Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings on people, process and responsible autonomy for small-business employers.

Month: April 2023

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score
April 28, 2023

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

You may find that you need to refine an existing part of your Score.

This could mean simplifying an Activity by removing unnecessary steps.  Or spelling out what has to happen in more detail.  You might remove an Activity, or add a new one, or several.

Whatever the change, there are bound to be knock-on effects.  Perhaps you need to review Props for this part of your Score.  You might need to create a new Role.  You’ll certainly need to let your people learn and practice the new Score before you perform it for real.

This may seem like a lot of unecessary work, especially for minor adjustments.  It will be tempting to just change practices without bothering to change the Score first.

Resist that tempation.

Following through the impact of even minor changes on your Score, before implementing them in real life allows you to try different ideas and scenarios ‘on paper’, when getting it wrong and reversing back to your starting point is easiest and cheapest.

It means you get to see the full impact before you start changing anything.

It means you can share this task with everyone on the team, to get multiple perspectives and arrive at better solutions more quickly.

It also means that your Score always reflects the reality of how your business works, which keeps it useful, and even more importantly, preserves the value of your business until you’re ready to exit.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Dig deeper
April 27, 2023

Dig deeper

“Practical tips for talking to your employees about stress and worry.” – the title of an email that landed in my inbox this morning.

I couldn’t help thinking: “What if you made sure you are never the direct or indirect source of stress and worry in the first place?”.

Work doesn’t have to be a means of squeezing the joy out of life, it can be part of creating that joy.

If your business isn’t doing that, dig deeper.

Change the system, before it gets changed for you.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation
April 26, 2023

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.

This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.

You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online.  Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts.   Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.

Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.

For example, emails.

If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails.   Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.

This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process.   It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.

It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well.  You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients.   Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.

Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • For a human being, is this drudgery?  Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
  • Is this something that people do better than machines or software?  Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
  • Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want?  How many will we lose as a result?  How many could we attract?  Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
  • Will it be worth it?  How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services?  Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?

And above all, this one:

  • Is this consistent with my Promise of Value?

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Unicorns
April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either.   Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.

Adjusting the system 1 – Props
April 24, 2023

Adjusting the system 1 – Props

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.

It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.

Props aren’t just physical either.  You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.

And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.

Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.

Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too.  You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.

Employee Ownership
April 21, 2023

Employee Ownership

You already know you want your employees to own your business.

How about getting them to run it too?

That would enable them to really take ownership.

And if you enable them to do that before you hand it over, you get to go, or stay, as and when you please.

It only takes a year.

Ask me how.

Extrapolating consequences
April 20, 2023

Extrapolating consequences

A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:

  1. What’s causing it?
  2. Have we seen it before?
  3. Is it a trend?
  4. What happens if we do nothing?
  5. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
  6. What are the consequences of that?
    1. What happens if we do nothing?
    2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
    3. What are the consequences of that?
      1. What happens if we do nothing?
      2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
      3. What are the consequences of that?
        1. What happens if we do nothing?
        2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
        3. What are the consequences of that?
          1. What happens if we do nothing? – you get the picture.  Repeat until you are are confident to stop.

Hint: Most of us stop too soon.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

What do you do with all that feedback?
April 19, 2023

What do you do with all that feedback?

Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.

Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).

Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.

This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.

Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play,  you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.

Discipline makes evolution possible too.

Ask me how.

The others
April 18, 2023

The others

I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.

Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them!  Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.

Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex.   And this is science.

Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

And so do you.

Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:

What is it be like to be them?

Followed up by a bit of finding out.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Services
April 17, 2023

Services

One of our case studies at London Business School, involved a company that supplied rags to industry.   Rags – textiles at the absolute end of their useful life might seem to be the ultimate commodity.  Almost worthless.   How could a business supplying them ever hope to create unmissable value for it’s customers?

Simple.

By surrounding that commodity product with deep layers of service.

By getting under the skin of it’s clients; understanding where and how they used the rags and what the problems could be.  Then making sure they more than met every rags need in the way they sold, delivered, collected and disposed of them for the client.

By maintaining that intimacy with their clients through the people they interacted with – the people who delivered and collected, so that every new need could be anticipated and added to the service.

In those days, adding service meant adding people, because people are the only way to create value for other people.

That’s still true, even if nowadays your first thought would be to build an online platform.

Technology doesn’t create new value overall, it can only make it cheaper for a particular business to deliver its service – until another particular business catches up or overtakes, or undercuts (Ever wondered why hand car washes have replaced the automated ones?  Cheap (slave) labour, makes machinery unprofitable).

So if the key to profitability is service, and service means adding people to deal with people, maybe we have an answer to the climate crisis?

Stop making things, use what we already have (e.g. enough clothing for 3 times the global population), and pay people well to support other people – regenerating our environment; housing; education; health; repair and recycling; art; music, entertainment… the list is endless.

We wouldn’t be short of work, and we might well be happier.

After all, this is how we did things for most of our existence on this planet.

One day we might realise we don’t even need money to make this work.