Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 54 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 7, 2022

How to capture a business process: Step 6

I’ve written quite a bit elsewhere on how to capture a business process. But I left out a step.

After you’ve thought about what the point of your business process is; where it starts; where it ends; what happens through this process; what Roles are involved; what Props are needed and how exceptions should be handled, there is one more crucial thing you need to do:

Have a go.

Your first draft will be wrong. Mine always are.

Your second draft may well be wrong. Mine frequently are.

Your third draft may not be quite right. That often happens to me.

But you can’t find any of that out unless you have a first, second, or third draft to work with. It’s very hard to follow a process that’s in your head. Much easier when you see it spelt out as a map in front of you. That’s true for you and for your colleagues.

This is how great artists work. They sketch, tentatively and hairily at first. to get the idea out of their head into a form they can work on.

I’d even go as far to say feel free to start at Step 3, with the story and just get something down. Then review it in the light of Steps 1 to 5 to refine what you have in your own head before you present it to others.

When it comes to capturing how things should work for your business, the most important step is to get it out of your head, and into a form that you and others can reason about, re-design and improve.

It will never be perfect, but it will be visible. Therefore capable of being made better

Like a great artist, keep practicing, keep sketching.

In time, your sketches will look more like finished works. But they’ll always be valuable.

March 4, 2022

On a Friday

Every Friday morning, I start my day with a Zoom call as part of a group called Like Hearted Leaders. … Read More “On a Friday”

March 3, 2022

Friends

Our modern world is built on treating people like strangers. That means we can concentrate on things, on the transactions through which we acquire things, ignoring the human being(s) behind them.

That makes life very convenient, but it also makes it unsatisfying.

It also makes it dangerous. It’s easier to attack a stranger than a friend. And when you’re used to ‘unseeing’ people, even those you’ve lived among for decades can easily become strangers.

How lovely then to be working with clients who want to build a global enterprise based on mutual benefit and trust. On people, not on things. Between friends, not strangers.

How lucky I am to be their friend too.

March 2, 2022

Outsourcing Work

I’ve had a lot of work on this last couple of weeks. A fair chunk of it as a customer.

My bank is asking me to re-give them some information they have had for at least 11 years; my pension manager has asked me to give them information about dependents – but won’t use that information to update anything they already have, so now I have call them to check that myself; I’ve had to chase to get a replacement pair of boots delivered and I’ve had to walk my own ‘last mile’ to pick up a parcel that got to my doorstep, but not beyond.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with do-it-yourself – where that makes my life easier.

We humans want agency. We want to do things for ourselves. What we don’t want is to get tangled up in the inefficient bureaucracy and busy-work that is clearly going in inside these major organisations. Bureaucracy that’s happening because they’ve forgotten who they really serve. The customer.

Do your own job guys, that’s what I pay you for.

PS If you want to know more about bureaucracy in modern times, read this book. Watch the author’s summary here.

March 1, 2022

Missing the point

The process is closely tracked:

But for some reason its purpose fails and the parcel never makes it past my front door.

Even though I was on the other side of it waiting for delivery.

There was no knock. Only the faint rustle of a blank ‘no delivery’ card pushed through the letterbox. By the time I got there the van, and my parcel, had gone.

Later that evening my husband and I walked the mile and a half to the collection point to pick it up, because it was too heavy for me to carry on my own. That was, in part, why I’d had it delivered.

This seems to be a growing feature of our modern lives. Every low-paid, precarious service job is surveilled and tracked to within an inch of its life, and at the same time compressed into an ever shorter timeframe, until the point becomes to satisfy the tracking system – even if that means dissatisfying the customer.

This misses the point, big time. The purpose of process is to support human beings to be better humans. To remove the need to remember the things we’re good at forgetting, so we can concentrate on doing the things we’re good at doing – like focussing on the customer as another human being. But of course, that can only happen by acknowledging that the delivery person is a human being too, not a poor substitute for a robot, who you don’t know, don’t care about, don’t think is worth decent pay, and who therefore won’t be in the job long, so can’t be trusted to do the job properly.

So in the race to the bottom, what we end up with is process as a means to consistently and efficiently deliver bad service.

We really have missed the point haven’t we?

February 28, 2022

Unforgetting

Whenever I put our plastic rubbish out for recycling, knowing that it won’t get recycled, but at best burned. I remember this.

In 1998 I visited a factory that recycled rubbish from the street bins of Barcelona into cardboard for packaging. They didn’t sort a thing. They took everything – paper, cartons cans, banana peels, everything.

They extracted the easy metals, then boiled the rest up, extracted the aluminium (which they sold to the concrete factory across the way) and turned it the result into perfectly printable, usable card for packaging.

Why am I telling you this?

Because sometimes we have had answers, but they’ve been sidelined or ‘forgotten’ by the system.

Maybe part of our job as responsible businesses and humans is to help people ‘unforget’ that other ways are possible. Or to imagine new ways that might be possible. And to help us act together, to change the system.

To which end, I’ve got a little involved in a thing called The Carbon Almanac.

“Because when it comes to the climate, we don’t need more marketing or anxiety. We need established facts and a plan for collective action.”

Watch this space.

February 25, 2022

Practice

In a crisis, we want people to take responsibility, assert autonomy and agency and act together as a community for a higher purpose.

To prevent that crisis from being hijacked by a subgroup with an agenda.

It helps a lot of we’ve allowed them to master doing all these things first, by practicing them as part of their daily work.

The irony is, of course, that if we did that we’d probably have fewer crises.

February 24, 2022

Power

As you can see, I’ve started a new book.

I don’t know why, but I find this image from page 3, somewhat chilling.

The Fundamentals of Power (my photo)

But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

It’s a lens, not necessarily a fundamental truth.

Wish me luck.

February 22, 2022

The foundational freedom

My second reading of this book has, as you can see, given me plenty to think about. The most important of which is a different idea of what freedom really is.

The foundational freedom is the freedom to walk away. To say ‘I don’t like it here, I’ll go somewhere else‘ – knowing that wherever you end up, you will be taken in and treated as a person, a fellow human being, who could become an honorary member of the family.

This freedom, which seems to have been exercised surprisingly frequently in our prehistory, and later, is a foundation for the next freedom, which is the freedom to disobey the rules. Individuals or cadres that set themselves up to be ‘in charge’ of others, soon found they were in charge of nothing. Their ‘subjects’ had simply moved on.

If people don’t have to follow orders, governance becomes quite different. It has to be based on consensus rather than command, and since everyone is free to walk away, it also has to include everyone. People become citizens, with a role to play in shaping and maintaining their society.

This leads to the third freedom, which is the freedom to create new ways of living well with each other – new societies. These societies don’t have to be permanent or rigid. It seems many peoples lived well together in very different ways, depending on the season, changing the form of their ‘society’ 2 or three times a year. They knew, because they lived it, that “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.”

How can we recover these basic freedoms?

A start would be to offer what all ancient peoples took for granted. Hospitality. The reassurance that a stranger, wherever they are from, will be taken in, recognised as a human being and a person, as someone like us.

In other words, to gain our own freedom, we have to give it to others first.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible