Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Delegation

Why create a Customer Experience Score?
May 18, 2023

Why create a Customer Experience Score?

Why write down your Customer Experience Score?  I can think of at least 6 reasons:

  • Memory.
    • Without a Customer Experience Score, some of the knowledge of “what we do here” and as importantly, “how we do things round here” and “why we do what we do” gets lost every time one of your ‘good people’ leaves.  This knowledge also gets changed as new people join and bring their previous experience with them.
    • This can be overcome by a founder that spends time and energy ‘policing’ the culture (think Steve Jobs), but one day even the founder will disappear.
    • A Customer Experience Score gives your business a memory of its own, outside the heads of the people in it – including you.
    • That memory needn’t be prescriptive. The most detailed score still leaves room for interpretation, and you can make it more improv if that’s your style, but the main thing is that if the business always remembers the “what”, “how” and “why”, your people don’t need to make it up as they go along.
  • Detachment.
    • As Japanese businesses know well, what I call a Customer Experience Score embodies the ‘thing’ a group of people are working on – whether that’s a play, a car, a building or a service.
    • This allows a certain level of separation between ‘what I am trying to achieve‘ and ‘who I am‘, which makes it much easier for everyone involved to discuss and agree improvements, because it’s ‘the thing’ that’s being judged, not ‘me’.   Free from the fear of personal criticism, your good people can eagerly look for ways to make things better.
  • Confidence.
    • Having a Customer Experience Score to follow while they learn, gives people confidence that they are doing the right thing.
    • Once people are confident that they know what they are doing, they don’t wait to be made accountable – they take responsibility.  With the confidence of a process behind them, your good people can pretty much manage themselves.
  • Emotion.
    • Most modern businesses, large and small, involve interactions of some kind – with other employees, customers, and suppliers.
    • These interactions require emotional labour – listening; empathising, being present to the other person as well as intellectual labour – pattern-matching, imagining potential scenarios, reviewing possible solutions etc..
    • Without a Customer Experience Score these interactions become harder than they need to be, because every interaction is treated as unique, where in fact they fall into common patterns, with unique features.
    • Your Customer Experience Score captures what has to happen in the common patterns, giving your people a framework to work from that doesn’t need much thinking about.
    • A Score frees up intellectual and emotional energy to be spent on the unique and personal aspects of regular interactions, and on the exceptions that either prove the rule, or highlight the start of a new pattern.  With their heads cleared of the routine, your good people can use their hearts to do more than keep your promises – they can confidently exceed them.
  • Automation.
    • The hardest part of automating any process or function is specifying exactly what it is you’re trying to do.  This is so hard that most people skip this step, trusting the software to do this job for them.  The trouble is, off the shelf software is by necessity, targeted at a mass market, while you have your own unique way of making and keeping promises.  This means either conforming to the way everyone else does things, or worse, automating the details, without understanding the process as a whole.  With a Customer Experience Score, you can use automation (even off the shelf) to strengthen your uniqueness, not dilute it.
  • Longevity.
    • Not even I would say that a Customer Experience Score can be designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality, and without good people a Score-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.
    • Good people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur. They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the Score.
    • Good people spark off constraints (such as a process), they ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities.  With a solid framework to play in, good people bring a business to life – they make it human.  A Customer Experience Score enables people to keep your business alive and human for generations to come.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Roles
May 10, 2023

Roles

One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.

It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.

Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice.  There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.

Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on.  There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it.   And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.

In The Disappearing Boss,  I use a similar idea.   A Role is a part played in a performance by a person.   It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.

Here’s an example from one of my clients.  Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:

The definition of the Ship's Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op. It covers what the Ship does,what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed.  They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships.  What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.

As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing.  One person can play many Roles.  A given Role can be played by many people.  Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.

At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable.  Worth coming back for again and again.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

The cat’s out of the bag
May 3, 2023

The cat’s out of the bag

I see City bosses are clamouring for a return to office working again.

I wonder why?

Are they worried about rents on empty offices?   Those are effectively a sunk cost.

Are they worried about their teams’ jobs or wellbeing?  I doubt it.

Are they worried about ‘losing control’?  Are they bullies then?

Is it about status?  What’s the point of being a boss when there’s nobody around to see it?

Or could it be that when frontliners demonstrate that they can achieve better results without supervision, intervention and commutes, it’s the manager’s job that’s redundant?

Hmmm…

It seems to me that for a long time, traditional corporate management has been about pushing risk and accountability downwards to the people who do the work, without giving them the rewards to match.  Now the cat’s out of the bag.

It’s going to be hard to put it back.

Better then to follow through instead, and give people what they really want:

  • Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
    • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

Supported of course, just not necessarily in the form of management.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

What do you think?

Getting ahead
April 14, 2023

Getting ahead

Of course, if you embed your unique promise of value into the way your business works well before you decide to exit, you get all the benefits of exit, without actually having to do it.

You can even continue to grow your business at the same time.

Applied at the right time, Discipline really does make Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Giant leap
March 9, 2023

Giant leap

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Big step
March 8, 2023

Big step

Repeat your Baby Step and Next Step until your entire Customer Experience Score has been written down and can be played as well as or better than you by everyone and anyone in your team.

This will take time, but the payoff is huge.

Your team will be happier and more engaged with the business.   Supported by a clear framework for the least that should happen, they can dare to delight more.  It will feel more like their business.

Your clients will notice the difference.

You’ll be able to disappear when you need to and grow the business further.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Next step
March 6, 2023

Next step

The more people who know how to do what up to now only you could do, the better.

So, once you’ve got your first section of Score written down, get the person who helped you to teach everyone else how to play it too.

Then, once everyone is familiar with it, get them to take turns performing it for real.

Collect their suggestions for improvement.   After  week or so, discuss them with your team, and apply only those that enhance your Promise of Value for the people your business serves.

That might mean automating some piece of drudgery that enables the team to spend more time with clients.   It might mean un-automating something to make a client/team experience more human for both of them.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that truly lives up to your Promise and that anyone can run as well as or better than you.

You don’t have to do this alone.

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Baby step
March 3, 2023

Baby step

What’s the smallest step you could take to get started on your Customer Experience Score?

Try this:

  • Choose a job you shouldn’t be doing.
  • Find someone to help you – ideally the person you wish to delegate the job to.*
  • You tell them what needs to happen to complete the job, they write it down.
  • They have a go at doing it, following their notes.
  • You observe, and where it goes wrong, between you, you modify the instructions to get the outcomes you want.
    • You clarify what really happens  (not what you think happens).
    • They suggest ways to make it easy for them to do.
  • They write up the improved version.
  • Save the latest version where everyone can get at it.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that can be run reliably by anyone who needs to.

*If you plan to outsource the job to another business, get a friend/fellow business owner to help you do this, then hand over the finished Score as part of your specification for the supplier.

Tips:

  • Assume competence.
  • Start with the (usually positive) 80% case.  You can capture major exceptions later.
  • Think ‘Get Outcome’ – what’s true at the end of the process that wasn’t true before?  So it’s easy to tell when you’ve succeeded (or not).
  • Start at the very beginning and carry on right to the end.  You’re trying to capture a transformation that is meaningful to your client and therefore your business.
  • The quicker you test it, the quicker you can improve it.
  • If it feels like you’re trying to fit too much in, you probably are.
  • It’s a prompt, not a novel.
  • Practice makes perfect.
  • Remember, it’s about the process not the people.

And for the visually minded:

 

Even a little bit of Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Start here
March 2, 2023

Start here

Years ago, after a holiday in the North East, where we saw the Great North Run kick off, I decided I wanted to join in.   I’ve never been a runner, and had no clue how to begin training or where to even start.

After a bit of searching I found a handy spreadsheet online (yes it was that long ago), that would take me from 0 to 5k in about 12 weeks.

The first step was to go out, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds – and repeat till 20 minutes was up.

Gradually, the proportion of running to walking stepped up, until by the end we were running for the full 20 minutes, and eventually, for forty minutes.  I could run 5k without stopping.

If contemplating 40 minutes of non-stop running when I couldn’t run a step was daunting, imagine the thought of getting everything about your Ideal Customer Experience written down as a score.  Paralysing.

Luckily, you can just get going with with a tiny part of it.   Here are some ideas of where you could begin:

  • With something really simple, almost ‘trivial’, like how you open for business each working day, and how you close.  You’ll be amazed what a difference a clear, shared routine makes for everyone.
  • With the most painful part of your Customer Experience.  Where you get most questions from clients or team members, where you have to intervene most often to put things right.
  • With the easiest part of your Customer Experience.  Where writing it down will enable you to delegate the process to others quickly, so you get the headspace to think about the more painful parts.

Like learning to run, it gets easier as you practice, especially if you have a coach alongside you correcting your stance and your style.

But the most important thing is to start.   Here.  Now.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Transforming knowledge into know-how
February 27, 2023

Transforming knowledge into know-how

“Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them.

But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them.

And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.” Paul Graham

This is why composing your Customer Experience Score matters, and why it works.

You aren’t simply transferring your ideal Customer Experience onto paper, you’re (re-)defining it. And then sharing it.   And what you create can be further refined and honed – re-designed if necessary if it doesn’t work or when circumstances change.

That thing you currently carry around in your head can become a tool you and all the people you employ can use to make your business 100 times better than it is now.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.