a potential client can help them solve the business’ process vulnerabilities at a fraction of the typical time required to conduct client interviews and research.

What you don’t know can hurt you

Like skillful doctors with a patient, a VIA·Business assessment is a diagnostic triage that measures the status of important business processes and then supports leadership decision making, about what to do, and in what order!

Good information and awareness (knowing) enables the ability to choose wisely. Often it is not knowing—information that is not in our current awareness—that becomes the root cause of problems that emerge.

When a business doesn’t know what it should know, that missing information can lead to business failure. And in those cases you need outside help.

Introduction to the capability model

Vector Reports realized that a systemic diagnostic approach was needed and designed its assessment accordingly. When you observe a struggling business it is easy to see the lack of process capabilities. And in a successful business you can see robust process capabilities.

Small businesses need to develop four important capabilities simultaneously to move from surviving to thriving.

And those capabilities need to balance and align with each other, or that imbalance can create problems, too.

These capabilities, and their associated processes, are not magic, nor do the leaders of those successful companies have a secret formula. Instead, successful capabilities are built up by developing reliable and aligned business processes that work interdependently to produce desired results. It is a form of steady discipline:

• Identify the vulnerability,
• Learn what to do to correct it, and then
• Repair the immature process so that it works well with other processes.

VIA·Business assessment uses this model to quickly display the results of process integration vulnerabilities in any of 32 critical processes. The assessment has four categories of processes:

• product operational effectiveness,
• marketing to the right customers,
• business design and implementation, and how well you
• commercialize your product or service

Normally, small businesses do not demonstrate world-class business process attributes. To help you build toward capable and aligned processes, VIA·Business assessments provide you with vulnerability indicators about your current-state business processes—while also providing participants a valuable learning experience from actually taking the assessment itself.

Taking an assessment will produce a custom report that shows what needs attention and repair, as well as delivering a sequence of prioritized process improvement recommendations for your unique current-state conditions.

A VIA·Business assessment is a review of 32 business processes critical to very small businesses. An assessor (typically the person who is “in the know” about each process current status) evaluates the current state of that business by rating the maturity levels of eight processes in each of four categories.

Assessors follow a simple step-by-step process

• Read the statements of what a well-functioning business process should look like
• Use the yardstick of four maturity levels—Zero through Three—to discuss and validate each process in the business being evaluated.
• Enter the evidence or notes supporting each rating.
• Click the appropriate maturity level to select the current status.
• When all 32 have been rated, submit them to get your custom report.

VIA·Business assessments were designed to be taken in one session with the same assessor(s). Most assessments are conducted with one assessor, but a team of process leaders in the company as assessor(s) who march through the statements is a good practice.

Assessor(s) should read all the level descriptions from the bottom up before choosing the one you believe accurately represents your current state. This “bottom-up” design helps assessors understand the maturity statement more completely while teaching the elements of increasing maturity inside each process.

Honesty in rating is important—”gaming” the system by stretching the truth or misrepresenting a current state (even unwittingly) will only slow down improvement journeys.

A VIA·Business assessment generates a comprehensive, customized report that highlights what needs attention and delivers a prescription of prioritized improvement recommendations at the detail process level that address your unique conditions.

In the end, your business-building efforts must produce a solution for your customers and you. The report delivers recommended actions that help create profit, support the right kind of growth, and produce satisfied customers.

Leverage your leadership attention

Vector Reports recommends that businesses being evaluated use the VIA·Business diagnostic review process for level-setting and creating alignment and balance across your organizational team. Let any gaps, imbalances or low scores in the results serve as an attention-focusing device for change now and in the future.

Discuss your understandings of current-state conditions with coworkers and team members (and with your client if you are a consultant or mentor). Subsequent change agents should understand that sometimes even all the decision makers in an organization are not aware of what others may think about the organization. As such, the implications of what some of them “think they already know” about the organization could simply be wrong or at least hold incomplete information; consequently, the report content contains details that encourage improvement conversations among all helpers and suggests methods to help plan for next steps.

Take the next steps

A rising tide lifts all boats—if you receive a report that shows an imbalance that makes sense to you, then leverage your strengths to buy time to fortify those processes that are not. Improving your lowest scores can help prevent unforeseen impediments from emerging at all.

You are in charge … the diagnostic is your decision support system for change.

Your report offers detailed customized recommendations to help you make more informed business choices. You decide when and how to apply them.

You can implement some or all of them internally, or find outside expertise to focus on what you now know are your most vulnerable conditions.

The story

A small company CEO decided to take the assessment as a group with his team leaders. In the past two years they had begun to divide up their work and create departments—Engineering, Sales & Marketing, Manufacturing, Quality and HR.

The team leaders were in different parts of the country. The CEO hosted the Zoom meeting. I had coached the CEO to mostly remain quiet, to ask questions if he needed clarifications, but mostly to let his leaders rate their status. I facilitated the steps through the assessment which included:

• Introductions of each team leader, their role, and what they were responsible for,
• How the assessment maturity models worked and that they needed to start at the lowest level and discuss what their real status was to rate higher up the levels,
• Introduced each of the four Categories of processes along the way to set context
• Ran the pages so all could see and rate processes

The CEO had been very positive about what he expected the status ratings to be. He believed the company was on the verge of breaking into a larger market.

This turned out to be the longest session we’ve ever had with a small company. The CEO remained quiet while the responsible leaders provided their process maturity status against the criteria. And indeed, the CEO asked a lot of clarifying questions, and then stopped and let the process continue.

Almost from the first few ratings the other leaders began discussing the status the process owner was selecting—mostly, they were challenging each other because they had often experienced problems with the outcomes the process owner thought were working well. That discussion tended to move into blaming and not solving the issue. I facilitated ending the blaming behavior, and asked them to put remarks into the notes field to remind them of why they had selected that rating and initial thoughts about what they could do about it, but mostly they were encouraged to move on. They were surfacing problems and making discoveries!

Insights from the story

Four hours later (much longer than most assessments take), they came away with multiple beneficial results.

Process benefits:

• The team felt the boss had “finally” listened to what was really going on inside the business.
• Individual team members had an ‘ah ha’ moment that the team’s success depended more upon them helping each other be successful than with just the output of their process. It was their first bit of education of how a system of systems is required to work together.
• The CEO got a new self insight resulting in a reset of his expectations and the delay of a product launch effort until the team said they were ready.
• They experienced how future team status meetings might be run.

Report benefits:

• The report amplified the message one team member had been voicing for months—everyone but him was surprised that the emphasis of the team’s work had been on the wrong priority.
• The report indicated the CEO was a bit biased toward external efforts and needed to confirm the company was internally operationally ready to perform what was in his mind.
• The CEO said that—while the report itself had been helpful for them—in their case, the team building that resulted from the group rating of their process maturities actually demonstrated the team culture he had wanted all along.

The story

Years ago, when Vector Reports was testing the alpha version of the assessment, a large agency agreed to participate by “volunteering” to assess a company the agency had been guiding. This company was in line to be become one of the most successful businesses coming out of their process—the “designated one!” The agency was running “their best company” through our diagnostic as courtesy.

This session was held on Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. The assessor team was comprised of the company CEO, the agency’s lead mentor, and myself. We marched through the assessment processes and the CEO selected the ratings together.

What followed was some pretty interesting behavior from each of us.

The CEO would provide a rating and briefly say why he made that choice. The mentor would correct the CEO and say emphatically, “You are forgetting the training we provided you that covered that. You know what you are doing!” The lead mentor simply ignored or did not listen to the CEO!

The CEO actually replied, “Yes, what you are saying is technically correct, but I am letting you know that we are not confidently and currently meeting all the criteria that is being called for at this maturity level [for this process].”

I attempted to support the CEO, because after years of experience I knew we needed to listen to the one who is doing the work to get the real answers. But the CEO’s comments were quickly dismissed by the mentor.

The mentor said, “You are better than this rating. Remember, this diagnostic material is still being developed. Your score will send the wrong message.”

In my mind, I thought there it is!

The following day the CEO called me, and said, “Thank you for your time and your assessment. I found the processes identified and the rating information to learn if one is really ready or not to be unbiased and observable criteria. I found it to be very helpful to me and gave me insight as to where I really am.” He closed with, “I wanted to call you personally to let you know I got value out of it … don’t sweat what they said.”

Insights from the story

It was a classic example of “not knowing” that we refer to throughout our website.

In my junior-status role, I felt lucky to be allowed into their process to test our assessment. I didn’t have the positional authority or reputation at that point to push back and say, “That is not how it works.”  Instead, I let it go, which in hindsight I wish I had not done (and would not do today).

I realized the mentor and the agency could not afford to look bad or have any bad outcomes for the business that was designated to be their success story. I later learned through the communication grapevine that the lead mentor had publicly dismissed the earliest version of our assessment as “not ready.”

We were ready to reexamine if our research that produced the assessment maturity scale was not calibrated correctly. We were taking a step back because we trusted his judgement when he indicated the company-rated results were lower than what he “knew” the company to be. It felt like a failure on our part.

We now know, years later, this is one of the largest forms of resistance that almost always occurs—no one wants a bruised ego or a tarnished image—even if the humbling experience is needed. Mini-failures are necessary for growth and future success.

The Vector Reports VIA·Business assessment was also tested in the SBA Regional Innovation Cluster contract in Arizona. The team leader of that cadre required a couple of his mentor/advisors to use the assessment on small businesses as a test case.

Facing resistance

When one is required to do something that is outside of their normal process the wall of resistance gets built—that is normal human behavior. Change is tough to implement those performing the work are forced to do something differently than what they are used to doing.

We faced voiced opposition, you may, too:

You cannot replace or place my experience into an algorithm! That is true. And we are not trying to do so. Instead, we are performing a diagnostic to learn if you are the mentor with the right experience that can best help the business client.

You cannot replace or place my experience into an algorithm! That is true. And we are not trying to do so. Instead, we are performing a diagnostic to learn if you are the mentor with the right experience that can best help the business client.

I have helped hundreds of people, I know how to help them! That may be true if your expertise matches the client’s need.

You’re are taking my business (in my “rice bowl”) away from me! Our intent was to augment, not replace, the expert. It helps small businesses be more ready to make change because they, not an external person, are making the ratings, so they are more likely to listen to the expert when they show up. We have always been focused upon the success of the business client and what they need now. When we were outside consultants, we always referred the client to someone with the expertise that matched their need if we could not supply what the client needed to improve. Please consider that you may get more advising business by creating a reputation of connecting them to what they really need even if it isn’t always you.

These are simply standard answers for process issues! That is mostly true. And the problem we are solving is that most don’t know those standard answers—they are newbies. And, the assessment is broad enough that it covers areas of expertise that any one advisor does not possess. It actually shortens the diagnostic process to get to good answers fast. It becomes a method to surface vulnerabilities and then point to the more effective action sooner.

You can’t use this because of privacy issues and inadvertent disclosure that might be embarrassing to the business. That would be incorrect. The system is designed to deliver results to only two designated roles—the owner of the assessment and the assessor who provided the ratings. They could disclose information to others if they chose to, but Vector Reports DOES NOT SHARE any of that kind of information with anyone.

This went on for quite awhile until they actually used the assessment.

In the end, they realized it saved time for both the advisor and the client-business, and improved the quality of the improvement discussions they subsequently held. We even heard back from one advisor that the client didn’t want to work on the top recommended action, but wanted to do that a bit later. The advisor reported that the second recommendation was actually worked on first. He said that it made his job easier and helped the client move into a more “ready to change” way of being.

The story

One advisor / consultant was already helping a small business, but found them resistant to improvement suggestions. He was frustrated because time was ticking away on an opportunity that would be lost if not responded to quickly and in the right way—and, the client was headed away from the what had been advised.

The advisor asked if their client would take the assessment—and they did.

Almost as magic (or coincidence) or because the algorithm works, the top recommendation the report delivered was exactly what the advisor had been previously asking them to work on.

Ironically, it seemed as if the business finally heard that message for the first time! The business asked the advisor if that recommendation was what they could work on together. The advisor was wise, and simply said, “Sure, I can.”

The insight

This is an example of “triangulating” to a 3rd party to disarm bias and reduce the resistance to the message. Both the business and advisor were happy. And the advisor got back to us and said they captured the opportunity they had before them!