Improve Your Culture’s Ease
Teamwork is often difficult. It feels … well … like work. You’re an adult, so you know that work is supposed to feel like work, but even so, you love people who make your life easier. Within the context of an innovation factory, you might describe ease as:
Big bang for your buck
Getting more done with less
Working smarter not harder
High earn for what you burn
This last bullet - Earn versus Burn is the framework for this post about Ease.
A roadtrip is a fun analogy for Earn versus Burn. This table shows that Earn is the miles traveled. Burn is the time and money spent.
In the modern workplace, teams’ labor boils down to two forms of “burn” - meetings and email. If Accomplishment XYZ required a total of only 5 emails and 2 meetings, that feels easy. If Accomplishment XYZ required 30 emails and 5 meetings, that feels difficult, laborious, and fatiguing. Given this, anytime an organization can define, organize, and complete work where the effort is modest and the value is far-reaching and enduring (i.e. an “asset”), that qualifies as “ease.”
You make your project easier for employee, customers, and stakeholders if you can achieve high Earn versus Burn. Ease requires that you:
Build a standardized, stable, valuable Asset Portfolio
Know the difference between a good meeting and a bad meeting
Manage your Asset Portfolio with Five Verbs
On a roadtrip, there’s no need to emphasize Earn Versus Burn so intensely that you starve, run out of gas, or get a speeding ticket. Relax! Eat, keep your gas level in a safe zone, enjoy the scenery, and avoid a speeding ticket! Staying conscious of this framework is smart, responsible, efficient, and makes life easy!