You may have heard about Doughnut Economics. You may even be wondering what you can do about it as a business.
Here’s an introduction worth watching.
It struck me yesterday that ‘Money for Nothing’ is quite a nice example.
You don’t have to be big. You just have to be regenerative and distributive, by design.
So, the thing about the news (including social media) is that it isn’t really about keeping people informed. It’s about … Read More “News”
I learned a new concept today: ‘hegemonic narrative’. In plain English, a ‘dominant story’ about why things are the way they are.
Dominant because more or less everyone subscribes to it.
Story because it’s made up.
In fact human history could be said to be one long sequence of hegemonic narratives, each one displacing the previous one, not necessarily for the better. Often benefiting one group of people over others. Beneficiaries therefore have an incentive to keep their story dominant.
They are psychologically useful, because they help us live with contradictions. But they are nevertheless made up.
Much better to try and resolve the contradictions, and create a story that works well for everyone.
The good news is that inside your company at least, you are free to do just that.
For a long, but very interesting article on how such stories work, check out this article: “Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work–family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture“. It’s a fascinating read.
I’ve met hundreds of small business owners, but I’ve yet to meet one who set out to be a Boss. Or at least a Boss of more than one person.
We embrace the challenge of starting a business, of finding customers, but we become Bosses reluctantly, sometimes half-heartedly, not always effectively.
Sometimes the experience of being the Boss of other people is so painful we joyfully go back to being the Boss of just ourself.
The trouble with that of course, is that the potential to create ever more value disappears along with the role we dislike so much.
There is another way to disappear as a Boss.
Instead of walking away, make yourself blend in. Enable your people to act more like Bosses, more like you.
After that it’s the more the merrier.
If you’d like to learn more about how, there’s a little welcome treat from me: Sign up for The Disappearing Boss Newsletter
Swarms look like an attractive option for decentralisation. After all, “Social insects work without supervision. In fact, their teamwork is largely self-organized, and coordination arises from the different interactions among individuals in the colony. Although these interactions might be primitive (one ant merely following the trail left by another, for instance), taken together they result in efficient solutions to difficult problems (such as finding the shortest route to a food source among myriad possible paths). The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence.'” (Corporate Rebels blog ‘Reinventing work‘)
As you know, I’m all for self-organisation, but for me it has to emerge from autonomy and a shared purpose. Ant colonies work through programming. Individual ants don’t get much say. I’d rather be a goose.
A different kind of swarming showed up this week around GameStop shares. Bottom-up collaboration between individuals.
The queen ants of Wall St. didn’t like it at all.
“Here’s your welcome treat” says the email. Inside, a code for a 10% discount on my first purchase, as a reward for signing up to the mailing list. Lovely.
Except that I’ve already made my first (hefty) purchase, which is how I signed up to the mailing list in the first place.
Now I’ve been given a discount code I’m unlikely to use. I don’t feel special, or welcomed, I feel cheated.
If you have more than one way for people to end up on your mailing list, make sure the reward for doing so works properly in every case.
It’s not rocket science. Just meaning it.
Now you know what your business process is aiming to achieve (Step 1), and you know where it really starts and ends (Step 2), you’re ready to describe it.
I’ve always found the best way to do this is to literally talk someone through it. Imagine that you are telling the story of this process to a listener, who is going to make notes. Ideally your listener would be another person, but if push comes to shove you can play both roles.
The conversation goes something like this:
That’s it. For now. The next step is to work out the order things really need to happen in.
Let’s look at the human body. Simpler, less tightly-coupled joints are held in place by muscle and cartilage, combining rigidity and strength with flexibility and adaptability. Although there is a ‘standard’ bone shape, tolerances are high, accommodating a wide range of variation in components – both across a population and within a single individual. Growth is allowed for.
At the same time, possibilities are constrained by the surrounding muscles. If there is too much play in a joint, strengthening muscles will help. If there is too little play, stretching and loosening them will allow more movement. Remediation is possible without taking anything apart, or even stopping – all that’s needed to keep things in good order is a healthy variety of movement.
Perhaps this is the sweet spot between machine and ecosystem we should aim for in a business?
The thing that makes ecosystems different from machines is that they are made up of autonomous, interdependent and loosely coupled components, which may themselves be ecosystems.
Autonomy allows evolution in the component. Loose coupling means that the ecosystem can tolerate a good deal of evolution before it breaks. Interdependence gives feedback to evolving components, constraining or encouraging variation, and, in the end, allowing the ecosystem itself to evolve.
Actually, it’s not really possible to break an ecosystem, but it can evolve into something that becomes hostile to one or more of its components. So the question for owners who want to build an ecosystem rather than a machine, is how to keep it in balance, without stifling creativity?
Maybe the answer is to explore something between a machine and an ecosystem?
When you’re putting together a machine that needs to run without you, precision engineering is key. Each component must fit tightly to the next, in exactly the right position in order to perform a single highly specific function, and no other.
The upside of this approach is efficiency, durability and a kind of austere beauty. Standardised parts are simpler to mass-produce and easy to replace. You can reach a much larger market. And the whole thing runs as we say, ‘like clockwork’.
The downside is that building a machine takes a lot of upfront investment, and when new technology comes along, that highly-engineered investment turns itself into a pile of scrap. This is true of software machines too.
So maybe the answer is to take our cue from nature and build ecosystems instead?