Enabling Framework – Page 10 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 30, 2022

In your head, in the world

The reason you can wander around a new town centre without getting run over is that you don’t have to remember or even really know, how a town centre works. The information you need to navigate and interact with it successfully is built into its design.

Pavements tell you where you can walk. Kerbs tell you where the pavement ends. Different paving tells you which parts are pedestrianised. Black and white stripes tell you where you can cross the parts reserved for motor vehicles. Shopfronts and market stalls tell you where you can buy things. Litter bins tell you where to put rubbish.

Much of the knowledge of what a town centre is and how to use it is ‘in the world’, which means it doesn’t have to be in your head. Once you’ve encountered one town centre, you have a mental model – an enabling framework – that you can apply to the next, without having to remember every detail.

Knowledge ‘in the world’ enables us to use our experience to deal with the new and unexpected safely. When our town centre introduced ‘shared space’ – space that pedestrians and motor vehicles are meant to share nicely – they helpfully made it from patterned paving so walkers didn’t mistake it for a pedestrianised area, in black and white so that cars knew to expect pedestrians. They also added low-level signage to tell everyone this was something new.

It’s worked brilliantly.

Knowledge ‘in the world’ saves us brain space and effort.

So why do we business owners insist on trapping all the knowledge of how our business should work inside our heads?

August 24, 2022

The revenge of Muri – a reprise

When times look good, or you think nobody will notice, it’s tempting to overload systems, processes and people.

A little cut here, a small increase in workload there. A freeze on recruitment, a delay of re-equipping or upgrading. It has no visible effect on the bottom line. You get away with it.

So it becomes tempting to do it again. To ‘keep it lean’, ‘cut no slack’, ask people to ‘lean in’, commit 100% 110%, 120%, 150%.

And again.

Then, when you’ve cut everything to the bone and built your entire system on just in time, lowest cost, no slack, it doesn’t take much to bring the whole thing crashing down.

It’s not rocket science. We are part of a system. Overloading any part of it is not sensible behaviour. Overloading all of it at once is madness.

Freeloaders will try, of course, because it means they can extract a higher immediate return. Blind to the fact that they will not be able to enjoy it.

It’s up to the rest of us to prevent them. For their sakes as well as ours.

August 22, 2022

Confusions

Stick insects confuse their predators on purpose. They pretend to be a twig. A predator already has a mental model of what a twig is and how it works, which doesn’t include being edible. So it leaves the insect ‘twig’ alone.

We humans confuse people all the time. Sometimes on purpose, most often by accident. We assume that our mental model of the thing we’re building will be obvious to everyone who buys it, uses it or operates it. Yet that is rarely the case.

Take a small business. For a shareholder or investor it’s a machine for generating returns. For founders it’s a way to make a dent in the universe or their route to a coveted lifestyle. For their accountant it’s a set of connected accounts. For an operations manager it’s a set of loosely related functions, one of which they probably consider to be the most important. For some employees it’s a means to enjoy life outside work. For others it’s a lifeline, and for others still a vocation. For a customer it’s a solution to a problem.

Conflicting mental models pull people in different directions and make the thing you’re building confusing, less effective and ultimately unusable.

The answer?

Use a model that is simple, easy to communicate and effective in delivering what everyone wants.
Design the thing you’re building around that model, so that the way it works clearly reflects the concept behind it.
Share your model in your marketing materials, shareholder reports, filed accounts, operations manual, help guides and status reports, so that it becomes a joy to interact with, whatever your role.

If you’re a small business owner, you might like to use mine:

It works well, if you want to create a business that can last or that can grow.

Or both, if that’s what you want.

August 16, 2022

Keep it simple, stupid

I’m facing a really interesting challenge at the moment.

Over many years I’ve developed a methodology, notation and software for capturing a Customer Experience Score in a way that suits people rather than machines. My notation is very simple. There aren’t many rules, and even those are only casually enforced.

This is because it’s all about making it easy for ordinary mortals. Whether that’s a business owner wanting to capture their desired customer experience or one of their colleagues wanting to learn what’s needed to deliver that experience. My aim is to make the software easy to learn and easy to use, and above all flexible so that the people using it can start scrappy, and build up to whatever level of detail works for them.

My challenge now is that some of those humans want to generate something more formal from their Score, something that needs clear rules to produce an output.

It’s interesting because it’s showing me how fuzzy (and sometimes inconsistent) my logic is. This is fine for humans, because humans are perfectly capable of interpreting fuzziness, and in any case I want to leave plenty of room for interpretation. It’s not so fine for software.

One approach would be to make the tool more rigorous, more constrained, more precise. In other words, to make it more machine-like. But that would mean adding levels of detail that would soon become excruciating for any ordinary mortal.

No, my work is all about liberating humans to be human, so I have to find another way, and I think it’s this: If humans are good with fuzziness and nuance, and machines are not, let the machine ignore all that and concentrate on the essentials.

For stupid machines, the answer might just be to keep it simple.

August 12, 2022

The war for talent

There’s a talent war going on.

Companies are spending a fortune searching for that perfect new recruit – you know, the one with 10 years experience of a 3-year old industry; who can bring fresh eyes to your business plus an intimate knowledge of how you do things; who will ‘go the extra mile’ for a bit less pay than the last person in that role, and none of the perks.

What if instead of looking for unicorns, you gave everyone in your business the responsibility and autonomy they crave, a Customer Experience Score to follow and a share of the profits they make?

You’d probably find there’s more than enough talent in your business already.

It’s just that you’re wasting it.

August 8, 2022

Magic dust

On Saturday we tried out the Elizabeth Line to Paddington. Just to see what it is like.

Brilliant!

A bus from the end of our road, 30 minutes to Paddington.

On the way home we kept thinking of new places that would now be easy to reach, and some old places that would be even easier to reach.

This new line has opened new possibilities to many.

Can your business do that?

PS the clouds in the picture are actually piles of dust on the roof of the exit. Looking beautiful from this angle against the blue sky. Once you were out, you could see it was just dust. Magical though.

July 4, 2022

A tender impact

Patrick Hurley takes a huge blank piece of paper, thinks about what he wants to draw – ‘It’s going to be a ring, I want it to have depth, it will be made of squares‘ – marks a few points for guidance.

Then he draws. In a single continuous line.

From a distance the result has impact. There’s a clear structure, a vision – you might almost say a purpose to it.

Up close, you feel tenderness for the humanity of it. The wobbles, the inconsistencies, the variation, the failure to keep to the ‘perfect’ alignment.

‘It’s like life,‘ says Patrick ‘You can only go forward, if you make a mistake, do better next time, or do something that atones for it.’

Yes.

Work is part of life. So why not approach it this way too? Create a framework with clear boundaries, a goal and a method for achieving it. Then let everyone add their own humanity.

Impact with tenderness.

Find Patrick and more of his work on instagram: @hurleyman03.

June 23, 2022

Regenerating business

What is it that people want?

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

We want to be citizens. Collaborating with purpose on something bigger than ourselves.

What if, instead of building our businesses to sell stuff – that might create a fleeting sensation of one or more of these things, we built them as a means to enable people to genuinely achieve these things?

We could repair and enrich our world instead of impoverishing it.

It’s not too late for Disicpline to make Daring possible.

June 20, 2022

Going with the grain

We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.

This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.

As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.

So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.

Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.

We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.

And we’re out of practice.

That’s where small businesses come in.

Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?

Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?

When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?

And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

June 8, 2022

Handshake overhead

“Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.” Seth Godin, from this post.

Only if you’ve designed your business so that everyone needs someone else’s approval to get things done.

The great thing about designing your business to be more like an orchestra than a pin-factory, is that if you want to make more noise you simply add more players.

Give each new player a copy of the Customer Experience Score to follow, a bit of time to practise, then simply let them get on with it.

If everyone in your business knows how to make and keep your Promise from beginning to end, there’s no need for them to get anyone’s approval first.

Least of all yours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework