If you’ve looked through my website, I’m sure you’ve noticed hints of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. There’s no accident in the references to Alice’s adventures in that world and the way I work with companies to develop or improve their operations. In fact, Looking Glass Consulting LLC was chosen specifically to call up memories of a world where doing things in reverse made sense and the idea of anything being impossible was simply ludicrous.
Through the years as I worked with individuals and organizations on business planning and process improvement, I noticed that many of the individuals would have an idea, but their vision of the end result wasn’t complete. Those who knew exactly what they wanted the final product or service to look like typically had a better result. Eventually I realized that the best way to improve the value stream was to look at it backwards.
This is how I approach every project. One of the first questions I will ask is “In a perfect world, what does this look like in the end?” What I’m looking for is a detailed description of the last steps in the value stream. How is the product or service being delivered to the customer? What does that interaction look like? Once I can see that vision, and understand where we are now, I can begin to work on the most efficient path to create that final vision.
Looking at a process from the end first isn’t new. In fact, some of the most successful people in the world took this very approach. My next blog post will highlight one of them. What makes Looking Glass Consulting different is that I take this approach and apply the tools and techniques from some of the top project and process improvement techniques to ensure that you end up with the right vision with the least amount of waste.
If you need help with any issue facing your organization – from the initial business plan to refining the analytics or operations – join me through the looking glass. If you’ve ever said “I think I could, if I only know how to begin…” let me help you realize that, as Alice found in the story, very few things indeed are really impossible.
