Life’s Most Important Jobs

People Architects helps people perform life’s most important “jobs.”

We see challenges, professional or personal, as being able to perform specific jobs well.

Professionally, we face momentous challenges such as:

• How to bring a new technology to market that thrills customers and allows you to dominate the market?

• How to help your customers so that your offering thrills them? It is about helping them perform their job better. For example, help physicians perform a serious medical procedure with far less complications than normal (complications often result in patients dying or experiencing unnecessary hardships)?

On a personal level, we face jobs like:

• How to best perform the job of managing a challenging medical diagnosis?

• How to be a better parent, caregiver and support others in challenging circumstances?.

Jobs-to-be-Done are everywhere. Our approach is as effect helping professionals win as it is at helping individuals succeed.

Our 30+ year proven approach mines the wisdom of experts and gleans their secrets, hints and strategies they have learned the hard way to help everyone perform better.

Why put yourself through the pain of making mistakes others could have told you how to easily avoid?

People Architects specializes in jobs that are a matter of life and death, what we call “life’s most important jobs.”

• A surgeon has a “job” of performing a medical procedure.

• A patient has a job of managing a serious diagnosis.

• A leader has the job of leading his or her team and organization, otherwise people may lose their jobs and the company will lose money.

• Personal jobs and goals are important. We do not want to be laid off or fired. We want to experience the fullness of life even with a challenging medical condition.

People Architects has experience and proven results in each of these jobs. We help surgeons cut their complications rates by a factor of 10 in their first year performing heart surgeries. We have coached people put on a performance improvement plan with 3 months to improve or they will be dismissed: everyone has kept their job. A new leader wanted to understand his department was working and what could be improved. We saved him months if not years (per his by revealing a plan to restructure the department and double their effectiveness.

We use the word “Jobs” in the broadest sense. People have a role at work, which is commonly called their job. Thinking of jobs or “Jobs-to-Be-Done” (JTBD) in a broader sense provides many benefits.

First, it keep the focus on performance and performing the job. Customer, for example, buy products and solutions to help them perform a job better. Focusing on the products and solutions without understanding the job a customer is trying to accomplish often (as much as 94% of the time) results in solutions that don’t work.

Theodore Levitt, a marketing expert from Harvard, is quoted as say, “People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill. They buy a quarter-inch hole.” People Architects takes this one step further. What is the job people are doing where they need a quarter-inch hole? This is the job-to-be-done. This is where successful design projects start. Defining the JBTD keeps the design team focused on what the customer is trying to achieve.

Jobs are stable over time. Solutions can evolve dramatically. New technologies often disrupt existing incremental solutions.

For example, when digital photography emerged, Kodak failed to make the shift from film. The job of recording life experiences and sharing these memories with others is more popular than ever (e.g., we now have ‘selfies’). They just do not use film-based cameras. Even camera makers are losing out as the number of cameras being sold plummets each year. Most photos are now taken with smartphones.

Focusing on the job makes it easier to not become obsolete or miss innovative solutions that break with the past. It is too easy to be focused on figuring out how to get a faster horse or buggy, when buggies start being powered by engines.

This is why we think of “Jobs” more broadly. People make decisions and buy products and services to help them perform specific jobs better.

Given the amazing results from our Xpert Map+Model+Design™ approach, our vision is to focus on the most important jobs.

• A patient diagnosed with a disease has a “job” of managing their diagnosis.

• Parenting consists of many jobs.

• Being a good life partner is a very important job.

• Creating well being in one’s life is a job.

What is the advantage of thinking of “jobs?”

The shift to helping people perform a JTBD helps people see new opportunities for making it easier to perform a job or even eliminate the need for the JTBD. Often new technology or breakthroughs in science require a totally new way of approach a “job.” For example, trying to breed a faster horse became mostly irrelevant once Henry Ford creating the Model T and assembly line manufacturing.

A key benefit is that thinking of an objective as a “job” shifts the focus to performance. A People Architect is trained to coach people to perform jobs better. Other helping professions often are focused on things that may or may not contribute to performance. But a coach focuses on performance outcomes and the factors that contribute to performing life’s most important jobs better.

A “job” can be modeled. We can research people who already perform a job well, and learn from their insights. Rather than trying to learn a job from scratch and having to figure things out individually each time, the wisdom of experts can be used as a jump start for clients as they create their own solutions.

Performance may be low on a job not because the job is so difficult, but because of competing jobs. This is why understanding the context of a job is important. Performance with a particular job might very well be because of competing jobs. For example, the jobs associated with parenting can end up being competitive with work jobs. Certain life jobs matter not matter very much in some instances but be very important in other situations, e.g., the job of food preparation for a single, healthy person compared with a person with a disease that requires specific foods. Considering jobs in one’s life has many more benefits that these two listed here.

Why “Architect”?

Just as we think more broadly about jobs, we also think more broadly about human performance. Performance entails more than individual skills and knowledge. Maximizing performance is primarily about the context, environment and culture within which a person performs a job. The goal is to make it almost effortless for a person, no matter their innate capabilities, to perform a job well.

People Architects are adept at helping people develop the skills and knowledge required to perform a job. Skills and knowledge are not enough. The “Architect” in People Architects is about helping clients designing a system to support high performance. It’s about creating a culture where people excel. A carpenter can remodel a room and do smaller home improvement projects. A People Architect can build a structure, a new home if you like, that makes living well much easier. If a “carpenter” can fix an issue, us a carpenter. But when a job is really important and other approaches haven’t work, it is time to invest in a performance architect.

The difference is in the results. Training, for example, typically improves performance about 16% of the time. People Architects’ approach typically improves performance 94% of time. The degree of improvement is also important. People Architects performance structures often result in a 10x improvement (e.g., 1/10th of the complications in a heart surgery (year 1 compared with the previous approach), or a 10% increase in sales for a $3.4 billion dollar company (year 1 compared with others in the same industry).

The “homes” a People Architect designs are not meant to be mansions. They are meant to be practical performance-support structures that meet the requirements or “givens” for each project. A project starts by gaining clarity about the “givens.”

• What’s the budget?

• What are the constraints?

• What will work for the end users who will need to implement the solution?

Being skilled at designing within the constraints of a project while maximizing the investment of resources is why hiring a people architect is almost always a far less expensive approach.

People ARCHITECTS is an expert at helping people perform important, complex jobs. Performing life’s most important jobs successfully is how we measure results and impact.