The final component of feedback that matters for your business, is the impact it makes. On your clients, your team, your family, your friends, your community and your planet.
Impact is probably also the hardest kind of feedback to measure.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
What ripples is your business pebble responsible for?
An atlas helps you to see further than your immediate surroundings.
It puts you in context.
Actually, it puts you into multiple contexts, showing you how the small space you currently occupy is connected to others, by geography, geology, ecology and of course politics.
We tend to think of AI as something disembodied and impersonal. In reality, it’s very far from either.
This book puts AI into multiple contexts that get beyond and behind the current hypes.
So you can see further.
‘Atlas of AI’ by Kate Jackson
Well worth a read.
The idea of ikigai is a practical tool for helping yourself to fit in with the world as it is:
Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>,
What if the diagram looked like this instead:
Finding happiness would be much easier, if we didn’t have to work for a living.
Maybe what the world really needs is a change of system.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Once you’re all working beautifully from the same Score, there’s no real need for one of you to bear all the responsibility for the performance. That heavy load, shared among many, becomes lighter for everyone.
Especially you.
There’s more than one way to become a Disappearing Boss. Maybe the best way is simply to blend yourself in?
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.
To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones. To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better. To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.
Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this. But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.
And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.
Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”
When you’re composing your Customer Experience Score, it’s important to remember that your customer experience music has always been there.
If it wasn’t your business wouldn’t be doing as well as it is. You have clients who love what you do for them. You have employees and suppliers who love working with you. The music is there and it appeals to others. You’re an expert at playing it.
When we become experts, we turn things we used to have to think about into habits we unconsciously perform. Some of those habits are excellent. Some are not so good. They’re simply the habit we got into that made things ‘good enough’ at the time.
Some habits are downright bad, but we keep using them because to do otherwise takes conscious effort, and when you’re busy looking after clients and teams, that’s hard to do.
Your first job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to make the music as good as it can possibly be. To surface all your habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.
It’s an opportunity to deliberately assess whether you could do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better. To make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value, and to re-shape it so that it does.
This is not straightforward. Dredging stuff up from your subconscious is hard work. So it helps to have a framework to build on, and a critical friend to encourage you, push you, suggest solutions and hold you to account.
That’s where I come in.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“The changes and processes you recommended are coming together nicely. But it all takes so much time! Slowly but surely I’m disappearing as a boss though :).“
A musical score is a multi-use tool. For the composer, its a tool for thinking, for designing. The score gives concrete shape to the music that’s playing in their head. And once concrete, it can be more easily modified and improved, until it fully reflects their intentions.
From then on, the score also becomes a different kind of tool. A tool for communicating that vision to the players who will be responsible for delivering it. A tool that tells them what the performance must convery, without telling them how to do it. Because as experienced artists, they know that already.
A score can switch between these two uses as many times as it needs to.
A Customer Experience Score works the same way. It’s a design tool for the business owner, a communications tool for their team. And like a musical score it can switch between these uses whenever it needs to.
Perhaps even after its composer has disappeared, if the players feel strongly enough about the original vision.
“Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful – that is in which it takes on social value.
All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure within which it is embedded.
At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognise that one is also working on people.” David Graeber
In other words, the ‘perfect employee’ is made by how you choose to employ them.
Yesterday I learned two things from the same street in Soho.
The first was that when you try and force yourself into the box that society/the system has made for you, you may very well die.
The second was that when you design your own box, then connect it with those of other like-hearted people, you become a node, enabling yourself and everyone around you to be so much more than society/the system expects.
It might just be me, but it feels like the nodes are winning, in spite of everything the system/society is throwing at them.
If you’re worried about the economy, and what might happen to your business this year, I’m going to recommend this book again:
The Joy of Tax, by Richard Murphy. My copy, photographed by me.
and this free pdf by the same author:
Downloadable from here.
You can’t take the best actions, if you don’t know how the system really works. Take a moment to feel the water you’re swimming in.
Discipline makes Daring possible