Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Efficiency

Creating bandwidth
November 11, 2021

Creating bandwidth

Apparently human neurons are strikingly different from those of other mammals.   Neurons are the building blocks of our nervous system – our internal communiactions system by which we percieve and react to the world.

All neurons communicate with each other and with other cells through electrical impulses, produced by ‘ion channels’.   In general, the larger the neuron, the more ion channels it has.   Until we get to humans.

Our neurons have far fewer ion channels than expected.   We still need ion channels, but somehow we are able to get by perfectly well with less of them.

The hypothesis is that by evolving a ‘lean’ neuron model, human brains became more efficient, able to spend less energy on the basics, freeing some up to spend on more interesting things that other mammals don’t do, such as imagining.

That makes sense.  The less communication you have to do to support the usual, the more bandwidth you leave to deal with the unusual.   Or to imagine a new usual.

Our businesses could learn something from our neurons.

Standards
November 9, 2021

Standards

I’m not sure the plumber appreciated me hanging around to watch.  Not to begin with anyway.

But by the end of the afternoon, he was glad of it.   Because by then I’d seen for myself how everything went wrong, and more importantly, I knew he was not to blame.

It wasn’t his fault the ducting wouldn’t go through the hole.   That was my fault for buying the wrong size – to fit the cooker hood, but not a ‘standard’ hole.  Although to be fair I didn’t know that a) there was a standard hole size and b) that my cooker hood had been built to a different standard.

It wasn’t the plumber’s fault that the old tap was so hard to remove.  That was because for some reason the old tap fixings couldn’t accommodate a standard worktop depth, so the previous fitting had been slightly bodged.

It wasn’t his fault that the new tap would have to be slightly bodged in the same way, since it was identical, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that the lever came off in his hand as soon as he tested it.  That was down to tap manufacturers observing no quality standards at all.

So all in all, what should have been a straightforward job, turned into a bit of a nightmare, involving the purchase of yet another (different) tap, some new hose, plus additional reducers and fixings, and of course more of the plumber’s time and skill (not least that of being a contortionist).

Will, the plumber, is only young, but even he complained that ‘in the old days’, everything was manufactured or imported to a British standard, which meant you could rely on the fact that one thing would work seamlessly with another.  You could get most jobs done easily, only the really unusual was tricky.

That’s what standards are for.  To make the usual easy, so you can have imagination and energy to spare to deal with the unusual.

Having a choice of standards opens up different possibilities.  That’s great, as long as everyone states which standard(s) they are working to at any one time.  Otherwise, all you’ve done is turn the usual into the unusual.

No wonder we have a productivity problem.

New tunes
November 1, 2021

New tunes

“Research carried out by Oxford Economics found that it takes recently hired professional workers 28 weeks to reach optimum productivity – which has an attached cost of £25,200 per employee.”

Why is that?

Because even if your new hire has worked in your industry for years, they haven’t worked in your business before.  They don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe, and don’t do things the way you do them.

You may have started out as a one-man-band, doing covers.   But by now you play your own music, nobody else’s.   That’s why your best clients love you.   That means that no matter how experienced, every new person that joins your team has to learn new tunes.

Maybe it’s time you got that music out of your head?    So others can learn to play it more easily and more quickly.  Bringing their own personality and flair to the performance right from the start.

And you can spend less time telling them where to put their fingers.

 

 

Rotations
October 27, 2021

Rotations

Circles are an interesting form of organisation.  Like King Arthur’s famous Round Table, nobody is ‘above’ or ‘below’ anyone else.  All are on a level.

A circle can be the basis of useful mechanisms for sharing work fairly, without the need for discussion, consensus building or command.

For instance, if you all work in an office, someone has to open up each day.   Often it’s one person’s job.   What happens when they don’t turn up?

You could decide to give everyone a key, and it’s simply the first to arrive that opens up.    But if you are the habitually early one, you might start to resent being the only one who has to do this in practice.

Or you could create an ‘opening up ‘ circle (which could include everyone) and do it by rotation.  You might even use a single set of special keys to make the mechanism visible, perhaps even more like a game.

There are probably more jobs that could be organised in this way.   You could rotate delivery drivers through different routes or rounds, to give them a change and to introduce customers to more of your team.   You could rotate people through networking events in the same way.  You could even rotate people through Roles to expand their experience and get clients used to the idea that anyone in your business can help them equally well.

The beauty of a circle is that you can start anywhere, and go clockwise or anti-clockwise.  You can choose whatever frequency you like for the rotation.  It can even accommodate absences – you just jump the gap if today’s person is missing.  Best of all, there’s no room for argument.  Everyone takes their turn, then forgets about the job until it comes round again.

No need to write up complex rotas, just draw up your circles, put them somewhere visible, and set them going.

How powerful a signal it would be if everyone, including the boss, took their spot?

Sharing the work
October 5, 2021

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings.  He didn’t need them.  As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making.   Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office.  He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled.  The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson.  We hand-craft each and every user experience.  We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way.  We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours.   So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.‘

That’s unfair.   They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few.   Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less.   The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.

Communication, not control
September 30, 2021

Communication, not control

Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.

Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house.  They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.

Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.

The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines.  Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.

Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.

Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies.  They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.

In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control.  The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.

How about your business?  What would your technical drawings look like?  Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?

Timesheets
September 28, 2021

Timesheets

There’s a very interesting article by Alistair Barlow on AccountingWeb today, about timesheets.

Not as a tool for calculating prices, but as a tool for measuring performance.

As I discovered a couple of years ago, ‘time spent’* is a pretty accurate proxy for all costs.

That means that a relatively easy way to get an accurate picture of how much a process is costing to run, is to measure how much time is spent on running it.  And this can be measured straightforwardly, by simple observation.

Timesheets are one way to observe how much a process is costing to run.  But they are a pain to fill in, cost time to complete, and feel intrusive.

Much better to let each process tell you as a side-effect.

I’m working on that.

*”Duration-Based Costing: Utilizing Time in Assigning Costs” Anne-Marie Lelkes, Ph.D., CPA, Management Accounting Quarterly, Summer 2017.

Founders Syndrome
September 8, 2021

Founders Syndrome

I learned a new concept this morning: ‘Founder’s syndrome’.  Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

  • The organization is strongly identified with the founder;[8] and a result sometimes believed to be related to the founder’s ego.[9][10][11]
  • Obsessive leadership style compared to a more standard behavior.[12][13][14]
  • Autocratic decision-making (autocratic management style): Founders tend to make all decisions in early start-up companies, big and small, without a formal process or feedback from others. Decisions are made in crisis mode, with little forward planning. Staff meetings are held generally to rally the troops, get status reports, and assign tasks. There is little meaningful strategic development, or shared executive agreement on objectives with limited or a complete lack of professional development. Typically, there is little organizational infrastructure in place, and what is there is not used correctly.[11] Furthermore, the founder has difficulty making decisions that benefit the organization because of their affiliation.[10]
  • Higher levels of micromanagement by checking on employees or colleagues subject matter work instead of maintaining and evolving the overall company’s picture.[15]
  • Entrepreneurs show higher levels of bias (e.g. overconfidence) than do managers in established organizations.[16][17]
  • There is no succession plan.[11]
  • A failing so-called leadership transition[18] within first couple of years leading to consequences such as trust, moral, unforeseen future for the business.[19][20]
  • The founder has difficulty with adapting to changes as the organization matures.[10]
  • The culture of the leadership team and company plays an important role for success or failure.[21][22]
  • Often the founder’s idea is central to the initial business and clients of the company, so that if markets change, the need for the initial idea might vanish.[23]
  • Key staff and board members are typically selected by the founder and are often friends and colleagues of the founder. Their role is to support the founder, rather than to lead the mission. Staff may be chosen due to their personal loyalty to the founder rather than skills, organizational fit, or experience. Board members may be under-qualified, under-informed or intimidated and will typically be unable to answer basic questions without checking first.[24]
  • Professionally trained and talented recruits, often recruited to resolve difficulties in the organization, find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.[24]
  • The founder begins to believe their own press/PR and other marketing related issues.[25]
  • The founder, who is usually the CEO or managing director, suffers HiPPO (Highest-paid-person’s opinion), which means that often their ideas, decisions, etc. keep winning over the actual better ideas, decisions, etc.[26][27]
  • The founder becomes increasingly paranoid as delegation is required, or business management needs are greater than their training or experience.
  • Falling into two traps:[28]
    • Actions without a goal or
    • Wrong actions based on defined goal

The founder responds to increasingly challenging issues by accentuating the above, leading to further difficulties.[29] Anyone who challenges this cycle will be treated as a disruptive influence and will be ignored, ridiculed or removed. The working environment will be increasingly difficult with decreasing trust. The organization becomes increasingly reactive, rather than proactive. Alternatively, the founder or the board may recognize the issue and take effective action.[30]

A lot of this looks to me like the classic painful transition from one-person-band, to few-person-band, to full-blown company.   Which is really the transition from a small, personal, human-scaled business to a large, impersonal capitalist corporation.   The founder wants to keep things personal and true to their original vision.  New owners or new management want to make things efficient, corporate and therefore impersonal.  As far as the founder is concerned, they want to make it ‘someone else’s business‘.  Of course the founder resists.

There is a preventive for ‘Founder’s syndrome’.

Embed the founding vision and personality into the operating processes of your business before you try to scale, with a Customer Experience Score.  You’ll be able to scale without managers, even without investors other than the people you serve.  The best of both worlds: personal, true to the original vision and magnifying your impact.

Even better, once it’s built into the way your business works, your Score takes on a life of it’s own, nurtured and improved by everyone in the business.   It becomes harder for anyone to interfere – even you.

What’s wrong with being a boss?
August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do.   Often they also tell you how to do it.    A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’.   And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how.  It’s uncomfortable.  It feels wrong.  Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family.  You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable.  If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss.   Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too.  So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

Handovers
August 5, 2021

Handovers

When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead.  Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them.   Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money.   You’ve introduced transaction costs.   At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give.   So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it.   That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond.  It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun.   What’s not to like?