Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Dead space
May 22, 2023

Dead space

This weekend my husband and I crossed another thing off our ‘to-visit’ list.  We went to Canning Town and had a bit of a wander.  Steve was looking for where the Bridgehouse used to be (a pub he used to visit for  live music in the 70s) as well as the housing development site he worked on as a student in the late 80’s.  The pub is long gone, but the housing is looking nice, low-rise, semis and terraces with neighbourly gardens, set on the edge of the park that replaced the old victorian streets.

While we were there we took a look at the shops in Barking Road, then down to City Island, a brand new development nestled in a loop of the river Lea.

What struck me was the contrast between the two.  Barking Road is scruffy, some might say run-down, but lively and full of little independent shops (including a Portuguese shop and cafe that made its own pasteis de nata) and some impressive former local authority buildings.   City Island is brand new, high-rise, colourful, but samey.

And strangely dead.

A pedestrianised area goes through it, and there are shops, restaurants, a yoga studio, nursery and gym, with typical ‘city’ planting.

The space looks public, but isn’t.

The shops and restaurants are almost anonymous, the only branding the London City Island E14 logo.  The windows are dark, so you can’t see in, or tell whether they are open.  It’s a sunny lunchtime, but nobody’s around.

There are green spaces, but nowhere to sit in them, and certainly nowhere to play.  The last thing the landlord wants is to leave money on the table, and it shows.  Like a theme park, every experience is predetermined, everything is ‘provided’, but only at a cost.

“They’re just warehouses for people,” my husband said, “you’re only really meant to sleep in them, handy for your job in the city.  They’re not for living in.”

I’ve noticed the same about a lot of new places in London – Canary Wharf, Canada Water, Woolwich Arsenal, the South Bank, Elephant Park, Deptford.

The marketing literature likes to call these places, ‘Vibrant‘.

Hmmm.

Pretty bleak, I’d call them.

I know where I’d rather live.

The point about a Score
May 19, 2023

The point about a Score

The point about a musical score is that it tells you where you are, what comes next and where you’re trying to get to.

So when your bow breaks in the middle of your passionately executed violin solo, you can simply borrow one from the lead violinist and carry on. And so can the rest of the orchestra.

Ok, the pause breaks the illusion for a second or two, but the experience as a whole doesn’t break down. In fact, it becomes more memorable.

Not because it ‘failed’ but because of the ease with which it was got going again.

The only change you might want to make afterwards is to add a spare bow to each performance.

The point about a customer experience score is that it enables you to keep your promise, creatively, no matter what.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

HT to @Bev Costoya for the prompt.

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.

Blackmail – the new business model?
May 17, 2023

Blackmail – the new business model?

Is it just me, or is anyone else worried/annoyed/infuriated by the rise of ‘Clubcard Prices’, ‘Nectar Prices’ and the like?

I keep a pretty good track of prices in my head, and from what I could see, ‘Clubcard Prices’ weren’t lower than the usual prices elsewhere.  It was simply an opportunity to put ‘normal’ prices up, by quite a percentage.

Harmless enough, until every other member of the supermarket cartel joins in of course.

To me it feels very much like ‘Give us your loyalty, or you’ll pay extra for everything’.

Since when has blackmail been an acceptable business model?

Keeping it simple
May 16, 2023

Keeping it simple

“If you don’t tackle the underlying organizational complexity and bureaucracy that generate the torrent of meetings and email requests, you’re not going to make much progress–no matter how clever your personal “hack” might be.“ Michele Zanini in response to: “Workers Now Spend Two Full Days a Week on Email and in Meetings“.

No matter how ambitious you are, I bet you don’t want your small business to end up like this.

If you keep the overall structure simple and the purpose clear:

Then empower your team to manage processes rather than other people, you can make sure you never do.

And that means you can grow bigger, without growing slower.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

 

Negotiated joining
May 15, 2023

Negotiated joining

Another really interesting piece from Vaughn Tan today:

Using Negotiated Joining to Construct and Fill Open-ended Roles in Elite Culinary Groups

In a nutshell, instread of recruiting new team members against an extensive checklist of skills, comptencies and attributes, these elite teams (incumbents) select a likely-looking candidate (aspirant) and find out whether and how they can best work together by actually doing it for a provisional period.

During this time, the aspirant is expected to understand the role and the role-components that make it up, and to demonstrate strengths in enough of these roles to make them worth employing.   They may even bring new strengths to the role, requiring a new role-component.

On the other side, the incumbents are expected to understand and test the strengths of the aspirant and recognise when one or more of their own role-components is superseded, or a completely new role-component has been created.

Only when the negotiation is satisfactory to both sides does membership become formal.  In this way both sides negotiate coming together to form a new, reconfigured team.

I think this is a very interesting process that could be applied to more than elite teams, such as a growing small business that already has a Customer Experience Score in place.  Role-components correspond to Activities in the Score, while Roles have responsibility for one or more parts of the Score.  Having the Customer Experience Score in place makes this less risky than it might otherwise be, since everyone knows ‘the least that must happen’.

I’d use it to allow individuals to negotiate how they can best contribute to the delivery of the company’s Promise of Value, not just when they join, but throughout their career with the company, as they grow and develop.

I’d also use it to ensure that everyone knows more or less everything about the Customer Experience Score, giving flexibility and resilience to the organisation while leaving  plenty of room for evolution.

Because, after all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

Learning by doing
May 11, 2023

Learning by doing

As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.

How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?

The answer is a process something like this:

  • An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish.  There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
  • The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
  • Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback.  “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”.  The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”

These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu.   It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.

The key things here are:

  • Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are.  Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time.  It’s the job.
  • Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
  • It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space.  Nobody is managing anyone else.  They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.

The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job.   Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.

These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.

Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.

After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

How would you do it?

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.

Dancing with chaos
May 9, 2023

Dancing with chaos

I finished “The Uncertainty Mindset” this morning.   Unike many management books, it’s taken me a while to finish because the book is dense with ideas and insights, so I have had to rest between reads.

I thoroughly recommend it, especially for those who wish to disrupt with their business.

In the high-end, ultra-innovative world of fine dining of the book, teams of innovators repeatedly dance with chaos, pushing themselves into some new, unknown situation (moving the restaurant to new country; organising a conference; organising food relief in hurrican-struck islands) inducing a feeling of desperation as they scramble to deliver on a promise that will be at once utterly new and utterly familiar to their clientele.  Each time they dance they learn anew that they will succeed, even if they don’t yet know how.  And they do succeed. Spectacularly.   Then they rest, allowing themselves time to recover before they go again, on an even bigger challenge.

They can do this because they are specifically R&D teams.   The day-to-day of a restaurant can’t run like this.  The teams running the restaurants have a different challenge with it’s own rhythm.

What if you’re not a restaurant chain?  What if you aren’t R&D?  What if you simply want to evolve continuously, not necessarily radically, in response to the world around your business, through the lens of your customers?  What can be learned from this approach?

It’s this aspect that I want to pursue – that dance between order and chaos, between predictbility and uncertainty that makes life so interesting.

So I’ll be reading it again, taking notes, and translating it into my own terms, so I can share it with you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.