Unblock streams of information flowing in your digital tools, using simple automation

Everyone has experienced the pain of information not flowing as well as we want it to. Imagine a stream with a big boulder in the middle of it and your scooping the water with a little bucket...

If you work in organisations that prioritise the humans first, like I do, you know that the flow of information is even more important. It’s very hard to empower a decentralised / self-management approach if the people aren’t able to get all the context they need. So, if your information is stored in a multitude of systems/spreadsheets, where do you even start with the unblocking process...!?

In my experience, the best place to start, is with the smallest iterations. Take a leaf out of Permaculture and Lean Startup. Observe what’s naturally happening, create some minimum viable experiments and monitor their effectiveness. Get the whole team involved and report back regularly. Forget complex project plans and take an emergent approach.

But how exactly do you take an emergent approach to technical experimentation? Here’s a few practical steps to get you started:

1. Work out where information is coming in to your systems. for instance:

   1. Is it a new person arriving at your organisation?

   2. A new lead or project?

   3. A new appointment?

   4. A new invoice?

2. Create a form to collect this information so it’s consistent. It doesn’t have to be a fancy Typeform (though, they are great, for sure!), just setup a minimal Google form or similar, to get you started.

3. Make sure the responses are being collected in a spreadsheet. And if that’s as far as you get... congratulations! You’ve increased the consistency of your information and now you have a base of operations to continually improve. Each time a new entry is added, check to see if it’s got everything you need, if not, add another field. Not hard really. You haven’t had to do lots planning and now you can be more open to capturing new information as the needs emerge, as you have a place to add and change fields/questions.

4. But, let’s say you want more than that. Automatically getting form answers in a spreadsheet is a start but you want some extra-for-experts sauce, to really get your information flowing! Then you need an automation tool. Currently our favourite is Zapier as it’s really intuitive and visual but we also use others like Pipedream and Integromat (and then a whole lot of other combinations’ of tools that I won’t go in to here).

5. Setup an account on one of those tools (obviously missing lot’s of crucial steps here but this is meant to be a brief post!). Plug in your tool to the form.

6. Now, the magic happens! You can create any number of action steps (though, I’d recommend starting off with something simple, observe, collect data and iterate) based on where you need this information to flow to...

   1. A Slack notification

   2. An email response

   3. A spreadsheet or database row

   4. An invoice

   5. A formatter step to get the date in to the right shape

   6. A new entry in your CRM, or thousands of other digital tools...!

   And that’s it! You’ve started creating your own automated information flow.