Hello Again.
Everybody tells us we should be thinking big, but I tend to favour thinking small. More specifically, I believe in applying the minimum effort to achieve maximum results.
It is a mindset I have come to adopt because of my role as a consultant. Before I became a consultant, I didn’t have a lot of time for the role. It seemed to me it was about making a lot of noise and looking busy, rather than providing value.
Therefore, when I decided to move into consultancy, I wanted to provide my clients with maximum results for the minimum time investment.
Why Think Small
It is a mindset that has served me well. However, I also believe thinking small can help you as well, for three reasons:
Outcomes, Not Solutions
Thinking small forces you to not make assumptions about the solution, but instead, seek to understand the desired outcome.
In other words, a client may come to me, asking me to redesign their website. That is a solution. However, their goal might be to increase leads from their website, and there may well be a simpler way of achieving that.
Progress, Not Perfection
Second, thinking small emphasizes progress, rather than perfection. We often get caught up creating the perfect solution, but perfect is often more than is actually required. Perfect is expensive and time-consuming. A smaller input of effort may not create perfection, but it will make progress.
Returns, Not Effort
Finally, thinking small places emphasis on a return on investment, rather than on the amount of effort you put in. As an outside supplier, there is a huge amount of emphasis on the number of hours that we work. However, what really matters is the amount of value we provide. This is why some people promote value-based pricing.
Personally, I find value-based pricing challenging to make happen in practice. However, I want the value I produce to be disproportional to the effort I put in.
Thinking Small in Practice
I regularly reduce the scope of the work people bring to me. In fact, the vast majority of my individual engagements with clients consist of less than five days of work. I prefer to focus on doing shorter engagements that provide greater value.
Let me give you three examples of where I have used thinking small to provide more value to my clients.
Resisting Growth
One client came to me, asking for my help. She ran an in-house digital team that was utterly overwhelmed and in a constant state of firefighting. The demand for her services was so high that she wanted my help to expand her team to increase her capacity.
However, when I looked at the problem, I realised a smaller, more cost-effective solution existed.
You see the problem was this team was overwhelmed and so were working inefficiently. They were also doing a huge number of small site updates that anybody could do.
Instead of recruiting, I spent five days creating a simple digital playbook that helped introduce some working methodologies. It also taught stakeholders across the organisation how to better engage with the digital team, and even make updates themselves.
This put the digital team back in control and saved the organisation a substantial investment in recruitment.
Avoiding a Redesign
Another example was a client who approached me to help them with a redesign. When I asked them why they wanted to redesign, they explained that the website wasn’t generating enough leads.
Instead of an expensive redesign, I recommended starting small and simply optimising three critical pages on the website.
The result was a 24% increase in leads. In the end, the client decided not to redesign, saving themselves a substantial capital outlay.
Changing Company Culture
The final example I want to share with you is a company who asked for my help to create a more user-centric company culture. The UX team wanted to run a one day workshop with all staff.
I couldn’t help thinking about the number of person-hours this would involve across the entire company, and that people would probably resent being taken out of their normal work.
As I chatted with the team, it quickly became apparent that the approach wouldn’t be effective anyway. That was because the targets set by management were preventing staff from prioritising user-centric thinking.
Therefore, instead of spending a day with all staff, I proposed that I spent just 20 minutes with the senior management team. Sure enough, this led to a change in key performance indicators to introduce customer satisfaction metrics, and the culture started to shift.
Applying Pressure at the Right Point
Ultimately this comes down to where you are applying pressure. If you have to apply enormous pressure in terms of effort, then the chances are you are applying it to the wrong point, and you need to reconsider what you are doing.
So ask yourself, is what I am currently working on the least I can do to achieve the goal I am looking for? Do you even have a clear picture of what that goal is, or are you too focused on the output rather than the result you want?
Perhaps it is time to challenge your mindset.
Upcoming Workshops
I seem to have a number of upcoming online workshops that you might be interested in joining. Here is a list and where you can find out more.
- Designing Websites That Convert (20th and 21st Jan)
- Finding Clients Masterclass (16th, 17th, 23rd and 24th March)
I also have two more workshops that will be available for booking soon:
- Customer Experience Strategy
- Implementing Customer Experience Online
More on those soon.
