Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Customer Experience OurScore

Now share the work
February 8, 2023

Now share the work

Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.

To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.    To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.    To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.

Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this.  But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.

And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.

Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”

It’s always been there
February 7, 2023

It’s always been there

When you’re composing your Customer Experience Score, it’s important to remember that your customer experience music has always been there.

If it wasn’t your business wouldn’t be doing as well as it is.   You have clients who love what you do for them.  You have employees and suppliers who love working with you.   The music is there and it appeals to others.  You’re an expert at playing it.

When we become experts, we turn things we used to have to think about into habits we unconsciously perform.   Some of those habits are excellent.   Some are not so good.   They’re simply the habit we got into that made things ‘good enough’ at the time.

Some habits are downright bad, but we keep using them because to do otherwise takes conscious effort, and when you’re busy looking after clients and teams, that’s hard to do.

Your first job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to make the music as good as it can possibly be.   To surface all your habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.

It’s an opportunity to deliberately assess whether you could do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.   To make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value, and to re-shape it so that it does.

This is not straightforward.  Dredging stuff up from your subconscious is hard work.  So it helps to have a framework to build on, and a critical friend to encourage you, push you, suggest solutions and hold you to account.

That’s where I come in.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“The changes and processes you recommended are coming together nicely. But it all takes so much time!   Slowly but surely I’m disappearing as a boss though :).“

Two tools in one
February 6, 2023

Two tools in one

A musical score is a multi-use tool.   For the composer, its a tool for thinking, for designing.   The score gives concrete shape to the music that’s playing in their head. And once concrete, it can be more easily modified and improved, until it fully reflects their intentions.

From then on, the score also becomes a different kind of tool.  A tool for communicating that vision to the players who will be responsible for delivering it.   A tool that tells them what the performance must convery, without telling them how to do it.    Because as experienced artists, they know that already.

A score can switch between these two uses as many times as it needs to.

A Customer Experience Score works the same way.   It’s a design tool for the business owner, a communications tool for their team.    And like a musical score it can switch between these uses whenever it needs to.

Perhaps even after its composer has disappeared, if the players feel strongly enough about the original vision.

Reproduction
January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged.  If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service.   Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible.  Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable.  Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

Regulation is feedback too
January 13, 2023

Regulation is feedback too

It may not feel like it, but regulation is simply another form of feedback for your business.  It just happens to be the kind of feedback you are not allowed to ignore.

Think of it as feedback from your industry.  Lessons learned by others that can save you grief.   Of course not all of it is designed to help your business, sometimes it’s the result of bigger players flexing their muscle in the market, to make it harder for businesses like yours.  Even that is useful feedback – telling you where the bigger players feel vulnerable.   Use it to your advantage.

Since you can’t ignore regulatory feedback, it pays to have a really clear Promise, and plenty of the other kinds of feedback coming in regularly, so that you can make sure the requirements of regulation can’t unduly distort your unique way of making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.

That means that as far as possible, compliance, like admin, needs to be a side effect of doing what you’re here to do, not the other way around.

Of course you need to be compliant, but the regulator shouldn’t come first.

They’re not your customer.

A disappearing act
January 11, 2023

A disappearing act

You don’t have to lose your business to be able to leave it.

You just have to take yourself out of the day-to-day.

To do this, make everyone a boss.   Get the music that’s in your head written down so that other people can play it.  Give your people the responsibility and the autonomy to deliver your business’s unique customer experience consistently, in their own style.

The sooner you do this, the sooner you get to choose how much time you want to spend in your business, the sooner you free the business to grow and the sooner you’ll free your people to grow too.

Best of all, you get to keep everything that makes your business uniquely yours.

In the end, you’ll have built a community, not just a business.  A community centred around the promises you make and keep for the people you serve.  A community that becomes your legacy.

Ask me how.

The irony is that all this makes it an even more attractive buy.

But of course by then you won’t want to sell.

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.
December 16, 2022

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.

“In six months, 300 volunteers from 41 countries worked asynchronously to produce a best-selling book. The Carbon Almanac is now in ten languages. The almanac for kids, Generation Carbon is in 17 languages. There are more than 88 podcasts, a photobook, and a daily e-newsletter.”  From Fast Company: “Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss, and everyone’s a leader.“

And dozens more spin-offs too.  The enterprise is still going strong, and still growing.

The Carbon Almanac was created this way.

With no managers, no boss.  Everyone’s a leader.

Maybe that’s also how Stonehenge was built?  And Çatalhöyük or Knossos?

Maybe that’s naturally how we build worthwhile things?

Maybe you could take the load off your own shoulders and reframe your small business into something longer-lasting that way?

Making everyone a boss unleashes amazing energy.  Especially when you also give them a lovely firm but springy floor to bounce off.*

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

*That’s where I can help.

Supported Display
December 7, 2022

Supported Display

I took a lot of photos on my visit to the Museum of London at the weekend.  Some, because I liked the thing I was looking at, this one because I liked the way the display system worked.

It’s a very simple system.  A regular grid of holes at the back allows supports to be positioned in a variety of ways to suit what’s being displayed, from a single bronze shield found in the Thames, to a mix of bronxe daggers and swords, to these flint hand tools.  It’s highly structured, yet flexible and very effective.

But what I really liked about it was the way it’s been designed to foreground the objects, providing each one with reliable support, allowing them to seem to float; putting each one in the spotlight, so that you can appreciate the differences between them as well as the similarities.

You know where I’m going with this.

With the almost invisible support of a Customer Experience Score, your people too can shine in the spotlight – both as individuals and as part of the whole that is your business.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

A medieval carved head of a smiling woman in a wimple.

This I just liked, because it reminded me of Geraldine McEwan.

What if it was never about the things?
November 29, 2022

What if it was never about the things?

First nation peoples and clever marketers have known for a long time that Sharing your Promise is never really about selling the thing.  It’s about how that thing affects our relationship with ourselves and with others.  So what you’re really selling is a change of relations.

Which means of course, that when it comes to Keeping your Promise, you’re not really delivering the thing.   You’re delivering the shift in relationships signified and caused by the thing.

Which means that’s what the Customer Experience should be all about.

Which means that’s what should be in your Customer Experience Score.

And why keeping it human matters.

How to do big business with a tiny company
November 22, 2022

How to do big business with a tiny company

I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size.   In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.

How can he do that?

Here are some ideas.

First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it.  Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues.   Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.

Second, let your people manage themselves.   After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility.  Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though.  Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate.   Do this and you can ditch the managers.

Next, get rid of ‘admin’.   Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time.  Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job.   Do this and you can ditch the admin department.

Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service.  In essence make them a one-person instance of your business.   Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.

Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it.  Reward must follow responsibility.  Ownership must be real.  Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.