Navigate the Swirl

CHAPTER 2Understanding Businesses: The Business Triangle

If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

What is a business? And what does it mean to be in business together?

Sometimes in workshops, I lead a simple exercise: I ask people to jot down on a piece of paper their best definition of a business. It's revealing. The answers that people give tend to be strongly influenced by the roles that they play in the company. So, for example, a marketing person might say “a business is a system for winning in the marketplace,” whereas a product designer might say “a business is an engine for innovation.” People naturally tend to be focused on the deliverables, metrics, and priorities that are their responsibilities. As a result, to borrow an oft-used phrase coined by Michael Gerber, they're used to working in the business but they're unable to work on the business—because they can't even see the business as a whole. Too often, team members don't have a clear picture of the relationships between different aspects of the business and the way they all fit together. In their minds, it is as if the organization is just a big collection of people with different jobs, all working alongside each other—a giant blob of activity and intersecting objectives.

That's not really a helpful way to think. Organizations may be social systems, but in a business context, they're more than just communities of people. A business organization ...