Delegation – Page 9 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones. To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong. In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast. And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing. You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude. People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation. We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed. Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control. They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well. They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it. They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it. Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself. But after a while, your people won’t even need that. With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

November 22, 2021

Indispensable

It feels nice to be wanted. To be the fount of all knowledge . To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question. To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making. To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware. Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak. An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first. The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive. It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make. It can easily become a trap for you. And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions. Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know. As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score. Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience. Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together. Review the score. Adjust if necessary.

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end. Get it out there.

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?

September 30, 2021

Communication, not control

Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.

Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house. They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.

Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.

The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines. Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.

Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.

Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies. They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.

In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control. The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.

How about your business? What would your technical drawings look like? Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?

September 29, 2021

What is a musical score?

It’s the music the composer(s) can hear in their head(s) captured in a way that enables other musicians to play it. It allows the composer to delegate the responsibility for producing the music to others across space and time.

You could think of it as ‘management without the managers’. I have thought of it like that.

But I’ve changed my mind. I think that just like building plans, screenplays and a Customer Experience Score, it’s more like ‘leadership without the leaders’.

A musical score doesn’t say “Do this task, then this one, and this one next”. It says “Here’s where we’re going, here’s the notes we have to hit, find your own best way to hit them, together.”

Hmmm.

What do you think?

July 21, 2021

Double bubble

What could be more energising than knowing that every action you take contributes directly to a customer’s experience? Nothing superfluous, nothing bureaucratic, nothing but the relationship being created or maintained between you and the person you are serving.

So the perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency, turns out to be the perfect marriage of employee engagement and operational efficiency too.

Double bubble.

What’s not to like?

May 28, 2021

Shuhari

“It is known that, when we learn or train in something, we pass through the stages of shu, ha, and ri. These stages are explained as follows. In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms that our forebears created. We remain faithful to these forms with no deviation. Next, in the stage of ha, once we have disciplined ourselves to acquire the forms and movements, we make innovations. In this process the forms may be broken and discarded. Finally, in ri, we completely depart from the forms, open the door to creative technique, and arrive in a place where we act in accordance with what our heart/mind desires, unhindered while not overstepping laws.” Endō Seishirō

You want your entire team to get to ri.

That’s impossible while the shu is only in your head.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

HT to Carlos Saba for the thought. And to Claire Perry-Louise for creating the space where it can be shared.