Culture – Page 13 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 15, 2021

Making

You may think a business is simply a matter of creating, manufacturing and selling products or services.

It’s also about creating people. We spend most of our lives at work. So the way we work together to make, sell and deliver those products and services has a significant impact on our capabilities, capacities and beliefs. Work changes us, forms us.

That means that a business is also about making society. Because although ‘society’ often feels like something that’s just ‘there’ outside of us, actually it’s made by us, in the way we work, in the way we live and play outside work, in the way we think about our relationships with others.

Now you know this, you can choose to consciously create, through your business, the kind of society you want to see. Starting with the little society of prospects, customers, suppliers and employees immediately around you.

That’s why for me, a business is not a machine for making money. It’s a system for making and keeping promises.

Because it’s the relationships between people that are really important, not the things we make.

October 29, 2021

Leadership?

At this morning’s Like-Hearted Leaders gathering we had an interesting discussion around what leadership is or could be.

It was an interesting, intricate, circular discussion.

But in the end, I think what leadership could be might be best summed up in the LHL values:

Real conversations, even if they are difficult.
Courage to be vulnerable.
Growth & Learning comes through thoughtful feedback.
Freedom of expression, where everyone is worthy of contributing.
Amplify others.
Trust grows in balanced relationships of give and take.

It’s an interesting question though.

What does leadership mean to you?

What does it mean to whoever you lead?

October 27, 2021

Rotations

Circles are an interesting form of organisation. Like King Arthur’s famous Round Table, nobody is ‘above’ or ‘below’ anyone else. All are on a level.

A circle can be the basis of useful mechanisms for sharing work fairly, without the need for discussion, consensus building or command.

For instance, if you all work in an office, someone has to open up each day. Often it’s one person’s job. What happens when they don’t turn up?

You could decide to give everyone a key, and it’s simply the first to arrive that opens up. But if you are the habitually early one, you might start to resent being the only one who has to do this in practice.

Or you could create an ‘opening up ‘ circle (which could include everyone) and do it by rotation. You might even use a single set of special keys to make the mechanism visible, perhaps even more like a game.

There are probably more jobs that could be organised in this way. You could rotate delivery drivers through different routes or rounds, to give them a change and to introduce customers to more of your team. You could rotate people through networking events in the same way. You could even rotate people through Roles to expand their experience and get clients used to the idea that anyone in your business can help them equally well.

The beauty of a circle is that you can start anywhere, and go clockwise or anti-clockwise. You can choose whatever frequency you like for the rotation. It can even accommodate absences – you just jump the gap if today’s person is missing. Best of all, there’s no room for argument. Everyone takes their turn, then forgets about the job until it comes round again.

No need to write up complex rotas, just draw up your circles, put them somewhere visible, and set them going.

How powerful a signal it would be if everyone, including the boss, took their spot?

October 25, 2021

Our greatest tool

Following nicely on from the last post, I recommend this series of posts from my friend Mary Jane Copps – The Phone Lady.

You’re probably familiar with the idea that as humans we are wired to look for stories, which means that telling them is a great form of marketing.

What Mary Jane makes us realise is that before you can tell your own story effectively, you have to first find the story of the person you are talking to. Not the story of the avatar you’ve created to ‘represent’ them, but the actual story of the actual person you are speaking to right now.

Why?

Because “It’s within their story that your value takes root.“

That means that whatever your process for communicating one-to-one with prospects or clients is, it must have room for curiosity, and enough flex to accommodate the learning you gain by exercising that curiosity.

October 22, 2021

Seeing ourselves

We humans are used to thinking of ourselves as self-aware, or self-conscious.

Except that most of the time we aren’t. We work on auto-pilot, following our habitual paths, working through habitual behaviours without consciously reflecting at all.

We do have moments of conscious awareness – when we’re thinking, or working out a problem – but these really are moments. 7 seconds on average.

Except when we are in conversation with other humans. In conversation, we think, we reflect, we are fully self-conscious. Sometimes for hours on end. You might even say that conversations with other people are where we fully realise ourselves.

And of course, you can’t have a proper conversation without being fully conscious of the other participants too.

You can’t be seen until you learn to see. Not even by yourself.

October 21, 2021

Learning

“There’s an interesting rule called the 70-20-10 rule, which states that 70% of learning comes from doing, 20% comes from observing in relationship, and only 10% comes from actual instruction.”

This is from my friend Grace Judson’s leadership newsletter (well worth subscribing to).

Here’s how you might apply it if you have a Customer Experience Score in place:

Instruction: The person/people who want to develop into a new or additional Role read the Customer Experience Score, so they know what to play.
Observing in relationship: They observe someone already proficient in that Role playing the Score for real, with real clients. At this stage these clients will come under the 80% of straightforward cases.
Instruction: They read the Customer Experience Score again, this time with some real examples to draw on.
Doing+Observing in relationship: They play the Score themselves, as a practice, not with real clients, but with experienced players taking the Role of clients, or fellow newbies armed with scenarios. Start with the straightforward cases until people feel comfortable with that. You know people have learned when they are able to critique each other.
Doing: While this is fresh in their mind, they play for real, with the Score at hand for reference, with real but straightforward clients.
Doing+Observing in relationship: Hold another group practice session. This time, explore some of the 20% non-straightforward cases. Your experienced players will love coming up with examples of these!
Doing: With this fresh in their mind, and the Score at hand for reference, you can let them play for real, with any kind of real client.

It’s a good idea to hold regular reviews of the Score, as part of group practice sessions. Over time, people will internalise the Score, but not necessarily as it is written. You want to share desirable variations and eliminate the undesirable ones. Regular group practice will enable this.

It is of course possible to do all this without a Customer Experience Score. It will be harder though, because you have to spend time agreeing whose version of ‘how we do things round here’ is the right one.

October 19, 2021

Old possibilities

For more than 40,000 years, human beings have been imagining and re-imagining new possibilities for how we live in the world.

We can’t stop now.

We can do better than this.

September 22, 2021

Joining the dots

Before the European invasion, the only use the people of the Americas had for wheels, was for pull-along toys. They used headstraps and pack-animals for carrying things, and made their clay pots by hand-building. Messages were carried by runners.

Perhaps because there were no suitable native draught animals, or because the terrain was too difficult, the possibilities of the wheel were seen, but never applied, except in play. Until of course, the Spanish introduced horses and cattle.

We tend to think of innovation as the creation of new things by a single individual. Actually, much innovation arises from joining the dots. And that only happens once the dots are in place.

Where are the dots being created in your industry? Could you join them to create something new?

September 21, 2021

Cattus Economicus

I love my cat. She doesn’t love me back.

All she’s really interested in is food and sleep. And every now and then, a bit of attention – on her terms, when and where she wants it, never when I do. She’s lazy, greedy and selfish. She is ‘Cattus Economicus’.

She can’t help it, cats, like most mammals, have evolved that way.

But not us humans. Somewhere in our distant past, we evolved new instincts of collaboration, co-operation, altruism. Because we needed those traits to survive.

‘Homo Economicus’ is a convenient fiction, that tells us more about the economists and politicians who use it than the people they like to apply it to. In their eyes, you and I and most of the people we know are less than human, to be treated is if all we care about is food and sleep.

We know better. We know that we collaborate, co-operate and help each other out all the time. We know that we need to exercise these pro-social instincts more than ever if we are to solve the pressing problems our species faces.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.

We’re no pussycats.

September 16, 2021

Why I read fiction

“The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.” George Eliot.

Middlemarch is my favourite work of fiction precisely because George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) succeeds so well in this endeavour.

Not everyone in the book is good, or beautiful, or admirable or likeable, but by the end you feel they are all worthy of the investment of your attention. Even the ‘villains’. You may not approve of everything they do, but you at least understand how they got there. Not through being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but through being human, by the choices they take at each little fork in the road, how they justify those choices to themselves and how that leads to the route taken at the next fork, and the next.

Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways I know to expand my horizons. I’ve ‘met’ far more people through fiction than I could ever hope to meet in the flesh, from all sorts of backgrounds, times and places. Practising empathy for these characters, written by and about people outside my comfort zone is great practice towards doing it for real.

I know quite a few businesses who keep a library of business books for their team. Perhaps its time to add some fiction.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Culture