On the topic of questioning Business habits, I am reminded of advice from a friend of mine who designs games.
Find out what’s fun, and do more of that.
That is, what you do in designing games is to enhance what gives the players the most Enjoyment, and cut out what is not necessary.
Let’s say you thought up a new game with three stages:
- Collect resources
- Build castles
- Knock down each other’s castle
Each stage has its own appeal, and you can’t tell which one people might think is fun; which one might appeal most.
You get some friends to play, and you watch as they endure stage one, get frustrated at stage two, and love stage three, seeing the towers slowly reduced to rubble. Their view, overall, is that it’s a bit long, but there are some good bits near the end.
You redesign, cut out stages one and two, and make a game that is just knocking down castles. But you find that they didn’t enjoy defending just any old Castle – it had to be the one they built themselves. It seems that parts of stage two were vital to enjoying stage three.
So you find out what was fun about stage two – include that, cut stage one out completely, and gear it all to stage three – knocking down each others’ hurriedly custom-built castle. It’s much better, and you set about refining it further for even more player enjoyment.
Stage one was not appealing to anyone. You might have liked it personally, but the customer has spoken and you want to offer the best value of fun for their time, so you cut it out and put it back in the ‘ideas’ folder.
In the same way, look at each process offered by your business – find out what is important and what is not, then go about testing to see what will give the most value.
Examining processes you’ve done for years is likely to expose things that you thought were necessary, but it turns out are dull to both you and the client. So why do it? It’s not necessary, it’s not fun, so cut it out and focus on what is.
Once you do that, once you cut out the chaff and get to the grain, you will likely find that it’s more fun for you too. Scoring goals more valuable to happy customers will put a spring in your step, and have you enthused to do even more for them.
So – find the fun. Do that. Do more of that.
