I recommend this Vittles article by Dr Andrea Oskis: Different Food, Same Blanket.
I loved it. It warmed my heart, made my mouth water and gave me food for thought.
It also made me wonder – could we apply some of this thinking to how we explore familiarity and innovation at work?
The team you’ve built for your business will have things in common. There are reasons you decided to hire them and they decided to work with you. There are reasons that you’ve stayed together.
Some of those reasons will be around shared values, behaviours and principles. Some of them will be to do with an alignment of vision and purpose.
Some will be entirely to do with their own personal preferences, aims and desires – perhaps proximity to home, an easier commute, a less demanding job or even friendships formed.
Are those reasons enough for you to entrust them with the client experience? I hope so.
But it might be better to be explicit about the values, behaviours, principles, vision and purpose.
That way you’ll both know for sure. And be able to act accordingly.
“The trouble with the sunshine” laughed the shop assistant, “is that it shows up how dirty the windows are.” “Tell me about it! What’s your secret for cleaning them?” I replied.
“I bring in my own e-cloths from home. I use one wet – just water- then the other to dry off. Works perfectly every time.”
That was a great tip (I tried it, it does work perfectly), but the thing that really struck me was the “I bring my own e-cloths in from home.”
People want to take pride in their work.
If you think they don’t, you might be what’s stopping them.
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.
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.
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.
The 11th principle outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” “A good service is usable by everyone, equally”, follows on from the previous one, and similarly, gets broken when companies don’t think hard enough about who their users are, and what the circumstances of that user might realistically be at the time they need to use the service. Nowadays it’s very hard to get a decent job without having a bank account, and impossible to get a bank account without having somewhere to live. That makes getting a proper job much harder than it should be for someone who is homeless – even if they have just become homeless and jobless through no fault of their own.
I’m exploring these principles from a different perspective, that of a business that delivers through other people. From this perspective, your team are your users, and services are the processes you build to help them share and deliver your promise on your behalf.
Looked at this way, it seems to me that principle no 11 is hardly ever applied inside companies. We expect every employee to conform to an impossible ideal of whatever is ‘normal’ for us – perfectly fit, permanently healthy, well-balanced and educated. We expect them to behave as if they have nobody to consider except themselves. We assume they are willing and able to fit their home-life around the demands of the business.
A little reflection on how your own life has changed over the years should make it obvious that this is unrealistic and unfair. And coronavirus has made many realise that it isn’t that difficult to put right.
So, as you design the services through which your team will deliver, thereby earning their living, make sure they are able to do that whatever their circumstances. Enable flexible working, remote working, part-time working, job-sharing. Make the process adaptable, so that each person can adjust things to suit their abilities and working style. Measure results instead of attendance. Make admin and reporting a side-effect of the process and ensure feedback is sent when and where it has the best effect.
The brilliant thing is that by making your services deliverable by anyone, you make it easier for everyone, and give yourself a wider, deeper pool of talent to draw on. By making the job easier for your team, you’ll deliver better results for your clients, and your business.
Handrails, like good processes, are there to provide stability or support, and prevent injurious falls.
But the most elegant way to descend a staircase is to do so without needing the handrail; the hand lightly skimming it as you go, or if you’re really good, twirling a cane while you dance your way down.
Sometimes, its enough to know that the rail is there, like that blade of grass you cling to when descending a steep, rough hill. It’s not going to hold you up, but it gives you the psychological courage to move.
Good processes, like handrails, support an interesting journey in the right direction, they don’t force you into a single track.
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.