As Nassim Taleb says in his excellent book ‘Antifragile’, ‘stressors are information’.
That means that rather than just get stressed by them, you can use them to direct improvement.
For example, when ‘exceptions’ start to become common, it’s a sign that something in your system needs to change in line with the environment.
A good place to start is by asking “How could I pre-empt this situation?”.
It sometimes seems to me that the world is divided into two ways of dealing with uncertainty.
You can expect the worst, and try to protect yourself from that possibility by tightly specifying and controlling everything down to the last detail.
Or you can expect the best, and leave everything to chance.
Neither response is optimal. The first closes off opportunities to do better than expected. The second leads to drift.
A more constructive approach is to set direction, leaving latitude for serendipity, obliquity and creativity, measuring effects as you go.
That way, whatever your natural bias, the worst that happens is that things get better.
You’ve put your heart and soul into building a remarkable business that does things differently.
Now you’re ready to scale.
But the last thing you want is to sell out to the same-old, same-old, corporate route to growth.
What if there were a new and different way to think about organising and growing your business, that takes the best bits of being small – your customer-focus, your agility, your meaningfulness – and scales the business around these properties, instead of suppressing them in favour of a traditional corporate approach?
What if you could structure your entire business around your own unique way of making and keeping your promise to customers?
What if your business had no management hierarchy, no silos, no ‘overhead’, only people enabled and empowered to share and keep your promise to your customer and to continuously improve how that works?
What if everyone in your business had roles that describe how they contribute to the customer experience, not where they fit into the hierarchy or the machine?
What if people were supported by technology to be more human, not straitjacketed into being less?
What if your business didn’t need you, because it is a living system, that not only works without you, but evolves without you to find new ways of delivering the promise it embodies?
It’s all possible.
You built a remarkable business, you can grow it remarkably too.
If you dare.
“I can see you’re waiting, why don’t you use the self checkout?” asked the shop assistant.
“Because I don’t want to leave the store angry.” I replied.
“Is it because people have lost their jobs?”
“No, often there are more jobs created fulfilling online orders.”
“So what is it then?”
“Well, first of all they’re slower, they go wrong (or I get it wrong), so I get annoyed, and I don’t want to get annoyed. But fundamentally, it’s because the supermarket is telling me that I am worth less to them than an online shopper, and that gets rubbed in every time I have to use a self-checkout. “
“Oh.”
I’m off to the farmers market.
This fact is not as well-known as I think it should be:
The world’s first business computer was developed for J Lyons & Co. Ltd., to streamline and automate the analysis of the masses of data they collected every day, through which they could accurately predict demand in their chain of tea shops.
What is even less well known, is that the machine, installed in 1951, was the culmination of 20 years of business design by John Simmons and his team.
In other words, they didn’t just throw new technology at the business. They worked out what was the best way to do things, put those processes in place, tested and tweaked them and only then used LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) to automate parts of them.
It’s an approach worth reviving.
PS. If you’d like to find out more – “A computer called LEO” is a good read.
PPS. The ‘computers’ were the chains of female clerks who cumulatively added up the daily numbers received from tea shops. One of Simmons’ ambitions was to release people from this kind of mental drudgery.
It’s become a bit of an annual tradition in our house to watch ‘Earth Story’ from beginning to end between Christmas and New Year.
And every year, I find myself thinking about why I enjoy watching it so much.
I love the fact that many of the scientists involved including the presenter, Aubrey Manning, are middle-aged or old. There is wisdom here as well as adventure. Many of these ‘old’ scientists made these exciting discoveries in their youth, and now younger people are following on.
I love that they collaborate so much across the world, feeding off and building on each others’ discoveries (sometimes by accident) to build an incredibly comprehensive picture of how the earth works.
I love that the topic is huge and complex, and that the documentary brings everything together in a way that takes you through the various discoveries and processes involved, until you too say to yourself “So that’s how it works”.
I love that it is a clear, straightforward, scientific, scholarly presentation. There’s no faux jeopardy, no contrived drama, no patronising. The subject is wondrous and dramatic enough to stand on its own. There’s no agenda other than to educate.
And at the end of the 8 hours, I sit back every time and think 3 things:
First, Earth is an amazing place. It’s been going a lot longer than we have, and it will happily carry on for a long while without us.
Second, people are amazing. Look at what we can do – not just the thinking and hypothesising, but the technology that allows us to observe and prove our hypotheses.
Third, there’s nothing we can do about how the planet works. The status quo will not hold forever. Whether we are speeding it up or not, the planet is going to get hotter or colder and cause us enormous difficulties.
So if we want our human story to be part of the earth story for a little longer, the answer has to lie in changing the things we can change – our societies, our priorities, our ways of living together, our ways of living on the planet – we made all these things, we can remake them.
Perhaps we could practise on smaller problems first – hunger, poverty, exploitation, how to enable anyone and everyone to live well, wherever on earth they happen to be?
Here’s to 2019.
Thank you!
May 2019 bring everything you wish for.
I’ll be back on the 1st January.
We humans have a tendency to assume that everyone else is the same as us – the same age, the same level of fitness; the same abilities; the same knowledge – until proven otherwise.
Usually, we design our systems and processes around these assumptions, and get heavy doors, high kerbs, long-ways-round walking routes, short crossing times; interfaces that require precise and accurate finger-control, or clear eyesight, or sharp hearing.
We’ll all get old.
I suspect that if we designed for that, things would be a lot easier for everyone, right now.
This graph comes from a 2012 article by McKinsey, on improving productivity for ‘interaction workers’ through the use of ‘social technologies’ for example, collaboration tools such as Slack etc:
The diagram shows that about 60% of what these people do is what McKinsey calls ‘work about work’.
But I also wondered what an ‘interaction worker’ is. Here’s a useful definition I found:
“These include managers, salespeople, teachers, and customer service reps, as well as skilled professionals whose jobs require them to spend a lot of their time interacting with other people. These interactions are with other employees, customers, and suppliers, and involve using their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions.“
The implication of the McKinsey article is that by making these interactions easier and quicker, the ‘work about work’ is reduced, and enormous productivity gains are possible.
I’m sure that’s true, but I think there’s are a couple of deeper questions worth asking:
Which of these interactions are truly productive – in the sense of adding value for the customer?
Which could we strip out altogether?
For me, the obvious answer here is management.
People who routinely ‘use their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions’ can usually manage themselves.
So the really productive question is how to enable that?
Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.
A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.
By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.
Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.
This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.
And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.