Designing the future of your organization

As entrepreneurs and creators we get to design the future of our companies. That’s pretty freaking cool, right?

So let’s talk about that design. There are essentially three elements within design. 

The first is the STRUCTURE. How we design the structure of the business. Think organizational chart, here.  

The second is the PROCESSES. How the work gets done and how things flow. 

And the third is BETS. A value proposition. Anybody with a company has done this. Whether it was they could do things better, more efficiently in a different market, etc. 

Let’s start with the structure. We already know how we’re designed today, right? But we need to be thinking in terms of the future. Six to twelve months out. 

This starts with designing the structure of your company using an organizational chart. A basic org chart with core functions…Visionary, Operator, Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance, etc. 

Every function in the organization should have a mission. And that mission provides sort of that overarching view of what's important and what has to be accomplished.

Next up is PROCESSES. I think process is kind of a four-letter word with entrepreneurs. They get a little freaked out about it. Usually, it’s either because they haven’t documented their processes at all or they’ve worked in a previous organization where they tend to over document.

A process involves a few steps. Define your goals, plan and map your process, set actions and assign the people who are accountable, test the process, implement the process, monitor the results, tweak if needed, and repeat. 

Last up is BETS. Bets might be a new idea for some of us, but it's actually not new. We do this subconsciously. 

We can think of it in terms of long-term, mid-term and short-term bets or however you want to lay it out. But, are we placing the right bets? We need to be making informed bets. And we have to have deep conversations about what's truly important and what we're trying to accomplish, whether it’s one, three, or five years. We’ve got to get really crystal clear on those bets.