Simple stuff

Controls and process improvement are a state-of-mind, almost as much as they are a discipline. And they don't have to be fancy.

It occurred to me that my Boy Scout Troop provides a pretty good example.

For a long time, the boys of my Troop complained to me that they no longer wanted to participate in District events. For the uninitiated, Scouting is structured like a corporation with large regions (Councils) and smaller local areas (Districts). Within a District there are probably 10-15 Scout Troops, with between 15 and 100 boys each. Usually twice a year, these Troops come together at a campout to compete against each other.

As you might imagine, the competitions include things like knot tying, first aid, and compass skills - the kind of stuff for which Scouts have been known for nearly a century. Each of these challenges take place at stations run by adult volunteers from each Troop.

Simple, right? Here's the issue.

They're usually a mess. The volunteer adults forget to write down times and scores. They lose the scraps of paper on which they put the points awarded. The terms of the challenges change throughout the day of competition. At the end, no one can figure out who won and awards go out to teams without regard to their true success. Very frustrating.

Moreover, this mess of a process has been common in Districts from Colorado to Texas to the Carolinas since I was a Scout (a few years ago, indeed).

Now, I'm fortunate to have some pretty high performing young people in my Troop and they'd had it. So rather than permanently abandon the idea of competition, we introduced a simple change. One ripped from the world of process and controls.

I've got a fellow in my Troop who is a professional leather worker. He makes saddles and tack. He provided scraps of leather, on which we stamped a 1, 3, or a 5. If a team attempted the event they got one point and if they finished it with flying colors they got five. Most importantly, they walked away with their points in-hand. No scraps of paper, no forgotten times. If they lost the token, too bad. At the end of the day, they presented their fist-full of leather and the team with the most points won. No arguments and no feeling of being cheated.Aside from the obvious work-flow improvement, this example highlights two key points. First, better controls don't have to be fancy. Second, large numbers of otherwise brilliant people will often muddle through a broken process for a very long time until a process-minded person comes along and looks at it differently.