“Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.”

Why it was said

Michael Gerber gives this definition in The E-Myth Revisited (1995), in his account of the business development process, built on innovation, quantification and orchestration, through which an owner turns a business into what he calls a franchise prototype.

What it actually means

Gerber's claim is that customers value consistency more than most owners realise: they want the same result each time they come back, regardless of who serves them. That only happens if the routine work is done the same way every time, which means taking decisions about how to do it away from whoever happens to be on shift and writing them into a system. The word "elimination" sounds harsh, and it is easy to misread. Gerber is not asking people to stop thinking. He is moving judgment up a level, so that it is spent once, on designing the best way to do a recurring task, instead of being spent again on every repetition. Discretion that remains should be kept for what genuinely varies.

How to use it

1. 1Pick the task your customers experience most often and write down the steps so that two different people would do it the same way.
2. 2List the decisions your staff make case by case each week, and mark those that could be settled once in a written standard.