Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Packaging a Promise
February 7, 2022

Packaging a Promise

Your Promise of Value is a big thing.  And unless you’re promising basics, like ‘enough to eat’ or ‘being able to stay warm in the cold’ or ‘staying alive’, it’s likely to be somewhat abstract –  ‘be more confident’, ‘be more beautiful’, ‘be more healthy’, ‘be more happy’.

I may want to ‘be more confident’, but I can’t just buy ‘confidence’.   There has to be something concrete I can buy or do that delivers confidence as a result – like a nose job, or a diet, or a new suit, or a private education.

Turning your Promise into something the people you serve can actually buy is Packaging, and the golden rule of Packaging is that it’s about them, not you.

That means you have to know the people you seek to serve really well.   What are their motivations?   What are the constraints on that motivation?  How can you configure what you offer to overcome those constraints and unleash their motivation?

If the constraint is money, the answer might be small packets – that’s how Poundland works – goods are packaged to a price point, so quantities change, but not the price.  Or it might be something that makes it cheaper for you to produce or transport, like a bag-in-box for wine or olive oil.

If the constraint is time, the answer might also be small packets, but it could be on-demand delivery, or a draw-down, or a subscription.

If the constraint is attention, the answer might be creating space for focus.

If the constraint is impetus, the answer might be a time limit.

The actual constraints your people are working under will vary, which might mean creating different packages for different groups of people.   But be careful not to turn choice into a barrier.

Remember it’s about making it easy for them to buy, not for you to sell.  And however you package it, it mustn’t fall short on your Promise.

 

Universal vs One Size Fits All
February 4, 2022

Universal vs One Size Fits All

‘One size fits all’ is not the same as ‘universal’.

One size fits all actually fits nobody.  Universal adjusts to fit anyone.

One size fits all starts from the perspective of its maker.   Universal starts from the perspective of its end-user.

When you design your business as a system for making and keeping promises, universal is what you’re aiming for.

Almost by definition that means it has to be human.

The trough of inefficiency
February 3, 2022

The trough of inefficiency

It’s a well-known phenomenon.   As a one-person or few-person business grows and adds more people it becomes less and less efficient.    As more people are added and roles are specialised, overheads are added too – of communication, coordination and support, and eventually management.

The result is that a business spends time in what Seth Godin calls The trough of inefficiency.  Perhaps even getting stuck there forever.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When you started your business, you were its CEO – Chief Everything Officer.   You did everything, gradually shaping a unique end-to-end process for making and keeping promises to the people you serve.  A process that works.

We fall into the trough of inefficiency because we think of our businesses as pin-factories – a set of tiny, repetitive operations chained together, managed by someone who can see the bigger picture, who has the whole process in their head.

Why not simply replicate the Chief Everything Officer instead?

If you can do it, so can someone else.  Especially if you tell them what you do.

Tell them your Promise, Tell them what you do to make it, and what you do to keep it.   Write it down like music in a Customer Experience Score so that they can run the whole thing themselves, even when you’re not in the room.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you only need meetings for business-changing decisions, not the day-to-day.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you don’t depend on specialists.  When everyone knows everything that needs doing, they can support each other.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, You don’t need managers.  People co-ordinate themselves, managing their own Customer Experiences.

Even better, further growth is simple.  For more impact, add more Chief Everything Officers.

A Customer Experience Score can your ladder out of the trough of inefficiency.

It works just as well as a bridge to stop you falling in in the first place.

Smarter than we thought
February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones.  To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong.  In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast.  And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing.   You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude.  People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation.  We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed.  Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

Early learning
January 31, 2022

Early learning

In the olden days, there was only one button you could use to request the bus driver to stop, and in the outskirts of Newcastle, where I grew up, only one person could press it – the bus conductor.

No exceptions.

There were other rules too.   There was a special school bus, which only allowed children on board.   And where there was a school bus, children weren’t allowed on the normal (rush-hour) buses.

No exceptions.

Until my first day at primary school.

My mum wanted to take me on my first day.   It was a fair way to go, so she thought we’d get the bus.

But I wasn’t allowed on the ordinary bus.  She wasn’t allowed on the school bus.

No exceptions.

My mum argued:

“It’s her first day, I want to take her myself.“

No exceptions.

“It’s just for the first day”

No exceptions.

“Surely you’ve had this happen before?”

No exceptions

It wasn’t just stubbornness on her part.  She realised that it wasn’t just her, it was every mum that missed out.*

She staged a 1-mum sit in until she got her way.

In theory, having separate buses during rush-hour was a great idea.   But the people who designed it hadn’t thought of the human aspect – that most mums would want to accompany their child to their first day at school.  If they had thought of it, it could have been easily accommodated, with an extra bus on the first day of a new school year, and exceptions allowed in between.

Instead they made the whole experience stressful for everyone.

I don’t know if my mum changed anything permanently, but at least she tried.

We were late for school, but I learned something useful that morning.

If you think something is wrong, don’t just put up with it, do something.

 

*I should mention that my mum had form. At her school, she’d successfully negotiated a permanent change of uniform for 16 – 18 year old girls – away from St Trinan-style gymslips to a more comfortable and becoming blouse and skirt ensemble.

Boardom
January 28, 2022

Boardom

I’ve been re-reading a book I found at the back of one of my bookshelves the other month: “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being“, by the poet Ted Hughes.   I bought it in a remainder shop 30-odd years ago, so it can’t have been that popular, but it is well worth a read.

The first thing that struck me from the book was this:

“The whole business of art, which even at it’s most naturalistic is some kind of attempt at ‘ritualisation’, is to reopen negotiations with the mythic plane.  The artistic problem is to objectify the mythic plane satisfactorily – so that it produces those benefits of therapeutic catharsis, social bonding and psychological renewal – without becoming unintelligible, and without spoiling the audience for adaptive, practical life on the realistic plane.   The human problem is that life evolves at different speeds on the two planes.”

Shakespeare wrote and worked during what could be called the early Anthopocene – at the point where humans started to see themselves as separate from nature and the natural world as a free resource to be exploited.  Where we learned to separate mind and body, head and heart, individual and community, real and mythic, male and female, and decided that only one half of each pair was acceptable.  Violence, ‘the boar’s charge’ ensues.

According to Hughes, Shakespeare mapped the psychological consequences of this through his plays, and found a way to reconcile these pairs in a new configuration.   Unfortunately, no other artists took up his reconciliation, and the separation continued.  Which could be how we’ve ended up in Boardom.  A world of seemingly arbitrary human rage and disconnection from what makes us fully human.

It’s a poet’s view.  But I think he might be on to something.

Living with it
January 27, 2022

Living with it

1,496 people died when the Titanic sank.  A tragedy that led to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, new “Rules for Life Saving Appliances”; the US Radio Act of 1912 and the formation of the US International Ice Patrol.   Back then, there was clearly a desire to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

Last week 1,557 people died due to coronavirus in the UK.  A Titanic’s worth.

Yesterday 346 people died.  More than a Lockerbie’s worth.

In total, 154,702 of us have died.  So far.  More than 3 Blitzes worth.

Still, that’s OK.   We can live with that, can’t we?

I worry that we can.

Dream Teams
January 26, 2022

Dream Teams

I’ve been reading the Netflix employee handbook – or at least versions of it that are used as exampes online.  It’s pretty well summarised on their jobs page.

There’s a lot I love.

The idea that responsibility comes with freedom:

  • “Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals”
  • “We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference.”
  • “In general, freedom and rapid recovery is better than trying to prevent error.”
  • “Some processes are about increased productivity, rather than error avoidance, and we like processes that help us get more done.”

Or that in a dream team, the team comes first:

  • “On a dream team, there are no “brilliant jerks.” The cost to teamwork is just too high.”

Or that managment is about creating context, rather than controlling:

  • “We pride ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior management makes.”

Or that by being highly aligned at the top enables loose coupling lower down:

  • “We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals.”

So what is it I’m finding uncomfortable?

I think it might be this:

  • “Mostly for our salaried employees; there are many limitations on this for our hourly employees due to legal requirements.“

and this:

  • ” Sustained “B” performance, despite an “A” for effort, gets a respectful severance package.”

Why does this make me uncomfortable?

Because the “Dream Team” can’t function without the people who work behind the scenes.

Mainly because the threat of expulsion at the whim of your boss feels like the worst kind of control to me.

Our best selves
January 25, 2022

Our best selves

Being ‘all of yourself, to everyone, all of the time‘ is what we might call being our ‘best selves’, our ‘whole selves’.

If you want your people to bring that ‘whole self’ to work, you have to make sure the work feeds it properly:

  • logical and creative,
  • thinking and feeling,
  • independent and communal,
  • autonomous and collaborative,
  • leading and following,
  • familiar and innovative,
  • left brain and right brain,
  • etcetera,
  • etcetera,

If you only use half the person, you’ll only get half the job.

In other words, the work needs to empower them to be fully human.

The investment pays off.   Handsomely.

Leaders
January 24, 2022

Leaders

I loved this image from Seth Godin’s blog post today: It reminds me of one of my favourite diagrams: We … Read More “Leaders”