Starting a Small Business
Positive Loops - virtuous circles
Often in business, it feels as though one is working against the grain; the amount of effort expended in the activity that one does, produces only a limited result. I can sympathise entirely with you if you're in that situation, it isn't a nice place to be. If, however, you may be prepared to think a little bit laterally about things, then there may be a solution. There may be a positive loop that you can tap into to make things flow better.
It may be most obvious in certain crafts, I shall use a cooking analogy to try to make my point here. I was watching the chef Gary Rhodes on the television last autumn. He had cooked a roast. The bottom of the roasting pan had of-course become caked in bits of the stuff that had been roasting.
However, instead of then battling away with cleaning a hellishly sticky pan, he simply added a good slug of red wine into the pan, and then heated it on the hob. As if by magic the pan is clean and he's left with the most fantastic sauce, full of the flavour of the roast. This is a positive loop of activity if you can see my logic.
Plenty of businesses could, with just a hint of this logic become highly profitable. One of the best examples I've seen is with ebay the online auction. The buyers and sellers on the site leave accurate feedback on the sellers, therefore enhancing the ebay site by eliminating the vast majority of rogue sellers. Ebay haven't had to pay for its own staff to do all this policing of the sellers, the users are happy to do it for free.
In the non web world, I noticed that at my local open-air swimming pool, that at the end of the afternoon, a number of kids would be enthusiastically going round picking up the fairly extraordinary amount of litter dropped around the lawns.
It turned out that it was due to the fact that they had been bribed with a free day-pass if they could fill a bin liner with litter. It has cost the lido pool absolutely nothing to have the litter removed! It would have cost probably the best part of £20 to have paid a member of staff to do it.
I noticed in Copenhagen recently that there were a few people collecting up the empty plastic bottles from the city-centre. The bottles have a bit of value, they can be traded in for money from any drinks shop! The city must save tens of thousands of pounds a year in not having to pay people to clear away all the bottles. All obvious stuff of course....when you think about it.
These virtuous circles (opposite of viscious circle) or “positive loops” may be known as “systems-thinking”. It will may be worthwhile looking at where there is currently a problem, then seek an ultra-elegant solution to it in this way.