Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Discipline makes Daring possible

Rules, interpretation, performance.
September 7, 2020

Rules, interpretation, performance.

Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).

An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it.    They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it.  They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.

Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.

Performance is the source of useful feedback.   Everything else is conjecture.   The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first.   The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience.  The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.

All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.

It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance.   Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.

2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:

  1. The ‘rules’ can be sketchy, but it’s almost impossible to create outstanding performances intentionally, repeatedly and consistently without any.
  2. Documenting the ‘rules’ is the beginning of the process, not the end.

Eulogy
September 4, 2020

Eulogy

Yesterday, I found out that one of my favourite authors, the anthropologist David Graeber had died suddenly, unexpectedly and too soon, the day before.

I am gutted.  Not just because I was looking forward to learning from him for a lot longer, but because he also seemed to be such an entirely admirable person.   Intelligent, articulate, active, radical.  As an anarchist, highly critical of human institutions. As an anarchist and anthropologist, utterly fond of human beings.

Some well-known people give mankind a good name.  For me, David Graeber was one of them.

Avoiding Bureaucracy
September 3, 2020

Avoiding Bureaucracy

For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:

“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services.   In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”

Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:

“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life.  We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able.  An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”

In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded.  As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:

“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.”

The questions to ask are:

  • Whose lives are you bettering?
  • At what cost to the rest of the world?

It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.

Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that.   One of which is mine.

Humanocracy
September 2, 2020

Humanocracy

This arrived yesterday evening (see why I need an extension?).

The promise is to “show you how to create an unstoppable movement to create an organization that’s fit for the future and fit for human beings.”

I’m looking forward to reading it, although I suspect it won’t go far enough for me.

I’ll keep you posted.

There’s nothing new under the sun
September 1, 2020

There’s nothing new under the sun

A coal mine isn’t the kind of place that springs immediately to mind when you think of innovative, even revolutionary forms of management, but as the Corporate Rebels shared today, that’s exactly what Eric Trist found at Haighmoor Colliery, way back in the 1940s.

The article is well worth a read, but what really resonated for me were these highlights:

  • “Miners were recognised for ‘cycle completion’: meaning being jointly responsible for the whole extraction process.”
  • “The miners not only ran the mining job. They also took care of selling the coal they mined. They were responsible for the product they produced.”
  • “a reward policy based on a basic wage and a bonus linked to productivity of the group throughout the extraction cycle, rather than a single shift.”
  • “Each miner at Haighmoor could handle a half-dozen jobs. That meant each could take on multiple team roles.”
  • “All teams were multidisciplinary.”
  • because the miners could influence their own work, they continuously innovated.”

Observing these work practices, Eric Trist and his former coal miner colleague, Ken Bamforth, called the whole thing practising “responsible autonomy”.

Sound familiar?

Which begs the question:

If we already know that responsible autonomy works, why aren’t we practising it more often?

Goodnight
August 28, 2020

Goodnight

For me, this has been a fuzzy week.   I don’t know whether it’s me, the weather or the time of year.  Maybe I’ve been reading too much, not moving enough, not speaking enough to other people.   Whatever the reason, it’s been a scrappy week, and I apologise if you’ve been adversely affected.

Still, it’s a bank holiday weekend, and despite the fact that the days all run together, I think it is worth taking a break.  Maybe even getting out somewhere to blow the cobwebs away.

But now, I’m off for a nap.  Sleep, I find, is a cure for nearly everything.

See you on the other side.

The most useful prop
August 26, 2020

The most useful prop

What is probably the most useful prop you can have in your business?

The prop everyone refers to, and everyone maintains.

The prop that makes the invisible process of making and keeping promises visible and therefore improveable.

Your Customer Experience Score.(TM)

The best way to look after it is to make it explicit, concrete and shareable.

Stage Management
August 25, 2020

Stage Management

Making sure the right props are in the right place at the right time is an important job in theatre or film (check out The Goes Wrong Show for what happens when it’s not done well).

It’s an important job in business too, although it’s rarely considered as such.   More often than not it turns into everybody’s job, which makes it nobody’s job, which makes it something that doesn’t happen consistently.

The answer is to think through the process your business runs (how you Share your Promise, and How you Keep your Promise) from beginning to end.  As you do, you’ll identify where each business prop is used or referred to.  Once you know this you can start to automate the ‘Stage Manager’ role.

Most importantly, you’ll see where it is easiest to create each prop, because that’s where the information it embodies is naturally and easily gathered.

As far as possible, you want this to happen as a side-effect of doing what people want to do anyway.  This is why cloud accounting is such a brilliant thing.  Clients do what they do – raise invoices, pay bills, log expenses, manage bank accounts.  The side effect of all this is that all the props needed to produce a VAT return or monthly management reports are ready and waiting for the accountant to work with.

Where this isn’t possible, sharing the text of the play (your process) makes the downstream impact visible.

Salespeople, for example, are notoriously rubbish at logging client details, even though they are the people who naturally have all the information to hand.  That’s because they don’t feel the impact on what comes after them.   From a business perspective a sale isn’t complete until the customer has received what they paid for and is happy with it.

That means that, like the bricklayer’s labourer, part of what every salesperson produces is the productivity of the people down the line.

Your business is like a play.   Each role in your business contributes to the productivity of the whole play.   Recognise that in the way you reward people, and you’ve created an incentive for improvement.

Invisible processes
August 24, 2020

Invisible processes

The walls of our new extension are going up fast.   It’s fascinating to watch how quickly they grow under the bricklayers hands.

In part this is because the bricklayer is good.   He’s fast, accurate and meticulous.

But at least as much of the speed is due to the parallel activities of his labourer, who systematically ensures that blocks, bricks and mortar are to hand before the bricklayer needs them.  This isn’t as simple as it sounds.   As the wall grows, ‘to hand’ moves from atop a stack of blocks, to sat on a hop-up, to set out on a high platform rigged from trestles and scaffold boards.

It’s a whole construction/deconstruction/reconstruction process in its own right, that requires brains as well brawn, yet will leave no trace once the wall is finished.   All so the bricklayer can do nothing but exercise his considerable skill.

This labouring role may be lower paid, and lower status, but it is essential if you want to get the most out of a bricklayer.   In essence, the labourer’s product is the productivity of the bricklayer.

Perhaps this should inform how this kind of work is rewarded?

Ideas
August 21, 2020

Ideas

Ideas thrive on being shared.  We humans can’t help ourselves – we love to pass them on, to our contemporaries, to our children, beyond, if we can.  After all what is immortality but having our ideas remembered?

Sharing an idea changes our collective brain, modifies old ideas and leads to the creation of new ones.  Every shared idea adds to that ever-growing pile that all are free to rummage through, in search of the missing piece of their particular puzzle.

All without destroying the original idea, or removing it from the mind that first thought of it.

For me, this is how ideas have worked all my life.   It feels strange to see a really interesting idea and not be able to share it.  It’s as if it’s been put behind bars, on show, but inaccessible.

I can’t help but ask: why would you do that to an idea?

Especially your own?