How to use Visual Systems Thinking for solving your toughest Business Problems?

It is a TED Talk worth watching again - Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast.

Here are a sample list of questions from Tom Wujec's website that visual systems thinking can be applied to:
1. Strategic Organisational Questions:
i. Where is your organization now?
ii. What is your noble purpose?
iii. How are global forces shaping your business?
iv. How are industry forces affecting you?
v. What is driving your market now?
vi. What is your essential offering?
vii. How will you delight your customers?
viii. How will you stand out and win?
ix. Where will you invest to grow?
x. What do you stand for?
xi. What is your business model?
xii. How will you track and measure success?

2. Tactical Organisational Questions:
i. Where are you creating value in your current business process?
ii. What is your approach to improving value? Why?
iii. How will you attract more and better customers?
iv. How will you get customers to buy?
v. How will you make your customers feel great at every touch point?
vi. How will you build your offering more efficiently?
vii. How will you do more of what works and less of what doesn't?
viii. How will you help your employees thrive?
ix. How will you run better meetings?
x. How will you respond to change more nimbly?
xi. How will your team work better?
xii. How will you measure your organisation's effectiveness?

Here is a PDF Document from Tom Wujec with a proposed approach on how to engage your teams in a collaborative visual systems thinking exercise to discover answers to the above questions.

​It would work very well to use this process to co-create process maps with your teams for the 4 to 9 key processes on your PACE (Process Accountability Chart) tool.questions illuminate how you can begin to see your business and 

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Here's a PDF of the PACE tool:

And, the PACE tool in an Excel:

Here's the process you can follow to build Process Excellence on Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) of the RYD Business Excellence journey before you scale your business on Mountain 4 (Mountain of Scale):
1. Fill up the Process Accountability Chart (PACe tool) with key 4 to 9 key processes that define your business, 2 or 3 metrics for each process and aspired for measure for each metric.
2. Pick up a process to innovate for better outcomes. 
3. It's best that you, the business owner / CEO, first documents the process themselves for better understanding to effectively lead a gamestorming session with your team to co-create the final process flow map. This exercise will give you insights into why the process is failing and / or how the process can be improved significantly. These insights will support you to effectively lead with questions in the gamestorming deep-dive for the team to reflect on points on the Ball of Perspective that they may have missed. During the deep-dive, you will also uncover fresh insights as the team gamestorms.
4. Use the approach shared in the PDF - A primer in Systems Thinking - shared above to lead the gamestorming deep-dive for the team to co-create the final process using sticky notes which can later be transcribed digitally.
5. Measure the process KPIs / metrics monthly / weekly / daily based on the process. The gap between the aspired for metric and the actual outcome is the Degree of Innovation that the process needs to be iterated through, as per the frequency of review that you defined In the Excel PACe.
6. When there is a gap between the aspired for process KPI and the actual outcome, do a root cause analysis using a 5 Why Analysis and arrive at a solution using a 5 How Analysis

The five whys and five hows techniques constitute a questioning process designed to drill down into the details of a problem or a solution and peel away the layers of symptoms. The technique was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda who stated that "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear."

The five whys are used for drilling down into a problem and the five hows are used to develop the details of a solution to a problem. Both are designed to bring clarity and refinement to a problem statement or a potential solution and get to the root cause or root solution.

For more on this approach, click on this link - 5 Whys and 5 Hows

Build strong processes for people to create Excellence rather than managing people to create Excellence.

Throw a Process at a Problem, instead of People.

Building a great business is a fun team sport. Keep playing to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜

Loving you,
j.

The second set of Questions by Leadership Team members of the Businesses we are coaching on reading Start to Scale by Verne Harnish as a warm-up to a deep-dive immersion with him as part of RYD Community EXPAND Event on 15-Jan-25:

Q1. How do I make people down the stream, understand the vision and have faith in this journey?
This would need you to grow in 3 ways:

a. Leadership Depth: Have unshakeable belief and faith in the shared Vision (Purpose) and the journey that every conversation you have with your people is alive with the passion for creating a. new future in alignment with this vision that leaves your people touched, moved and inspired. This requires strengthening of Communicating Powerfully in the World of Others leadership depth muscle. 

b. Business Excellence: 
i. Monthly Meetings with all the People Leaders month on month to transfer the DNA of the Founder and the senior leadership team to all people leaders in the business
ii. Vision Summary implementation for everyone that gives clarity to each team member in the business how what they are doing is contributing to fulfilling on the Purpose of the business.
iii. Gamifying the journey, one quarter at a time.

c. Craft Mastery: Deep commitment to learn and grow across Leadership Depth, Business Excellence and Domain Knowledge to be the world's best in your industry in order to make a massive difference to your customers and people.


Q2. How do we build the word called ownership within the team rather than a 9-6 job?
By infusing Purpose and Core Values through the whole organization that people bring their heart, soul and all of their limitless mind's potential instead of just body and part of their mind's intellectual capacity.

When people work for money, heart, soul and mind's full capacity is not engaged.

Make your organisation's Purpose so transformative that people are purpose-inspired and excited to come to work on Monday mornings and are energised by the contribution they are making to their country and all of humanity.

In fact, there's research that says that people live longer if they are purpose inspired. Give your people longer lives by giving them a Purpose that touches, moves and inspires them. For that, the Founder / CEO and the leadership team has to be touched, moved and inspired by the Purpose.


Q3. How should we run an effective 30 min weekly business update ? What should we do before, during and after this discussion?
For an effective weekly meeting, a minute by minute plan is given in Start to Scale - page 109 - as part of Meeting Rhythm chapter. Let's invest our creative energy in innovating products and services for our customers that make a massive difference to them, instead of spending time on re-inventing Business Excellence frameworks. 

Meeting Rhythm is the first Rockefeller that we want to implement.


Q4. How can we define our priorities effectively, how do we determine if the identified priorities are truly the ones that will drive our business scaling efforts?

Every quarter, it's important to have one priority from the People side and one priority on the Process side for balanced growth to scale the business.

Quarterly priorities are defined in alignment with Annual Business Priorities, which are defined in alignment with the 3 Years Goals, which are defined in alignment with the organisation's 10 to 25 years Big Hairy Audacious Goal which is a measurable milestone on the way to achieving the Organisation's Purpose.

​Q5. How can I make the Brand promise a way, without any fear of competition catching up?
Here's how:
i. By understanding what is the Job-To-Be-Done for the customers through customer conversations. What is your customers' greatest needs? What is the #1 job the customer needs you to do for them? And, making that your brand promise.

ii. Make a measurable promise to the customer: What's your measurable Brand Promise? 

iii. Then, tracking and evolving all business processes to deliver on the measurable promise made to the customer.

iv. Keeping a weekly eye on what's happening in the marketplace through a weekly rhythm of collecting and reviewing customer and employee data in the Weekly Strategy Execution Meeting (how to run this meeting is on page 109 in Start to Scale) so that you can respond quickly to the changing needs of the customer. Brand Promise will change in response to the changing needs of the customer.

v. It's important to decide who you want to serve - buyer personas - and, what is each of their measured 'job to be done'? This is THE critical strategy question that determines the rest of your business strategy and execution.


Q6. If a business is stuck at a growth plateau despite following your methodologies, what steps should the leadership team take to identify and overcome the bottleneck?
The scaling-up methodology is an integration of the work of thought leaders in the world of business. In my experience, if businesses don't get results after implementing the methodology, the implementation of the methodology has not been done correctly.

Therefore, the coach, the CEO and the leadership team work hand in hand for the implementation. 

Additionally, it is important for all the people leaders to learn and understand the entire framework because little knowledge is dangerous. That is why we had the Scaling-up Learning Expedition. And, on 7-Aug-25 Thursday and 8-Aug-25 Friday, we are hosting Verne in Gurgaon for a Scaling-up in-person Masterclass to take the learning deeper into the businesses we are coaching.


Q7. Making a brand promise is a huge commitment which requires people, money and time to implement it. So is it ok for a new organisation to start without a brand promise and later figure out what brand promise it can sincerely offer to its customer with full commitment.
Going back to First Principles, 

Revenue is an expression of the difference a business is making to its customers. Greater a contribution a business makes to its customers, higher the customer is willing to pay and more repeat purchases will the customer make.

Profitability is an expression of the difference an organization makes to its employees because Operational Excellence, which results in increasing the profit margin, is a function of a learning, super-performing, nurturing culture. 

Strategy is an action plan to increase the contribution the business makes to its customer and employee communities as measured by Revenue and Profit.

Brand Promise is what the customer really needs, the Job-to-be-Done for the customer.

Research tell us that if we tell the customers what we are going to deliver to them (brand promise) and give a measure of what exactly (measurable brand promise), and go ahead and deliver that exactly as per the measure, that brand is more successful and profitable.

If a new business wants to be profitable and attract more customers, it would make sense for the business to deeply understand its customers and offer them what they really need instead of spraying and praying which is what I see most start-ups do.

As per a Harvard study, 75% of start-ups fail in the first year. As per another study, 90% of start-ups fail in the first five years of their existence. Venture Capitalists work with an assumption of 20% success in their portfolio.

We can make 100% of start-ups succeed if we apply the art, science and math of building a great business by learning with a Beginner's Mind, understanding and implementing across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

So, it is OK for a new business to start without a brand promise because it didn't know any better but for it to be successful and grow exponentially, the leadership team must learn, understand and implement a measurable Brand Promise that it makes an effort to consistently deliver on. And, that would require learning, understanding and implementing the learnings across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

It actually is more expensive or more risky to not do a measurable brand promise.


Q8. Understand the Right Things Right Model more deeply, how can we gauge if we are following it correctly?
If revenue and profits are not increasing, and the drama in the business continues, then we know there's a problem in implementation.

Usually, when there is a problem which means revenue and / or profits are not growing or declining, we have a tendency to blame people or the framework.

Whenever there's a problem, we need to take a Sacred Pause for reflection and do a 5-Whys Analysis with all the impacted people to uncover the root cause, followed by a 5-Hows Analysis to innovate a solution.

Problems are great to have because they are opportunities for creativity, innovation and growth.


Q9. How the Financial metrics mentioned will measure healthy cashflow apart from Cash Conversion Cycle which is a KPI?
There are several ways businesses can dramatically improve their Cash Conversion Cycle using Cash Acceleration Strategies, allowing them to fund growth with internally generated cash and freeing them from the grasp of banks and / or investors.

It is best to brainstorm ways to improve cash flow at every Quarterly Planning meeting and pick a related initiative as one of the Top 5 priorities for the quarter for the business to super focus on.

Here are 2 tools for such a brain-storming conversation with the leadership team: