What is The 9 Box?- Ask Nathan by How to be Second

Nathan unpacks the concept of the 9 Box,  a framework for understanding the nuance of complexity and quality. Tony Ticknor and Nathan devised the 9 Box of Quality and Complexity at a time when they were both using the same words to describe the work that they did, while meaning wildly different things, and needing to make sense of that so they didn’t go insane. This conversation explores why bigger doesn’t always mean better, how the wrong systems can create chaos and Nathan talks about how understanding these differences can change the way you lead, price, build, and grow.

Hey, this is Nathan Young, founder and author of How to be Second, and this is Ask Nathan, where I answer questions about being and growing as a second in command + a Second by identity, and tear apart myths around those ideas and other concepts. I’m practicing communicating the value of Seconds so you can do so for yourself and others, with even more clarity.

Transcript

Nathan Young 0:00

Hey, this is Nathan Young. Founder and author of How to Be Second, and this is Ask Nathan where I answer questions about being and growing as a second in command and a second by identity and tear apart myths around those ideas and other concepts. I'm practicing communicating the value of seconds, so you can do so for yourself and others with even more clarity. If you're curious and wanna know more, listen on. If you know you're ready to invest in yourself and go together, connect with us.

0:30

All right, Nathan, I have a question for you. Explain to me what the heck the nine box is. I thought you would never ask Tony Tickner and I invented the nine box together because he did web design and I did web design, and we both independently led companies that were doing supposedly exactly the same work, but it was so obviously not the same work. Like yes, the end result was a page on the web that you could go to, but like the infrastructure, the teams, the agreements, the whatever, like all of the stuff that was there behind the scenes, none of it was the same. And it costs a lot different and we were doing it for different people and you know, like the reasons were different. And so we were like, how is it possible that you can charge $200 an hour for something and it be completely reasonable that you are charging $200 an hour per person mixed billing rate building $80,000 websites. Nobody is batting an eye. We charge a hundred bucks an hour, we build $10,000 websites. And if we proposed anything close to what you were proposing, our clients would laugh us out the door. Like how is that all true at the same time? And so we literally put together like a big old spreadsheet and we started picking apart like all of the, and we were like, where? Hold on. Do you do this thing? No, we don't do that at this level. Oh, we have to do it at this level. When we started putting those things together, we started to be like, oh, there's sort of like a stratosphere of like, this is a tier of complexity and you can have quality, but like having something way more complex does not make it better. And that was the distinction that we caught. And then we put it into a nine square grid and we were like, let's call this lowest complexity, medium complexity and highest complexity. And typically complexity comes with size. You can make something very complex. It often has to be really complex when you have more people involved or more systems or more agreements, whatever. You can make something huge and complex and shitty, which is actually pretty common. So we were like, okay, so if we have three tiers, let's also do like a basic better and then best. So now tier one best. And what we recognized was that if we plotted on these nine boxes, not the HR shit, 'cause that's awful. Everyone knows that. Delete that shit. Nobody likes it. It's not good for anyone. This is different. This is the new nine box. It's way better. We realize that when I plotted my agency, we were at tier one, lowest complexity, best. We were delivering really high quality because I was like always pushing for like, how can we do this better? How can we do this more? And so we had achieved a really high standard of quality, actually almost too much. And he was doing another level of complexity. Most of the stuff that he was doing, he was at tier two, probably middle to best. We were like, most of what you're doing, we don't need at all actually. But if he had tried to build what he was doing with our stuff, our structures couldn't hold up to the things that he needed, the team sizes, the whatever. And so now we've taken that concept. So we formed this thing, the nine box, three levels of complexity, three levels of quality. Quality and complexity, not the same thing. Size and quality, not the same thing. Then we started applying it to like everything. We were like, could you nine box this, could you nine box that could you nine box this, could you nine box like houses, could you nine box boats? And we were like, oh shit, you can nine box everything. Like it actually became this incredible like foundational thinking concept. We started applying and started seeing breaks in things all over the place. Like when people leave corporate America and then they try to work for a small business, they might have been the CEO of a billion dollar company. For all intents and purposes, this person is like they, they've got an MBA, they were a CEO. They ran a huge organization, and then they go to do a startup and they suck. It's because you took someone who was at tier three best and you stuck them in tier one, which requires completely different systems. Or they stuck themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For, yeah, for some reason they are now in tier one. Whether they left corporate America, then they got hired into a startup or they left it to build a startup, something, and they go into these little tiny companies. A startup or even like, let's say five or 10 million, something under like 50 people. Just literally none of the shit that they understand works at all. None of it applies and they make everything awful and it's very confusing. And also they're incredibly expensive and like usually all of those things all at the same time and everyone feels gaslit. They're like, how is this possible? How is it possible that we took what is literally the best and we put them into this situation and they were completely inept. And the answer is you took something at this level of complexity, size, and then quality, and you brought it down and you thought that it would translate and it doesn't at all. And so I see that kind of stuff constantly. That's nine box. I wasn't planning on taking this here, but there's a really interesting conversation to have here about pricing. Oh yeah. As well. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was thinking, my lived experience is being a pastry chef, right? Mm-hmm. So I was thinking about chocolate chip cookies and wedding cakes. Yeah. You can make really bad chocolate chip cookies and you can make excellent chocolate chip cookies. Right? But those are like tier one. And then same goes for wedding cakes. Yeah. Which I would call tier three. There's a lot more involved. Whatever you charge, way different for a wedding cake than you would a chocolate chip cookie. But if you are a wedding cake decorator and then you decide you wanna go make chocolate chip cookies, one, don't even know if you can do that. And also, you can't charge $400 for a bag of chocolate chip cookies. And so it's just a completely different mindset and vice versa. If someone was like, I wanna pay you $7,000 for a bag of chocolate chip cookies, you'd be like, I can't. I can't make that make sense. And so I also think there's a really interesting pricing conversation to have here. How we don't price ourselves appropriately, how we overprice ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. I a thousand percent agree. I would add on an extra nuance of saying, I would posit that there's a nine box of cake decorating of wedding cakes. I agree. I was trying to think of, but I'm, no, I'm totally with you. I was trying to think of a really obvious example. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because you can make a wedding cake tier one bad, right? The look on your face is like, oh yeah, you can. I worked at a country club and one time someone showed up with this poor bride's wedding cake covered in dog hair. Oh, yeah. Oh man. Oh, okay. I don't know what complexity level that was, but it was bad. It was not even table stakes. It was very simple. Yeah. And delivered very poorly. Oh man. Which is the other, the thing that we don't recognize on the nine box is shit. Right. There's basic, better and best, and then there's just shit. I keep reaching for the really extreme examples. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I would say this would fall out of the nine box completely. Yeah. Like, I don't know what tier you were on, but you weren't even to table stakes yet. Yeah. They couldn't even eat it. We had to throw it away. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's real bad. Basic better and best makes perfect sense. And it is whatever, but table stakes better and best is almost a better terminology. So how is nine box particularly useful for Seconds? Definitely the corporate thing that I just mentioned is probably the best way to anchor. But as you're going about any system, because we're always handling systems, right? As we're going about any system or any work, thinking about it from one of your thinking concepts, like being a nine box idea and going like, where is this in complexity and where is this and where do we need to deliver this in quality? And so thinking about that, like when you are kind of doing anything but I need to do financial management. Like, okay, cool. What level of financial management does your organization need? You're less than 25 people. You're less than 10 million in revenue. You need tier one. You need tier one financial management. You might wanna go to best, but you don't need financial planning and analysis. That's a tier two or up complexity. Whether you have it at shit or great, you just don't need that level of complexity. You need to make sure that your financial statements are in order, you whatever. Same thing with marketing, right? We already talked about websites and like pricing and when you're navigating a team, I constantly see seconds like try to install systems that are hilariously complex. And they are so overblown for what? I mean, I've done it. They're so overblown for what the person or the people need. Like I've seen people try to utilize whole business systems to run their like three or four person family and I'm like, are you talking about us? I think we tried that for three weeks and then I was like, nah, forget it. A weekly meeting. Great. How do we do our weekly now we sit on the couches and we go, what's your calendar look like? And so to level set the complexity first and then where you want to go with quality. And to not confuse those two things as a Second, constantly running your stuff, what you need to do through that lens first is incredibly helpful and also helpful. If you were working with a first in command and they're having a bunch of ideas to sort of gut check where their ideas are trying to go to. Because most first in commands aren't spitting out 20 ideas randomly. We're spitting out 20 ideas because our gut instincts are trying to point us in a direction somewhere. And so like I have way less ideas, but they do come from a similar place I've noticed, and that is we're trying to get to either bigger or better. Right along one of these axes. So we just constantly are like coming up with ideas to go along one of those axes. And so having that mental image in your head. I just was sitting with an organization recently where I was doing one of these coaching sessions and we were talking about the accountability chart. Which is the structure of your business, and then how you add people into that structure. We were talking about taking it from the first and second in command and then bringing it to the heads of, and introducing them to the concept. And one of the first in command people that we were working with was like, oh, and we should bring this person into the conversation and this person, and this person and this person. Pretty soon it was like a whole party. We were gonna have 12 people attend this leadership meeting, and I was like, Hey, I understand that your instincts seem to be pointing to this idea of like, how do we make this thing better? It seems like you're asking for more people to be involved and more voices to be in the room, and like all of those things are better. And in this moment all you've done is actually wildly increase the complexity, but we're not ready to communicate clearly yet. I understand where you're going, but like I need you to scale back. How can we honor your instincts without going in that direction? And when I said that, first of all, they were thankful that I recognized that it was actually happening. And then second of all, they were like, oh yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think, let's bring just these three people in here and let's make sure that we do the thing that I want, which is to eventually introduce it to everyone so nobody feels left out. I was like, yeah, that's great. So that's how you can use it. So the nine box is not in the book. Is there any place that you can find more information about it? In the professional section of the How to Be Second website, the Nine Box. There's a page, a whole page that describes all of this. Right on there. Awesome. Well, we'll end it right there.

Nathan Young 12:40

Hey, it's Nathan again. If you made it to the end, that's awesome. If you have a question, shoot it over to contact @howtobesecond.com if you're glad this work exists and want it to continue existing, you can support how to be second at howtobesecond.com /support Thanks again, i'm looking forward to your next question.