In business, so often it’s about knowing which levels to pull, when. You’re probably familiar with the allegory of a shipping magnate whose freighter is loaded with cargo ready for transport, but something is stuck and the shaft on the propeller won’t turn.
The shipping magnate’s crew looks the ship over and everything looks normal. Vexed, the magnate calls in an expert. This expert looks at the whole system — goes over the boiler, listens to the engine, generally pokes at everything for an hour and a half. They then pull out a giant mallet, walk to the drive shaft, hit it real hard one time, and tells the magnate to try and start the propeller now.
Miraculously, the problem is fixed. The expert tells the magnate, “Great, that’ll be $20,000.” The magnate is baffled and asks why it costs so much to swing a mallet one time. To which the expert clarifies that the magnate isn’t paying for the swing of the mallet, but for the expertise of knowing where to swing.
The moral of the story is that there’s a lot of value in knowing when and where to apply your efforts. Which leads me to today’s topic: knowing which levers to pull.
When running a business, whether a small local operation or a global enterprise, there are things you’d like to be different. There are probably several things, actually: you want to update your sales process, sell more of a certain product, etc. I ran into this issue when going on site visits with a management team. I’d look everything over and come away with 27 changes that would improve operations.
But in our allegory, the expert didn’t swing the mallet 27 times. They swung it once. If you have a lot of things that you want to change, then you have a responsibility to pull the right levers and make those changes. At the same time, the worst thing you could do is start pulling all 27 levers at once.
Because when you make a change, you need to see what happens after. Even if you’re 100% certain that a lever needs to be moved, maybe it only needs to be pulled halfway, or maybe you’ve overlooked a confounding variable that changes which lever needs pulling entirely. And if you only realize your mistake after you’ve pulled a bunch of levers, you’ll have no clues on how to course correct.
So think it through. Talk things over with your team, and when you’re ready, pull one lever, then sit back and watch to see how (and if) it moves the needle. I can tell you from experience that after thinking everything over, it’s going to feel like you’ve already been waiting for weeks or months by the time you actually pull the lever. But you need to give the change time to breathe and have its full effect on your operations.
But that doesn’t mean you need to sit on your hands while you’re waiting to see what changes, though. Instead, go back to your list of 27 items and look it over. Of all those items, I’d bet that some affect different areas; maybe some are pertinent to sales, whereas others pertain to operational efficiency or product development. If you can isolate the impacts of pulling different levers and establish separate controls, you can enact multiple changes and record them separately without worrying about them overlapping and messing with your results.
The only danger to this method is if there is unforeseen overlap between the two levers you pull. For example, if you change sales compensation, that will affect product movement, sales behavior, efficiency, etc. So if you changed something about a product at the same time you changed sales compensation and suddenly you’re selling more or less, it could very well have nothing to do with your product change, and you’re going to end up with some misleading results when analyzing your changes.
For this reason, having a well thought out plan is essential. Once you’ve accounted for all the variables you can and are confident that you’ll get good, isolated data, pull the lever. Then sit back, record what you see, and have the discipline to follow through and not change anything else until your first change has run its course.
Pro tip: If you can A/B test, do it. This will greatly speed up how quickly you can acquire real, actionable data about potential changes. If you work in retail, right now is a great time to try three similar-but-different concepts on three similar-but-different markets and see how the changes stack up side by side.
As a leader, it’s your job to know which levers to pull and when. While you should be cautious and methodical in your approach, you eventually need to make a decision and enact these changes. Because the only thing worse than pulling too many levers is pulling none at all.