Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Where power is
May 4, 2023

Where power is

“We may not like to admit it, but most organizations–even those with “nice” cultures–are authoritarian by design“ – from Michele Zanini’s post yesterday.

Of course they are.

Because they are founded on a fundamental asymmetry of power.

If an employable person doesn’t work, they starve.   That’s not true for their ultimate employers.

Enclosures, Poor Laws, Vagrancy acts and witch hunts were the weapons used to bring about this asymmetry, following a hundred years or so of peasants getting ‘above themselves’ after the ravages of the Black Death.

‘Austerity’, ‘inflation control’, ‘reforms’ to education, healthcare and the welfare state are being used to reinforce it today.

Now, we’re not even allowed to protest about it.

It’s why government doesn’t really like small business, despite what they say, because small businesses are often more equitable (because here, employer and employee are more or less in the same boat – if they don’t work, they starve).

The good news is that this puts power in our hands.  Because as small businesses we can choose how we grow, and so start to tip the balance back again, by growing differently.

Purpose-led.  Equitably organised and rewarded.

The way we naturally want to be.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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?

Order with feeling
May 2, 2023

Order with feeling

I didn’t get much reading done this weekend.

Instead I’ve been sorting fabrics.

Over the years I’ve built up an extensive collection of vintage fabrics and shirts that I’ve been intending to use for quilts.  I like the idea of recycling other people’s cast-offs into new and interesting material.

My collection was all over the place, scattered across different parts of the house, all colours jumbled together in various bags too heavy to move.

So my job over the last week or so has been to sort through it, chuck some, earmark some for passing on, and get the rest cut up for flatter storage, organised into smaller labelled bags.

It’s been hard work, but pleasant, evoking some happy memories.  I picked through a bag of scraps – far too small to actually use – remembering the velvet teddy I made for one niece; the bright Provencal backpack I made for another; the tartan dinosaur I made for a colleague’s wedding; the bean bags I made for nephews, and the enormous one I tie-dyed to commission for another colleague.  Then I threw the scraps away.

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.  I can’t draw or paint.  But give me something concrete to work with and I can create useful things that also look unexpectedly good.  Pottery, jewellery making, woodwork, patchwork – those are more my style.

Also businesses.

Give me a business, that perhaps feels a bit disorganised, a bit scattered, not quite coherent.  Yet nevertheless amazing.   I’ll teach its owners to re-arrange it into an elegant sysem for making and keeping promises that becomes more than the sum of its parts.  Ordered, scalable, yet still full of of feeling, it becomes an heirloom they’ll be even more proud to pass on.

In business as in patchwork, Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score
April 28, 2023

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

You may find that you need to refine an existing part of your Score.

This could mean simplifying an Activity by removing unnecessary steps.  Or spelling out what has to happen in more detail.  You might remove an Activity, or add a new one, or several.

Whatever the change, there are bound to be knock-on effects.  Perhaps you need to review Props for this part of your Score.  You might need to create a new Role.  You’ll certainly need to let your people learn and practice the new Score before you perform it for real.

This may seem like a lot of unecessary work, especially for minor adjustments.  It will be tempting to just change practices without bothering to change the Score first.

Resist that tempation.

Following through the impact of even minor changes on your Score, before implementing them in real life allows you to try different ideas and scenarios ‘on paper’, when getting it wrong and reversing back to your starting point is easiest and cheapest.

It means you get to see the full impact before you start changing anything.

It means you can share this task with everyone on the team, to get multiple perspectives and arrive at better solutions more quickly.

It also means that your Score always reflects the reality of how your business works, which keeps it useful, and even more importantly, preserves the value of your business until you’re ready to exit.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Dig deeper
April 27, 2023

Dig deeper

“Practical tips for talking to your employees about stress and worry.” – the title of an email that landed in my inbox this morning.

I couldn’t help thinking: “What if you made sure you are never the direct or indirect source of stress and worry in the first place?”.

Work doesn’t have to be a means of squeezing the joy out of life, it can be part of creating that joy.

If your business isn’t doing that, dig deeper.

Change the system, before it gets changed for you.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation
April 26, 2023

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.

This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.

You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online.  Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts.   Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.

Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.

For example, emails.

If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails.   Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.

This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process.   It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.

It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well.  You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients.   Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.

Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • For a human being, is this drudgery?  Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
  • Is this something that people do better than machines or software?  Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
  • Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want?  How many will we lose as a result?  How many could we attract?  Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
  • Will it be worth it?  How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services?  Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?

And above all, this one:

  • Is this consistent with my Promise of Value?

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Unicorns
April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either.   Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.

Adjusting the system 1 – Props
April 24, 2023

Adjusting the system 1 – Props

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.

It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.

Props aren’t just physical either.  You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.

And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.

Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.

Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too.  You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.

Employee Ownership
April 21, 2023

Employee Ownership

You already know you want your employees to own your business.

How about getting them to run it too?

That would enable them to really take ownership.

And if you enable them to do that before you hand it over, you get to go, or stay, as and when you please.

It only takes a year.

Ask me how.

Extrapolating consequences
April 20, 2023

Extrapolating consequences

A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:

  1. What’s causing it?
  2. Have we seen it before?
  3. Is it a trend?
  4. What happens if we do nothing?
  5. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
  6. What are the consequences of that?
    1. What happens if we do nothing?
    2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
    3. What are the consequences of that?
      1. What happens if we do nothing?
      2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
      3. What are the consequences of that?
        1. What happens if we do nothing?
        2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
        3. What are the consequences of that?
          1. What happens if we do nothing? – you get the picture.  Repeat until you are are confident to stop.

Hint: Most of us stop too soon.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.