Actually I wasn’t thinking of that sort of model, but they could assist in your business too.
What I mean is last week, I introduced you to a behaviour change model proposed by B.J. Fogg of Stanford University.
In, and of itself, this model is very useful to assist you to understand how you can influence people to change their behaviour and to eventually buy your product.
But is that the only use models have, to help you understand things?
I have learnt through experience that models help in business four different ways.
Understanding. Models can very effectively describe a process or action enabling you to understand what are the parts of a process, how the parts fit together and how the process works.
Simplifying. With a model of a process and the identification of the parts of the model, it enables you to clearly describe what’s going on, and seek to simplify the process by taking our unnecessary parts, or overly complicated parts. Even in my own work, I seek ways to make things simpler and hopefully easier to understand. Taking out layers in a process can save time and therefore money.
Diagnosing. If things aren’t going well in carrying out the process, you are able to use the model to diagnose what’s wrong. Either you are applying the model wrongly, or maybe the model is wrong itself and you need to enhance or diminish, add or remove steps in the model. But you need to have a clear model to be able to do this.
Communicating. We all work through others and we need to have them understand what’s going on. Models are able to assist in communicating processes and outcomes within your team. Take the time to simply and clearly explain the basis of the model and use examples to illustrate the models application in your business.
So here are four distinct ways in which models can help in your business.