Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 62 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 22, 2021

Seeing ourselves

We humans are used to thinking of ourselves as self-aware, or self-conscious.

Except that most of the time we aren’t. We work on auto-pilot, following our habitual paths, working through habitual behaviours without consciously reflecting at all.

We do have moments of conscious awareness – when we’re thinking, or working out a problem – but these really are moments. 7 seconds on average.

Except when we are in conversation with other humans. In conversation, we think, we reflect, we are fully self-conscious. Sometimes for hours on end. You might even say that conversations with other people are where we fully realise ourselves.

And of course, you can’t have a proper conversation without being fully conscious of the other participants too.

You can’t be seen until you learn to see. Not even by yourself.

October 21, 2021

Learning

“There’s an interesting rule called the 70-20-10 rule, which states that 70% of learning comes from doing, 20% comes from observing in relationship, and only 10% comes from actual instruction.”

This is from my friend Grace Judson’s leadership newsletter (well worth subscribing to).

Here’s how you might apply it if you have a Customer Experience Score in place:

Instruction: The person/people who want to develop into a new or additional Role read the Customer Experience Score, so they know what to play.
Observing in relationship: They observe someone already proficient in that Role playing the Score for real, with real clients. At this stage these clients will come under the 80% of straightforward cases.
Instruction: They read the Customer Experience Score again, this time with some real examples to draw on.
Doing+Observing in relationship: They play the Score themselves, as a practice, not with real clients, but with experienced players taking the Role of clients, or fellow newbies armed with scenarios. Start with the straightforward cases until people feel comfortable with that. You know people have learned when they are able to critique each other.
Doing: While this is fresh in their mind, they play for real, with the Score at hand for reference, with real but straightforward clients.
Doing+Observing in relationship: Hold another group practice session. This time, explore some of the 20% non-straightforward cases. Your experienced players will love coming up with examples of these!
Doing: With this fresh in their mind, and the Score at hand for reference, you can let them play for real, with any kind of real client.

It’s a good idea to hold regular reviews of the Score, as part of group practice sessions. Over time, people will internalise the Score, but not necessarily as it is written. You want to share desirable variations and eliminate the undesirable ones. Regular group practice will enable this.

It is of course possible to do all this without a Customer Experience Score. It will be harder though, because you have to spend time agreeing whose version of ‘how we do things round here’ is the right one.

October 20, 2021

Managing without managers

I found this excellent article by Michele Zanini yesterday: ‘Can we manage without managers?’. It’s well worth a read, but … Read More “Managing without managers”

October 19, 2021

Old possibilities

For more than 40,000 years, human beings have been imagining and re-imagining new possibilities for how we live in the world.

We can’t stop now.

We can do better than this.

October 18, 2021

Anonymity

There’s something very attractive about anonymity. It’s one of the pleasures of living in a town – you can wander unrecognised, without meeting anyone you know.

The real problem with villages – or any village-sized community – is not that “everyone knows everyone else’s business“, but that the consequence of that is a heavy load of emotional labour. You can’t walk down the street without having to greet someone, ask after them, take an interest in their affairs, respond to their interest in yours. You have to see them, recognise them as co-habitants, consider their needs in your decisions. Everything becomes a negotiation between you and your neighbours.

If you think that village life is bad, imagine what it would be like if every living thing was also an honorary person. If every tree, rabbit, and dandelion was a neighbour, requiring you to take an interest in their affairs, and taking an interest in yours.

Now add in ancestors, and you’ve got a recipe for emotional exhaustion, because trees, rabbits, dandelions and dead people don’t communicate their desires very clearly, so it’s easy to be wrong.

No wonder we leapt at the chance to have someone take this burden off our shoulders. To appoint a priest or a king whose sole job it was to deal with all these matters, so we can just get on with our day-to-day lives, able to treat the wildlife and the ghosts as strangers, saving our emotional labour for our living neighbours.

We’ve gone much further than that since, of course. Now even our neighbours are strangers. Amazon and Just-Eat, Mondelez and JBS S.A. have replaced priests and kings, taking care of all those matters we don’t want to be burdened with, hiding what we don’t want to see. Our connection to the trees, rabbits and dandelions has been attenuated almost to nothing. Our villages are empty.

There’s a downside to anonymity of course. After a while, you long to be seen, to be recognised as a human being, to be known again. We long for the company of people who know everything about us. We want to feel at home.

We can’t go back. Perhaps we have to create a new kind of village.

October 14, 2021

Earworms

My husband works best when there is background noise. Mostly talk radio, but often music. I’m the opposite. I find talking and songs incredibly distracting. I end up listening to the words instead of paying attention to what’s in my head. It’s a good job we can work in separate rooms.

The thing I find worst of all though, is catching earworms – those snatches of song that run through your head repeatedly and with annoying frequency, sometimes recurring for weeks after I’ve heard the original.

I don’t always have to hear the whole song to get an earworm. A few notes will do, or seeing a word that reminds me of it, or feeling an emotion I associate with it.

I find earworms intensely annoying, and avoid catching them if I can. I play only instrumental music in my car, work in a quiet room, avoid radios.

But maybe earworms could be useful? Even desirable?

The vision you have for how your business makes and keeps its promise to the people it serves, is like music – your music that you’ve created. For others to play it, you need to get it out of your own head. So you write it down in a Customer Experience Score.

But where you really want it is in your team’s heads. So they don’t have to constantly refer to the score. So they can create a personal interpretation of it that suits the human being in front of them right now.

Finding a way to generate earworms from your Promise of Value might be the answer.

October 13, 2021

A Day Off

Yesterday, I submitted an application for a Women in Innovation grant. It was a heck of a lot of work, but worth it, even if I don’t win.

And somewhere along the line, I caught a cold. The first (and worst) I’ve had for ages. Not Covid, but unpleasant.

Today my brain is empty and my head is full.

So I’m having a day off.

Back tomorrow.

As always, thank you for reading.

October 12, 2021

Down with management

I’ve talked before about the application of pin-factory thinking to work that requires empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair. This kind of thinking reduces management to supervision, control, and reporting. Activities that are easily automated, but add little value.

No wonder we have an employee engagement problem, an innovation problem and a productivity problem.

Because we have a management problem.

People don’t need managing. We are perfectly capable of managing ourselves, and do so every day.

We don’t need supervision and reporting. We need communication – a vision, a score to follow, feedback on how we’re doing.

We don’t need to be controlled. We need freedom – to make mistakes, learn from them, correct ourselves, improve how we do things.

We don’t even need to be led. We can lead each other – the right leader, at the right time to deliver what’s required.

Down with management!

Long live responsible autonomy!

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible