The Peace Bubble Guy says "Focus on the Process"
I am a golfer. The primary reason I golf is because nobody has invented a way to keep score in paper cuts.
But, I digress…
Last week, before our round, one of the guys in my foursome sent a link to the video below, The Peace Bubble. I think he meant it as a joke, but I couldn’t quite tell, so I ended up watching the entire thing until the end.
The gist of the video is that you can’t succeed by focusing on the outcomes of your actions. Rather, to succeed you need to focus on the process that creates those outcomes. The screens at the end that described “outcome-based golf” versus “process-based golf” struck me because they could be applied to startups and businesses as well.
When I think of the startups I’ve been involved with, one of them was completely focused on meeting weekly budget numbers. In other words, the outcomes. Discussions about the business always started with the weekly numbers, and rarely on the processes created them. That place was a completely unpleasant place to work, and only marginally successful.
Another startup, when it started, all the founders were thinking about was the exit strategy–an IPO, a buyout, etc. That place wasn’t so bad to work, but it wasn’t very successful.
At Cheezburger, one of the cultural attitudes we’re working hard to develop is an emphasis on knowledge generation through a scientific approach. In other words, we want to be methodical about testing what we do, so that we can learn from it, regardless of whether or not it succeeds or fails.
I feel like this orientation toward outcomes is actually process-based. In other words, the outcome we care about is the learning–do we have a process for generating knowledge and learning–and not the the success or failure of the effort.
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