If a company says it has a secret recipe, it’s not what you think. It won’t be the list of ingredients that goes in the sauce. It will be how hard they work to always stay one step ahead of their competition (who could copy that secret sauce in an instant, if they really thought that was the secret).
In fact, the not-so-secret recipe for success is how to make that hard work more efficient, ensuring that all the complex tasks the company must fulfil get done accurately and quickly, as well as opening up the possibility to improve performance at each repetition.
Doing the same thing exactly the same way every single time isn’t easy. It’s easy if you want an actual machine to do it for you, and the task is simple. But humans aren’t machines, you aren’t a machine, and most tasks aren’t that simple.
Even memorising a simple list of words like this isn’t that simple:
Mental. Forgetful. Capacity. Sequence. Load. Worry. Power. Process. Recipe. Memory. Outsource. Cognitive. Storage. Remember.
Tasks might seem simple, but we either have to repeat something multiple times until it’s registered in our deepest memories, or hope to get it right every single time.
And it’s also a thing that human brains are not very good at. One of the reasons humans tell stories is because we’re good at remembering how, in a narrative structure, one thing comes after another, perhaps because it helps us find our way around using landmarks.
But a list of things, with no real rationale behind the order? We can get so many of them wrong…
Luckily, since the invention of paper, we’ve had a way of outsourcing how to remember things, and for business, this generally takes three forms.
- Checklists
- Recipes
- Standard operating procedures, or SOPs.
All of these, particularly the latter, are at the very heart of what separates successful entrepreneurs and the ones who are still struggling. Successful entrepreneurs know that if tasks are to be completed properly and efficiently, every single simple step in the task has to be written down, so that it can be followed again and again. It makes work easier for the solo entrepreneur, and it makes it much easier for him to hand that work to someone else later.
- Checklists are a way of ensuring all the required tasks are completed.
- Recipes are sequential instructions on how to cook, or do, something
- Standard Operating Procedures (“SOPs”) are a combination of checklists and recipes that can be conditional or unconditional.
Checklists are famous in the aviation industry, causing a massive improvement in safety the moment they were introduced, and pilots no longer had to remember a huge list of items by heart. Now, they check off every single item and safety, the key goal of efficiency in the airline industry, is enhanced.
We all know recipes, of course. No one would give someone some bread and ask them to replicate it, without a recipe. The ingredients and the steps are crucial.
In our next instalment, we look in more detail at SOPs, the combination of checklist and recipe that will be your machine’s secret recipe, but first answer these questions.
Before you move on to the next section, The SOP Manifesto, the answer to the first question was “load” and not “checklist”.