Off by a Little?

Ok, I'm not talking about the fact that some people are a little off like that crazy aunt you have to visit once a year. I'm talking about why it's important to be "on track" with your processes. I'm a sailor. I've done a lot of it. Or I've done enough to call myself a sailor, but not enough to say I'm great. That part doesn't matter because I like it so much and I do it for fun. I don't race and no one's livelihood depends on my skill level; well, at least not for the most part. I'm a safe sailor and many with less sailing experience would say I'm good. So what does that have to do with you, me and what I write about in this column? The relevance of and issues with being a little off.

You know how sometimes things people say hit exactly the right place in your brain and you remember them for life? My son said something to me years ago when we were doing a long Atlantic Ocean "crossing", which this time meant sailing from Tampa to the Virgin Islands. We were using maps and plotting our course...yep, real paper maps and plotting equipment like a protractor, parallel ruler, pencils and dividers. The "process" of determining where we were and where we should go and how long it would take us was manual and hands on, and so was keeping the boat on the determined course. It's not unlike running a company, a project or heck, our lives.

My son taught me a very important lesson while doing all that work to reach our destination efficiently and in this case, safely. What he said went something like this, "If you're off a little, you can miss it by a lot". I learned that when you're in a big ocean, looking for a small island to rest for the night, that's a big deal. And I've learned that the same rule applies in business...it's irrefutable. It's one that engineers and scientists know to be true and important (think...determining the course to send a rocket to space) and it's one that, for the most part, people don't worry about much. Being a little off is acceptable. Maybe being a little off is acceptable most of the time, but if it's not that hard to be on a more direct path, why not?

I bring this up as I experience how people decide to improve their business processes or buy software to facilitate a process. They take some time to explore a new way of doing something and then they get off course, distracted by things. They never reach exactly where they want to be. They wait for that time of year when they do budgets, or until they find time to survey others in the company or the project team, or until they have "extra" money...all of these things are really uncharted and would make for a funny line on a map.

Navigation in the purest sense is the process of controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another. We know navigation in business consists of four stages: appraisal, planning, execution, and monitoring. But what we may forget is that a lack of navigation, a lack of platting, plotting and moving along an accurate path, means you can miss it by a long shot. Out on the water, more often than not, I'm doing leisurely sails instead of "crossings". I try to keep myself doing the same at work.

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