Customer Experience OurScore – Page 11 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 30, 2022

Love/Hate

There is much about being in charge of a company that every owner loves:

being part of a team,
working towards a common purpose
camaraderie
feeling that you’re not on your own
seeing ideas come up from others – better than any you could have dreamed up
seeing people grow and develop as a result of working with you – not just at work
Seeing your vision come to life.
The feeling of ‘I made this’.

There is also much about being in charge of a company that every owner seems to hate:

telling people what to do
making sure that they are doing it
worrying about whether they will do it properly
checking that they have done it properly
doing it again yourself when they haven’t
telling them they didn’t do it properly
telling them (again) how you want it done
dealing with disappointed clients
performance reviews
finding and hiring the right people
seeing them go
being the last to leave
being the last to have a holiday
being the last to be paid
not getting to do any of the ‘real’ work

What if you could have the bits you love, without the bits you hate?

You can, if you think about where the bits you hate come from.

If you were building an office block, or putting on a play, or making a film, you would have something that told people exactly what it is you’re trying to create. You’d have plans, a script and stage directions, a storyboard. If you were writing a symphony you’d have a score.

These things don’t just describe the outcome, they document how it is arrived at.

It’s not the bricklaying or the carpentry you’re worried about, you know your team know how to do that. What you’re worried about as an owner is the look and feel of the thing, the experience the audience – your client – will have of the finished article.

When you started your business you lovingly and painstakingly handcrafted the client experience yourself, in collaboration with the people who ‘got’ what you can do for them.

You expanded your business first by freeing up more of your own time – by handing over specific jobs that require specialist skills – bricklaying, joinery, accountancy, hr, phone answering. These are generic jobs, with their own rules that specialists learn. But there comes a point where you have to hand over parts of the customer experience itself, whether that’s sales or delivery.

This is where the problems start.

The solution is startlingly simple.

Create a description of the customer experience and how to deliver it, that ensures everyone starts from the same level of understanding as you.

That way everyone gets what they love.

June 28, 2022

5 principles for composing your Customer Experience Score

Principle 1: Remember why you’re doing it.

Everything you do in your business is done in service of making and keeping Promises to the people you serve.

This is the bigger picture:

You need to remember that when you compose your Score, and you need to ensure that your people will remember it every time they play it.

Principle 2: Not how it is now, but how you really want it to be.

As soon as you’ve written it down, your Score becomes your new ‘As-is’. Until you improve it again. You’ll never get to ‘To-be’.

Principle 3: The person playing this will be a human being like you.

You’re not composing for a robot, or a computer. You’re composing for a human, who can fill in any gaps from their experience, knowledge and skill. They need prompts, not instructions. They’ll probably suggest improvements.

Principle 4: Have a golden rule for dealing with the unexpected, and a recovery process for when things go wrong

You can’t predict every eventuality. Things change. So it pays to have a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with them in line with your Promise.

Similarly, mistakes are bound to happen. The way you deal with them is part of your Promise. And there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise: Be human.

Principle 5: Admin is a side-effect of doing the job

You want to spend as much time as possible on the thing that pays – making and keeping Promises to the people you serve. Everything else is a side-effect. But you have to design your business to work that way.

The first piece of admin to treat like this, is getting paid. Make it part of the process – even if it’s the final note of your Score. That way you can make sure it happens, on time, every time. Especially if you also make it part of the customer experience.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

And if you dare, I can bring the discipline.

June 20, 2022

Going with the grain

We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.

This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.

As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.

So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.

Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.

We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.

And we’re out of practice.

That’s where small businesses come in.

Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?

Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?

When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?

And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

June 15, 2022

Catching on

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

For many of us, this is exactly why we start a business. To build our own little utopia, where we make the rules, and get to decide how our world within a world should work.

But if we want to make a bigger impact, our model of how the world should work has to catch on. With clients, with team members, with suppliers, investors, our families and friends, our competitors.

That can only happen once the model is outside of our heads.

The good news is that getting it out of your head makes it easier for it to catch on.

June 9, 2022

Writing it down

Sometimes, it seems we business owners have a problem with writing things down.

On the one hand we think we have to pin down every last detail; dot every i; cross every t and cover every eventuality, so that absolutely nothing can go wrong. On the other hand, we fear that writing down anything at all will somehow stop our people thinking for themselves.

The answer is to sketch. Make a picture, not a document.

We humans are very good at working out what’s going on from sketches, outlines and broad strokes. We can follow the basics, and use our imaginations to fill in the rest.

If your ‘business imaginations’ are bounded by a clear and comprehensive Promise of Value, a sketch of what has to happen to make and keep that Promise is usually enough to be helpful without stifling imagination. You can always elaborate further where needed.

A sketch is much better than an excruciatingly detailed tome that we’d never have time to read.

And way better than a blank sheet of paper.

It’s discipline that makes daring possible.

June 8, 2022

Handshake overhead

“Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.” Seth Godin, from this post.

Only if you’ve designed your business so that everyone needs someone else’s approval to get things done.

The great thing about designing your business to be more like an orchestra than a pin-factory, is that if you want to make more noise you simply add more players.

Give each new player a copy of the Customer Experience Score to follow, a bit of time to practise, then simply let them get on with it.

If everyone in your business knows how to make and keep your Promise from beginning to end, there’s no need for them to get anyone’s approval first.

Least of all yours.

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.

April 20, 2022

Just in time

When you’re setting up a client in your systems for the first time, it’s tempting to ask up front for everything you will need for the journey.

Resist.

If your tailor is making you an overcoat, you don’t expect them to measure your inside leg.

Only ask for what you need right now, to get the client started. Otherwise you’ll overwhelm them with unexpected (and to them, unnecessary, perhaps even unnerving) work, to get information that may well have changed by the time you actually need it.

Keep your information gathering aligned with what you’re doing together. That keeps it feeling natural, and you’ll have all the right information when you need it – just in time.

April 7, 2022

What this hooey is all about

In this letter to Nirvana, pitching to produce their next album, Steve Albini sets out his Promise of Value for them to take or leave.

It’s not 100% applicable to a business like yours, (unless your business is actually a band) but there’s a lot that could be learned from it:

“I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…”

“If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.”

“I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play.”

“I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm.”

As the founder of your business, you’re the equivalent of Nirvana. You’re the live band. The customer experience you’ve carefully crafted as you grew your business is what your audience buys.

Your team, is like the records you make to get the music to more of those who want to hear it – far into the future.

Only now you are Steve Albini, and it’s your job to make sure the record delivers as if it was you:

“If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.”

Write your people a score, make sure they’re familiar with your sound and ethos, then let them play as human beings, not machines.

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.