The 4Qs framework empowers staff to make decisions 🙌 together and predict if the decision is likely to make the next sale frictionless. Best of all, if you’re an advocate of the Business Model Canvas or Agile methodology, you’ll enjoy how easily the 4Qs integrates with these two popular frameworks.
Written in 2018 by Australian entrepreneur, Anthony Coundouris, the 4Qs is actively used by over 150 companies worldwide.
How 4Qs templates empower decision-making
The 4Qs provides four distinct quadrants, or windows into an organization. It organizes staff and their processes into one or more Quadrants. By organizing both people and processes into Quadrants, the 4Qs breaks down departmental barriers and makes it easy for staff to anticipate 👀 how change can be made across a business.
For example, someone standing in Quadrant 1 can anticipate how their change will affect Quadrants 3 and 4. They can see who is assigned to these Quadrants, and what resources they have in place. They can collectively decide if the change will reduce friction across the business, and then present a case to management to get a budget.
Develop and share good decision-making
There is no value in staff making decisions if those decisions are not as good or better than decisions made by management. Day-by-day, week-by-week, staff learn how their organization makes decisions. To help illuminate good decisions, the 4Qs encourages users to ‘play’ or ‘fit’ 🕹 one quadrant with another, and address specific patterns when making a decision.
For example, if you decide to position your firm to an enterprise customer, this decision will change the course of the product roadmap in Quadrant 2, and it will affect the beliefs shared in Quadrant 3. The customer flows you built-in Quadrant 4, optimized for a small business, become redundant because the decision-maker from an enterprise business has a different buying process.
Consequently, all team members will be brought up to speed with the latest developments so that they can reach a consensus much easier.
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Begin the 4Qs journey your way
Best of all, the 4Qs don’t fix the user to a starting positioning. If you are a digital transformation consultant or customer service engineer, you might start in Quadrant 4. CEOs typically start in Quadrant 3; product folk in Quadrant 2, and the sales team in Quadrant 1.
Find out more about the 4Qs framework at runfrictionless.com
About the author
Anthony Coundouris has a decade of experience consulting to technology and software-as-service startups. Brands include salesforce.com, Google, SAP and IBM. He specializes in designing automated sales and marketing systems, and is the author of the book run frictionless.
He has consulted to SaaS vendors in the United Kingdom, Korea, Singapore, Philippines and Australia. Anthony has been a founder of two startups.
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