Arnold Consultancy

Your car sounds rough. It’s still going, it hasn’t broken down completely, but there’s something not quite right about it. So – despite the fact that you really don’t know anything about the mechanics of a car engine – you stop and open the bonnet, and you peer inside. You’re hoping that the cause of the misfiring is going to be obvious – that there is a tube unattached at one end, or a wire with a clear break in the middle.

But there isn’t. So what do you do? You follow each of the pipes and tubes and clean them and make sure that they are connected properly. You clean all the dirty bits and ensure that the electrical contacts are not loose. You spring clean every last bit you can see, and even all the bits inside those bits, that you can’t see until you delve even deeper.

Then you turn on the engine again, and it sounds just as rough as it was before.

What you didn’t know – what you couldn’t know unless you knew everything that was required to make your car engine purr – is that there is a bit missing. There is no bad connection to find, because there is no connection at all. There is no flapping pipe – there is just no pipe, and no indication that there should be one. You would never find what was wrong because you would never be looking for something that wasn’t there.

When you model your current business processes and stare at them, you might be able to make improvements. You might be able to clean the pipes and strengthen the connections. And if you are very lucky indeed, you might hit upon something that was significantly wrong. But if there is something missing – a whole process, perhaps, or a group of activities which would address the expectations of a stakeholder group were they present – then you would not see their absence, because you are not looking for something that isn’t there. If the expectations which are not being addressed are important to the stakeholders, and the stakeholders are important to you, then no wonder your company is not running as smoothly as it should. And simply studying and tinkering with the current processes is not going to help.

Defining the stakeholders who can influence your company’s performance, defining their expectations, and defining the processes and activities which will address those expectations is the equivalent of learning how your car’s engine is supposed to work. You will become an expert mechanic. Of course you still need to look under the bonnet – but now you will not only appreciate the importance of each component displayed before you in terms of the engine’s performance, but you will also recognise what is missing, and that might well be the most important component of all.