“Design your business, or it will be designed for you.”
In other words, if you don’t decide ‘how things get done around here’, other people will decide that for you. At best it will be your team, but it could end up being your toughest suppliers, or your most demanding customers.
You didn’t start your business to dance to someone else’s tune.
Better get your own written down then.
The genius of a composer like Mozart, is that no matter who plays his music, or what they play it on (even a synthesiser), you know it’s Mozart.
The genius of a musician like Grappelli or Menhuin, is that no matter what they play you know it’s Grappelli or Menhuin.
A genius musician playing a genius composer amplifies the experience of both. And shows other musicians and composers what can be achieved.
It’s the score that makes this amplification possible.
Every musician get’s told what notes to play, what mood to create. No less, no more. The how is completely up to them – as long as it delivers the required experience, or better.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
In a business, striking the right balance between control and freedom is hard.
We want the serendipity that freedom brings. To be open to emergent behaviour or trends. And increasingly, we want our workplaces to be human, places where people can exercise their natural powers of creativity, collaboration and problem solving to the benefit of the customer and the company.
But emergence without direction or foundation simply turns into entropy.
The answer is to make sure the culture doesn’t only live inside people’s heads.
Document your Promise of Value as a compass to guide everyone on your journey.
Install a floor through which nobody can fall.
Capture the high-level process as the clue that will get everyone (especially newbies) through the labyrinth safely.
Then set your people free.
For Adam Smith the pin factory, with its production line and strict division of labour, was the epitome of efficiency. It meant that thousands more pins could be manufactured, which in turn meant more people could afford to own them.
Until eventually a pin became the epitome of worthlessness, a thing you wouldn’t bother to pick up if you dropped it. The factory model solved a production problem.
Products aren’t the only thing we make through our work. We also make people. And since Adam Smith, we’ve also known that the pin-factory approach makes unhappy people.
Humanity no longer needs to be efficient. We no longer have a production problem.
We have a distribution problem. We have an unhappiness problem. And we have a survival problem.
It’s time then, to look for a different mode of production.
One where the survival of our species is the side-effect of work that produces lives well lived for all.
We can start from the bottom up, as we grow our own small businesses:
Think orchestra, not pin-factory.
Your business doesn’t have to get big. It should however, be capable of lasting longer than you do. Of continuing to make and keep its (your) promises long after you’ve gone.
Otherwise, all there is to sell when the time comes is your customer list.
How do you think your customers will feel about that?
The good news is that scalability equals saleability.
Which means you really can sell up, not out.
I’m about halfway through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. We’ve finally got to a statement of principles. Which can be informally summed up as something like this:
“All social primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”
That seems pretty obvious. Why has it taken 300 pages to get to here?
Because imagining a just system is a process.
We don’t choose where or when we’re born. We don’t choose our parents or our society or our status in that society. We don’t choose the talents or abilities we’re born with – any more than we choose our eye colour or complement of limbs. That’s all down to chance.
That doesn’t mean we have to accept what we’ve landed in. We can imagine a different kind of setup.
But to do that justly, and end up with something fair, we need a starting point that takes chance out of it. We have to take ourselves out of space and time, and imagine what we as individuals would accept if we didn’t know where we end up in the particular set-up we happen to be born in. We have to make ourselves blind, and build our picture of a just system from there.
That takes a lot of thought and empathy with all our possible selves.
It’s worth the effort, because then we can start to shape our societies to move ever closer to that ideal. Starting with what’s closest to us, our families and our businesses.
We had some unexpected guests yesterday. The first I knew of it was the sound.
‘What on earth is that noise?’
I looked up from cleaning the floor, and there they were, a mass of bees madly buzzing across 3 neighbouring gardens. 15 minutes later, they were clumped together near the top of our hawthorn tree.
I looked up my nearest beekeeper on the British Beekeepers Association website, (try them before you call pest control, beekeepers will give bees a good home), and Andrew came over.
We agreed that it was too dangerous for him to try and collect the bees from the tree, so he set up a bait box, to entice them down.
While we waited over a cup of tea, he taught me a bit about bees.
A hive swarms in stages. First the queen leaves, taking half the bees with her, to set up a new colony somewhere. 10 days later, her brood of queens start to hatch, along with the other eggs she’s laid.
It used to be thought that the first queen out killed the others, but research has found that isn’t the case. As each new queen hatches they replicate the original queen’s behaviour – taking off with half the hive. Only each time the half is smaller, even though the hive grows each day as new bees hatch. So each ‘cast’ becomes progressively smaller until the last is about tennis ball sized, and will be lucky to form a viable colony that can get through the following winter.
This it makes perfect sense. The bees are all the old queen’s children. Why kill other queens when you only need half the available resources? There is no scarcity, and so no competition for them. And why kill queens when replicating a simple process maximises the chances that the colony will survive and spread?
We humans could learn a bit from bees.
PS, they’re still in our tree. If they don’t fancy the bait box, they’ll swarm again and find a new place. If you see them, remember to give them 15 minutes to settle down, then call your local beekeeper.
Seth wrote a very interesting blog this week on Monarchists.
“As Sahlins and Graeber outline in their extraordinary (and dense) book on Kings, there’s often a pattern in the nature of monarchs. Royalty doesn’t have to play by the same cultural rules, and often ‘comes from away.’ Having someone from a different place and background allows the population to let themselves off the hook when it comes to creating the future.”
I agree, but I think the whole thing is more subtle and interesting than that.
Kings ‘from away’ could act in ways that were totally unacceptable to the native population – in order to create change. Sometimes, they were even asked in.
Beyond that though, those same Kings were contained and constrained into a purely formal role. They became figureheads, cherished, personally pampered but essentially powerless over the society they ‘ruled’. They didn’t administer the results of their change and they certainly didn’t take over resources. The original population carried on as custodians of the land, society and cuture, as before.
That was the point.
A stranger king enabled a system based on shared authority and collective, consensual decision making to radically change without breaking itself apart. You could almost call them a scapegoat rather than a king. Nowadays we’d call them a consultant.
The challenge then, is not merely to be prepared to ‘put yourself on the hook’ to lead change that will make the community uncomfortable, but also to forgive those of your peers who do it for you.
On my way to receive my second dose of the vaccine today, I used a well-worn but ‘unofficial’ route for part of my journey, at what is effectively an off-centre T-junction.
This desire-line shortened the distance by no more than 7 yards at most for people going in one direction. Interestingly, there was no desire line going in the other direction.
Why is this?
Well, when the path was built, it was obviously more efficient to build it as a single path. But using the path isn’t the same as building it.
For people going one way, the official path is close enough, even though it isn’t quite direct. It feels like you’re going in the right direction.
For the other way though, the official path feels completely wrong. You’re effectively going back on yourself before you can get in the rght direction. So it makes perfect sense to cut the corner, even though it saves very little.
There’s a nice lesson here for designing processes of all kinds. Obviously, you try and make the process as efficient as possible when you build it. Then look out for the desire lines and reconfigure as appropriate.
Not all short-cuts are are the right thing to build in, but nobody should have to go backwards in order to move forwards.
A system of any kind survives through feedback. What feels/sounds/smells/tastes/looks right. Or wrong. Or not particularly either way. Feedback helps us to learn, evolve and interact safely with the world around us. That means that getting good quality feedback about what’s actually going on is crucial. In fact, much of what concerns us as business owners is how to gather feedback effectively and act on it appropriately.
Marketing isn’t feedback. Although you can use it that way. I don’t wear fashion, but I do like to know ‘what’s going on’. A twice-yearly trawl through marketing materials – magazines, shop windows, a look at what’s around and at what people are actually wearing – keeps me up to date.
Social media isn’t feedback. It’s marketing. Increasingly it’s geared to tell us what we want to hear, to entrench us in our worldviews, intensify our outrage, because that keeps us on the platform, there to see the marketing that pays for it.
‘The news’ as we mostly know it isn’t really feedback either. It’s also marketing. Designed to sell a newspaper or a news channel, or a worldview. And it gets more like social media every day.