Think about this: there’s not a lot tricky about a pocket knife and yet, it’s very useful. What about tape? Duct tape is practically a cult. Pens and paper mean we have tools to push thought into a storeable, reusable format. Those devices are all tools.
Machines can be simple, too. The smallest motor basically does one thing: move something around in a circle as fast as it can. And yet, from this most simple thing, we can drill, we can pump water, we can make our cars move forward.
There’s something fascinating and gorgeous and lustful in turning this into a lens for us to think about things we do. What are some of the tools and machines you’ve developed? Do you have a cool little Excel spreadsheet trick that gets the job done? Do you have a little cardboard guide that makes packaging your company’s widget a little easier?
Here’s an example from my universe: I was once a 411 operator for the phone company. You know the drill. “What city, please?” “In Boston, can I have the number for Domino’s Pizza?” “Sure, on Beach, Boylston, or Staniford Street?” Yep. That was my job. The engine underneath this business for the phone company is: get ‘em in, get ‘em out, do it fast and efficient. The measure to beat: average work time. A typical call center — say, a help desk — is measured at around 3 minutes turnaround. At 411, we had to stay under 18 seconds to be profitable.
To search the database, we had to type four characters for the town/city name, and then the first four characters of the listing’s first field (either business first name or residence last name), then two characters of the next name. Here are two examples:
Bost / Domi Pi
Read/ Baxt Ja
By futzing around with the system, I realized that I got much better answers if I gave fewer letters to the first word and more to the second:
Bost/ Do Pizz
Read/ Ba Jame
But man, you can not mess around with the “rules” of a call center. It’s not allowed. Because the folks at the staff level position in headquarters have done studies this way and that to prove they’re right. And by the numbers, they probably are. But here’s the thing: my idea was right, too. So, I implemented it.
I managed a team of 33 employees. I told the ones who’d listen (mostly the non-lifers) that they’d get way better search results from my trick. Guess what? My team suddenly shot their average work time down from around 18 seconds to a consistent 14 seconds. You think four seconds isn’t a lot? It got me dragged into the district headquarters to explain what the hell I’d done.
All this from changing a search parameter manually with my fingers. Yep.
Sometimes, we get locked up by wanting to change the universe in big ways. We think, “Yeah, it’s been done.” Guess what? The highest number of U.S. patents granted in any year goes to people who are just tweaking other people’s inventions. Yep. Better mousetraps.
What do you have? What’s on board? How can you take some of the things you know how to do and make them into a little, discrete useful tool?
Related posts:
