Excellent Business Stewardship: Remember & Systematize IDEMA For Everything You Care About

When we don’t see the full lifecycle of how things unfold, we’re inclined to make poor decisions. We lose ideas, never plan, fail to execute, neglect maintenance, and forget to audit. When this is you and your business, you are toast.

In the first several years of Noodlehead Marketing, I felt as if something was missing from my toolkit. Companies had systems, processes, and people, but what held it all together? What brought cohesion to all these disparate parts working in different directions? If this cohesion is simply a person, they become a bottleneck, so there must be a stronger and better option. 

It took me time to find and articulate it, but this is the problem IDEMA solves, and where it's power shines. This framework is the underlying structure of your business. Every idea, project, department, and organization goes through a life cycle. IDEMA illuminates it in a practical and simple way. And it's held together, collectively by a living organization.

At the base level, IDEMA reminds me to capture ideas. To plan out my intentions for those ideas. To execute the plan we've created. And to consider what's required to keep it alive indefinitely. And finally, IDEMA informs me that at some point, I need to reflect and find out if we keep going as is, change course, or stop altogether. And this insight is critical if we're to align ourselves with the truth of how things happen.

“Truth - more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality - is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.”  - Ray Dalio, Principles: Life & Work

Ideally, you systematize this framework in how your structure your company, and how you lead others. The iceberg of unknowns can go deep, but we often limit ourselves by not systematically exploring the expected and potential knowns and unknowns. 

Your unrealistic visions are great, but making them happen must be grounded in how you actually bring them to life. So as you continue building your business, always remember IDEMA. And build it, your team, your processes around it.

1. Ideate. Capture our idea.
2. Discover. Establish intentions & plan to sustain.
3. Execute. Start, Finish, and prepare to maintain.
4. Maintain. Sustain our idea.
5. Audit. Determine our assessed idea's fate.

The deeper entrenched it goes into your mind, leadership, and operations, the more effective you'll become in growing your organization, and fostering an environment of flourishing. 

Hero Photo by Dmitry Dreyer on Unsplash