Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 57 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 21, 2022

Slow reading

I read a lot, and I read fast. But sometimes it’s nice to ‘slow down’, by reading something longer – a sequence of books that encompass individual stories as part of a larger whole.

It could be non-fiction, like Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of’ series, or crime fiction such as the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, or Reginald Hill’s Dalziel & Pascoe novels. Or it could even be children’s fiction, like Harry Potter or this series from Susan Cooper.

Whatever it is, there’s something very satisfying about working through individual books, adding to the bigger picture as you go, seeing the main characters grow, enjoying the references back to earlier stories or characters, or seeing the same story told from a different perspective, or simply noticing how the author’s writing style develops. It feels more rounded, more rich, more true to life than a simple jog from ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happy ever after’.

Perhaps I enjoy them because in these works the authors create an entire tapestry, not just a single thread. An ecosystem, rather than a single process. An ecosystem that can generate many different stories, not just the ones that happen to have been told.

There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple tale, or with building an ecosystem. You just need to know which one you’re aiming for.

Much like a business then.

January 20, 2022

Democracy

For the ancient Athenians, elections were profoundly unsatisfactory. The idea of devolving responsibility for running Athenian life to a few people simply because they could afford to do it full time was, for them, disturbing, and likely to lead to demagoguery, factionalism, and ultimately tyranny.

So for most public offices their preferred method of selection was sortition – a random selection from a pool of eligible citizens, much like our modern jury service. Posts were held temporarily and short term, so that during his life a free Athenian could expect to serve many times in several different capacities, part of a group of people performing the same office.

Of course to our eyes, the system was far from perfect. Only free men were in the pool of eligibility, but within that pool, it didn’t matter who you were; what you did, how well you were educated, or how much you owned. If you were a free Athenian man, you could be picked and you took your turn at making Athens run smoothly.

And it meant that every free Athenian man had to be able to carry out these duties if called upon. They had to learn how things worked, as part of their education, and by participating as observers as well as actors.

It took a lot of effort to run things this way (effort freed up by slaves), but it seems to have been effective at making a life well lived (eudaimonia) possible for everyone involved.

Nowadays we’d use technology to free up people’s time and call it participatory democracy, or holacracy, or Teal, or self-management.

The Athenians just called it democracy.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control. They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well. They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it. They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it. Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself. But after a while, your people won’t even need that. With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

January 12, 2022

The stories we tell others

If you visit a National Trust property, every person you meet is likely to be a volunteer. An individual providing this service in their spare time, for nothing. Yet the experience is remarkably similar across hundreds of houses and thousands of volunteers.

How do they achieve this? There are no scripts. Nothing is prescribed, apart from some simple Covid-19 distancing notices. Every volunteer performance is unique.

What every National Trust building does have is a story. The story of the building and the people associated with it – usually the famous one who commissioned it, built it or lived in it.

Every volunteer (whether they are a room guide, a shop assistant or a gardener) is expected to know this story, to research around it and to tell it. But they can do all of that in their own way, including details and providing context as they see fit, tailored to the visitors in front of them, in their own personal style.

The most basic ‘customer experience score’ is the story everyone can tell. For a business it’s the story of how you make and keep your promise to the client.

What’s your story?

Can everyone in your business tell it?

How do you help new people learn it?

January 11, 2022

What is innovation for?

I’ve been through a lot of hoovers in my life, from a massive ‘wet and dry’ suitable for builders through Dyson and any number of supposedly ‘handy’ machines. Many of which have not lasted long.

The GTech AirRam I inherited from my mum is the only one that’s made hoovering almost enjoyable, and yesterday, it looked like it was about to turn into another relic.

Fortunately, I found on the support site that I can replace virtually every part individually.

That means that unlike every other hoover I’ve owned, I can keep most of this one going indefinitely.

For a long time, hoover innovation was simply about creating new demand – ‘new’ models that superseded the old, so you had to buy all over again if you wanted the status of having the latest.

The trouble with that was that with a proliferation of models, a consumer was just as likely to buy someone else’s new model as yours.

Now it seems that innovation is about creating brand loyalty by making it easier to repair the existing. Allowing the consumer to preserve their original investment (in my case emotional rather than financial), and send less material to landfill.

What all this tells me is that the purpose of innovation is to change behaviour.

We’re going to need a lot of that to cope with what’s coming.

Get your thinking hats on.

January 10, 2022

A Relic

Years ago, my dad, who was an IT director for a civil engineering firm, said he liked to keep a record of everything a project had tried, even if those things had failed.

It meant that new projects could learn not just what had worked from previous ones, but also what hadn’t.

That didn’t mean all previous experiments would be rejected – after all, technology changes and things that weren’t possible before become possible now. What it did mean was that nobody walked blindly into repeating the same mistakes.

During my January tidy-up, I found this template for drawing out consistent shapes for computer flowcharts. A relic of a bygone era of hand-drawn flowcharts and a National Computing Centre.

I’ve never used it. I preferred to think through my programming logic with words, and I’d never dream of using it to capture what a human should do.

I’m trying to make work more human, not less. I want people to be making the decisions in their dealings with other people.

So I keep it.

As a reminder of what I don’t want to do.

Hello 2022!

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible