A new opportunity for business process redesign

Within the nine practices, we’ve identified important and useful sub-practices (and even sub-sub-practices) to consider; they can be found in Exhibit B (in the appendix) and will be discussed in greater detail in Part 2 of this series. While these practices and sub-practices aren’t intended to be the comprehensive final word on accelerating performance improvement, based on the work we’ve done, they represent a robust tradecraft for getting better faster. They may go much deeper, and they are likely to evolve as people use them and adapt them to harness evolving technological tools.

Interestingly, the practices that can unlock the potential of frontline workgroups as engines of acceleration for performance are also the ones that harness the uniquely human traits and capabilities: empathy, creativity, imagination, and divergent thinking. The practices are mostly agnostic of technology, although technology may be an amplifier in many cases and could enable new practices and certainly sub-practices. For example, technology that allows unmediated, real-time access to biometric and movement data would offer new affordances for how some types of workers might think about experimentation and reflection. Technology, however, could be a distraction if the organization doesn’t first focus on cultivating and supporting the practices that could drive accelerated performance improvement.

If we take seriously these practices and the new tools and technology that are available to us, we have the potential to create a business environment with an increasing returns curve, where the more of us that join together, the more value we can create together. And if we shift our focus toward creating new value, ultimately the value we can provide may be infinite. If we work this way, we have an opportunity to achieve more of our potential, express more of our individuality, and achieve far more impact, together.

What we learned

We looked across a variety of rapidly evolving arenas from those in high-tech environments, such as an airline’s network operations control center, to those in low-tech environments where even a cellphone signal can be hard to come by. We looked at some of the most elite units in organizations such as the New York City Fire Department and the Joint Special Operations Command, and in some unexpected places like teams in the massive multiplayer online game League of Legends. We looked at start-ups such as Away and at frontline workgroups within corporate giants like GE. We asked ourselves: Where are environments changing very rapidly, and how are workgroups improving performance in those environments? We sought to focus in particular on workgroups that were improving their performance over time.

Our sense was that if we could identify those practices that appeared to be contributing to improving these workgroups’ performance, these practices could help frontline workgroups throughout the company to accelerate their performance improvement. In total, we talked to 60-plus workgroups across 20 arenas and three continents. Figure 4 depicts a geographic sampling of territory we covered just in the United States. Exhibit A represents a cross-section of the workgroups we studied where we found frontline workgroups engaged in at least some of the practices required for accelerating performance improvement.

We were unable to locate any workgroup that had adopted all nine practices and had achieved quantifiable accelerating performance improvement as a result. In some cases, however, we encountered workgroups that may not have been pursuing a practice but that, when introduced to some of these practices, thought they might be useful in further improving performance. Most of the workgroups believed that they were getting better, rapidly, and had the sense that their improvement was actually accelerating. Unfortunately, they had collected too little systematic data to determine whether performance improvement was accelerating rather than increasing linearly.

Of these workgroups, all seemed to have adopted at least some of the practices for accelerating performance improvement, and all were achieving improved performance over time. None of the workgroups had adopted the full set of practices, however, and part of the untapped opportunity is to get the workgroups that have already improved performance with some of the practices to adopt the full range of practices, to accelerate their performance even further. In addition, there is an opportunity to encourage more workgroups everywhere to adopt, deliberately, the practices required to accelerate performance improvement-to become edge workgroups.

One reason this opportunity hasn’t been recognized is that there is a performance management paradox: The very workgroups that drive organizational performance are often invisible from a performance management perspective (see figure 5). While many leaders agree that this type of workgroup is important to an organization’s performance, few companies track performance at the workgroup level, much less track how these workgroups are doing over time. To the extent that they do evaluate workgroups, it tends to be a static measure of how the group performed relative to others, and efforts to improve group work tend to center on developing high-performing teams that excel in the moment. We found none that collected good, systemic data at the workgroup level. While we found examples of potential edge workgroups, we could not find any organization that systematically focuses on what is required to accelerate workgroup performance. Just imagine what could be accomplished if organizations pursued an explicit goal of accelerated performance improvement in their frontline workgroups.

Part of the discrepancy in the effort invested to manage performance at the individual and department or business unit levels versus the workgroup level can be attributed to the metrics that leadership and investors use and how they use them. In many cases, both internal and external stakeholders are concerned primarily with financial metrics. From this perspective, individual workgroups may not appear to contribute meaningfully to an organization’s cost basis, and their revenue is often marginal. Any one workgroup in a large department might not register meaningfully on overall financial metrics. Yet, if you look at the operating and frontline metrics, workgroups do have a significant impact, through the operating metrics, which are typically leading indicators of performance. They could become more and more important as the key drivers of organizational performance as processes and the departments that house them become less significant for performance improvement.

What are the obstacles?

It’s easy to talk about where you should focus, but this approach necessarily requires calling into question some key assumptions that many organizations have about their operations, their performance, and how companies or other large institutions function. There may be significant obstacles to overcome when asking people to abandon what they believe and take on a new framing.

Broadly, we have identified three shifts, three areas in which organizations or workgroups would have to refocus, in order to move down this path toward accelerating performance: performance focus, operating focus, and learning focus.

Shift 1: Redefining how we think about our performance focus

From relative performance to dynamic trajectory. Under the influence of the financial markets, in which investors continuously decide where to allocate capital among competing opportunities, organizations-particularly public companies-have come to approach performance as a relative concept. Although analysts often compare quarterly performance numbers on a year-over-year basis, the focus is less on trajectory than on a current snapshot of performance improvement as well as on absolute performance for that period. Even the meaning of the absolute performance and the performance improvement is typically viewed through the lens of how it compares to other current competitors rather than against what is possible. This mind-set tends to breed complacency in those companies doing better than their competitors, despite the fact that all of them could be falling behind the pace of change around them. Across many sectors, incumbents are increasingly vulnerable to disruption by new entrants that wouldn’t even have been on their radar as competitors in a previous period, in large part because of the accelerating rate of change in the Big Shift.

At the workgroup level, the story is largely the same. To the extent that companies are actively targeting initiatives at group-level performance, most are focused on creating “high-performing” teams/workgroups rather than edge workgroups. The differences between high-performing and edge aren’t trivial (see figure 6). Most high-performing groups focus on doing the best that they can, in the moment, and assess performance relative to themselves, or to other teams, in a specific context. They tend to stick with what works, seek harmony, and focus on performance in the moment. After all, why mess with success? High-performing groups can, thus, fall prey to the trappings of scalable efficiency; as a result, their performance can breed complacency. Edge workgroups, in contrast, might sacrifice short-term efficiency for long-term growth. What often gets lost with the emphasis on in-the-moment snapshots is that where a workgroup, or organization, is at, at any point in time matters less than where it is headed and where its performance trajectory can take it.

This focus on the trajectory of performance improvement, across changing contexts over time, is the crux of where we depart from high-performing teams and agile approaches. Both are valuable concepts that have delivered value and are crucial to performance in some settings. However, neither appear to target the opportunity we’re discussing: accelerating performance improvement over time. They may be necessary to address the challenges of an exponential world-but they’re not enough.

Agile, despite the similarity of organizing around small groups and a bias toward taking rapid, experimental action, focuses on speed and especially flexibility, optimizing short-term deployment for solving a particular problem in a given context at a point in time rather than over time. The frontline workgroups with which we’re concerned will be facing a wide variety of complex and unknown problems across dynamic contexts. Agile practices seem to do little to support the learning or development of relationships or capabilities within the workgroup to get better at handling these types of problems over the long term. If you organize around performance improvement over time as a means of learning faster and improving faster, everything can change.

From efficiency and cost-cutting to value creation. In a scalable efficiency mind-set, performance is often synonymous with efficiency, cheaper/faster, and driving out costs, which puts organizations in a diminishing-returns mind-set. When efficiencies define performance, the more performance we eke out, the harder it can be and the longer it can take to achieve a next level of performance improvement. It also assumes that these institutions’ constituencies will settle for standardized products and services that meet the lowest common denominator of need.

Most customers, however, are less and less willing to settle for standardized products and services, and technologies (for example, cloud-based or social) have already reduced costs. For many, the type of performance that may matter most and may give them advantage is likely to be the type of performance associated with creating more and new value (better/different versus faster/cheaper). The numerator-revenue growth-comes from developing new opportunities, creating new value, and meeting new needs in novel ways. For organizations to get better at creating and delivering significant new value, they should move beyond promoting efficiency and start focusing on tracking, measuring, and supporting the behaviors associated with value creation.

From financial performance metrics to operating and frontline metrics. Financial metrics drive behavior at the top levels of most large organizations today. Yet, these metrics tend to be lagging indicators of performance; they are backward-looking. If you’re serious about getting on an accelerating trajectory, you should identify and rigorously track the relevant leading indicators. Operating metrics are near-term, leading indicators of an organization’s performance. Key operating metrics drive financial metrics and have typically been thought of as measuring the success of a key business process. The connection between operating metrics and frontline activities-and associated frontline metrics-that drive them is generally more immediate and understandable. For example, in a customer support unit, a frontline activity such as validating the installation might drive an operating metric around issue resolution rates, which in turn might drive a key operating metric-customer churn-that drives revenue growth. In addition, a workgroup can directly affect operating metrics and operating performance, making them more relevant than financial metrics.

Shift 2: Redefining how we think about our operating focus

From business processes to workgroup practices. Most large companies today formally organize around processes; Jeff Bezos, in his annual letter to shareholders, notes large organizations’ tendency to too often make process a proxy for results. Indeed, workers-and entire organizations-get so caught up in “doing the process right” that they lose sight of the outcomes. And processes are increasingly inadequate to drive significant performance improvement. The value of further optimizing processes to deliver products and services seems to be rapidly diminishing. What can be standardized likely will be, and those processes will likely be automated, but where will the next level of performance come from? Focusing on process efficiency and eliminating variance may not help companies gain a competitive advantage. More importantly, in this environment, most processes can’t keep up with addressing the new challenges and opportunities served up by the Big Shift world-nor can process optimization likely help companies figure out how to create more value for their customers.

Not only can routine processes be an avenue of diminishing returns-they can actually be barriers to performance improvement. Trying to update and optimize processes to conform with the ever-changing reality, and ensure compliance to those processes, is typically time- and resource-consuming. Continuing to optimize processes can divert the organization from investing in the capabilities to make sense of the changing reality and learning how to better create and capture value for it. Machines are increasingly able to perform the tightly specified, highly standardized tasks that support scalable efficiency more predictably and reliably than humans. As a result, many companies have invested in automating processes-removing people wherever possible-rather than exploring how these tools might better reflect and amplify the business practices of the people who could be deployed to create more value for the business.

The world of the Big Shift is one that is less and less about “known challenges” with “certain solutions” for which process and efficiency models thrive (see figure 7). Yet the temptation for most large organizations is to focus on controlling what they can. Consider the example of 3M, where, in the early 2000s, a new CEO decided to “optimize” R&D by systematically stripping away inefficiencies. Controls were brought to bear on R&D: Processes were formalized, with forms developed to ensure engineers innovated efficiently and tighten compliance; 3M’s operating margins quickly improved and Wall Street rewarded it. But the company soon found that R&D wasn’t creating new sources of value as effectively as it once had, and not until a new CEO came in to unwind those efforts was 3M able to turn things around, in 2012.

In fact, rigid processes may have never been an effective way to tap into the workforce’s value-creating potential. Actual compliance to many processes can be low. The act of process reengineering, however, was a useful line of inquiry into the work of the organization; done well, it could highlight opportunities to create feedback loops, ease bottlenecks, and reduce unacceptable errors in products for which the consequences of variance were high-for instance, airplane engines. As David Weinberger notes in his introduction to The Social Life of Information, process “assumes that people follow the steps, and that all people follow steps the same way. But people aren’t like that.” And now, the work that most people are asked to do is less and less like that. Rather, workers more often need to use their creativity to effectively address unexpected events on the fly, and organizations should be ready to recognize and pursue the potential opportunities-for new products, services, and approaches-that reside in those events.

If processes have a growing potential to become prisons that keep us trapped in a world of diminishing returns, workgroups might be the catalysts that can help us achieve more and more of our potential. And if managers take as their primary objective accelerating learning and performance improvement, then the practices of the workers in those environments may have to be redesigned.

While technology can certainly enable and support new ways of working, the practices embedded in a workgroup can either foster or extinguish its potential. For example, if failure is frowned upon, the group may shy away from making decisions. On the other hand, if the workgroup has a practice of celebrating the learning from failure and making its learnings visible to others, that group may be more likely to take on greater challenges over time.

Further, we believe that the types of capabilities that can help companies thrive are those that are amplified and accelerated by the practices of workgroups rather than the processes undertaken by machines (see figure 8). What’s predictable can also be easy to automate, and what’s automatable can be easier to copy. The kinds of approaches that will create new value and have the potential for sustained advantage will likely be those that are harder to copy, those that rely on capabilities that are distinctly human-imagination, empathy, creativity, compassion, and judgment.

From tightening controls to enhancing the frontline workgroup’s ability to improvise. Today, exceptions are generally resolved through workarounds: Workers may struggle to find the colleagues with the information, skills, or authority they need, often in different departments, and often must work outside the rules to access the relevant information and resources to resolve the exception. What they did and learned is largely lost to the rest of the organization, and the workers who take on these challenges may not receive credit for their efforts and may even be penalized for not complying with processes and policies. In fact, faced with a lack of both decision-making authority and informal empowerment, many workers turn to process as a refuge from the ambiguity. As has been seen in, for example, some highly publicized airline incidents, frontline employees often feel they lack the permission or the resources, or even the expectation, to improvise creative approaches when faced with dynamic, unpredictable situations.

It used to be that these activities tended to be limited to the executives at the top. Everyone else just had to execute. In times of relative stability, senior executives could tightly specify what needed to be done and could rely on the front line to get the job done. These hierarchies are giving way to more fluid chains of command; command-and-control mechanisms no longer appear to be as effective.

In fact, to improve in the face of dynamic, unpredictable situations, workers must improvise, and it isn’t just a necessary evil. Improvisation is a way of taking action in the moment that moves beyond the status quo and can yield fresh insight about what works or doesn’t. Understanding that improvisation can accelerate learning in the moment, managers can look for ways to actually expand the potential for improvisation by reducing the constraints imposed by standardized operating processes. Workgroups can make the most of these opportunities in the moment by tinkering with their approach and push the envelope of performance. Of course, a key element of improvising is building on what you have, and that means that mistakes and successes need to be made visible for others-exception handling can’t be kept behind the scenes.

As will become more apparent in the practices, edge workgroups typically have some fundamentally different biases and values than those with which many organizations operate today, favoring initiative and improvisation. For example, these workgroups favor trust-based relationships and mutual accountability over compliance and controls, which can afford them more space to explore variances instead of hiding or minimizing them. Edge workgroups resist the urge to oversimplify, embracing the tension of diverting efficiency for the sake of exploration and greater effectiveness over time. They also redefine risk around the risk of not acting. Inaction is a huge and seldom-discussed risk in most organizations, with significant cost in terms of the opportunity for powerful learning we forgo if we don’t experiment and put ideas into action.

One important difference to call out is the role of friction in the practices for accelerating workgroups. Most traditional organizations have tended to try to eliminate friction wherever possible in order to increase control and predictability. Not only can friction slow things down and make them change course-it can generate heat, with unpredictable consequences. It is neither efficient nor comfortable. As a result, most organizations smooth over friction in favor of “getting along.” They are so eager to defuse friction and create an environment devoid of discomfort that we never get a chance to inquire into it. Yet what we call friction is what happens when diverse ideas, assumptions, and approaches collide with others that do not align. When this type of friction occurs in an environment of trust and respect, it can be productive: challenging assumptions, testing boundaries, and generating new and better solutions-leading to better performance-than an individual could alone.

As Steph Korey, co-founder of luggage start-up Away, says, “Friction is how you end up with the best ideas happening. If you had a company culture where you excluded friction, you’d end up with a mediocre product.” While many large companies try to eliminate friction, Away decided from the beginning that workgroups that “go along to get along” don’t go very far. The company credits this practice of cultivating friction as part of the reason it has continuously operated in the top percentiles of customer satisfaction, even as Away continues to grow at a 5-6x clip.

Friction is resistance, and resistance can be a productive force, just as boats sail faster when they sail into the wind, provided the sails are positioned to harness the wind’s resistance (see figure 9). In the same way, workgroups can turn friction into a powerful source of performance acceleration and learning, provided they anticipate friction and have practices to harness it toward an outcome.

From siloes to networks. Today, most frontline operations are narrowly construed to focus on just the people within the company and, often, just the department. Information and resources are allocated to specific silos and guarded from others. Yet, when exceptions to the rule increasingly are the rule, what one knows and the experience of having done something before can be less directly applicable to the situation at hand. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Instead, looser, broader, and richer connections can help shift our focus to what hasn’t been done before. As the pace of change increases, the peripheries and edges may become more important. Engaging with others can help avoid tunnel vision, and finding ways to motivate others and leverage their capabilities-as well as what they know-can help you to achieve more impact. Organizations will likely need to make decisions and overcome obstacles faster, and may have to seek informal interactions with a broader range of participants to gain the necessary insights to act. This may require organizations to support practices that let individuals be much more networked across workgroups and across organizations so that workgroups can engage with each other to help accelerate performance improvement.

Shift 3: Redefining how we think about our learning focus

From knowledge sharing to knowledge creation. Today “learning” typically means training programs and knowledge management systems. Training programs and knowledge management systems-even those that seek to bring it closer into the context of everyday work or make it bite-sized and on-demand at the worker’s desk or smartphone-are typically focused on knowledge that already exists. By the time training is created and deployed, it is often already dated. And because the training environment is usually still separate from the actual use of the knowledge in the work, more so in the case of training programs, the knowledge is less likely to be put into action. Often it is explicit or skills-based, “how to do x,” and is treated as static, a knowable thing to be conveyed to and mastered by the worker. When the skill is no longer relevant, the worker needs to be retrained. As the relevance of static knowledge diminishes more rapidly, more of the most valuable knowledge is tacit, difficult to articulate or convey except through shared participation. Tacit knowledge often trumps explicit knowledge because it is generally newer, emerging from new experiences and interactions and providing insight into how to act.

In a future where we envision workgroups handling more and more of an organization’s differentiating work, the imperative for knowledge creation through action could play out in two ways:

• First, the workgroup itself continuously evolves its approach to have more of an impact with its work: to deliver more or to deliver better or to reach more people with it.
• Second, workgroups themselves could become powerful environments for learning-for both individuals and the organization. In particular, participation in a workgroup may be one of the most effective ways to access tacit knowledge, which resides in our heads and bodies, embedded in the work itself and in our practices around the work. By engaging with other members to address challenges in different contexts, individual workers can gain tacit knowledge from each other and create new knowledge in applying it and evolving it as they move forward.

From training to get performance to pursuing performance in order to learn faster. One of the main rationales for corporate training has long been to equip workers with the necessary information, skills, or capabilities to do their jobs better, in the hopes that the investment will pay off in improved performance down the line. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, this type of training is less and less effective as the half-life of specific skills decreases and the number of unexpected exceptions increases. The model of learning and performance improvement flips when you focus on accelerating performance improvement as the primary goal, then cultivate the practices and provide the support to make that happen. Rather than train first and hope for a bang later, you can aim to create an environment in which workers learn faster as they focus together on accelerating their performance. Workgroups can be the most fertile setting for learning faster-more so than an individual sitting alone in an office or an office of workers committed to the department’s overall goals.

From fearing exceptions to celebrating exceptions. In the scalable efficiency model, where process efficiency is the source of performance improvement, exceptions and deviation from the norm are typically seen as a problem that is either slowing us down or creating costly waste. For those measured on the efficiency of a process, dealing with exceptions can be an unwelcome distraction from executing the standard process. For the individual, the department, and the organization, all of the incentives and systems encourage minimizing variances and even hiding those that occur. Meanwhile, the potential opportunities-to serve the customer in new ways, to use new tools or create new value-go unexplored. This is where the opportunities to improve an organization’s performance may arise.

As the number of exceptions increase for frontline workers, organizations should embrace and celebrate exceptions as an opportunity to improve performance. At the very moment when much of business, government, and society is consumed by the idea of machines taking our jobs and what that will mean for humans, we risk letting what differentiates us from machines atrophy. Humans are better at handling exceptions than machines are. Mistakes can be the fuel for learning and improving performance over time.

How to get started

Shifting people’s assumptions and beliefs within an organization can be difficult. In fact, trying to do it head-on will likely result in failure: Such moves often trigger corporate antibodies to defend against a perceived attack. Luckily, there is a pragmatic way to address this opportunity and start overcoming obstacles through small moves, smartly made.

Rather than approach this as a “big bang” initiative to redesign all of the company’s workgroups, measuring success through broad adoption metrics, think in terms of targeted impact, designed to build momentum. This approach starts small but smart, by identifying and targeting the handful of workgroups that could potentially have the highest impact to the business unit or company overall. These workgroups become the test beds for cultivating the practices required to accelerate performance improvement.

The key behind making a “small moves” approach work is to systematically identify the frontline workgroups that could be most pivotal in addressing some of the biggest current opportunities or pain points in the financial performance of the business unit or company overall by using a “metrics that matter framework” (see figure 10).

Take, for example an oil-field services company that suffers from low revenue growth. In looking for the drivers of low growth, we discover that the company is experiencing a high customer churn rate. Digging a little deeper, we find that departing customers point to high equipment failure rates in the field. This would lead to targeting a field-services workgroup for which the practices in this article could be cultivated to try to accelerate improvement in a relevant metric, such as first-time repair rate or maintenance compliance rate. Focus on the opportunity that can have a meaningful impact on metrics, and align efforts to support those workgroups’ adoption of these practices rather than getting bogged down in trying to drive change across organizational hierarchies and structures.

1. Identify the opportunity. Use the metrics that matter framework to identify the frontline workgroups with the greatest impact on the most significant financial opportunities and pain points of the business unit or company. This will require identifying the operating metrics and ultimately the frontline metrics that will have the greatest impact on the financial metrics that matter.
2. Empower a workgroup. Start with an existing workgroup that has the greatest ability to influence the frontline metrics that matter, and help it transform into an edge workgroup. With the practices and sub-practices of the Periodic Table (Exhibit B) as a guide, let the workgroup choose a few practices to focus on that they believe will have the most impact on the challenges they are facing. Other than setting the focus-accelerating performance improvement-the workgroups should largely own how they implement the practices. Encourage the test-bed workgroups to make the practices their own and to identify the metrics they think are most relevant for the challenges they encounter, but help them understand how certain of their frontline metrics make a significant difference to the broader operating and financial metrics that matter to senior management. These types of practices should help the workgroups be more effective, realizing their potential to make more of an impact. In addition, individual workers will likely learn faster from each other and gain the experience of taking on difficult challenges.
3. Track metrics. Track the agreed-upon workgroup metrics and make the trajectory visible. Check in with the workgroup about the trajectory and seek input on how the workgroup metrics might be refined to provide the most relevant indicators of meaningful impact. Treat the workgroups as test beds to better understand, within the context of your organization, what tools or support edge workgroups might need from the organization, and be alert to which practices seem to have better traction with the workgroup members-and which seem to have particular impact on the metrics.

Practice, and evolve. If edge workgroups begin having an impact on key frontline and operating metrics, other leaders within the organization will surely take notice, lending momentum to the opportunity to accelerate performance improvement. While momentum is good, it carries a risk: Organizations tend to look to formalize and scale any practice that seems to be successful-in effect, turning a practice into a formal process. It may start out as a defense mechanism to make whatever it is we do look more official, but it is also deeply engrained in our organizations and in ourselves, as an illusion of control. We value process because being able to say, “This is how we do it” can be reassuring.

But constraining edge workgroups with formality can be counterproductive. Adding rules necessarily changes the practice itself and, in a rapidly changing world, likely makes it less effective. The goal should be to scale the practices for accelerating workgroup performance across the organization without being explicit about how any given workgroup might implement those practices. Each workgroup operates in a unique context that calls for a unique implementation of the practice.

What to do about it? Stay vigilant to the tendency to try to simplify and make things the same. Ask yourself and others: What’s different about this workgroup or this context at this point in time? How can you adopt and adapt new practices? How might the practices you employ change over time? Keep each other honest about the imperative to shift the mind-set from formalizing and making things controllable to embracing ambiguity.

All of these can also apply if you’re in a workgroup. You don’t have to be an executive or senior manager to start making meaningful change in your workgroup, or others. Ultimately, the organization should shift the way it measures performance and relax process controls to see an accelerating performance impact at scale, but an individual implementing these practices in one workgroup can have a significant and positive effect on the performance and learning of their workgroup and of themselves, as individuals. Localized successes can garner attention and build momentum. In the meantime, it’s like ly in your own interest, and the interest of the workgroup and the organization, to adopt the practices that can accelerate performance and learning for an unpredictable future. You don’t need permission-just get started, track, and learn.