Culture – Page 11 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 7, 2022

Archaeology

I’ve been reading a book on ‘Women in Prehistory’, in which the author quite rightly expresses caution about inferring social structures from archeological finds.

That reminded me an episode of ‘The Goodies‘, in which Bill Oddie attempts to reconstruct a prehistoric creature from a fragment of fossilised bone. The resulting creature is preposterous, because Bill’s assumptions about what the bone was and where it came from in the original animal are completely wrong.

It isn’t only ancient history that can be misinterpreted in this way.

If an archaeologist discovered your abandoned business tomorrow, what could they infer about how it works from the artefacts left behind?

What do today’s new joiners and new customers have to infer from the systems, people and processes they encounter when they arrive?

The advantage of writing down your Customer Experience Score is that nobody has to guess, or reconstruct the symphony from a single note.

There’s room for different interpretations of course, but they are very unlikely to be preposterous.

May 27, 2022

Re-purposing

I’m sharing this from Seth Godin today, in full.

It’s what I needed this morning.

And I thought perhaps you need it too.

Thank you Seth.

How Change Happens

Slowly then all at once

For people who aren’t paying attention or actively involved, it can seem like cultural change is sudden. One big shift after another.

In fact, cultural change always happens relatively slowly. Person by person, conversation by conversation. Expectations are established, roles are defined, systems are built.

From the foundation

The people in the news and at the podium get all the attention, but they’re a symptom, not usually a cause. Everyday people aren’t the bottom, they are the roots, the foundation, the source of culture itself. We are the culture, and we change it or are changed by it.

From peer to peer

Change happens horizontally. What do we expect from others? What do we talk about? Who do we emulate or follow or support? What becomes the regular kind?

People like us do things like this.

Day by day, week by week, year by year.

Going to the protest of the day, performing acts of slacktivism, hopping from urgency to emergency–this is how people who day trade in our culture are whipsawed. But the people who are consistently and actively changing the culture are not easily distracted. One more small action, one more conversation, one more standard established.

The internet would like us to focus on what happened five minutes ago. The culture understands that what happens in five years is what matters.

Focused, persistent community action is how systems change. And systems concretize and enforce cultural norms.

If you care, keep talking. Keep acting. Stay focused. And don’t get bored.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 13, 2022

TIAAA

How often have you been told ‘It must be this way’, ‘This is just how it works’, ‘Things have always been like this’, ‘There is no alternative’?

There is always an alternative. More importantly, there are always alternatives. Always have been throughout human history. Always will be throughout whatever future we have left. Alternatives we’ve designed for ourselves as a counter to what’s on offer.

It’s just that history is told by the victors, and alternatives – especially those that work – are hidden or misrepresented by the people who benefit from the status quo.

So maybe part of our job as owners of purposeful, sustainable and humane businesses is not just to find those alternatives and explore them. It’s also to share them. To show them. To enable people to make up their own minds on which they’d rather choose.

Our models of the world are stories we tell ourselves.

Let’s not get ourselves trapped in just one.

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.

April 29, 2022

We are many

A quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead today:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Imagine what we could do if we all got together?

April 22, 2022

Every day is Earth Day

Today’s image is NASA’s ‘global selfie’ for Earth Day 2014.

It’s a reminder that we are all part of a global ecosystem. We affect it as individuals. Even more so, we affect it through the social systems we build on top – some of which take on a life of their own.

Some of our effects are benign, or at least harmless. Others are malign – diminishing, depleting and damaging. Making the planet a less hospitable place for others and ourselves.

It’s not too late to switch to having only benign effects.

Any difference we can make individually, will help. But we’ll make a bigger difference when we get together.

Our social systems are just that – social. We made them up. We can make up new ones, different ones, better ones. That enrich and nurture people and planet.

But where do I start?

With yourself, your family, your friends, your workplace, your street, your block, your town, your county, your country. You get the idea.

Find the others.

Then do something together.

Happy Earth Day.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

April 21, 2022

Cui bono?

There’s a question worth asking whenever someone says “that doesn’t work” or “we can’t do that”, or “that’s not worth investigating”.

“Who benefits from the way things are right now?”

Those are the people you really need to convince.

April 5, 2022

What capitalism wants

All capitalism wants is a money-machine.

Machines aren’t good places for humans (or anything that truly lives) to thrive.

One of them has to give.

April 4, 2022

The equality of unequals

You know your clients are individuals. With individual personalities, character traits and preferences. You know that what delights one won’t delight another.

You also know that you want them all to be delighted by your service. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

In the same way, you know that your people are individuals, with individual personalities, character traits and preferences. That what delights one won’t delight another. Yet you want all of them to be delighted to work here, because that’s how they are motivated to delight your clients. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

“But how do I keep things consistent?”

By setting boundaries for behaviour, a floor for what has to be done, then giving your people free play to experiment and explore what delight means to them and to clients.

Doing exactly the same thing every time is what machines do. Cookie-cutting is an efficient way to produce to a minimum standard at scale, but it’s rarely a delightful experience.

Equality doesn’t have to mean treating everyone the same, it can be about doing whatever it takes to produce the same outcome. And if a delighted human is your desired outcome, delighted, free-playing humans are your best means of achieving it.

March 15, 2022

Sending and receiving

When sending and receiving, asking and getting an answer, happens asynchronously, it takes more work to get to a point where things can move forward.

This work is often invisible until you try and capture it in a Customer Experience Score.

At which point, it’s a good idea to ask: “How much of this can I make synchronous instead?”

Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve got so used to tech that allows us to operate asynchronously that we default to it.

Now we have tech that makes it much easier to operate synchronously too – even across time-zones. Perhaps that should be our new default?