Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 75 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 14, 2021

Disappearing

There are two ptarmigans in the picture. Did you spot them?

There’s more than one way to disappear.

The obvious way is to take yourself out of the picture. The less obvious solution is to blend in.

Not by matching yourself to the background, but by making yourself indistinguishable from the others around you.

What if, like Spartacus, you could enable and inspire everyone else in your team to behave as if they were you, the original? You would no longer stand out. In fact you’d no longer even have to be there.

It starts by thinking differently about what your business is.

Issue 2 of The Disappearing Boss is out today.

April 13, 2021

Blind man’s buff

Working away from the office has been uncomfortable for many people. Not least leaders.

We’re so used to the panopticon of open plan, together with the richness of non-verbal communication that enables ‘management by walking about’ – the ability to dip in and help where it’s needed with feedback and encouragement.

Remote working has made leading feel like a game of blind man’s buff.

It feels like we should become more like old-fashioned managers – telling people what to do then trying to assess where they really are through regular progress reports or software. None of these things tell you what you really want to know – whether people are struggling, or have misunderstood what’s required, or are simply missing something – all the things you used to be able spot really quickly when everyone was together in the office.

It’s an interesting problem, that existed long before before lockdown and work from home. What do you do when people struggle but don’t ask for help?

For some the answer is more surveillance, and more checklists. For others it’s mandating a return to the office. But I wonder if framing the problem differently might work better?

What if we looked at our people as students, rather than workers? What if instead of asking ‘How do I know they are where they should be?’ we asked ourselves ‘How do I know they are learning?’.

The answer to that question would I’m sure lead to a different way of organising how teams are supported.

And from my experience we could do worse than look at how Akimbo does it.

April 12, 2021

Freedom Rules

“Freedom … is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating” ‘The Utopia of Rules’, David Graeber 2015

Without rules, we get nothing done.

With only rules, we get nothing done.

The interesting challenge is to create a set of rules that enable the creativity that will in turn makes new rules necessary, while at the same time ensuring that each cycle of new rules never becomes stifling.

It seems to me that’s only possible when everyone shares in the work of creating the rules and breaking them.

April 9, 2021

Teams

The team you’ve built for your business will have things in common. There are reasons you decided to hire them and they decided to work with you. There are reasons that you’ve stayed together.

Some of those reasons will be around shared values, behaviours and principles. Some of them will be to do with an alignment of vision and purpose.

Some will be entirely to do with their own personal preferences, aims and desires – perhaps proximity to home, an easier commute, a less demanding job or even friendships formed.

Are those reasons enough for you to entrust them with the client experience? I hope so.

But it might be better to be explicit about the values, behaviours, principles, vision and purpose.

That way you’ll both know for sure. And be able to act accordingly.

April 8, 2021

Not like. The same

Sometimes, a process that looks like it could be a pattern isn’t.

If the same thing happens in the same way every time, and it’s performed by the same Role using the same Props, then what you have isn’t processes that are alike. You have the same process, repeated exactly as part of several larger processes.

As an example, take dealing with a visitor to your office. Often this is the responsibility of a particular Role. They greet the visitor, take their coat, show them to a waiting area and offer them a drink. It makes no difference why the visitor is here, what happens afterwards or who deals with them next, the process is exactly the same whether the visitor is a client, a prospective employee or a tax inspector.

In this case, it’s better to define the process once, and include it in the Customer Experience Score wherever it occurs. You could call it ‘Receive Guest’, define it the first time you identify it (for example as part of your ‘Enroll Prospect’ process) then refer to it elsewhere (for example, in Handle Tax Inspection, Recruit Team Member, Hold Social Event).

Identical twins, triplets, even quintuplets are a wonderful thing in humans. We don’t mind that they make more work because they’ll each grow to be unique human beings.

You don’t want them in your Customer Experience Score though. The extra work they create there is pointless.

April 7, 2021

Pattern vs Catch-all

When designing your Customer Experience Score, you often uncover processes that follow a specific pattern.

For example, you want a client to have a similar experience every time you request information from them – perhaps you send an email, then immediately follow up with a phone call or a text, or both. Perhaps you call, then follow up with an email. After a while, you might remind the client if they haven’t responded. There might be a limit to the number of times you do that.

However you want the experience to be, you want that experience to be consistent across all the information requests you might make, so it’s tempting to lump all these different processes intoa single catch-all process.

That’s a mistake. Although the pattern is the same, each individual process turns out to be slightly different. The information being requested is different, the purpose is different, the priority, urgency and timescales may be different. The Roles involved may be different. The Props will definitely be different.

These differences will out, and somewhere in the depths of what looks like a simple process, you’ll end up having to include some way of spelling out what actually happens in each case. It usually involves a complicated list of “If you’re dealing with A, do B; if you’re dealing with C, do D;…”

And so on.

The key is to remember why you’re writing your Customers Experience Score, which is to enable someone else in your team to perform the process as well as or better than you. That is best achieved by making each process self-containedly easy to follow, without cluttering it up with decisions about alternative possibilities.

When Google gives you directions for getting from your house to that beauty spot you love, it gives you full directions for each and every route, even though most will start with the same turn out of your street, and end with the same turn into your destination. Imagine trying to find your way with directions that say “If you’re following route A, turn right at the next roundabout. If you’re following Route B proceed straight across. If you’re following Route C, turn right.”

You’d take longer, annoy fellow drivers along the way, and probably get lost a few times. You might even give up and go home. That’s the last thing you want your team to do when they’re delivering your Promise to clients.

A pattern is a pattern, nothing more. Use it to design in consistency that reinforces your Promise of Value.

A catch-all, on the other hand, makes everyone work harder, for no extra benefit.

April 1, 2021

Slow burn

Every now and then, my husband has a big bonfire in the garden. I must admit they make me nervous. I find myself compelled to watch them well into the night to make sure they’re properly out before I go to bed. I’ve been known to resort to water, just to be absolutely sure.

I much prefer an incinerator. Contained, controlled, slow-burning but often more intense, an incinerator gets the job done with less risk and almost no need of supervision.

For me, on purpose beats all-out, every time.

Whatever Easter means to you, enjoy the break.

See you Tuesday.

March 31, 2021

Unwritten

A written constitution is certainly open to interpretation (Who exactly are ‘We, the People’? What exactly does ‘Happiness’ mean?), but it does at least provide a tangible, concrete reference point for discussion, amendment and clarification. It is separate, both from the people who made it and the people interpreting it right now, a thing in its own right, and therefore capable of improvement. And at all times, citizens can compare the current culture with what that culture once aspired to be, as embodied on the constitution, and decide to act.

The unwritten is protean, slippery, even more open to interpretation, even exploitation. But what’s worse is that the culture that surrounds it can change beyond recognition without anyone really noticing. Until suddenly, the flag we’ve grown up with comes to stand for something rather disturbing.

Brands, whether national or corporate, are tokens of an underlying culture. If you want that culture to persist, it’s a good idea to write it down. An an even better idea to share it with everyone.

That way everyone can hold you to account for it.

March 29, 2021

Spring

If you’ve been considering making changes in your life, work, or business, it seems to me that now is a good time to get started. Much better, than say, January.

Why?

Because there’s a reason we celebrate re-birth around this time of year. From now on (in the northern hemisphere at least), longer, brighter, warmer days and a general atmosphere of growth and increase all around us will make it easier to stick to the new habits we’re trying to build. Which means there’s a good chance we’ll have them bedded in by the time the year turns back again to Autumn.

It’s hard enough to re-invent ourselves. We might as well get nature on our side. Maybe that’s why we call it Spring.

March 26, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 5

When sketching out a process it helps to start with the most straightforward case. The one where everything goes right, or at least goes as expected. Once you have this laid out, you can identify exceptions.

I find it helps to think of the whole process as a river. The straightforward case is the main, well-worn channel, but there may be parts that break off and loop round before coming back into the main flow.

So, for example, your straightforward case for preparing a set of annual accounts for a client assumes you have all the information already, the client approves your draft immediately and you can go straight on to filing them. But what happens if you don’t have all the information? Or the client doesn’t bother to get back to you with approval? The process needs to deal with these too. These are alternative routes through the process – loops in your process river if you like. And that’s exactly how I like to represent them.

Here’s another example. For a maintenance business, the ‘straightforward’ case is the typical reactive, unscheduled job:

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible