FQ distilled: Stop, Start and Enhance; aka what Marie Kondo/Queer Eye would do for business
This is a reprint of a classic blog that I wrote in October 2019 when I first started my company Shiageto Consulting. Enjoy!
How many times have you found yourself slightly obsessed with something to the point that you lose clarity of thought? Or doing something that adds little value to your life but you do it anyway as you’ve always done it.
I’m not talking about anything nefarious or malicious; I mean like a box set that you tell yourself “Only one more episode tonight…”, then before you know it, it’s 3am and you have work in the morning.
In a similar way, how often do you find yourself not quite doing the things that you know will bring long term benefit but for one reason or another you never have got round to doing it? Maybe it’s decluttering your house or learning a language. It’s easy to just push it to the side and carry on with things.
Finally, and here’s the most interesting one: how often do you review the things you do, work out which things are the most positively impactful on what you want to achieve and then put in the changes to do those more regularly? It could be that cooking makes you feel healthier so you decide to do it more often or that meeting certain friends is very important to you so you vow to do it more than once a week.
Before you get worried, this isn’t a blog about habits and New Year’s resolutions or a pitch for you to get Marie Kondo/Queer Eye into your life; it’s about how achieving great FQ (focus quotient) in business involves adopting a similar approach and embracing a STOP, START and ENHANCE methodology.
It’s no different in the corporate world: we end up doing a range of things of differing value towards our strategic success — bits of processes that are done because they’ve always been done that way; entire projects that were started a while back but the strategy changed, they are no longer relevant but nobody has closed them down; inefficient teams whose performance is not addressed; obsolete technology that is not retired; the list goes on…
It’s remarkably easy to let this all build up, holding back the overall results that can be achieved. It’s harder to take stock and make decisions to improve your business’ likelihood of success by applying focus.
At Shiageto Consulting, we support a range of clients to do just that using our STOP, START and ENHANCE methodology. Be it processes, projects, teams, assets, behaviours or any business aspect, we intrinsically link them back to the business’ strategy and goals challenging the value each brings to achieving these.
From this we can identify what existing elements should be STOPPED in their entirety, which new elements should be STARTED and what existing elements should be ENHANCED (i.e. supercharged to make even more of the value they are currently delivering).
As with much of what we do, it sounds incredibly straightforward but you’ll be surprised the difficulty we all have in prioritising, letting go of things and doing the things we’ve always known we should (we’re all human after all and being in business doesn’t change this).
I’ve previously talked about examples where companies have really struggled with this and it is here that Shiageto being an external pair of eyes, with no attachment to specific areas, can be of great benefit. Throw into this the innovative techniques we use (ever tried turning projects into top trumps for example??) and our clients find great improvements can be made to their corporate focus.
We may not set New Year’s resolutions for you but we can certainly help you get into better shape and give you the ultimate support to get there (just consider us the Marie Kondo/Queer Eye of the business world — other Netflix experts are available).
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness.
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
