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Megan Hyatt Miller: One day, a German physicist was experimenting with cathode rays. After a while, he noticed light hitting a piece of cardboard across the room. There was a thick screen between the cathode emitter and the cardboard, and there was no light burning on the other side of the room. He realized particles of energy must be passing through the screen. After a few more experiments, he found out he could create images, like photos, with cathode radiation. He had discovered the X-ray completely by accident.

Michael Hyatt: In 1907, another scientist named Leo Baekeland was looking for a cheaper insulation for electrical wires, and in the process he created the world’s first synthetic plastic. He called it Bakelite. Bakelite became a big hit. It has been used to make everything from telephones to airplane propellers. In fact, Bakelite is still used today in billiard balls.

A pharmacist named John Pemberton also ran a few lab experiments. He was looking for a way to cure headaches, and he mixed up a concoction of coca leaves and kola nuts. Later on, his lab assistant accidentally added carbonated water, and Coca-Cola was born. Now that’s what I call a happy accident.

Megan: Post-it notes, Play-Doh.

Michael: Microwave ovens, superglue.

Megan: Teflon, Velcro, penicillin.

Michael: The Slinky.

Megan: Even the heart pacemaker. Those were all accidental discoveries, but not all accidents turn out so well. Most are inconvenient at best and tragic at worst. Everybody gets lucky from time to time, but chance is not a strategy. When someone asked researcher Sara Seager the best way to make discoveries she said, “Commit time and energy to find out if your idea works.”

Michael: A biomedical engineer named Chris Toumazou was asked the same question. He outlined a four-step process beginning with this: “Think of a solution and then work backward.” That’s great advice. More often we think of a solution and then keep doing what we’ve always done.

Megan: What do you want to accomplish? What results are you going for in your organization, your family, your personal life?

Michael: Have you created an intentional strategy to produce that outcome or are you relying on luck?

Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael:  And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work, succeed at life, and lead with confidence. In this episode, we’ll show you exactly how to get the results you’re looking for by creating a process designed to produce it.

Megan: As leaders, we’re all responsible for getting results, yet it seems like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel, trying to solve the same old problems, but if there’s one thing we’re known for here at Michael Hyatt & Company it’s mastering the art of process automation, and today we’ll show you how to design a process that’s virtually guaranteed to deliver the results you’ve been looking for. You can finally get off the hamster wheel of repetitive tasks and create a winning process for every responsibility in your portfolio.

Michael: Before we get to today’s episode, can I ask you a favor? If you’re enjoying Lead to Win, would you please leave a review of the podcast? We’ve made it super easy to do. Just go to mh.fullfocus.co/reviewit. It’ll only take two to three minutes, and it really helps us to keep this podcast visible so that other leaders like you can find it. Thanks so much.

Megan: Before we get into the steps for engineering success, which I’m really excited about talking about with you today, I want to clarify something. We’re really talking about any situation where a leader is dealing with a problem that’s the result of a bad process, but leaders deal with all kinds of problems that result from other things too.

Michael: That’s right. I think this is a helpful disclaimer. You may be a leader who’s frustrated with results, and maybe you’ve tried a number of solutions. Maybe you’re getting pressure from upstream, like your boss or maybe your corporate board, but there could be a number of root causes for the results you’re getting. It’s not always about a business process that’s delivering those results. For example, it could be personnel, an underperforming manager. You might have to fire somebody or give remedial training. Or maybe a product. You have a poorly designed or low-quality product on your hands.

I love what Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather used to say. “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.” If you have a product problem, you have a product problem, and that has to be addressed. Or it could be marketing or sales, not delivering the results they should, or maybe using a poor methodology. Maybe you need a new marketing strategy or process, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. You have a standard way of doing things, and it simply doesn’t work. It’s delivering a predictable result; it’s just not the result you want. If you don’t like the cake, change the recipe.

Megan: I think what we’re really saying here is that before you start to solve a problem you need a diagnostic process to make sure you’re solving the right problem, because what you don’t want to do is put your effort after the wrong issue and then still have the problem at the end. So just take a minute before you dig into this process question to ask, “What kind of problem do I have?” and then you can proceed from there.

Michael: Let’s say you come to the conclusion that it’s a process problem or you suspect that it might be a process problem. Here’s the thing to realize: you do have a process. Even the people who say… Like my grandmother used to say this when we loved her chocolate cake with the caramel frosting. You know, “Give us the recipe.” She’d say, “I don’t have a recipe.” The truth is she had a recipe; it just wasn’t documented. Everybody has a recipe. It’s just not working. Or as Ian Cron says, you’re getting the pizza you ordered. I love that.

Megan: I like that and I don’t like that.

Michael: If you want a different outcome, you have to figure out a different process.

Megan: The most natural places where you’re going to have a process problem in your business are around production. In our business that would be content production, but it could be manufacturing or something like that. Scheduling. If you have an executive assistant and you find you’re constantly in a situation where you’re double booked or don’t have drive time or things like that…

Michael: Or even overwhelmed.

Megan: Or overwhelmed. That may be the result of a bad process. Operational management. That’s definitely a place where processes are really important. Financial management for sure. If you’re constantly running out of cash, maybe you’re not managing that according to a process in such a way that you’re able to look at things like, “What are my bank balances, and what do I have coming up, and how am I anticipating expenses?” Things like that that could be really critical.

Michael: Before you get off that one, I think managers and leaders often jump to some other problem other than process, but the process… It may not be able to fix your current situation, but it can definitely keep you out of trouble as you move forward. Look at that as a process.

Megan: Absolutely. We’re really talking about how to design a process that can deliver stellar results in these kinds of situations. By the way, we’re in our new office today.

Michael: I know. I love this. This is one of my favorite offices I’ve ever been in. It’s a first for our team. We’ve been completely remote, all 35 or 36 of us, but now we have a home. What’s cool about the office is that we refer to it as a co-working space. No one is required to work here, but everyone is invited. We tried to make it cool enough that people are going to want to work here, but obviously, if they want to work at home and be more focused they can do that too.

Megan: By the way, it’s really cool.

Michael: It’s really cool. Did you mention that?

Megan: It’s in a historic building we renovated, and it has almost a boutique hotel kind of vibe to it. It’s really fun. We may even do an episode on it in the future. But if you’re listening and you just noticed that maybe it sounds like we’re in a different space, it’s because we are.

Michael: Do you know my favorite part about it?

Megan: What?

Michael: We’re sitting at our conference table, and I’m sitting right across the table from you like we’re having a cup of coffee together, because we are, and we’re just talking.

Megan: It’s great. All right, Dad. Today we have three steps to engineering success. What’s the first one?

Michael: The first one is to define the outcome. Before you can get anywhere, you have to be clear on where you’re going. You don’t just get in your car and head out on a vacation. You define where you’re going. You probably rented a property there. You know what it looks like. You have to do what Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind, or as we often say here at Michael Hyatt & Company, define the win.

Too often, we start with this vague idea, and then we kind of end up wandering around or we create this unbelievable, unmanageable process because we don’t really understand what it is we’re trying to produce. Obviously, we want to use the most effective, most efficient means for defining the process. It begins by defining it.

Megan: This shows up a lot in customer experience for people. If you have clients or customers, very often you have somebody who’s unhappy or maybe a lot of people who are unhappy. You want to fix that problem. You want to deliver a great outcome to them, but what you need in order to do that time and time again is a very well defined outcome you’re trying to create. How do you want them to feel? What’s it going to look like? All of those kinds of things, and then engineer the process backward with steps that can be repeated over and over again.

Michael: This can work in a lot of different areas, and it works particularly well when you’re trying to create a product. I think about when I wrote my book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. I engineered the success of the book. I said, for example, “If I want to get this on the New York Times Best Seller list…” Which I did, and it did get on the list. “…what would have to be true?” That’s a great question to ask yourself. “What would have to be true?”

So I started thinking about, “Okay, I have endorsements from all of these amazing people, including Seth Godin.” I was able to get his endorsement. So I reverse engineered the process. First of all, it would have to be a well written book. That kind of goes without saying. So, I’m defining what it looks like when it’s completed.

Or another example. When we engineered the success of the Full Focus Planner, we asked, “What would it take to create a great paper planner that people would actually use? What would have to be true?” We defined the win before we got involved in the process. Otherwise, so often you end up with a Frankenstein of a product where people are just cobbling things on willy-nilly without any ultimate design.

Megan: Or a really bloated process that’s way overkill and more than you need and, therefore, doesn’t get consistently applied, which is problematic.

Michael: By the way, we do have a tool for this, something we use in our coaching program, which we call a Project Vision Caster, which forces people to get crystal clear on the outcome at the very beginning. It asks that question, “What’s true?” or “What does it look like when it’s finished?” and then kind of reverse engineers it. It’s a way for leaders and managers to get clear before they delegate something or before they embark upon this journey to create an outcome.

Megan: One of the things that’s interesting about that tool is that you talk as though the outcome were already a present reality, which I think is critical for envisioning what the win is going to be.

Michael: I talked a little bit about this in the first section of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, where I talked about wow. How do you create wow experiences? I give the example in there about when I was in the publishing business, our company wanted to renovate our lobby. Rather than just renovating it, I said, “Wait a second. What’s the outcome we want people to experience? What do we want people to experience when they either approach this lobby or they’re sitting in this lobby?” We stated it all as if we were describing it as though it were complete, so, in the present tense. That’s really important.

Megan: I love that. So, the first step is to define the outcome or, as we like to say, to define the win, and it’s critical to start with that end in mind. What’s the second step?

Michael: The second step is to engineer the process. Once we have the win defined or the outcome defined, now we can roll up our sleeves and get to work. This really is the secret sauce. Start at the end, and then work backward. It’s a lot simpler than it sounds, and I just want to give you three sub-steps under this main point.

First, identify what you’re currently doing. It’s a little bit like my grandma’s cake. You already have a process in place. You already have a recipe, but you’ve determined you don’t like the cake. You don’t like the outcome you’re producing, but is it leading to the result? That’s what you have to ask yourself. “Okay, we have a process…” It could be a hiring process, it could be a manufacturing process, a scheduling process, all of the things you mentioned, but is it giving you a predictable result and a result that you want?

Megan: It’s kind of like if you go to Chick-fil-A, for example. When you go to Chick-fil-A, you know you are going to get in and out of that line faster than any other fast food restaurant you could possibly go to. Why? Because they have an amazing process they follow to a T that is honed to perfection, and they’re able to move more people than you could possibly imagine through that line.

In fact, somebody told us the Chick-fil-A not far from us moves 200 people an hour through their line. Just think about that for a second. The only way that’s possible is that they have identified every single step it takes to get someone in and out, including overcoming all of the obstacles their competitors are facing, and then they’ve trained their team to execute against that process without fail.

Michael: And they use this everywhere. It’s not just like that process is engineered. The reason you can go there and get a chicken sandwich and it tastes the same in San Diego as it does in Nashville…

Megan: Which they’re making in the back. It’s not like all frozen. They have to make it.

Michael: They’re making it, but it tastes the exact same no matter where you buy it. By the way, I should mention another resource, a book for people to read, which is The E-Myth Revisited. E-myth stands for entrepreneurial myth. That book by Michael Gerber is a classic, one of the top 10 best business books I’ve ever read. It’s all about this topic of process engineering.

Megan: It kind of reminds me of that quote by W. Edwards Deming. He designed the sampling techniques that are still used by the Census Bureau today. He said if you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. Kind of like your example of your grandmother’s cake. You know, grandmothers of the world. They can’t describe what they’re doing, necessarily, and, therefore, they can’t document it, but if somebody were able to come in and pay attention to all of the steps it probably could be documented and, therefore, repeated.

Michael: In fact, that’s exactly what happened. What my mom did was she went to my grandma and said, “Of course you have a recipe, and I’m going to document it.” She wrote it down on a note card, which I have, by the way, so that Gail can duplicate that cake anytime she wants to, you girls can duplicate it anytime you want. Why? Because we documented it, and now we have a process.

Megan: I secretly think that’s a strategy of grandmothers to keep their recipes secret and make it special.

Michael: It’s like magicians. They’re not going to tell you how they do the tricks, because then the magic is gone. So, first identify what you’re currently doing. Second, identify what’s not working. You have to ask yourself the question, “What would have to happen in order to produce the result we want?” The goal here is to identify the major actions, the resources you’re going to need. Again, I think the recipe is a perfect metaphor. You want to be able to hand it to somebody who doesn’t know anything about the process and for them to be able to follow it just by getting your recipe and get the result you get.

Megan: For example, back to the Chick-fil-A analogy. Maybe there’s some part of the process that you or I would look at, if that were our recipe, and think it’s not important enough to write down. Like, maybe you have to cook it for exactly 35 seconds and not 32 or 37 or it gets rubbery or undercooked. If you just said, “Cook it until it’s done,” and you weren’t specific enough, then what is done is going to depend on who’s making it, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to have happen. You want to have a foolproof process that can be done by anyone.

Michael: One of the things I would say about that is if you’re getting variable results, there’s some aspect of the recipe you haven’t yet decoded and documented.

Megan: Like, standardized.

Michael: That’s right. Again, this sub-process here. Identify what you’re currently doing, identify what’s not working, and then thirdly, design a process to produce the result you want. This is where you put it all together like a script, like a program, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Once you punch the button to go, then the process starts and you get the same result every single time.

Megan: Another really good tip on this is after you have documented your process it’s very helpful to not only have people test it, which you absolutely need to do, but have people review it. Have somebody without your context and your own brain look at it and ask, “Does this make sense? Have I left anything out?” Very often, what you’ll find is that the person you’re trying to hand it off to to replicate will not understand some part of it. You’ll have the curse of knowledge yourself, and you’ll leave things out you assume everyone knows, and, in fact, they don’t. You need somebody outside of yourself to evaluate it.

Michael: Another example from the company is that when we design a sales page and we’re about to launch a campaign or launch a new product, we have a lot of people beat that sales page to death, run through the buying process, and make sure there aren’t any problems so that, again, the customer has a consistent experience, because we don’t want for them to have a different experience. We want them to have the same experience every time they go through it no matter where they are in the world, so we have to test that.

Megan: Absolutely. Back to that Chick-fil-A example. You have to run it through a lot of people to make sure it works. Otherwise, if there are points of friction, your customers are going to experience it and are going to be frustrated.

Michael: Yes, they are.

Megan: A couple of places where process improvement could be really helpful… If you find that you’re chronically late with product launches… You know, you’re working till 3:00 in the morning the night before. We certainly used to do that several years ago, and we were like, “Man, this isn’t working. We need some kind of a better process.” If you have bottlenecks in your inventory or your production… Again, something we have struggled with in the past.

Michael: Which, by the way, with the Full Focus Planner… That was challenging to get that process identified and fine-tuned so we could produce a predictable result. Thankfully, our customers were patient with us, and we were able to get it right.

Megan: By the way, just as a pause here, it’s important to remember this is an iterative process. The process of creating a process is iterative. You’re probably not going to get it 100 percent right the first time, and that’s not even the goal. The goal is to be in a place of refining and making it better. If you hold yourself to a standard of total perfection, you’ll just throw in the towel and think, “Oh, that process stuff doesn’t work.”

Michael: You could end up slavishly addicted to the process when it’s not producing the result. I’ll tell you an example. I got this one from Gail this morning. She was telling me how when she was coming through TSA on our way back from Denver two days ago, she had some part of her facial stuff, some liquid, that was twice as much as they legally allowed.

Megan: Oh, the little three-ounce things?

Michael: Yeah. She could only have an ounce and a half. The TSA agent said, “Well, you can go buy a container at that store over there and pour half of it in one container and leave half of it in the other container.” I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, what’s stupid about this? It’s the same amount of liquid.” It’s crazy, but that’s where they’re so addicted to the process they forget the result. The whole point is you want to keep people from building bombs, I assume.

Megan: What do we need to do to do that?

Michael: Yeah, what do we need to do that? Putting the stuff in another bottle is probably not the answer.

Megan: Absolutely. I have seen this happen so often. People are committed to the process so much they forget the outcome completely, and you can’t get them off that process. It’s like you have to reorient people sometimes. In fact, this is a great thing to do when you’re setting this up with your team. If you’re going to go introduce a new process, I would always say, “This process is beta. It will change. We will iterate, so don’t get too married to it, and be prepared to give feedback, because it’s probably not going to work 100 percent, and we don’t want it to be any more cumbersome than it absolutely has to be to produce the result.”

Michael: I think it’s setting up the mindset of that very thing. Everything is beta. Love that.

Megan: I have great news to share with you. Soon we’ll be releasing version 3.0 of our best-selling product the Full Focus Planner. This version comes with updated daily pages, weekly reviews, calendars, and so much more. So if you’ve been hearing great things about the Full Focus Planner and have been thinking about getting one of your own, now is the perfect time.

Just in case you don’t know what it is, the Full Focus Planner is a physical planner to help you distill your big annual goals into daily actions. Some of the best features include our Daily Big 3, which helps prioritize your high-leverage items for a day, and our weekly review to help you plan your week and beat the overwhelm.

The planner also follows a 90-day achievement cycle. This helps break up your big annual goals into quarterly ones so you’re always making progress. With our annual subscription, we can automatically deliver a new planner to your doorstep every 90 days so you never experience a break from your goal achievement. To get your copy of the Full Focus Planner, head to fullfocusplanner.com today.

Megan: The second step in creating the outcome you want is to reverse engineer the process. Remember, whatever result you’re currently getting is likely the result of a process. If it’s not working, find out why and work backward toward a solution. Let’s move on to the third step.

Michael: We probably stole a little bit of our thunder when we were talking about the last one. The third step is to optimize it to perfection. Here’s where the design process falls apart. That is, the designer of the process quits too early. Like you were saying earlier, when the process is complete or you think it’s complete, it’s still not done.

Megan: Where we see this a lot is in daily rituals people have. We encourage people to create a morning ritual, an evening ritual, a workday startup ritual, and a workday shutdown ritual. In fact, we talk about that in more detail in episode 33 if you’re interested. Where people often get hung up is they create those rituals… Like, they’re sitting at their desk and dream up these great rituals, and then it’s the next day and they’re all gung-ho to go implement them, and guess what. They don’t work quite like they thought.

It takes longer to get the kids ready for school than you thought or your workout routine you thought only took 30 minutes you forgot to include the drive time or you forgot to include getting breakfast, so you keep skipping breakfast. Something about it is not going to work, no matter how well you think you have it, until you really put it to the test. If you give up at that point and say, “Well, this whole ritual thing just doesn’t work for me…” In reality, you just didn’t iterate yet.

Michael: I love this quote: “If you quit on the process, you are quitting on the result.” Like with rituals, I’d be curious to know, how often do you revise yours?

Megan: Well, I actually just did it this morning. This morning my kids had their first day of school, and I realized the ritual I have been using all summer was based on…

Michael: The summer morning ritual.

Megan: Last time I revised it was when we went into the summer, and that’s different because we’re not rushing to get out the door. I don’t have to pack lunches in the summer, those kinds of things. So I realized this morning, “Man, we are just barely making it out the door; this is really stressful,” and I thought, “I have a process problem. I have not accounted for how much time it’s actually going to take to get us all ready and out the door for school and work.” So I revised it.

Michael: Well, I’m about to revise mine as well, because I have a whole new strength training regimen I’m about to use, and it’s going to take less time than what I was doing previously. Part of that is because I’m going to be able to do it at home, so it requires a revision in my morning ritual. The point is don’t worry if you have to change it. That’s the sign of progress.

By the way, this is why we teach in another context, in our coaching program, the After-Action Review, because that’s a way to be reflective on something you’ve just done and ask yourself the question, “What can we improve to make it better so that next time we get a better result?” Again, you have to test the process. You have to document it carefully so others can understand. This is a missing ingredient too, this whole documentation part.

Megan: It totally is, because if you don’t document it, if you just say, “We’d like to do these three things,” again, you’re probably leaving out steps that are going to produce an inconsistent or undesirable result.

Michael: And people forget or distort it or whatever.

Megan: We’re really talking about a checklist. It should be distilled down to a checklist.

Michael: When I was on my recent sabbatical, we flew into the wild parts of Canada that we could only get to in a very small airplane that was one of those seaplanes.

Megan: That’s a little terrifying to me. I’m going to be honest.

Michael: No, it was great. I love it. Well, think about it this way. Would you rather slam into the water or slam into concrete? It feels a lot safer.

Megan: Except for the drowning part.

Michael: The second part of it was we got on a helicopter. I was seated right behind the pilot in the helicopter, and he went through a process that took him literally five minutes, where he had a visible checklist on a clipboard and was going through every single thing.

Megan: Amazing. That gives you a lot of comfort.

Michael: It gives you a lot of comfort, because it’s going to produce a predictable result. We’re going to land safely. We’re going to be alive. I like that result.

Megan: That reminds me of that great book called The Checklist Manifesto written by Atul Gawande who’s a surgeon and public health researcher. In it he talks about the power of processes and checklists in surgical rooms. For example, people were dying in very large numbers from sponges being left in their bodies at surgery.

Michael: I hate that.

Megan: It’s a horrible thing to contemplate. What he found was that if they instituted a process whereby they scanned barcodes on the sponges they could make sure they were not left inside the patients.

Michael: Everything had to be scanned in and out.

Megan: Everything had to be scanned in and scanned out, and that was their process. What they found was that the death rate was dramatically reduced. That’s a great and extreme example of where a process can really help you.

Michael: Again, I think the point is we want to document, and in this case the documentation was you have to scan all of these things in and out. That’s, in effect, creating a checklist. So, the documentation is key. Third, you have to communicate the process to anyone who needs to take part. Then fourth, you have to continually evaluate the process according to the results.

Megan: Like, did the death rate go down?

Michael: Right. And if it didn’t, then try something else. There’s actually a great article about this. I mentioned the After-Action Review before, and I forgot we have an article in this issue of the Michael Hyatt Magazine. It’s called “Why After-Action Reviews Are So Important.” It’s written by Mike Harris, and you can check it out at mh.fullfocus.co. It’s up today, and it’ll give you the detail of what we do in that After-Action Review process.

Megan: Okay. That’s great. Let’s talk about some of the tools that can help you with the documentation process.

Michael: By the way, I want to refer to the E-myth again too, because he talks about some of these tools, like templates. That was one of the first times I got an idea for this thing I now call template thinking, but it was the idea of if you start with a template it’s much easier to produce a result.

Megan: Well, it is a process. Right? A template is a process.

Michael: Well, it’s kind of part of the process. Like think of this. Let’s say you want to make circus waffles. Do you know anybody who does this?

Megan: I do. My mom. My kids love it.

Michael: She uses a template to do that. She doesn’t just make up the waffle stuff and then decide she’s going to be an artist. No, she has a template.

Megan: Right. It’s a waffle iron.

Michael: It produces a predictable result every time. So, a template is great. We have templates we use in our company for all kinds of things, whether it’s the Project Vision Caster or the After-Action Review or any number of things, even a meeting template.

Megan: That reminds me, in our book No Fail Meetings we have a template for a meeting agenda, and that actually is a process within a template, because if you will use all of the little blocks in our agenda template, then you will have the makings of a great and productive meeting. It’s really like paint by numbers.

Michael: Totally. I used it last night for an executive committee of a board I serve on. I was leading the meeting. We went through the meeting, it was flawless, we covered everything, and it just helped produce that predictable result. Another one is workflows.

Megan: You really like workflows a lot.

Michael: I love workflows. It’s challenging to document them. I don’t even know if you know this story, but 20 years ago I was frustrated because I had executive assistants who all came in with how they wanted to do things. After a few years I’d get a new executive assistant. I kept promoting the ones I had, and then I had to start all over.

So I said, “No. I’m going to document everything from managing my email to setting up my meetings to greeting visitors when they come into my space,” and I documented all that. It’s still on my hard drive. It’s about a 200-page manual that goes through the steps for every single process. From there on out, everybody did it the same way. Now, we tweaked it, but at least we had it documented and we were all part of the process for making it better.

Megan: One thing to say about this, though, and you kind of alluded to it: it takes longer on the front end. When you decide you’re going to create a template (that’s a little bit less time) or definitely a workflow, you have to think of it like you’re making an investment that will pay off later.

Michael: Two questions to ask on that front. First, “Is this a process I want to use again?” If so, create a template so you start without having to recreate the wheel. Secondly, “Is this a process I want to delegate to somebody else?” Then you have to have a workflow. So, templates and workflows. Both are key.

Megan: Absolutely. Then, of course, we already talked about the After-Action Review. So, templates, workflows, After-Action Reviews… Those are the elements of designing processes. They’re pretty consistent results.

Michael: The thing the After-Action Review is going to do for you is put you in a process… It’s like a meta-process that enables you to get better at what you’re doing so that it’s constantly improving and going to the next level.

Megan: Right. For example, if you had an executive assistant who left for one reason or the other and you weren’t happy with the results you’d gotten, that would help you understand why and what you needed to change going forward.

Michael: Totally.

Megan: So, today we’ve learned that you can create the outcome you want by following three steps: define the outcome, reverse engineer the process, and optimize it to perfection. Before we go, I just want to remind you that your current results are the result of your current process. If those results aren’t what you want, you have the power to design your own success. Dad, do you have any final thoughts?

Michael: Yeah, I do. I think it’s very easy when you’re not getting a result to blame something external to yourself.

Megan: So true.

Michael: One of the most important questions you can ask is, “What is it about my leadership, about the way I’m doing this that’s producing this result?” Then it puts it back on you where you say, “Hey, am I smart enough to produce a different result by reengineering the process?” To me, that employs my creativity and gets me excited about solving the problem instead of just being frustrated and pointing the finger at somebody else.

Megan: I want to thank our sponsor LeaderBox. It provides automated personal development in a box. Check it out at leaderbox.com. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, get the show notes and a full transcript online at leadto.win.

Michael: Thanks again for joining us on Lead to Win. If you’re benefitting from this podcast, tell your friends and colleagues about it. The easiest way to do that is to leave a review. Go to leadto.win and follow the simple steps. Thanks.

Megan: This program is copyrighted by Michael Hyatt & Company. All rights reserved. Our producer is Nick Jaworski.

Michael: Our writers are Joel Miller and Lawrence Wilson.

Megan: Our recording engineer is Mike Burns.

Michael: Our production assistant is Natalie Fockel.

Megan: Our intern is Winston.

Michael: Stay tuned this week for a special bonus episode where we’ll share the learning from our recent sabbaticals. Then join us again next week when we’ll learn how to identify and avoid a huge productivity killer: fake work. Until then, lead to win.