Customer Experience – Page 15 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

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.

September 14, 2021

Management

Management – the co-ordination of activities executed by many people – is expensive. Managers don’t contribute directly to the bottom line, and good managers cost good money to hire. So it’s no surprise that firms around the world have been looking for a way to get rid of managers.

One solution is to automate – management by algorithm, as used by Uber, deliveroo and the like, and increasingly applied to fields such as home-care. This is hideously expensive to set up, of course, and it depends on creating an effective monopoly. Plus it effectively turns humans into mindless robots, paid accordingly.

The other solution is to devolve responsibility out and down to the front-line – radical de-centralisation, where teams on the front line manage themselves. An extreme (and very successful) example of this is Haier Industries, essentially what Corporate Rebels call ‘the biggest startup factory in the world’.

At Haier, ‘teams’ are startups, consisting of internal and external people (such as suppliers), all working to create value for customers, sharing the risks and the rewards along the way. They are monitored and supported, but not controlled. Haier doesn’t decide what will work and what won’t, the market does.

In contrast to Uber and the like, Haier has created a highly profitable solution to getting rid of managers – by creating an ecosystem that enables self-managing people to do what only humans can do – create value for other humans – supported and rewarded by systems that help them to keep growing.

In the future, there will be no managers, only management. What kind of management do you want for your business? Uber? or Haier?

I know which I’d prefer.

September 2, 2021

Art and business

Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?

The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.

If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.

The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.

The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.

Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.

Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.

September 1, 2021

Tension and delight

Of course, inspiration on its own isn’t enough. Inspiration needs a starting point, a constraint, something to bounce off, spark to or rebel against.

The maker of this ‘crazy’ quilt was already constrained by the assortment of odd-shaped leftovers they had. Perhaps also by the limited colours they’d been given. They decided to impose another constraint – the nine square layout. The result isn’t random. Nor is it purely functional. It satisfies more than the need to keep warm at night.

Why would someone do this?

We humans like order as much as we like wildness. We desire both certainty and uncertainty, rules and license. Pulled by these opposites, we find the tension between them uncomfortable.

So we turn it into the most delightful thing of all – art. Capturing a fleeting, but satisfying moment of balance between the two. The ‘right’ balance is elusive, every time we try, the result is different. That’s what keeps artists in practice. The ‘right’ balance is also personal. That’s what gives each artist their own style.

If you want your business to feel human, it needs to be a place where art can happen.

You can’t dictate the artistic solutions. But you can create the required level of tension, by imposing rules, order and constraints.

If those constraints are designed around making and keeping your promise to the people you serve – if they define a floor, but no ceiling – you’ll have created a safe, exciting and human space for everyone.

Especially you.

August 24, 2021

Structuring emergence

The problem with a hierarchical management structure, is that it’s expensive – adding layers of overhead and transaction costs that have to be carried by the revenue-generating part of the business. Even worse, it encourages everyone working within it to focus on the wrong thing – their immediate boss. And that makes work miserable for many, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Alternatives to hierarchy, such as holacracy, co-operation and teal address this by delegating much of the management and decision-making to the people at the coal-face – no longer the bottom, but the cutting edge, where the business meets its customers.

This doesn’t reduce overhead that much because in effect, as Dr Julian Birkenshaw of London Business School observes, these structures “replace a vertical bureaucracy with a horizontal one”. Considerable interaction costs remain as people collaborate and generate consent to create emergent actions. But at least the focus is where it matters, on the customer, client or stakeholder.

It seems to me that what’s really needed is both structure and emergence. A structure that takes the thinking out of doing the right thing most of the time, but allows for emergence at the edges to respond to exceptions and to evolve. The main thing is that both the core structure and the processes for emergence are focused on the same thing – the customer, client or stakeholder.

By now, you know all about my core structure:

Even hierachy works better around this. Replace that with holacracy, co-operation, teal or responsible autonomy, and your business will fly.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 19, 2021

Customer-centric

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.

They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.

The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.

Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.

Hmmm.

Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 9, 2021

Less is more

Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars? Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices. And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?

As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.

In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam. Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.

More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from. But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.

The lesson for packaging your Promise?

If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice. If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard. They’ll probably give up.

August 4, 2021

Sunflower moments

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.

His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself.” D.H. Lawrence.

That ‘third thing’, the ‘vivid relation’ between ‘me’ and the other, is a moment when we feel truly alive, connected, aware of our place in the universe. Such moments don’t only happen to artists. I’ve experienced them while shopping, walking or making dinner. The difference is I’ve never tried to capture them.

It seems to me that much of what we do as humans is about creating opportunities where those ‘sunflower moments’ – that you might also call Sawubona can happen.

What if that is what work was really for?

What if we measured our performance by that?

August 3, 2021

Resisting Commodification

What do we mean when we call something ‘a commodity’?

It means its substitutable, interchangeable, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

It means we don’t have to think about it. It’s just there. To hand when we need it, otherwise invisible.

I no longer use ‘commodity olive oil’. Mine comes from Marije in Portugal. I’ve seen her family harvesting the olives. I’ve seen the designs for the special ceramic bottles it can come in. I’ve seen the ship ‘Gallant’ sailing to pick her oil up, and sailing back to Penzance to drop it off. I know the names of many of the people involved in making that happen.

And every time I use my oil, which is every day, I think of them and all the work that’s gone into getting olive oil to my table. I feel connected to a network.

My olive oil is not a commodity, I pay well above average price for it, and it’s worth every penny.

Commodification is not inevitable. We can choose to be different, as buyers, producers and middle-men.

As a community.