Harness the Juice by Aaron Alfini

Author:Aaron Alfini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silverback Cloud LLC
Published: 2023-03-02T17:31:11+00:00

My Three-Step Process for Torching “The Box”

Now, onto my recommended process for torching the box. Everyone always talks about the proverbial “box” that we keep our minds in, telling people to “think outside the box.” I’m saying that the box doesn’t exist. It’s a set of biases that we’ve constructed in our minds. Therefore, each of our minds is trapped by our own mind. The box is a zen riddle, a paradox. We will incorporate all of the other mindsets discussed so far to set this box on fire and get rid of it once and for all. To do this, we need to flush our biases and think like a child. We are certainly going to need to prove ourselves wrong. By incorporating all of these thought processes, we can truly get creative.

The first step is to truly understand the problem. We’re talking about significant problems; you will not use this process because you ran out of coffee in the break room. Identifying the problem seems simple enough. But most of the time, people get it wrong. People are great at identifying symptoms but not root causes. You might have pain in your ankle. You recognize pain as the problem, so you take painkillers. But pain isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. The real issue is that your ankle is broken. Fix that, and your pain will go away. For our scenario, the problem we’re facing is that users are abandoning our mobile application. Yes—that’s a symptom, not the problem. What we really need to determine is “why” users are leaving the application. We’ll get to that.

The second step is to find all of the players involved. By players, I mean all stakeholders, such as your salespeople, managers, developers, customers—anyone impacted by the problem or impacting it. Depending on your organization and problem, there could be dozens of actors. Make a list if you need to. With the list of actors, you can move on to the next step.

The third step is to start looking at the problem through the eyes of all the players to uncover the root problem. Start with the player you think is closest to the issue; that’s probably the users in our scenario. Then, once you uncover that player’s root problem, take that issue, and go on to the next actor. For us, that would be those who are choosing to cancel their subscriptions. Look at the problem through each player’s eyes, beginning with the player closest, putting yourself in their shoes. Once you’ve identified one actor’s root problem, move on to the next.

So, let’s do a little acting, and walk through all three steps with our scenario:

Step one: Identify the one large problem. Here, the problem is that users are not happy with the application and are therefore canceling the subscription. The underlying problem is not that they’re canceling, or that revenue is decreasing, or any other surface-level symptom.

Step two: Identify the players. In this scenario, we have the users, developers, the development manager, the CTO, and the CEO.

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