Fix This Next

The Fix-this-Next framework is based on the book by Mike Michalowicz with the same name. His core idea is that while humans have the Maslow pyramid of needs, companies have the BHN, the Business Hierarchy of Needs.

• If there is no food, humans do not care about aspirational growth

• If there are no sales, a company shouldn't worry about purpose

While the Maslow hierarchy of needs works intuitively, the BHN does not. Fix-this-next provides a framework to decide at each moment where to put the focus.

We tweaked the hierarchy of needs for our purposes.

Level	Finance	Sales	Marketing	Customer	Delivery	HR	Operations
Legacy				Legacy	Quality
Purpose			Thought Leadership	Transformation	On time	Culture
Belonging		Referrals	Partnerships	Community	On budget	Personal Growth	Roles
Safety	Profitability	Return Customers	Channels	CX	Utilization	Career Perspectives	Redundancies
Survival	Liquidity	Conversion	Prospecting	Legal	Capacity	Renumeration	Processes

The framework works like this:

1. for each OKR period, we go through the pyramid

2. for each box, we tick if this is currently a bottleneck

3. we focus on the lowest level having at least one bottleneck

4. if there is more than one bottleneck on the lowest level, we discuss and pick the perspective having the biggest impact

Example:

• We believe the following boxes are bottlenecks:
  • Customer Transformation
  • Profitability
  • Liquidity
  • Delivery on Time

• Our lowest level is, then, Survival

• We have to pick among Liquidity and Delivery on Time

• We pick Liquidity as the key topic to work on

Obviously, everything is related!
However, working on everything at the same time is overwhelming.
This framework allows setting a clear focus and addressing one thing at the time.
The beauty of it is that, by solving one thing, often other problems are fixed, too.