Listen
Everyone has a voice. The question is whether you built anything to receive it.
The numbers are drifting, the explanations keep changing, and the people who know stopped telling you a while ago. Your reporting averages the problem away before it reaches you.
Why
The thing I got wrong
I spent my career building instruments that measure an organization from the outside. First getting the data at all. Then benchmarking, which is putting one organization’s number next to another’s and asking what the difference is made of. Then matching practice against performance, to find out which practices drive the result and which are merely present in the binder. Each one answered something the one before it could not. And all three are blind in exactly the same place.
None of them can tell you what the person operating the system knows about it. The practices that separate a good operation from a bad one are mostly not in any document, because they were invented on a shift and never written down, and you cannot inventory what was never recorded. The only way to get it is to ask the people doing the work.
I have been asking them for most of my career, and for most of that time I could reach about ten at a time. A cross functional group, or a shift with pizza and nothing in my hands to write with. It works better than anything else available, and it does not scale. That limit shaped my method so completely that I stopped noticing it was a limit. About three years ago it stopped being one.
I built my career on the idea that you measure the system, and I was right, and it was not enough. What the people inside it know is the last unmeasured thing. The 8M Institute exists because it is finally measurable, and because the right number of people to ask was never ten. It was everyone.
Value delivered
The problem it solves
Profit is draining somewhere your reports cannot see, and the people who know stopped telling you a while ago.
The value it delivers
A finding list from asking everyone, sorted into eight categories and prioritized on the weakest. A chartered team on each selected finding, with gains counted as cost removed, cost avoided, or revenue recovered, and nothing closed without evidence the failure stopped.
Why talk now
Bring the number that keeps drifting. Thirty minutes tells you whether the eight categories would find it.
Schedule a Strategic ConversationWhat it does
Three years ago the limit came off. This is what asking everyone looks like.
Everyone gets asked, in their own words. Not a focus group and not a sample of ten. Every person in the scope gets a prompt and a box, and types or dictates the way they would a text message.
Occasions, not opinions. The prompts ask what happened, what you did, who decided, and how often. Nobody is asked to rate anything.
Eight categories sort the causes. Every occasion lands in one of the eight boxes named below, and the finding is the weakest category, not the average of the eight.
The profit leaks are patterned, not bespoke. The same profit leaks show up in a manufacturing plant, a technology company, a hospital, and a physician clinic, which is what makes them findable before anyone briefs us.
The cost shows up in three places: profit, valuation, and the morale of the people who watched it happen and could not stop it.
We do not hand you a report. We run the team that delivers the performance and the profit, and the check that proves it is set before the work starts.
Proof
Firms with a wide gap between how management and staff see the businesses show 16% lower return on assets, 10% lower market value against asset value, and a 48% higher chance of CEO turnover.
Stop the Line. The book is free. It is how most people meet this work. Get Stop the Line at 8minstitute.org (opens in a new tab)
Eight categories, and you perform at the weakest one
Man
Qualification and competence
Machine
Equipment and the systems driving it
Material
Inputs and inbound information
Method
Procedure and standard work
Measurement
Data, definition, and abstraction
Mother Nature
The physical environment of the work
Maintenance
Asset upkeep and recall
Management
Resourcing, targets, and governance
Eight boxes, eight owners, no exits. Every cause an organization produces lands in one of them, and the finding is the weakest of the eight, never the average.
Your people already know where the profit is leaking. Ask them.
Thirty minutes. Bring the number that keeps drifting, and leave knowing whether the eight categories would find it.