Our last fuel can disappeared while my mate Simon and I were watching a welder in Mongolia pull lightning out of a power line. Everyone was doing something useful, and something important still went missing. If work keeps falling between people in your team and landing back on your desk, it’s the same thing.
Watching the welder
It was 2008. Simon and I were driving a tiny 600cc Citroen 2CV from London to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. By the time we got to Altai, the underside of the car was falling apart.
To weld the bottom, everything had to come out. Bags, tools and fuel cans, all sitting on the ground beside the car. The welder hooked a cable over the power line, put on his sunglasses and lay under the car. It was a modern-day miracle, and we couldn’t take our eyes off it.
While we watched, someone walked off with our last fuel can.
The God bag
We did have one rule on that trip. Our passports, money and papers lived in one bag, which we called the God bag, because everything important was in it. One of us was always attached to it. Even at night, we took turns sleeping with it inside our sleeping bag, because other travellers on the same route had documents stolen from their tents while they slept.
That bag never went missing. The fuel cans had no rule. Nobody’s name was on them, so nobody was watching them.
Every task has a person, and nobody owns the gaps
A lot of businesses I walk into look like that pile beside the car. Every task has a person. Invoicing has a person. Onboarding has a person.
Then I ask who owns getting a new client from signed to happy, and the room goes quiet.
To fix that, you need two words that usually get used as if they mean the same thing.
An SOP should be the size of one task
An SOP should cover one task: one person, in one sitting, getting one result. Send the invoice. Book the kickoff call. Set up the client’s folder.
If it needs three people and two weeks, it’s too big for an SOP. I like my SOPs short, and this is the same idea from the other side: one task wide, and only a few points long.
A process needs one name on it
A process is the chain of those tasks that moves one number you watch every week. New clients onboarded, invoices paid on time, calls booked.
The process needs one name on it, and that person owns the gaps between the tasks. They might do some of the tasks themselves, or none of them. Their job is to watch the fuel cans while everyone else watches the welder.
247 SOPs, and every decision still went to the founder
I once walked into a business that had 247 SOPs. Every task was written down, but the team had stopped opening them eight weeks before I arrived, and every decision still went to the founder.
The SOPs covered the tasks. The gaps between them belonged to one person by default, and that was the founder. When nobody owns a process, the founder does.
Try this week
Pick one number you care about. Write down the tasks that move it. Give each task its own short SOP and its own person. Then put one name on the whole chain, and tell that person their job is the handoffs.
The five-second test
Pick your most important weekly number and ask who owns the process behind it. If you can’t name them in five seconds, nobody owns it. And if nobody owns it, you do.
Back to the fuel cans
We got the car welded and we drove on. But we lost the fuel can because we were both watching the most exciting thing there.
Your team will always watch the welder. Somebody’s name needs to be on the fuel cans.
So whose name is on the fuel cans in your business?
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