Podcast Ep 65 | Do You Have a Stop List?

Do you have a stop list?

It’s human nature to try and solve a prob­lem by start­ing some­thing new. But it’s not intu­itive to ask what should we stop doing to solve this problem?

This week we talk about the stop list from Jim Collins and how you should con­sid­er stop­ping doing some­thing in order to free up resources or clear block­ages in your business.

We also dis­cuss the process of build­ing a stop list rhythm, where each month, each quar­ter or each year, you and your team con­sid­er all the things you should stop doing.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Hey, wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. Not okay com­pa­nies, not flash in the pan com­pa­nies, not build it up and get rid of it fast or sol­id fast com­pa­nies but endur­ing great com­pa­nies. And I’m joined today by my co host, Brad Giles. Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:34

Pret­ty good. Very good. In fact, yeah. mid­dle of win­ter, I think it’s the short­est day of the year. And yeah, mid­dle of win­ter. quite cold, but good. Every­thing is well, how are you?

Kevin Lawrence 00:49

Oh, you know what, by gen­er­al­ly, like, you know, what’s inter­est­ing, I thought about this the oth­er day, I always say I’m good. But I almost always feel good. It’s actu­al­ly truth. And I was talk­ing with a friend about this. And it was a mind­set. And it’s basi­cal­ly, you know, when you burn grat­i­tude into your brain, and you find ways to be grate­ful for almost every­thing, most things look good. And even some­times the hard things focus, I don’t want to seem like arti­fi­cial now, I am tired today. But I am also good. Like, I feel real­ly good. I am insane­ly grate­ful, which would be my word of the day today is grat­i­tude and grat­i­tude of just you know, when I stop and think of how damn for­tu­nate I am. And whether it’s relat­ed to the pan­dem­ic or just in life or just with a, you know, the amaz­ing peo­ple that I get to spend time with my awe­some kids and, you know, and fam­i­ly I’m, well, most of the peo­ple, my fam­i­ly, I would say are great. There’s always peo­ple who can dri­ve you crazy. And I can dri­ve them crazy, too. But insane grat­i­tude to the point where they get hit me hard, maybe because I had­n’t had a birth­day recent­ly, but, and a bunch of stuff, like a bunch of things and what they like in insane­ly deep grat­i­tude to the point. And you know, and I plan to be on this plan­et, at least anoth­er 50 years. I want to be healthy to 100 that’s my goal. And I hope new sounds will help me but like, some­times I’m like, Frick, it’s so darn good. I like this is like good mag­ic. It’s in that’s my per­son­al grat­i­tude. is it’s deep inside me. And I feel and today I feel an incred­i­ble amount of it. How about you? What is your word today? And I’m sure it’ll be real­ly, real­ly close to grat­i­tude. Yeah.

Brad Giles 02:46

No. One is the north­bound train.

Kevin Lawrence 02:49

Yeah, obvi­ous­ly, that’s

Brad Giles 02:52

Yeah. So there’s a guy called Frank Cos­ta, who passed away recent­ly here in Aus­tralia, he was pres­i­dent of the jilong foot­ball club. And I had the very good for­tune to see him present his busi­ness and talk about his busi­ness and his pas­sion. And we had like a walk through his busi­ness many, many years ago, like 15 or so years ago. And he was a mar­ket gar­den­er who built a $1 bil­lion rev­enue busi­ness, you know, an amaz­ing, amaz­ing guy. As we walk through his busi­ness, he, he talked about their pas­sion and their cul­ture. And we came across a wall, a huge, huge wall, which would have been, I guess, like 10 meters long. And there was this pic­ture of the train that was paint­ed on it, six foot high, two meters, by one point, I made it I all the length of the wall, and you could­n’t help but say, What is with that train? And he said, Oh, that’s the north­bound train. In every one of our offices, we get an artist to paint a pic­ture of a train on the wall. That paints nor the sto­ry that points north. And so we’re going north, we’re on the north­bound train, if you want to go east or south or west, that’s no prob­lem, jump off the train. But we’re going north. So if you’re not all on about it vision, if you’re not part of what we are all about, that’s okay, because we know what we’re all about. And it was just it just still, every sin­gle one of my clients. They know the north­bound train, they know the sto­ry, and it’s com­plete­ly okay to say to some­one if you’re not on the north­bound train, that’s okay. So mine is the north­bound train.

Kevin Lawrence 04:47

Nice. I love that exam­ple, Brad. It’s a great exam­ple to use with peo­ple to help them get ground­ed. So today we are grate­ful for the north­bound train. I love it when these things pieced togeth­er. I just like to, I like to sew them togeth­er grate­ful for the north­bound train. I’m grate­ful for the peo­ple that get off the train when they don’t want to be on it as well. Or the oppor­tu­ni­ty myself to get off the damn train. But I don’t want to go well. That’s a That’s awe­some. By the way, that’s a whole oth­er thing about the will­ing­ness to step off the train and when you should, and that and the art of doing that in what­ev­er it hap­pens to be in your life. Yeah, that’s a whole nother thing. So what is the show today? What are we doing? What are we talk­ing about? What’s aside from the north­bound train?

Brad Giles 05:36

Well, it’s kind of con­nect­ed to the Nord­strom bound train a lit­tle bit, it’s Jim Collins stock list. Sim­ple, real­ly sim­ple. But humans have a ten­den­cy to take things on, when there’s been stud­ies that have been con­duct­ed. And when humans try to solve a prob­lem, it’s intu­itive to think about adding some­thing and not tak­ing some­thing away, that goes against your intu­ition to think about solv­ing a prob­lem by sub­tract­ing or tak­ing some­thing right. Peo­ple very, very, very rarely Think about that. So one of the things that Jim Collins talks about is the stop list. In oth­er words, build­ing a list of things that you need to stop doing rather than start­ing dur­ing and then build­ing that as a part of your rhythms. Yeah, and when we’ve

Kevin Lawrence 06:28

done pri­vate ses­sions with him in his lab in Boul­der, and I’ve shared on pre­vi­ous shows, we’ve tak­en 100, twice, 120 CEOs around the world to spend two days with them pre COVID, in his lab, you know, at the end of the day, often, or when I am when I’ve, when I’ve attend­ed, he’ll at the end of the day, and when you’re talk­ing about what you’re going to do, he gets peo­ple to note the stops, let’s say, okay, and you got to free up addi­tion­al band­width with under­uti­lized resources or time to allo­cate to these new ideas. And he gets peo­ple to write down a cou­ple stops, and then a cou­ple actions as just a tan­dem activ­i­ty to help build that dis­ci­pline of let go to start, stop to start. And it is hard, it is not nat­ur­al. I remem­ber, you know, there’s that show hoard­ers on TV in the US may not have seen it there. And it’s basi­cal­ly these peo­ple who keep accu­mu­lates. Now some peo­ple accu­mu­late like cars in their farm yard. And some peo­ple like to col­lect spoons, and some peo­ple like to col­lect stamps, or coins, or pho­tos or mag­a­zines or what­ev­er it is, these hoard­er peo­ple, it gets a lit­tle beyond that to the point where their hous­es are so stuffed with stuff. And it all ends up becom­ing messy in garbage and stuff that they just that he can’t it’s not safe. Yeah, nev­er­mind, fire haz­ard. But you know, all kinds of oth­er haz­ards. But you actu­al­ly have can’t walk around the house because the house is so stuffed. So obvi­ous­ly, for most peo­ple, that’s not their exis­tence. But in real­i­ty, con­cep­tu­al­ly, we all end up with a lot of stuff. And some­times we’re very good at orga­niz­ing it, so you can’t see it. And I have a friend who just moved recent­ly. And they had an awe­some, you know, small­er place on the lake where they were. And as he’s mov­ing his stuff, he could­n’t believe how much stuff they had jammed to the small place. So I’ll kind of stop my share with a friend that I had years ago that she and her part­ner lived in a very Zen like space. And it was in the city. So it was small­er. But they had a rule in their house. One thing in one thing out, yeah. What like lit­er­al­ly like any, any­time they brought some­thing new and some­thing had to go out. Yeah. And that’s the only way they could main­tain that Zen like space. Yeah. And that’s kind of what we’re talk­ing about here is is the dis­ci­pline to get rid of things.

Brad Giles 08:56

Oh, it stopped things. It’s things and it’s things that you do. So yes, absolute­ly. So I think about one of the teams that I work with the CEO applied this, I’m gonna say prob­a­bly six to 12 months ago, this kind of stopped this rig­or­ous­ly. It was around. It was around Jan­u­ary, actu­al­ly. And he did it. His rit­u­al was at the begin­ning of the cal­en­dar year. he would fig­ure this out, what am I going to stop doing? He was in YPO. And a fan­tas­tic orga­ni­za­tion that peo­ple who were in the YPO young pres­i­dents orga­ni­za­tion, they love and it gives them life­long friend­ships. But he decid­ed that was one of the things that he had to stop doing, which was an incred­i­bly hard deci­sion because these are some of the strongest bonds is that many peo­ple would do but he said it’s just it’s tak­ing up too much of my time and it’s sac­ri­fic­ing my fam­i­ly and every­thing else and he said noth­ing. That’s it. That’s got to go. A very hard deci­sion. But in the same way that you said, in the Marie Kon­do type envi­ron­ment, the min­i­mal liv­ing, if some­thing’s going in, then some­thing’s got to go out. Well, that was his. So it’s not just about things. It’s also about things you do. And it’s also about rela­tion­ships you have.

Kevin Lawrence 10:24

And this is a spot that’s also hard for many peo­ple, is when it’s a, it could be a sup­pli­er that you don’t want to work with. It could be a team mem­ber you don’t want to work with it could be a friend you don’t want to spend time with and those are also very hard because we feel respon­si­bil­i­ty. I was talk­ing with an entre­pre­neur recent­ly, I’m try­ing to remem­ber who was AB, it was a casu­al con­ver­sa­tion. And you know, and we were talk­ing about it and we were talk­ing about is, you know why they could­n’t had a hard time let­ting go of some of these peo­ple. Well, they Well, these were they were there from the begin­ning. They believed in me when nobody else did. They’ve been part of it. How can I cut loose the per­son and yes, they’re an under­per­former today. And yes, I know it’s not going to change. But these are my like my loy­al peo­ple that gave me a start and sup­port­ed me and worked with me. And how can I be heart­less? Like that? Yeah, right. Or, or? Or it’s also stop invit­ing a cer­tain friend to a par­ty or say­ing no, but here’s the main thing in the world, and prin­ci­pal­ly what I have learned myself in my own world, and i’m not always the best at it some­times. But when you say all firm, no, and, and stop some­thing like you could be stop­ping a rela­tion­ship of behav­ior, clut­ter, or what­ev­er you say, Stop say­ing no, you make space for some­thing else. Yeah, lit­er­al­ly, it’s like, when you stop, you elim­i­nate all the cups in your cup­board. You make space to notice new amaz­ing cups you would want. Right? or, or, or you clear space in your gar­den, you make space for ideas or ideas around a new one, or rela­tion­ships or sup­pli­ers. Right? Like gen­er­al­ly, some­thing bet­ter always can show up. But there’s no damn space for it in the sys­tem. Yeah. So so it doesn’t.

Brad Giles 12:18

Yeah. And so what we’re say­ing is, it’s things that are burn­ing resources or burn­ing time. Yeah, that don’t pro­vide an effec­tive return on invest­ment. If it’s

Kevin Lawrence 12:30

Yes. And by burn­ing, there’s waste. And then also by burn­ing, there’s fric­tion, right? Like some of the process and rela­tion­ship things can some­times it can be fric­tion or resources. And then the stuff you know, the things can be resources. So just, it’s, it’s, it’s not it’s inef­fi­cient in the sys­tem. And yeah, and so it was, Oh, it’s this is the thing, that’s real­ly hard thing for peo­ple to do. Because as you said, up front, because no one we’re in the mind­set of just adding to it. Yeah. And usu­al­ly I go back and just as a sim­ple thought I was. I was out on the week­end and had risot­to, which is can be one of my favorite dish­es. and nine times out of 10 it does. It’s not great. Like Yeah, wait, risot­to is some­thing special.

Brad Giles 13:22

It’s brighter. It’s bad. I find it you’re a sick­ly it is

Kevin Lawrence 13:25

Yeah, it’s great or it’s bad. And the one I had was in the bad cat­e­go­ry. And but it was inter­est­ing. I was shar­ing with a friend that I’ve got a bud­dy in Dubai at and he’s a mas­sive, mas­ter­ful cook, and his biggest Scott Ed makes the world’s best risot­to ed has made and he gave me the recipe. He actu­al­ly told me all the ingre­di­ents. We did­n’t fake it and I made it twice. Once, it was almost as good as ads. And then once it was bad. So I but the point I’m mak­ing is, is that you know it’s sim­pli­fy­ing things, and I remem­ber cook­ing with Ed once and it was a pas­ta. He was three ingre­di­ents in the sauce three there’s only three things with olive oil, chili pep­pers, and one oth­er thing. It was like the best paste tast­ing pas­ta I had my it was spec­tac­u­lar. Right But did get it down and reduced to just a few things require stops in most peo­ple when they make a pas­tor when I’m mak­ing pas­ta I like add a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent things in Yeah, because it looks good. And we so by adding we often sub­tract, or by sub­tract­ing we add and that’s the idea is to find ways to remove stuff from the sys­tem to make things sim­pler or flow better.

Brad Giles 14:40

Yeah, yeah. You know, many, many plants actu­al­ly can only thrive if they’ve been real­ly heav­i­ly pruned. I don’t know if you’ve ever been past a rose gar­den but in rose gar­dens. The only way that they can get a great bloom in spring is you They cut them right back. So they real­ly only like eight to 12 inch­es long, at the autumn, or in the win­ter when they do the heavy print­ing, so they cut them right back. And that’s what gives a real­ly boun­ti­ful har­vest of rose flow­ers the lat­er that year. Now, look, metaphors aren’t every­thing. That’s a nice metaphor, but it’s kind of the same in your life, you could, what are the things that you are doing that you need to stop doing that aren’t either adding val­ue or pre­vent­ing you from bring­ing on some­thing that is real­ly high impact?

Kevin Lawrence 15:39

Yeah, and you’re just tak­ing stuff that isn’t pro­duc­ing a high return. So you can rein­vest it some­where else, it’s like, if you were wast­ing 100 bucks a month on some­thing that was of no val­ue, you could invest that 100 bucks a month into some­thing a high val­ue, and over­all, you’re gonna get a bet­ter return in the sys­tem. That’s it. So it’s not the prin­ci­ples easy. Yep, every­one’s gonna Yes, guys, I under­stand this. But how? How do you get human stop? Because it’s not our nature? How do we get humans to stop the stuff and take the time to think about the things that they should stop?

Brad Giles 16:13

Well, it’s habits, isn’t it? I mean, it’s, it’s about hav­ing a rhythm and a habit. So I men­tioned ear­li­er, I try to remind peo­ple to do this in Jan­u­ary, at a min­i­mum. So I kind of ask, When I’m with lead­er­ship teams, I’ll ask the ques­tion, what do we need to stop doing in our busi­ness? And we’ll run that as a facil­i­tat­ed ses­sion? Because there’s always things that have built up or those sys­tems or process­es or these things where we just have to ques­tion it. And this is dif­fer­ent from anoth­er exer­cise I do about the bru­tal facts. This is sim­ply like that, we can do a whole sep­a­rate I think we have done a whole separate

Kevin Lawrence 17:01

we have that’s it is a sep­a­rate con­ver­sa­tion. It was so good, I for­got it.

Brad Giles 17:07

But yeah, what this is, is what do we need to stop doing? This is a very, very dif­fer­ent and impor­tant ques­tion to have it in as a habit.

Kevin Lawrence 17:17

Yeah, and for exam­ple, we have our quar­ter­ly team meet­ing hap­pen­ing tomor­row. And you know, I’m, as we’re talk­ing about this, I go, I don’t think it’s on the agen­da. I think I might have for­got it. And I got a post it note right here that I’m gonna make sure we talk about indi­vid­u­al­ly. What are we going to stop doing? And as a team, what do we stop doing to free up resources? Because, again, we’re always adding new things, we could do this, we could do this. That’s our cre­ative process. So the first thing is, you got to have a time to this to actu­al­ly have the dis­cus­sion as a team, what are you going to stop doing, and make indi­vid­ual com­mit­ments or group com­mit­ments. And then the sec­ond is we’ve already talked about is look at things that burn resources don’t pro­vide a return, or they pro­vide a weak return. Or, you know, they they they frus­trate things a lot we’ve talked about. So num­ber three half years, it should be rhythm, it should be every quar­ter every year. I love it. I don’t know if this is on our list here today, Brad. But one, one team we worked with is that every indi­vid­ual team, like the final five or six on the front lines, would make a list of their stop lists. And they put it up on the wall. And so that they could actu­al­ly find remind them­selves and then cross it off when it was absolute­ly stopped. Or they became an indi­vid­ual team work­ing ses­sion. And that was their exe­cu­tion dis­ci­pline, it’s on the wall. And then when you can, when you can ful­ly say it stopped, you can cross it off and move on to your oth­er ones.

Brad Giles 18:47

It’s such an A way to break through the bot­tle­necks, isn’t it? It’s I love that that’s a fan­tas­tic idea. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 18:54

it was great it and it worked because it’s vis­i­ble because we for­get to once we decide we need help remem­ber­ing what needs to hap­pen. So num­ber four we have down here is ask a lot of peo­ple in your orga­ni­za­tion lead­ers and man­agers like get their opin­ions and i think it’s it’s it’s super impor­tant, which ties into num­ber six, how you deal with it, but get peo­ple think it basi­cal­ly get them think­ing about it, and then ide­al­ly, empow­er them to do some­thing about it. You want to touch on num­ber five there, Bri­an? Sure.

Brad Giles 19:29

What could it be? Well, I guess first of all, I want to just close off the pre­vi­ous point. So there is a dif­fer­ence between a start, stop keep and a stop list. They both kind of there are sim­i­lar as we’re ask­ing in a sur­vey we’re ask­ing a lot of peo­ple gen­er­al­ly ver­bal­ly through a start stop key which we start doing, what should we stop doing and what should we keep doing? Many of our audi­ence Rum­sey famil­iar with that. And that’s more of a stir. That’s more of a sur­vey. Where we col­lect the data in a qual­i­ta­tive sense, but the stop list is often more of a brain­storm­ing ses­sion, it’s more of a team work­ing togeth­er, per­haps to fig­ure that out. So for exam­ple, we could be say­ing we’re going to stop doing a part of a meet­ing, we could stop doing reports that don’t work, stop­ping a client, get­ting rid of a client stop­ping doing a ser­vice or a prod­uct, it could be any­thing in the com­pa­ny or any­thing in the per­son­al. But if we go back to the kind of begin­ning, it’s what is burn­ing resources or time. And we could there­fore stop doing it to get some­how more time, more resources, or free up our resources to be able to work on more effec­tive things.

Kevin Lawrence 20:51

Yeah, so this is more about a con­ver­sa­tion and then mak­ing a deci­sion about it. Ver­sus gath­er­ing the infor­ma­tion and get­ting, it’s get­ting peo­ple think­ing about it, and going to do some­thing. And there’s lots of exam­ples. And the main thing is we got to keep chip­ping away at it, because they build up and peo­ple don’t even think about it. And so there’s kind of two ver­sions, once you have your list of what you do. One is empow­er peo­ple to do it, ide­al­ly, at that team lev­el, like we talked about, Hey, you know, as a team, you decide what you’re going to do, or as an indi­vid­ual and do it. And then there’s some stuff that’s kind of it’s kind of a it’s like, it’s above their pay grade, or it’s above their, you know, they don’t have the author­i­ty to do it. You know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna stop pay­ing com­mis­sions to sales­peo­ple. Yeah, that’s not some­thing, you just go ahead and decide, yeah, it could be an excel­lent idea could be a hor­ri­ble idea. But that needs to get kind of put up on on the list of projects, the team would work on, right, they would go to the appro­pri­ate peo­ple to have a dis­cus­sion, and to see if it’s viable or for make sense. And maybe there, maybe there is a you know, maybe we were chang­ing some­thing notable, like com­mis­sions, I’m mak­ing that up, but, or how bonus­es are cal­cu­lat­ed, or, you know, big things and there’s Amelie, what he needs to be pri­or­i­tiz­ing the cross func­tion­al team would take care of it. The key idea is that does­n’t stop us from doing a lot of the lit­tle sim­ple things that do burn a lot of resources. Those are, you know, we did some work with being the con­sult­ing firm on round Net Pro­mot­er Score. And they just call it inner loop and out­er loop. inner loop is like, it’s all with­in your con­trol, you and your team, go do it. Out­er Loop involves oth­er parts of the busi­ness. And you can’t decide with­out hes­i­ta­tion or work­ing with oth­ers. I love that. And we just want to make sure that peo­ple don’t get bogged down on inner loops stuff they can do, and just like let them run while we go do the oth­er things. Because oth­er­wise, we’ll get slow and bureau­crat­ic. We don’t want that.

Brad Giles 22:53

And so I guess then what we real­ly get to is, is know­ing that it’s not human nature, to say what are we going to stop? It’s human nature to think about prob­lems. But then think, what can we add? What can we start? What can we do to solve that prob­lem? instead? What we’re say­ing build a rhythm, pat­tern or habit into your life? Where you ask the ques­tion indi­vid­u­al­ly and with your team. What can you stop doing? What is the thing that you can stop doing? Around any­thing real­ly, like just the open ques­tion? What should we stop doing? And in my expe­ri­ence, peo­ple come up with all sorts of dif­fer­ent inter­est­ing and amaz­ing ideas. Some of them good, some of them not so good. But it’s, it goes against their intu­ition, which is why we should do it.

Kevin Lawrence 23:52

Exact­ly, and why peo­ple need our help. So look, this is insane­ly sim­ple, and it’s rarely done. That’s the idea of why we’re talk­ing about it. It’s not rock­et sci­ence, yet, peo­ple’s busi­ness­es get con­gest­ed, and, and need help doing this stuff and weav­ing things out of the sys­tem. Because this allows things to flow bet­ter and like my friend Ed’s pas­ta dish, they have a lot of stuff is removed from the typ­i­cal pas­ta dish, and it’s out­stand­ing. It’s so darn sim­ple. And that is not nor­mal. I nev­er ever would have made pas­ta that way. Nev­er yet. That’s some­thing learned from mas­ter­ful Ital­ian cook­ing. He knows based on how he was taught in his fam­i­ly, but nor­mal­ly there would be like sev­en oth­er ingre­di­ents, and it would look good, but it’s just stop­ping things and elim­i­na­tion. So remov­ing to sim­pli­fy, right? There’s some­thing I wrote down it was ear­li­er on, I’m just gonna look at my notes. Well, that’s dif­fer­ent that’s a dif­fer­ent prin­ci­ple. But you know, basi­cal­ly sim­pli­fy­ing it to make it bet­ter or remov­ing things to make it bet­ter. Also, Good think­ing for us.

Brad Giles 25:01

Very good. Um, so yeah, let’s think about let’s start think­ing about what we can stop. That’s anoth­er way to put it. All right. So what a good chat that we had today. Yeah, this should be a rhythm. What are the things that don’t burn? I’m sor­ry? What are the things that are burn­ing resources or time? How do you stop doing them? And how do you get your team involved in that? So with all of that, ask your­self the ques­tion, what can we stop doing? This has been the growth whis­pers. I’m Brad Giles. And you can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au You can find the video ver­sion on YouTube, obvi­ous­ly. And you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com. Thanks very much for lis­ten­ing. We would love to see you again next week on the growth whis­pers Have a great week.