5 Step Org Process that Elon Musk Swears by for SpaceX and Tesla

In a recent interview, Elon Musk went into the details of the 5 Step Org process he has seeded in SpaceX and Tesla. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made for every organization. Follow this process to get your organization to innovate and execute faster.

Step 1: Make your requirements less dumb

It doesn’t matter who gave it to you. It’s even more perilous if an intelligent person gave the requirements to you; you might not question them enough. Everyone is wrong some of the time, no matter who you are.

Pro Tip: Requirements must come from a person, not a department: If you want to ask about the constraint, you cannot ask the department; you need to ask the person in that department. Following this puts the onus of ownership of that requirement on that person instead of an entire department.

Step 2: Delete Part of the Process

If you are not adding things back 10% of the time, you are not deleting enough. Our bias tends to be towards adding steps in the process “in case” we need it. You can make "in-case" arguments about so many things that you will make this process cumbersome by adding too many steps.

Step 3: Simplify or Optimize

The most common error of an intelligent engineer is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist. Don’t optimize a thing that shouldn’t exist. This happens because we have been trained to answer a question given to us by our teacher but not tell the teacher that the question is dumb.

Step 4: Accelerate Cycle Time!

You are going too slowly; go faster but don’t go faster unless you have worked on the first three steps. If you are digging your grave, don’t dig it faster. That’s why it is essential to do the first three steps.

Step 5: Automate

Finally, the last step is “automate.” Automation might not be the best idea in all cases. So choose wisely. First, get a human to do it, then try automating the process if the delta is big enough, only then do it. We often discount how good humans are at certain things. 

P.S.: Earlier this was a 6 step process, I followed Step 2. I am just kidding. I write about marketing-related stuff on Medium. Follow me on Twitter and Linkedin to read more such articles :)