Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 69 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 13, 2021

The sleep of reason

NASA engineers had noticed a problem with the O-rings used to seal joints in the boosters of the Challenger space shuttle. When the weather was cold at launch time, the O-rings failed to seal the gaps properly. But they couldn’t quantify the effects, so were not allowed to act on their concerns. After all, the NASA engineering watchword was : “In God we trust. All others bring data.”

But what if you don’t have data? Does that mean you just leave it to God?

Of course not.

As Richard Feynman said at the enquiry following the disaster “If you don’t have data, you must use reason.”

Our processes must allow for that.

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, imagine what wonders we create when we combine data with waking reason, driven by humanity?

Our processes must be designed for that.

HT to Abishek Chakraborty for the prompt.

July 12, 2021

Cobbler’s children

At the end of my road there lives a builder. His house has been a mess for years.

I know commercial knitters who wear old jumpers out at elbow, and doctors who smoke, drink and eat junk food.

As a business owner, it’s helpful to ask yourself – regularly if possible – ‘If I was my client, what would I be telling myself to do?’

Then follow your own advice, the way you’d expect a client to.

If nothing else, you’ll find out what it feels like to be your client.

July 9, 2021

Concentrated learning

As aboriginal Australians know, the way to deepen learning is to make it immersive. They also know that practising scenarios before you encounter them speeds up the process.

We small businesses have our own form of immersive learning. We call it ‘throwing them in at the deep end’.

Somehow, we hope that through this experience, newbies will learn to make and keep promises on behalf of the business as well as we do. Of course, many don’t, and some just drown.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if pilots learned by being ‘thrown in the deep end’. I prefer what actually happens. They learn in a simulator. A safe space – the paddling pool if you like – where they can be immersed in what if feels like to fly a plane, and systematically run through all the scenarios they may have to cope with – taking off, landing, turbulence, bid strikes, engine failures, and so on.

You and I can feel safe getting on a plane because pilots have literally been through all these experiences many times before they get anywhere near a real cockpit, at the head of a tubeful of passengers and crew.

Why not do the same for your prospects and clients? Build a simulator for your business, program it with likely scenarios and use it to train new people, or practise new services before you deliver them, or explore how you could do things differently. Make it a psychologically safe space and it will be fun, team-bonding and surprisingly productive. It will become a practise space people use regularly to improve your customer experience score.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 8, 2021

Goals

I’m not remotely into football, but inevitably I catch the odd England game – or at least snippets of them.

What’s struck even me this time round, has been the aim to win rather than merely not lose. There’s been a definite effort to actively score more goals than their opponents, rather than get away with letting fewer goals in, or relying on penalty shoot-outs.

This is not rocket science. If you try and score goals, while preventing the other side from scoring against you, you give yourself more chances to win, and win conclusively. It also makes for a much more exciting game to watch and to play – for both sides.

Delightful as it is to win, winning isn’t everything. How you win matters. The process matters. And speaks volumes about your priorities.

July 7, 2021

Atomic

With a few exceptions, atoms don’t like to be alone.

They prefer to join with other atoms. They can’t help themsleves, they’re just built that way.

If they stick to their own kind, together they make an element. A useful building block. When they combine with different atoms, they create a compound, generating properties none of the constituents have on their own.

Almost all the interesting things in our varied world are the result of atoms combining with atoms that are different from themselves, repeating the process until something durable emerges.

Inter-connection with different others is our natural state.

We can’t help ourselves, we’re just built that way.

Atom by atom.

July 6, 2021

While the cat’s away…

…the mice will continue with whatever processes are in place.

Do you want them to be yours or theirs?

July 5, 2021

Preserving process knowledge

How do you embed ‘process knowledge’ – the knowledge of how to do things – into other people’s heads across space and/or time?

Well the first step is obviously to get it out of your head first. Then you have to communicate it to others in a way that is easily absorbed yet also ‘sticky’.

One familiar way is through apprenticeship – repeated physical practice under the eye of a master. Great over time, although slow, harder to apply over space.

Another familiar way is to write things down – in manuals, standard operating procedures, process maps. This solves the problem of space as well as time, but is actually notoriously un-‘sticky’. Nobody likes reading manuals – in fact most people hate it.

So the best way is to create some combination of scribing and physical practice that combines the best of these approaches.

And that’s just what aboriginal Australians have been doing for around 40,000 years. They preserve their culture – their ‘way of doing things’ through a complex combination of activities that includes mapping, painting and sculpture of all kinds, song, dance and actual doing, tied to a landscape that acts as both operating territory and memory jogger.

What’s interesting is how even the ‘scribing’ is so physical and multisensory – maps can be physical representations that are walked around; memorisation takes the form of songs and stories attached to landmarks. Painting or dancing is not just a way of representing an activity, its a form of doing it.

We process mappers and manual writers could learn a lot from this approach.

Hmmm.

Watch this space.

July 2, 2021

Even brilliant businesses fail in the end

A butcher’s shop Deptford is closing down soon.

No big deal you might think.

Except this butcher’s is a family firm that’s been going for 192 years. Their pies, home-made, filled with succulent chunks of meat and delivious gravy are legendary. Their T-bone steak has topped the leaderboard of the Steak Society’s ‘T-bone Tour’ since 2018. And it’s all surprisingly good value too.

It will disappear just when the market for it’s wares is growing as Deptford gentrifies.

But the current owner, Bill Wellbeloved, needs to retire, and couldn’t find anyone to take over the business.

Even brilliant family businesses fail in the end, if they don’t find a way to last longer than their current driving force.

That’s why Gibbs & Partners exists. So brilliant businesses can carry on for as long as their clients need them.

July 1, 2021

Bucket list

Basecamp and Brewdog both got into trouble last month – so much so that Corporate Rebels deleted them from their bucket list of companies to visit. Looking at what happened, I think there is a difference between the two cases.

At Brewdog, ‘the way things get done round here’ bore no resemblance to the face the company showed the outside world. As is all too often the case with ‘brands’, it was all just marketing. Behind the hype was the same-old, same-old.

This is what happens when you don’t build your Promise of Value into the way your business operates.

In Basecamp’s case, the founders felt that ‘the way things get done around here’ had drifted too far from their core reason for being, and yanked things back. For me it was the yanking back that was mistaken here, not the realignment with their original purpose. And that realignment was always going to be painful, because they’d left it so long.

This what happens when you let yourself be seduced away from your Promise of Value by fashion.

There’s a difference between these two episodes, which I think it pays to think about.

And Basecamp is still on my bucket list.

June 30, 2021

Conversations

I love conversations. Proper conversations, that sometimes get passionate, even heated. Where the interplay of light shed by multiple perspectives allows new insights to appear between us. Where I can feel new creases forming in my brain as I change my thinking.

A philosophical workout, if you like.

Good conversations allow new knowledge and wisdom to emerge.

Great conversations do it on purpose, with questions that are designed to bring out the participant’s wisdom, and a structure that helps that wisdom emerge in a coherent form. Discipline makes Daring possible.

Having them recorded is priceless – you can pick up on insights you missed in the thick of things, and of course, share them with others.

I was lucky enough to be part of one of these recently with Scott Perry of Creative on Purpose. Our conversation isn’t available yet. You can look out for it here.

Why not enjoy some of his earlier conversations while you wait?