Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Month: May 2022

And what about everyone else?
May 12, 2022

And what about everyone else?

It’s not often I think that Seth Godin is being ungenerous.  But I think he is in this post.

Of course Seth is writing for his tribe, those with what Shelle Rose Charvet would call  an ‘Options’ preference.  Who love uncertainty, exploration, overshooting boundaries and blank sheets of paper.

But not everyone works like that.   A few like to slavishly follow a process step-by-step.  Most of us like to have a map.  Or a score we can interpret in our own way.

That doesn’t make us want to be a cog in a machine without responsibility or accountability.  It just means we like to see where we are, where the destination is and what the possible routes are.   We are perfectly willing to take responsibility, be on the hook, initiate action.  It’s just that like children, we play more freely when we can see the boundaries.

Industrial control was never the answer to human flourishing, but neither is a void.

A little bit of discipline makes a lot of daring possible.

Approaching equilibrium
May 11, 2022

Approaching equilibrium

Systems of all kinds can persist for long periods, staying more or less the same.   Not static, but always hovering around some equilibrium value, even as they grow.

This happens because of feedback.  A change in the equilibrium value triggers a change in the flow of something that affects that value.   Like your central heating thermostat, which uses feedback on the actual room temperature to regulate the flow of hot water to your radiators in order to maintain a temperature that feels comfortable to you.

A business is a system too.  We’re usually looking to grow it, exponentially if we can.  We don’t often think of it as something we want to keep in equilibrium.

But perhaps we should.

A business is a system for making and keeping promises.  That means that whatever else we might like to see, the important equilibrium value is how many promises we keep – or perhaps even how many we exceed.

If we all made that our thermostat there’s a good chance that a better kind of exponential growth would take care of itself.

Remember that you have a voice
May 10, 2022

Remember that you have a voice

I love this reminder from The Phone Lady about the leaving a message when you phone and don’t get through.

OK, voicemail may be a bit old-fashioned now, but Whatsapp, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter all have voice options.  If you’re feeling brave, and have more time, most social media channels have live video options too.

The main point though is that your voice is human.  It creates connection and builds trust.

Show you’re human, show you care, use your voice.

Being an ancestor
May 9, 2022

Being an ancestor

As I get older, I am more conscious that I am not immortal.  It’s quite hard to imagine my life 20 or 30 years from now.

But then, I never did think that far ahead – not even when I could reasonably expect to have another 30, 40 or even 70 years ahead of me.

Would I have made different decisions if I had?

It is of course impossible to foresee the future, so the question would have to be about impact and ripple effects rather than concrete, specific results, but ancestor questions are well worth asking, of one’s self and one’s business:

“What impact do I want to make on my generation?”

“What impact do I want to make on the next generation?”

“What impact do I want to make on the generation after that?;

“And the one after that?”

“And the one after that?”

“And the one after that?”

“And the one after that?”

…

We can’t know how they’ll live.

We can know whether we have made living harder or easier for them.

And it’s not too late to change what we do.  Especially if we change together.

Do you believe in the lifeworld?
May 6, 2022

Do you believe in the lifeworld?

I’ve been trying to get my head around the work of Jurgen Habermas lately.    It’s interesting.

Simply put, his theories state that we humans operate in and across 2 spheres of existence:

One: the ‘lifeworld’ – where we operate in our capacity as human beings, members of communities at different levels – family, friends. communities and society; and two: the ‘system’  (or systems) where we operate as economic agents or as citizens of a state.

Freetrader, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So far so good.

The lifeworld is something we create ourselves, through what Habermas calls communicative action, a constant adjustment of norms, preferences, values and desires between ourselves and others.  Adjustments we choose to make ourselves in discourse with others.   We are never alone in the lifeworld.  You can’t be human without other humans.

In contrast the system is created by others.  We don’t get much of a say in how the economy or the state works.  We don’t get to choose how we act as consumers or employees, or as clients or citizens.

We could live just in the lifeworld.  As humans we did so for millenia, coming up with all sorts of creative adjustments to enable human flourishing.

The problem is that as humans we are also good at creating systems that crush that flourishing.  Not necessarily intentionally.  Systems that make us less than human, that sometimes run away with us.

We can’t live just in systems.   So maybe, part of our job as business owners is to keep the balance weighed in favour of the lifeworld, not the system.

Luckily I think that comes naturally to most of us.

Beyond urgency
May 5, 2022

Beyond urgency

For a long time, paid-for journalism has been in trouble.

It has relied on a model of change that it no longer monopolises.  That model is based in acting as a fire alarm: find smoke, shout ‘Fire!‘ and let the outrage build until those in power do something to put the fire out.

The trouble is, anyone can shout ‘Fire‘ on social media.  Plus those in power often start fires of their own, as a distraction from the big fire everyone’s worried about.   The result is that there’s a lot of outrage out there, and very few fire extinguishers.

There is an alternative.  Some call it Solutions Journalism, others Constructive Journalism.

This journalism says it’s no longer valuable enough to simply shout ‘Fire!‘ and expect the problem to be solved, this journalism seeks out people and places who have solved the problem already, finds out how they did it and shares that knowledge with their audience.

This journalism uses knowledge transfer to move the audience “from urgency to agency“.

Why am I telling you this?

One, because The Carbon Almanac is an excellent example of this kind of journalism.  Sign up for a Daily Difference newsletter.

Two, because I think this is an excellent model of change for small, purposeful businesses to adopt too.

If you’re struggling to change, instead of shouting ‘Fire!‘ and waiting for the consultancy fire engines to arrive with the usual solution, why not seek out people and places who’ve already done what you seek to achieve, and share that learning with your team?

Even better, why not encourage your team to be the journalists and do the seeking out?  Once everyone knows something is possible, it’s easier to see how you can make it happen in line with your own Promise of Value.

This post is mostly a paraphrase of this excellent speech by Professor Jay Rosen.  I recommend a read of it.

Meanwhile, here are some questions I’ve extracted for you to assign to your investigative journalists:

  • What’s working where? (It’s a simple starting point. But so different from, “what’s broken here?”)
  • Who does it better than we do? (Who in North Rhine-Westphalia, who in Germany, in Europe, or around the world.)
  • Who has bucked the trend? (Meaning: faced the same problem, got a different result. Also called “positive outliers.”)
  • How did they find their way to a better outcome? (Bornstein calls this the “detective story.”)
  • What’s missing from our community that these other communities seem to have?

Go beyond urgency.  Construct agency.

A Promise of Value
May 4, 2022

A Promise of Value

I’m liking this new website from 37Signals, who’ve just renamed themselves back from Basecamp.

It’s one of the clearest, simplest and most comprehensive expressions of a Promise of Value I’ve seen.

What would yours look like if you wrote it out this way?

Connect – your way
May 3, 2022

Connect – your way

There’s been a lot of talk about leaving Twitter over the last few days.  To be honest, I’ve contemplated it myself.

Yes, it’s increasingly shaped to serve the agenda of those with money and power, but Twitter, like all social media, is a tool, like any other.   We don’t have to use it the way others want us to.

Perfectly illustrated this weekend:

On Saturday, we ventured into unknown parts of London in search of roads that share our surnames.  Boxall Road is in North Dulwich, not far from the Picture Gallery, while the much more impressive-sounding Gibbs Avenue is in Upper Norwood.  An interesting day’s walk, that just left us with the question ‘Why?‘

A quick post on Twitter, and sure enough, the answer came back in seconds.   A certain Robert Boxall kept the old ‘Greyhound Inn’ nearby, and having made a bit of money, decided to go into property development.

Thanks Dulwich Society!

The point of this story?

Social media is a tool like any other.  You choose how you want to use it.   And the best way turns out to be the way we use any other means of communication – to have real conversations with real people – to make connections, not break them.