The 6Ps™

Most principals can already point at the part of the business that isn't working, and they're usually pointing at something real.

Whether it's the cause is a different question, and it has nothing to do with how well they know their own company. In any system, the part that hurts and the part that's failing are rarely the same part. That's true of a body, an engine and a business. It's also why the same problem gets solved, and solved again, and comes back a third time looking like something else.

The numbers get examined first, because the numbers are what everyone already has. They rarely hold the answer. A business that has stopped moving is almost never short of data about itself. It is short of an account of why capable people, with a reasonable plan and no shortage of effort, cannot make the thing go.

The 6Ps are that account. Six functions, and every one of them leaves marks you can go and look at. The calendar. Who got promoted. What the business turned down. Which decisions take three weeks.

We read those first. The symptom is the loud part, and it's almost never sitting where the fault is.

Like yin and yang, the code has two polarities.

Passion, Pleasure and Purpose are the yin. Inward, unseen, and the root the rest grows from. They live in the operator. No adviser can install them, no capital can buy them and no process can enforce them.

People, Planet and Profits are the yang. Outward, active, and the part the world gets to see. They're the fruit. They're also the only three anyone has seriously tried to measure.

The two halves were never drawn as rigid blocks, and that's the part most people miss about the symbol. They're drawn as a curve, because each one turns into the other. And each carries a seed of its opposite, the dot of yang inside the yin and the dot of yin inside the yang. Profits report whether the inside and the outside agree, and the surplus is the freedom to choose again. Passion is what produces anything worth selling.

That's why so much improvement work doesn't hold. It gets applied to the yang, in a business whose yin stopped running years ago.

Three of the six aren't ours. We didn't invent them, and we've never claimed to.

People, Planet and Profits were published in 1994 as the Triple Bottom Line, John Elkington's framework, and it was a genuine provocation at the time. It was also half a system. By the time it reached the mainstream it had been reduced to a reporting exercise: a section in a deck, a score produced for people who were never going to check it.

The flaw is structural, not moral. All three measure a business from the outside. They'll tell you what to disclose. They won't tell you why a capable team has stopped being able to move, why a profitable business has become a burden to the person who owns it, or why a programme executed exactly as designed changed nothing at all.

Passion, Pleasure and Purpose are the missing half. They sit inside the operator, which is why nobody was measuring them, and adding them turns a model that describes results into one that explains them.

You will never outgrow your self-image. Your business will not either.

Each absence produces a recognisable business, and they've got names because we keep meeting them. Most principals find their own before they reach the end of the column.

They won't tell you what to sell, or to whom.

They won't price your product, repair your balance sheet, or tell you whether a market is worth entering. They aren't a strategy and they don't replace one.

What they tell you is whether the business you already have is capable of executing the strategy you already chose. Most of the businesses we meet don't have a strategy problem. They have a business that can no longer carry one.

It takes about a fortnight, and most of it is us listening.

We talk to the principal alone first, then to the people who actually carry the decisions. We ask for the calendar, the promotion history, the last things the business turned down, and a year of numbers. We're not auditing any of it. We're looking for the places where what the business says about itself and what it does have come apart.

What comes back is short: which function has stopped, what it's already cost elsewhere, and what we'd do about it. If the answer is that nothing's wrong that we can help with, we say so, and that's the end of it.

The 6Ps tell us where to look. Total QX™ is what we install once we know.

That order is fixed, and for a reason. A framework applied at the wrong point of failure is an expensive way to change nothing, and that's where most improvement programmes come apart, long before anyone reaches execution. So we read the six first, name the one that's bleeding, and put the operating system in at that point.

Then we leave. That's the whole engagement.