Book Recommendations – Page 6 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 13, 2021

Invention

I received this book on Friday and finished it on Saturday. It is, as one (female) reviewer put it “equal parts informative and infuriating”, what I call ‘a gnasher’ – where men decide that woman ‘can’t do’ something because of their biology, then make a law to prevent them doing it anyway, just in case.

Gnashing aside, this is well worth a read, if only to help us think about what the world could look like if businesses founded by women received more than 1% of UK venture capital, or if ideas that come from the old, the differently-abled or the ‘lower classes’ were taken seriously.

If ‘innovation’ wasn’t just about disruption, creative destruction and domination, but also about care, repair and contribution.

Or if we just acknowledged that we’re human animals, with bodies as well as brains.

I recommend it.

We need more mothers of invention.

August 25, 2021

As easy as breathing

Breathing is something that comes naturally to us. That doesn’t necessarily mean we do it well.

Nature is lazy, it does enough to get by, to survive. Any more than that is over-engineering and wasteful. So as we grow up, we learn to breathe badly. Not noticeably, but badly enough to create problems for ourselves in later life. Because we assume that since it ‘comes naturally’, we must be good at it. And because we assume that, we assume that the problems are ‘natural’ too.

‘Breath‘ by James Nestor will open your eyes to just how much we’re missing out by taking breathing for granted. Fortunately, it will also open your eyes to how breathing actually works and how it can be improved, through discipline, to create astonishing possibilities.

‘Breath‘isn’t just a fascinating read, it’s a reminder that understanding how something really works, and using that understanding to improve daily practice, pays dividends.

Literally, if the something is your business.

August 6, 2021

500 percent

I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.

It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.

Here’s my takeaway from reading it:

Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:

They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.” In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework. In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards. Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so. In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.

As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading. In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.

If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.

And I’d love to help.

June 24, 2021

Sonnets

I accidentally listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests on ‘In our time’ this morning. I’m glad I did, because they were discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets, one of my favourite collections of poetry.

For me, the most interesting thing in this morning’s was not about the content of the sonnets (controversial, complex, certainly not all sweetness and light), but about their form: 14 lines, divided into 3 lots of 4 (quatrains) and a final two lines (couplet). With rhymes. An extremely tight box within which to work as a poet, and a box which was already old-fashioned by 1609.

Yet Shakespeare used this structure to express content that was new in language that was unconventional, to create a collection of poems that has outlasted most others of his era.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

PS. Guest professor and poet Don Paterson made a really interesting point that I think is worth sharing. To paraphrase: we humans get bored quite quickly when reading poems, somewhere between ines 8 and 9. So it helps to create some sort of turn or twist at that point in your sonnet, to re-pique the readers attention and interest, and carry them through to the end.

Something to think about for my next blog post.

December 18, 2020

A bit of R and R – and R

2020 has been a year that has forced us all to adapt, sometimes painfully.

These books are already helping me to head into next year ready, willing and able to adapt consciously and on purpose:

To work a level or two up from recipes and procedures, but still with intention and process.
To create space to make and take offers with generosity and gratitude.
To respond with ‘Yes and…’ instead of ‘Yes but…’
To play with change instead of resisting it.
To act before I know everything.

I think you might like them too.

Happy Christmas, and here’s to an interesting 2021!

I’ll be back on the 4th of January.

Thank you for being there. How can I be more there for you next year?

December 16, 2020

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that

Of course life isn’t really an improv show.

In business and sometimes in life we have an idea of where we want to go, where we want to end up. What ‘Everything’s An Offer’ really means is that you should take things that happen outside your control (Covid-19, Brexit, losing a client or prospect, that unexpected pregnancy) as a potential gift, rather than a threat or a thwart.

You probably already do this on holiday, when you’re playing. A few years ago my husband and I were in Graz, having a few days off. We were headed to a particular part of town to see something, but we decided to wander ‘in the general direction’ and see what we found.

We smelt the offer first – a lovely, fruity, alcoholic whiff from what what looked like a garage at the bottom of a block of flats. Then we saw the stills it was coming from. We stopped and looked into the door of the ‘garage’ to see if we could make sense of it; spoke to the guy loading up a van. He pointed us across the road to the distillery shop. Hazelnut schnapps (among several delicious flavours). An offer we couldn’t refuse. We bought a bottle, then carried on wandering towards our destination.

Nassim Taleb calls this being a ‘flâneur‘, someone who walks, not aimlessly, but open to deviation that has no downside and might lead to an upside. Its a crucial element of being antifragile.

You don’t have to to take up an offer, unless it helps you get to where you want to be, or to somewhere more interesting that you hadn’t foreseen, but it helps to tell yourself “Here’s an offer. Could it help or hinder?” before you decide. The answer isn’t always obvious.

December 11, 2020

She changes

“Good Services” principle number 13: “A good service should respond to change quickly”

The key here is ‘respond to’. This is about reflecting relevant changes in the user and understanding the implications of those changes for the user.

A simple example: I’ve just had a call from my insurance broker. They wanted to speak to my husband about renewing his car insurance. He was insured with them, until he got rid of the car a couple of years ago. Somewhere that change has not been propagated through the system. Of course that doesn’t mean that they should never call him – he may have bought a new car since – but it would be a different, more appropriate call, that doesn’t start with “We see your renewal is coming up…”.

Automatic propagation isn’t always appropriate of course, so the best option might be to let the user notify a change then let them also specify where it should propagate to, perhaps with the least contentious options pre-checked to make the ‘usual route’ easier.

This could have an interesting side-effect of making people more conscious of where their data is held and for what purposes, putting them even more in control.

Giving back control – there’s a thought.

December 9, 2020

Them and Us

Here’s a scary set of statistics from “Good Services” :

A 2014 study found that up to 60% of the cost of UK government services arose from calls and casework. Not that surprising perhaps, until you delve deeper and find that of those calls, 43% were chasing the status of a case, 52% were ‘how-to’ questions, 5% were complaints, and only 2% were to do with complex cases that needed human intervention.

In other words, at least 95% of all calls received were unnecessary – should have been unnecessary, either for the caller to make or the responder to handle

That’s a lot of wasted effort, that could have been better spent designing systems that helped people get what they needed.

Designing and implementing good services is not rocket science or cutting-edge, or even particularly expensive. All it takes is empathy and care.

Putting yourself on the side of ‘them’ instead of ‘us’.

December 4, 2020

Contexts

One of the many things I like about Lou Downe’s book “Good Services”, is that it goes beyond the boundaries of the service, even of the business. For example, as part of principle number 12: “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”, this comes up:

“A good service is good for everyone

Users

Staff

Your organisation

The world”

Here’s a useful tool for judging how your business is doing with that:

Check out the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for more useful tools and ideas on this. Including how ‘the doughnut’ varies across countries and the world – opening up some astonishing opportunities for business as a force for good.

Do you remember writing your name out as a child? Locating your intensely individual self inside progressively larger contexts until you reached ‘The Universe’?

When did we forget how to do that?

It’s a game worth repeating now and then.

December 3, 2020

What gets measured, gets done.

“Good Services” principle number 12 is “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”

The “right behaviours” are up to you. They are the behaviours that live up to the Promise you have made to prospects and clients. You can encourage them to happen by building in reminders of why an Activity or Process gets done, and by making sure the right things are measured and rewarded – or more importantly, that the wrong things aren’t.

An old example: A Chinese emperor offered a financial reward for dead rats. The intention was to reduce the population of rats plaguing the country. The outcome was that people started breeding rats to get the reward.

A recent example: Under Tony Blair, GPs were given a target of no more than 48 hours waiting time for an appointment. The intention was to have GP practices create more capacity. The outcome was that it became impossible to book an appoint more than 48 hours in advance, and almost impossible to get an appointment at all.

A financial example: CEOs of listed companies are often rewarded through share options. The intention is that by prudent management and investment, the business generates more value for shareholders. The outcome is often a slow decline followed by a sudden collapse of the business, as CEOs find ‘easier’ ways to raise the share price that actually damage the viability of the business.

We humans are lazy AND ingenious. If you want people to do ‘the right thing’, you have to make that the easiest and most rewarding option. You have to build processes that go with the grain.

Designing those processes takes thought and effort. It means cycling through some difficult questions:

What do I really want people to do? How do I really want them to behave?
If I want them to do that, how do I measure it? Is that easy to capture or does it make more work?
If I use this as the measure, what else might be done to achieve it? Do I want that?

…and back again to the beginning.

It’s hard work, that requires going against the grain. But the payoff is well worth it, for everyone.