I really liked this piece, shared as part of a brilliant masterclass on doing nothing by Laurence McCahill at this morning’s Like Hearted Leaders.
So as it’s Friday, and nearly the week-end, I thought I’d share it with you.
https://ideas.ted.com/the-7-types-of-rest-that-every-person-needs/
Or, if you prefer, 7 ways to avoid the criminal waste that is Muri.
Re-pose.
Sometimes you can’t just do, you have to think about what you’re doing.
Sometimes you can’t just think, you have to think about what you’re thinking.
Sometimes you can’t just think about what you’re doing or thinking, you have to think about how you’re thinking or doing it.
Sometimes you can’t just think about how, you have to think about why.
It would be exhausting to operate like this all the time, but every now and then, it pays to take yourself up a level or two, perhaps with the help of other people, or a book, or a video, or a podcast or a tool.
Because once you are aware of what, how and why, you can repeat your best doing or thinking, on purpose.
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?
“Good Services” principle number 13: “A good service should respond to change quickly”
The key here is ‘respond to’. This is about reflecting relevant changes in the user and understanding the implications of those changes for the user.
A simple example: I’ve just had a call from my insurance broker. They wanted to speak to my husband about renewing his car insurance. He was insured with them, until he got rid of the car a couple of years ago. Somewhere that change has not been propagated through the system. Of course that doesn’t mean that they should never call him – he may have bought a new car since – but it would be a different, more appropriate call, that doesn’t start with “We see your renewal is coming up…”.
Automatic propagation isn’t always appropriate of course, so the best option might be to let the user notify a change then let them also specify where it should propagate to, perhaps with the least contentious options pre-checked to make the ‘usual route’ easier.
This could have an interesting side-effect of making people more conscious of where their data is held and for what purposes, putting them even more in control.
Giving back control – there’s a thought.
How many times have you run out of page writing a notice? Or got halfway through a recipe before realising you were missing a vital ingredient? Or partway through a task before realising that you simply don’t have time to complete it?
When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly. I believe the best way to achieve that is to help people to manage themselves.
In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!
A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.
The third principle Lou gives is that ‘a service sets the expectations of the user’.
Setting expectations is about making sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why easy-to-follow recipes start with the oven temperature, prep time and cooking time, then the list of ingredients. So you can be prepared before you start cooking.
It’s possible to do the same for services, whether they are for your clients or your team to use:
If you build this into the definition of your service, you’ll save false starts, repeated steps and interruptions, and help everyone feel more in control.
When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly.
The traditional way of doing that was to build a hierarchy of management above those doing the work, to supervise, check and adjust how things get done. The problem with that approach is that it’s unresponsive, expensive and actually makes it harder for people to work autonomously and responsibly. And if you are a small business owner trying to do all of that yourself, it can nearly kill you and the business.
The alternative is to help people to manage themselves. For that, they need a framework that supports them, but doesn’t stifle their ability to respond creatively and humanely to emergent scenarios. There are lots of familiar models and analogies for this kind of framework – a map, a blueprint, a screenplay, for example. My preferred analogy is a musical score – what I call your Customer Experience Score – that describes what has to happen and when to deliver the experience you want your clients to have when they deal with you – but leaves the how to the talented musicians you employ.
But how do you create that score?
In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you create a Customer Experience Score that works well, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!
The basic idea is simple. A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.
The first principle is that ‘a service should be easy to find’ – even when you don’t know what it is.
Imagine you’re a newbie to your business. How do you find out what you’re supposed to do in your job? Where do you look? What do you look for? As a newbie, on probation, eager to impress, you want to be productive from day one. All too often that means asking someone who is already busy.
So the first thing that might help make services easy to find is to put them all in one place. You could call it an operations manual, but nowadays it’s more likely to be online, and searchable in more varied ways than a physical folder or file. What’s key is that:
How can you help your team find the service they need?
The name is a good place to start. Ask yourself: What do clients usually call this service? What do we normally call it? What do experts call it? Are those names the same? If not, what are your options?
A service should primarily be known by one name. Preferably one taken from the client’s perspective. This helps to remind everyone why this service exists – to help the client get the outcome they want – especially if it’s really part of a larger service for the client. You might call it ‘VAT reporting’, but the real service to the client might be ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’. You might call it ‘Management Accounting’, but the real service to the client is ‘Control My Business’.
This highlights another important aspect of naming. A service is an activity that helps someone do something. So it’s a good idea to name the activity to reflect what gets done when it works. This name is usually made up of two parts – a verb that describes what happens, followed by a noun that describes the thing it happens to e.g. ‘Draft VAT Return’.
This works at all levels of granularity, from the lowest level – ‘Draft VAT Return’, ‘Approve VAT Return’ or ‘File VAT Return’, up to ‘Report VAT’, ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’ and finally ‘Keep Promise’. The name should tell you exactly where you get to after you’ve completed the activity successfully. You’re there or you’re not, and if you’re not, you haven’t actually completed the activity.
By naming a service or activity in this way, you’ve also met the second principle, which is that ‘a service should clearly explain its purpose’.
Once you’ve arrived at this kind of name, you can make sure it’s findable by any of the other names you identified at the beginning.
With a clearly explained purpose and a customer-focused name, findable by familiar alternatives, you’ll help you newbies get up to productive speed much faster – by themselves. Which should make both of you much happier.
My husband pointed me in the direction of this book, and I’m very glad he did. I’m not that far into it and my neck already aches from vigorous nodding in agreement.
On the face of it, this book might not seem appropriate for business that don’t make and keep their promises entirely online.
With a little twist in perspective, that can change:
On page 19, Lou gives this definition of a service: “A service is something that helps someone to do something.”
Our first thought is that the ‘someone‘ is the end user – me paying my car tax or filing a tax return online, via the gov.uk site. But what if that ‘someone‘ was one of your team? And the ‘something‘ they’re trying to ‘do‘ is share your promise so potential clients find it, or deliver on that promise to clients who’ve signed up?
What if you designed your business to be an eco-system of services that help your team do things for themselves? Without the need for supervision or management?
You’d want your ecosystem of services to follow all the principles for a good service:
And in the process deliver these qualities:
I would also add:
Unlike the UK government, you’re not delivering to every citizen, but to people who share at least some of your values, behaviours and worldview, and they will want to see that reflected in the way you do things for them.
This is what I call a Customer Experience Score. The ecosystem that turns your small business into an orchestra, playing your unique music for the people you serve, with no need for supervision or management.
I’m going to explore all of these points over the next few posts or so, as I work out how to apply this for my own business and for my clients. I think you’ll find it useful. I hope you’ll find it enjoyable too.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to buy the book, you can order it from my favourite bookshop.
What is a to do list, really?
Sometimes, they are steps in a process.
More often though, they are a cross section through a set of processes you are running in parallel.
That means that prioritising to dos is easier if you can see which processes will move forwards as a result.
Turning processes into to do lists has the opposite effect.
Maintenance. None of us want to do it. Most of us don’t even want to know it’s being done. We hide it. We put it off, and off, and off again, even though we know that ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’.
Why is that I wonder? Animals and birds seem to do maintenance instinctively. Birds pop food in one end of their nestlings, then tug poop out of the other. Nests and dens are rebuilt or cleared out regularly. How have we humans lost this?
Maintenance of all kinds is what keeps our systems and ecosystems going, but we don’t value it. We don’t even want to see that it’s being done. We hide it in basements and cupboards, offsite, even offshore. And we certainly don’t value the people who do it, we turn them into quasi-servants, invisible, ‘low-skill’, and therefore deserving only low wages.
Until something breaks. Then we love them, applaud them, can’t thank them enough. 5 minutes later, we’re ignoring them again.
Maintenance isn’t sexy, but it is essential. It’s high time we got better at it.
As a start, perhaps we should all do more of it ourselves?
I’m off to clean the oven.
Of course, you’ve surrounded yourself with really good people.
How are they actually spending their efforts? Delighting clients, or dreaming up new, better ways to deliver on your Promise of Value?
Or are they re-inventing the wheel? Teaching new recruits the ropes? Trying to remember what they did the last time that rare, but surprisingly regular occurrence cropped up? Finding ways to get around the software system that actually makes their job harder? Looking for another job?
Every member of an orchestra knows how to play their instrument. They don’t need to be told where to put their fingers. But they do appreciate having a score to follow. A score means they don’t have to think too hard about 80% of the job, freeing up energy and imagination to deal with the 20% that makes all the difference to performance. That 20% is what keeps clients happy, loyal, willing to pay extra and eager to tell their friends about you.
But the real power of a score is that it enables your team to bring their whole selves to bear – time after time, performance after performance.
And that’s what keeps your team engaged, aligned and proactively taking responsibility.