Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 73 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 17, 2021

Managing what matters

When you pay a traffic warden by the ticket, you’ve incentivised them to find the easy targets, not to prevent illegal parking, and certainly not to keep the roads safe for other users. Worse, you’ve incentivised them to pursue minor infractions over major ones.

That’s why my street is full of traffic wardens just before school opens and just after it closes. It’s why parents arrive 30 minutes before they need to in order to grab a legal parking space, wasting an hour a day just sitting in their cars. It’s also why everywhere else in my town centre remains plagued by illegal, inconsiderate and dangerous parking.

This kind of simplistic proxy for performance has become endemic, because its easy to measure. If you can say ‘I’ve hit target’, you’re off the hook as a person, a school, a company or a government department. Never mind that you’ve actually made life worse for everyone, and really dreadful for some.

What gets measured gets managed, they say. True.

So start with what you really want, then explore different, creative and possibly multiple ways to measure whether you’re achieving it.

The answer’s unlikely to be a simple tally. And you may just come up with a completely new approach to the problem.

May 14, 2021

The monster in the office

There’s a monster in the office, and everyone’s afraid.

Everyone calls it ‘the Boss’.

The owner thinks it has many heads, eating the business out of house and home, and just not caring enough what they do and how they do it.

The team thinks they know exactly who it is – the control-freak micro-manager, constantly interfering, trying to do everyone’s job and never happy with the results.

Neither are right.

Every business owner I’ve met has a vision in their head for how their business makes promises to clients and keeps them. But there’s often a massive gap between that vision and what they’ve actually managed to communicate to the people whose help they need to achieve it.

That gap is the real monster.

Fortunately like most monsters, it disappears with daylight.

May 13, 2021

Everything’s a process

My grandmother was obsessed with spotlessness, which meant my mother grew up under an extreme housekeeping regime: shoes had to be taken off at the door; books weren’t allowed to be seen (too untidy); everything, from picture rail to chair rail had to be dusted every day. And of course at that time, as the only girl of three children, it was my mother’s job to do it.

When she had a family of her own (7 children), my mother had to come to an accommodation with housework. It was pointless spending all day dusting chair rails, when a horde arrived back every afternoon bearing a new cloud of dirt, but to leave it to a once a week blitz would mean living in what felt like squalor to her (and ruin a precious weekend day).

So every day, once we were out at school, she’d spend an hour on housework, using a weekly rota to keep on top of everything. That freed up the rest of her day to read, see friends, shop, whatever, knowing that if a visitor dropped by the house would be, if not spotless, respectable.

The thing that makes housework depressing (if you let it) is that it is never ‘done’. It’s a continuous process. For my mother, the answer wasn’t to avoid it, or even to outsource it. It was to embrace it as a process, enjoy it as part of life, without letting it take over. She knew her house would never be perfect, she preferred to enjoy living in it.

That’s an approach worth learning from.

After all, everything we do (and are) is a process. We’re never ‘done’.

So instead of fretting about a stasis that’s impossible to achieve, let’s make sure we all enjoy doing what might get us there.

May 12, 2021

Considered adoption

Contrary to the popular image, the Amish are not backward-looking. Nor are they against new technology. What they are against is a rush to embrace the new without considering how it might impact on their ethos and their way of life.

Once they have considered, communally, they often adapt a new technology to suit their needs. An iron or a lamp becomes battery- or propane-powered, to preserve their separateness from the outside world. A phone and internet connection is housed in a shared booth at a walkable distance from homes, to maintain the primacy of face-to-face communication and neighbourliness.

The resulting ‘contraptions’ might look odd to us, but the approach is one worth adopting.

Before you jump on the latest bandwagon, ask yourself:

Does this technology support and enhance my ability to make and keep my Promise of Value?
If not, how could I change to make sure it does?

If the technology can’t adapt to suit you, it probably isn’t fit for your purposes.

May 11, 2021

Collective authenticity

If authenticity is doing, not being, it follows that for a company of more than one person, achieving corporate authenticity requires everyone to be ‘doing’ what is consistent with the company’s values and personality.

How can you ensure that?

Be crystal clear on the Promise you make as a business. Use that clarity to attract and recruit only those who share it. That way you can be confident that whatever work they produce ‘from within themselves’ will align with it.
Support them with a Customer Experience Score to make learning easy.

Then give them the responsibility to deliver, and the autonomy to do so.

As all master craftsmen know, practice never makes perfect, but it does make authentic.

And authentic is what clients really buy into.

May 10, 2021

Authenticity

Authenticity is a result of mastery.

Our word comes from the Greek roots ‘auto‘ – self and ‘hentes‘ – maker or doer. For the ancient Greeks it indicated someone who had mastered their craft to the point where they could produce work from within themselves, as opposed to copying from someone else.

What’s interesting to me about this is that authenticity isn’t so much about being as doing. We master our craft by interacting with the world, changing both sides of the equation in the process. Eventually, other people see us as authentic because we appear to have mastered our means of expression. Of course it never feels like that from the inside, which is why artists never give up.

You can’t be authentic, you can only do it, over and over again. In whatever field you’ve chosen to practice your art.

That’s how you leave your mark.

May 7, 2021

Intermittence

I realise that my posts have been somewhat intermittent of late.

I apologise for that.

Most of it is down to me. Some of it is down to technology.

I’ve got myself in hand. This weekend it’s tech’s turn.

I’m hoping you’ll spot the difference.

Thanks for bearing with me.

May 5, 2021

Superficiality

I had my blood test yesterday. Ahead of me in the queue was an angry (not rude) man. He’d waited 2 weeks for his appointment and taken time off work to attend, only to be told “You’re not on our list”.

Testing was a pretty efficient set-up, with 3 people taking samples for 3 people every 5 minutes, so they were able to fit him in.

During my turn I asked what had gone wrong.

“It’s the call centre”, I was told. ‘They send us about 30 people a day, who aren’t on our list of appointments. Sometimes for appointment times that are already taken. Sometimes for children who shouldn’t even be sent here – we can’t handle children here. We do our best to fit people in, but we can’t always do that. It wastes everybody’s time and makes our job miserable. We’ve tried to tell the call centre, but we don’t have the authority.”

On the face of it, centralised booking for several different units at different hospitals should be more efficient. A small team can handle more volume more efficiently, saving costs across all units.

But this only works if the central team are a) incentivised to produce a satisfactory outcome of the entire process; b) have all the information they need, when they need it, to do that job properly, and c) use feedback from people further down the line to improve how it works.

Otherwise all you’ve added to the process is a silo that increases real costs for everyone involved.

There’s a more fundamental error that’s been made here. The people delivering a service should be in control of the customer experience of that service. Either by managing the end-to-end process themselves, or being a key player in its design and continuous improvement.

But I’m guessing that customer experience was probably the last thing on the mind of whoever came up with this, along with a genuine interest in efficiency. Superficial gains were enough for them.

It shows.

May 4, 2021

Piracy

Pirates were a threat to the 18th century establishment. Not only because of their predations, but because of the alternative organisational model they offered.

Here are the Articles for Revenge, a pirate ship captained by John Phillips pictured above:

Every Man shall obey civil Command; the Captain shall have one full Share and a half in all Prizes; the Master, Carpenter, Boatswain and Gunner shall have one Share and quarter.
If any Man shall offer to run away, or keep any Secret from the Company, he shall be maroon’d, with one Bottle of Powder, one Bottle of Water, one small Arm and Shot.
If any Man shall steal any Thing in the Company, or game to the Value of a Piece of Eight, he shall be maroon’d or shot.
If at any Time we should meet another Marrooner [pirate], that Man that shall sign his Articles without the Consent of our Company, shall suffer such Punishment as the Captain and Company shall think fit.
That Man that shall strike another whilst these Articles are in force, shall receive Moses’s Law (that is, 40 Stripes lacking one) on the bare Back.
That Man that shall snap his Arms, or [smoke] Tobacco in the Hold, without a Cap to his Pipe, or carry a Candle lighted without a Lanthorn, shall suffer the same Punishment as in the former Article.
That Man that shall not keep his Arms clean, fit for an Engagement, or neglect his Business, shall be cut off from his Share, and suffer such other Punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit.
If any Man shall lose a Joint in Time of Engagement, he shall have 400 Pieces of Eight, if a Limb, 800.
If at any Time we meet with a prudent Woman, that Man that offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death.

A pirate ship was governed by the Pirate Council, who deliberated on decisions until a consensus was reached. A Captain was only elected for engagements, and could be anyone.

A far cry from life on a Navy ship, where the Captain’s rule was absolute, and his share of booty determined by him.

As Colonel Benjamin Bennet wrote: “I fear they will soon multiply for so many are willing to joyn with them when taken.”

No wonder they were crushed.

April 30, 2021

Motive power

In the old model of business, marketing was something you did last. It answered the question “How can I sell these things I’ve made?”.

Today, to be effective, marketing comes first, because it answers the question “Who can I best serve and how?”.

In this new model of business, your Promise of Value is the engine, and the motive power is empathy. A fuel available to everyone.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible