rubrics and riffs

When I was CEO of a public health startup that administered COVID tests and vaccine doses, I saw a surprising parallel between our top performers and the very best teachers at the high schools Ben led in New Orleans. At our peak, my startup team was swabbing noses and sticking arms by the hundreds of thousands at locations all over Colorado and other parts of the country. We started with a tailgate tent in the parking lot of one child care center. Then we scaled. 

The scaling only worked because smart, empathetic, detail-obsessed leaders built a replicable rubric and playbook. When we open a new location, we have all these supplies on hand. We run these setup and break down procedures. When a patient drives up, we say this set of scripted things to them. The rubric set a reliable, replicable floor for our performance. 

Our very best COVID testing sites, like the very best teachers, went beyond the rubric. The leaders of those sites adapted the rubric in the moment, using our values and mission and their emotional intelligence to make the rubric better serve the patient. They riffed. And their riffing raised the ceiling for patients, opening the possibility of an outstanding experience, one that was so surprisingly good that patients told other people about it. In the business literature, you hear stories like this about Disney, Southwest, Nordstrom, and Danny Meyer’s restaurants. 

When it goes right, big companies and exceptional teachers have their -ish together, operationally – systems mostly invisible to the customer or student whir efficiently in the background. And leaders on the front line get the chance to bend and use those systems in the moment for the benefit of the people right in front of them.

Companies and classrooms often struggle by leaving out one of these two. They go all in on rubric and create rote, faceless experiences. Or they rely on undisciplined riffs, and fail their teams and customers with inconsistency. 

-eric