Let's say you're sitting in an L10 meeting and a number is off track on a Scorecard.
What happens next in most companies is people start guessing. Somebody has a theory. Somebody else has a different theory. Eventually the conversation lands on a person, and that person gets a talking-to.
Here's the question that should come first, every single time.
Is it a who, or is it a how?
Is it a person, or is it a process?
Because if you don't know, you're in trouble. You might go yell at Bob. It may not be Bob's fault at all. It may be that the process is so outdated that Bob is following it rigorously and it's just broken. Or you updated the process at the executive level six months ago and never trained him on it. There are a million ways this goes wrong and most of them aren't Bob.
So a number goes off track. That's an alarm bell. And what a builder does next is inspect.
Is the playbook current and accurate? Has it been deployed? Have people actually been through it?
Nine times out of ten what you learn is that you never gave folks the tools. Either the process is broken or it was never really shared.
So the builder creates the content. Fixes that playbook, updates it, or builds it from scratch because none existed. They're grabbing wisdom, mapping process, making playbooks.
Then you turn the lights on.
You engage the user community. This is the part everybody skips. Building the content isn't the job, delivering it is. Rigorously. Consistently. In front of people until they've actually got it.
Because it's all in the catch. It doesn't matter what you pitch.
We're all responsible for what we say, sure. But the outcome lives in what they received. You cannot stand there and say "I told them once in a meeting on a Wednesday last year." That's irresponsible. People need to be told routinely, reminded, and held accountable. All of us do. Trust but verify still works.
Then you run the reports. And this is where it gets good, because now you can see something that used to be completely invisible.
I don't know what's going on with Bob, he just seems unplugged. I can't figure out what's happening with Margaret, she was getting great numbers and now she's falling off the wagon.
Pull a report. Is this person engaged with the training? Has the playbook been updated, is it going out to them, are they opening it?
Now you've taken one variable off the table. A big one. Either they're compliant with a current process, in which case it isn't their fault and you go look somewhere else, or they've never been through it, in which case you know exactly what to fix.
Before, you're playing whack-a-mole in the dark.
Then you go back into the scorecard meeting and you look at the number again. As a lag indicator, you should see movement. That's the hypothesis. Something's off, let's make sure everybody's trained on what we already know works, run it two weeks, and see.
Sales are off. Why? The appointment setters aren't making outbound calls. Okay, let's take fear and ignorance off the table. We've got one salesperson who's great on the phone. We're going to squeeze their head like an orange, playbook it, deploy the training, and verify with reporting that everybody's been through it.
Lag indicator: outbound call volume goes up.
And if it doesn't? Now you've got a real question instead of a vague one. They went through the training, so are they doing it in the field? If it works for Margaret, why isn't it working for anybody else?
But you have data now. That's the difference.
Wouldn't it be cool if Judy knew what Bob knows?
That's the whole thing, right there. Bob does it this way, Judy does it like that, Bob gets great results and Judy doesn't. The company that closes that gap gets standardization of best practice and starts running on rails.
The one that doesn't just keeps hoping Judy figures it out.
