Discipline makes Daring possible – Page 80 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 19, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 2

Step 2 of capturing a Business Process is to work out where it really starts.

A good rule of thumb is to think about where the ‘thing’ you’re dealing with – the ‘Noun’ in your process’s name – gets created, from the perspective of the business. These are good questions to ask:

If the thing is created outside the business, where does it first come into contact with it?
If the thing is created inside the business, where does that happen? Is that where it should happen?

You can ask similar questions to find where your process really ends:

If the thing passes through the business, when does it leave?
If the thing only exists inside the business, where does it get destroyed, or archived?

It’s helpful to think about the process from its real beginning to its real end, because that’s how many opportunities for improvement can be identified, without having to go to the trouble of documenting the entire thing first. It gives you a shortcut, if you like.

January 18, 2021

Devolution

Often, when we think about delegation, we’re thinking about merely handing over execution to someone else. We’ve already worked out what needs to be done, all they have to do is reproduce that. This somewhat mechanical form of delegation works well for really simple and generic tasks such as answering the phone, booking meetings, or filling in forms, or even for generic functions such as preparing annual accounts, fulfilment, distribution, even marketing.

But for what really weighs down a business owner, delegating execution doesn’t help much.

I remember my mum telling me, when as a child I offered to go shopping for her “The shopping is the least of my worries – I still have to think about what we’re going to eat, plan the meals, and write out the list. That’s the hard bit.”

What we really want to be delegating is the thinking, the decision making – in other words, the management. And that’s hard, because it means giving up power, entrusting business outcomes to other people. It means devolution.

But devolution is what really pays off. If my siblings and I had all taken turns to ‘manage’ the household, or taken responsibility for different parts of it, I’m sure that our family horizons and opportunities would have been broadened. 9 heads – even childish ones – are always better than 1.

The good news is that as business owners we have an advantage over mum, in that we’re dealing with adults we’ve selected for shared values, principles and beliefs. Who will welcome the ability to step up and lead.

Especially if given a score to follow while they (and you) get used to the idea.

Self-determination

I’ve spent the whole of the day re-setting and rebuilding my computer. Windows simply refused to restart. No reason was given, no error messages, no hint of what might have caused it, just an escalating series of interventions that culminated in a factory reset.

That’s my day gone. I don’t have a choice. My laptop is infrastructure. I need it to work.

Imagine if corporations like Microsoft decided to do that to us on purpose.

It’s easy to miss where power really lies.

January 14, 2021

Fractals

I was delighted to see Matt Black Systems feature again in this week’s Corporate Rebels blog. I’ve told their story so often, since I visited them back in 2012.

I’m even more delighted to see that they offer consulting on how to apply their fractal model for businesses.

The fundamental thing that makes that model work, as I discovered on my visit, is responsible autonomy. Enabled by process. Rewarded by profit.

That makes it a natural model that can work in any business.

They’ve also published a book. It’s been ordered. Of course.

January 13, 2021

The problem with empowerment

The problem with ’empowering’ people, is that it implies a transfer of power from someone who has it to someone who doesn’t.

Why don’t they have it already? How come you have it to give? Where did yours come from? How is it maintained?

Everyone has power. They don’t always have the autonomy to exercise it.

Autonomy is much more powerful than empowerment. Which is why it’s scary for the currently powerful. And it’s a fairer bet for everyone.

HT to Gustavo Razzetti for the prompt.

January 12, 2021

Meeting Spec

Specifications highlight the difference between value creators and value extractors brilliantly.

Value creators treat specifications as minima. They’re always looking to see far they can go above and beyond, within the time and financial constraints they face. For them the spec is a starting point.

Value extractors, on the other hand, view specs as maxima. They’re always looking to see how little they can get away with, how much they can bend the definitions, while still being able to say they’ve met the specification. For them the spec is the bar, and they’re always trying to lower it.

Extractors win in the short term. But the future belongs to the creators. Especially if they collaborate with each other.

The picture is 2 days worth of lunches for a Finnish schoolchild during lockdown last year.

January 11, 2021

A virtuous flywheel

I love it when somebody else finds ways to say things better than I can. Here’s a great post from Corporate Rebels exploring how 2 very different companies found similar ways to turnaround and then grow:

3 Principles To Run A Company Sensibly

“both were motivated to adopt their unique methodologies to rescue the struggling companies they were leading. They wanted to save the jobs of people in their organizations. They thought this could be achieved by giving all an understanding of how the businesses were run—and then involve them in improving them. Their way of saving jobs became a new way to create jobs. These new jobs created new wealth. This wealth, was then shared with those who created it in the first place: all those in the company.”

In other words, they created a virtuous flywheel that didn’t depend on the bosses.

Sounds sensible to me. Flywheels get going faster when everyone pushes in the same direction.

January 8, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 1

The first step in defining a business process is to work out where you want to be at the end of it. More precisely, where do you want the person you are serving to be at the end of it.

This involves stepping up a level or two from your usual narrative – from the minutiae of how it gets done to what it is you are really trying to achieve. This helps you identify ‘what’ has to happen, which in turn can open you up to different ‘hows’ for making it happen.

Write down (or better still get someone else to write down) the process you want to think about as a narrative. Then ask yourself these questions:

What things should be true after this process is completed?
Which of those things is truly meaningful to the person you are serving (your prospect, client or customer)?
- What is it that matters to them?
- What difference will they notice?
- What is it that they are paying you for?
How could you best sum that up in a two-word phrase, composed of a verb followed by a noun? This phrase should be binary, it’s either true or it’s not. You’ve either done it or you haven’t.

Now you’ve found the point of your process. It’s probably much bigger than you thought.

January 7, 2021

A technology for thinking

One of the great reasons for reading so much on so many subjects (a fact which is being brought home to me as we bring our books back into the house) is that you stumble across stuff that helps, that you would never have gone looking for.

Aeon and it’s sister-publication Psyche are two of the my favourite places for stumbling across interesting things.

This week it was this article from Nana Ariel:

Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking

It’s obvious once you think about it.

And it’s why a good first step for capturing a process is to try to explain it to someone else.

January 6, 2021

How I learned Italian

I was trying to think of another example as good as Katerina’s for how to look at something and turn it into a repeatable pattern – a process if you like. This is one I remembered:

Many years ago I was in Italy, having hitch-hiked there with a boyfriend. We wanted to go to Pisa, by bus. One of the frustrating things about being a foreigner anywhere is the knowledge that’s so taken for granted that it remains completely hidden. If you know it, you know it. If you don’t – hard luck.

In this case, frustratingly, we couldn’t work out how to buy a bus ticket. Remember, this was a very long time ago, so there was no ‘online’. In the UK, you could buy a ticket from the driver. Not here. If you didn’t have a ticket, you couldn’t get on the bus. There were no ticket machines we could find – at bus stops, the railway station, anywhere. Where did people get a ticket from? We couldn’t even ask, because neither of us spoke Italian, and we hadn’t thought of bringing a phrase book.

I did speak Spanish and French though, so many nouns were sort of familiar, plus I’d already started to spot a pattern of how words changed between Spanish and Italian. For example, ‘-ado’ in Spanish becomes ‘-ato’ in Italian. So the English ‘passed’ was ‘pasado’/’pasada’) in Spanish, and ‘passato’/’passata’ in Italian. I’d worked out from the notice on the bus that you needed a ticket (‘biglietto’ c.f. Spanish ‘billete’, French ‘billet’). So far so good. But how to work out how to ask where to buy it?

I could read the similarities easier than I could hear them. So I looked at advertising posters, shop signs, notices. I worked out that Italian frequently uses a reflexive sentence pattern in much the same way as Spanish, so that a sentence like ‘Where can I buy a bus ticket?’ could become ‘Where does a bus ticket get itself bought?’.

All I needed now was the word for ‘buy’. I hit lucky with the ad on the side of a building – which contained the line ‘XXX gets itself bought here’

Bingo! (did you know that was Italian?). I could create a new sentence from the pattern I already had

“Dove se acquista un biglietto para el autobus?”

It wasn’t correct – the last bit was pure Spanish. But the person I asked understood exactly what I meant and directed me to the nearest tobacconist. We got our tickets to Pisa, and walked around the outside of the leaning tower at every single level.

I never really learned Italian, but I get by in Italy. Because I recognise patterns from Spanish and French, I can understand what people are saying, and I can construct a sentence that communicates what I mean, even if the details aren’t quite right.

This is no big deal. We all make patterns from the world around us, so we can predict big things and spend more time on the interesting details. It’s just that sometimes you have to do it on purpose. Like when you’re trying to explain a process to someone who’s never done it before.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible