Lead the team 17 of 17 in this group
SOP 279
Map a process as actions someone can be seen doing
What this page is for. Use it when only you, or only one employee, knows how a job is done; when the same job comes out differently depending on who does it; or before you pass a job to someone new, or to software that works from written steps. It carries why written maps of the work matter, what a skill is, how to break a label down into skills and a skill down into actions someone can be seen doing, how to turn each result into the actions that produce it, how to mark decision points, how long a map can run, and how to test it on a learner. Handing one of your own advertising jobs to someone by writing it down, showing it and watching them do it is SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate.
SOP-279-Map-a-process-as-actions-someone-can-be-seen-doing.md
1. Why the work has to be written down
The problem, for many owners, is that the process is either in your head or nowhere at all. If that is where it lives, you cannot give it to anyone else, nor, in time, to software that does the work for you. Employees still matter, in the view here, so being able to map the work is what wins your time back and lets the business keep growing. The reasons, in the order given:
- New hires get up to speed faster. Without maps, you train everyone by hand. That is a painful drain on your time, above all if you are starting out: bringing on even one person can take up almost half your time.
- The output stops varying. Without maps, a service business turns out uneven work. A business that sells no service still has operating steps whose results need to repeat.
- The know-how stays when people leave. Treat everything your team knows that is not written down as knowledge held only in their heads. When people leave, if they leave, they carry most of what you know about how the business runs out of the door with them. That is foolish, in this view, and above all when you paid to hire that talent and to have them learn those skills. That costs a business a great deal.
- The business becomes something you can own and sell. For anyone with a long-term view, a company that does not need you to do everything is more fun to own, and very sellable.
Taken together, the view here is that this arguably solves the largest pain point in any business and unlocks the most value in it, whether or not software ever runs the work.
2. What a skill is
Mapping a process is teaching a skill. A skill here means a linked series of actions that brings about a dependable result.
The test of a skill. Scratching your nose: is that a skill? Only if there is a reliable result, and there is one if the itch stops. Harder skills need longer chains. Stack skills together and you arrive at labels, words that each cover a whole set of skills.
The shoe. Tell someone, or a piece of software, simply to tie your shoes, and back come the shoes wrapped together, or hung in a tree. The output is neither consistent nor reliable, and you end up frustrated. The fix is to break the job into actions anyone could watch being done:
| Step | The action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Take hold of both laces |
| 2 | Pull them apart so the shoe tightens |
| 3 | Make a loop with one lace |
| 4 | Wrap the other lace around that loop |
| 5 | Push that lace through the gap |
| 6 | Pull both loops tight |
Do those, and the shoe is tied. This is the most basic case.
A warm-up. Before reading on, try writing out, from memory and in words alone, how to tie a shoe. The view here is that many of you would find it hard. That is the point: using an AI tool well still takes a great deal of thought and intelligence.
3. Break the label into skills
Wanting to improve at marketing is like wanting to improve at baseball. In the view here, nobody can get better at baseball as such. What you can get better at is its skills: hitting; pitch recognition, which is knowing what kind of pitch is coming at you (a fastball, a slider, a curveball); pitching; fielding; base running; and at-bat discipline, which is choosing whether to swing or not.
Marketing has its own equivalents underneath it, and many of them: there are email marketers, search marketers, paid-ad marketers, affiliate marketers and content marketers, all different ways of gathering attention and pointing it somewhere. That is why learning to market is a lifelong skill and never one thing.
4. Go a level down, until each line is something someone can be seen doing
A skill name is still a result. Telling a small child just to hit the ball does not make you a good hitting coach; telling someone just to pitch does not make you a good pitching coach. So you go one level underneath. Taking hitting, the stages are counted as eight, and each holds three actions or so, more or less, that you could watch someone do. The split into stages below is this page's reading of the order given.
| Stage | Actions someone can be seen doing |
|---|---|
| Stance and setup | Front foot at the front of the box, back foot at the back, weight evenly loaded, bat held above the shoulder |
| Load | As the pitch begins, load onto the back leg |
| Stride | As the ball leaves the hand, step forward with the front foot and move your weight forward |
| Read the pitch | Recognize what kind of pitch it is; then decide: swing, or let it go |
| Start the swing | If you swing, drive off the back foot and turn the hips |
| Bring the bat | Keep the hands as near the body as you can, with the bat's knob leading the way |
| Contact | Watch the ball; hold your head still at the point where contact will happen; drive the bat through that point |
| Extension and follow-through | Arms straighten out fully; the swing finishes with the bat over the front shoulder |
A swing like this is a process map: a map of behavior. Put marketing where baseball is, and the same shape appears.
5. Turn every result into the actions that produce it
Look at the contact stage. You cannot tell someone to make contact with the ball: contact is an outcome, not an action. What you can tell them is what to do so that it happens: keep your eyes on the ball, keep your head still, push the bat through.
Go down the map line by line. Wherever a line names a result, replace it with the actions that bring the result about. The view here is that your skill at putting actions into terms anyone can observe predicts how reliably you get the results you want, from people and from software alike.
6. Mark the decision points
Some stages hold a choice. In the hitting map, the fourth stage asks whether to swing at all. Mark each such point in the map, and write the actions that follow once the choice is made.
7. Expect the map to run long
Across its eight stages, with three actions or so in each, hitting comes to about 24 actions, and probably more, since this is a simple sketch of the skill. Done consistently, those actions together give a reliable result.
A business case. In one example, a map for writing hooks was drawn up the same way. It defined what was being advertised and the level of awareness to aim at, collected proven hooks from the platform where the buyer spends time, logged them, and split each new round of hooks between proven, varied and new ones. It came to 22 separate actions, while a hook is only one piece of making a short video, a long one, or an ad. The split it uses is SOP 122 — Split hook effort seventy, twenty, ten.
That is the reason for insisting on defined terms and exact language: a single word of business hides a long chain of actions.
8. Test the map on a learner who shows you at once what they missed
Training anyone on anything takes two parties, a teacher and a student. A brilliant teacher can teach someone who learns slowly; a brilliant student barely needs a good teacher. The view here is that an AI tool is a brilliant student, and the people doing the teaching are less than brilliant teachers. So, in this view, if an AI tool cannot do a job from your instructions, you probably have no business trying to teach it to a person. That may sound backward; the view here is that it holds.
Why the test works. With software, you see at once that it did not understand. People tell you they understood, and a week or two later you are not getting what you wanted. The feedback loop with people is much slower. People are not easier to teach; they are easier to be fooled by. You think you taught more than you did.
What to do with the result. Judge the map by what comes back, not by whether the learner says it made sense. Where the output is wrong or uneven, a line is still too broad, and the fix is the one the shoe needed: break it down further into actions.
The same skill, everywhere. The view here is that an owner who struggles to manage a team struggles because they cannot train anyone on anything, and that the same holds for raising children. Teaching anyone anything works the same way.
9. What this page does not decide for you
- How the eight hitting stages divide. The order is given and the count is eight; the stage boundaries in section 4 are this page's reading. Not established on this page.
- How long a map should be. This page gives no figure for the right length. The 24 is a count from the hitting example, and the 22 is a count from the hook example.
- What to do on the branch where the batter does not swing. Not established on this page.
10. The checklist
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Choose a job nobody has written down, and state the dependable result it has to deliver |
| 2 | If the job is a label like marketing, break it into its skills |
| 3 | Split each skill into stages, then each stage into actions you could watch someone perform |
| 4 | Replace every line that names a result with the actions that produce it |
| 5 | Flag every point where a choice is made, and set down what is done once it is made |
| 6 | Allow for length: a simple skill ran to about 24 actions, and writing hooks to 22 |
| 7 | Test the map on a learner who shows you at once what they missed; judge the output, not their word |
| 8 | Where the output is wrong, break that line down further into actions |
| 9 | Use the map to bring new hires up to speed, to keep output even, and to keep the know-how when people leave |
11. Where this sits
- Skills as chains of behavior that break into chunks, told through basketball: SOP 193 — Treat hard as a skill you lack and chunk it down, section 2.
- Handing over one advertising job by recording it, showing it and watching it done: SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate.
- Handing a strong hire the playbook: SOP 265 — Find which corner of functions, people and operations breaks first, section 6.
- How much each role decides for itself: SOP 266 — Set each role's level of ownership and train people up the dial.
- The first months of a new hire: SOP 270 — Onboard every hire against a written plan, then keep them growing.
- Fixing a process step by step, ending in automation: SOP 221 — Move faster: run the five-step process, then commit, section 6.
12. What this page does not cover
The settings of AI tools, and the prompts to give them, are not covered on this page. Hiring is not covered on this page.
Terms defined on this page
- Label (set of skills)
- A word that covers a whole set of skills, such as marketing or baseball. The view here is that nobody gets better at the label itself, only at the skills under it.
- Process map
- A job written down as a chain of actions someone could be seen doing: each result replaced by the actions that produce it, and each decision point marked. One view tests the map on a learner whose output shows at once what was missed.
- Skill
- A chain of adaptive behaviors linked together, which breaks down into smaller chunks, all the way to the most basic. SOP 279 puts it as a linked series of actions with a dependable result.