Your Latest Creative Business Tactic!
What do you know about... systems?!
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You know that adage, right? Failing to plan is planning to fail?
This phrase has seen so much in its lifetime; at one point, it was even somewhat disdained! (mostly because everyone went overboard and over-planned themselves into overwhelm and paralysis. That will, in fact, do it)
But now I’d say it’s enjoying a welcome renaissance! Hey, planning is cool actually, if you don’t try to annihilate yourself in the process, who knew?
But what on earth does THIS have to do with creatives? Well as it turns out, you do actually have something to gain from the ye olde planning revival, and it may be just the thing to take your enterprise to new heights!
Systems of Value Creation
Firstly, Value creation doesn’t just happen. I know, this is the greatest tragedy!
There’s specific approaches you take, a dash of trial and error here and there, but ultimately you try something and it works.
Your next step is to effectively do a post-mortem to uncover that special thing that worked this time compared to previous attempts. Oh yes, we know this song and dance.
But the choreo evolves!
Now that you know the secret sauce that brought you success, you’ve got to build that into a system of activities that bring you success every time you perform those activities. Or at least a very statistically significant number of times, because absolutes are funny like that.
But the point here is to
look around your current operations,
identify all the points in each part of your system where you’re successfully creating Value for your clients,
uncover the ‘thing’ at work that makes the Value creation happen, and replicate that thing wherever possible
Blend New Systems with Existing Ways of Work
Now you’ve got new insights and new systems, how fun! But… you’re not just going to plonk those new things into your operations all willy-nilly, right?
RIIIIIIGHT?
Right! Because you’ve got to work mindfully whenever you’re introducing new stuff into our current ways of work! It’s not that the current ways of work are a complete failure and need to be scrapped completely; they just need enhancement!
So, to make sure that you don’t accidentally implode everything, you have to incorporate these new systems in a way that improves the current ways of work while also not disrupting them so completely that they end up wrecked.
To achieve that, you must look at both the new system and existing processes sort of like a jigsaw puzzle:
Where are there edges on both pieces where they could slot together?
i.e. where are points in both the old operations and the new system where they’re compatible and could successfully overlap and slot together?
Don’t try and force together pieces that don’t fit, even if they look like they should
i.e. even if a new system looks like it could fit in, around or alongside an existing process, make sure that they actually DO fit!
Honestly, there’s more I could mention about building systems of Value creation for creative enterprises; and I WILL be mentioning them in the Create Your Value: A Playbook for the Creative session of the Your Value Advantage series!
In the Create Your Value: A Playbook for the Creative session, we’ll be discussion these fresh tactics and covering additional tools and concepts, including:
What Value even is for creatives, and the customers who buy from them
Systems of Value creation for creatives
General approaches for leveraging Value needs
If this already sounds like something you want in on, keep an eye out in your emails! Early bird ticket sales and bundle pricing will be opening soon!
Oh and by the way: each webinar session has only 10 seats available, so be sure to snatch up yours before they’re gone!
Like my work? You can get more of it!
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Check out our Value creation work over at Vivre Consulting
Connect with me on LinkedIn!