Enabling Framework – Page 11 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 13, 2022

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How often have you been told ‘It must be this way’, ‘This is just how it works’, ‘Things have always been like this’, ‘There is no alternative’?

There is always an alternative. More importantly, there are always alternatives. Always have been throughout human history. Always will be throughout whatever future we have left. Alternatives we’ve designed for ourselves as a counter to what’s on offer.

It’s just that history is told by the victors, and alternatives – especially those that work – are hidden or misrepresented by the people who benefit from the status quo.

So maybe part of our job as owners of purposeful, sustainable and humane businesses is not just to find those alternatives and explore them. It’s also to share them. To show them. To enable people to make up their own minds on which they’d rather choose.

Our models of the world are stories we tell ourselves.

Let’s not get ourselves trapped in just one.

May 12, 2022

And what about everyone else?

It’s not often I think that Seth Godin is being ungenerous. But I think he is in this post.

Of course Seth is writing for his tribe, those with what Shelle Rose Charvet would call an ‘Options’ preference. Who love uncertainty, exploration, overshooting boundaries and blank sheets of paper.

But not everyone works like that. A few like to slavishly follow a process step-by-step. Most of us like to have a map. Or a score we can interpret in our own way.

That doesn’t make us want to be a cog in a machine without responsibility or accountability. It just means we like to see where we are, where the destination is and what the possible routes are. We are perfectly willing to take responsibility, be on the hook, initiate action. It’s just that like children, we play more freely when we can see the boundaries.

Industrial control was never the answer to human flourishing, but neither is a void.

A little bit of discipline makes a lot of daring possible.

April 8, 2022

Feedback is how we learn

A complex evolving system, such as a planet, an ecosystem or a business, learns through feedback.

That means at least 4 things:

There has to be room within the ‘normal process’ for variation.
There has to be a way of recognising repeated variations that should be part of the normal process.
There has to be a way of quickly and easily capturing these into the new ‘normal process’.
There has to be enough ‘slack’/redundancy in the whole system to make the first 3 possible and practical.

Without these, a system fossilises, becomes irrelevant and ultimately dies.

Thanks to Seth Godin for the prompt.

March 18, 2022

Recipes

When you first write down your Customer Experience Score, it’s likely to be very like a recipe – a set of detailed, step-by-step instructions to create a very specific outcome.

That’s great. Recipes can be a great way for you to get stuff out of your head, and for people to build confidence.

But they can also become a trap that undermines confidence. If people have never learned the basic techniques and methods that underly any recipe, its easy for them to become reliant on having exactly the right ingredients, the right pots and pans, the right equipment and the right actions, in the right order…

That makes for a lot of work, a lot of shopping, a lot of planning and a lot of anxiety too, which makes cooking a joyless activity for many.

Cooking doesn’t always have to be ‘fun’, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be relaxed, exploratory, and sometimes, surprising. By understanding the patterns hidden in recipes, we can start to play with them, tasting and learning as we go, until eventually, we can improvise a nourishing meal out of whatever we happen to have in the kitchen.

The same is true for your Customer Experience Score – recipes can be a great start. But results will get better if you allow people to tweak and experiment and improvise a little. Just make sure to ‘taste as you go’ and things will be fine. Eventually, people won’t need the recipes, they’ll be able to improvise a great customer experience with the resources around them and the customer in front of them.

Who knows? One day, their Bara Brith will be even better than yours.

If you’d like to become an effortless cook, my friend Katerina is running a workshop next weekend.

I did this and it honestly changed my life.

February 3, 2022

The trough of inefficiency

It’s a well-known phenomenon. As a one-person or few-person business grows and adds more people it becomes less and less efficient. As more people are added and roles are specialised, overheads are added too – of communication, coordination and support, and eventually management.

The result is that a business spends time in what Seth Godin calls The trough of inefficiency. Perhaps even getting stuck there forever.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When you started your business, you were its CEO – Chief Everything Officer. You did everything, gradually shaping a unique end-to-end process for making and keeping promises to the people you serve. A process that works.

We fall into the trough of inefficiency because we think of our businesses as pin-factories – a set of tiny, repetitive operations chained together, managed by someone who can see the bigger picture, who has the whole process in their head.

Why not simply replicate the Chief Everything Officer instead?

If you can do it, so can someone else. Especially if you tell them what you do.

Tell them your Promise, Tell them what you do to make it, and what you do to keep it. Write it down like music in a Customer Experience Score so that they can run the whole thing themselves, even when you’re not in the room.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you only need meetings for business-changing decisions, not the day-to-day.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you don’t depend on specialists. When everyone knows everything that needs doing, they can support each other.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, You don’t need managers. People co-ordinate themselves, managing their own Customer Experiences.

Even better, further growth is simple. For more impact, add more Chief Everything Officers.

A Customer Experience Score can your ladder out of the trough of inefficiency.

It works just as well as a bridge to stop you falling in in the first place.

January 12, 2022

The stories we tell others

If you visit a National Trust property, every person you meet is likely to be a volunteer. An individual providing this service in their spare time, for nothing. Yet the experience is remarkably similar across hundreds of houses and thousands of volunteers.

How do they achieve this? There are no scripts. Nothing is prescribed, apart from some simple Covid-19 distancing notices. Every volunteer performance is unique.

What every National Trust building does have is a story. The story of the building and the people associated with it – usually the famous one who commissioned it, built it or lived in it.

Every volunteer (whether they are a room guide, a shop assistant or a gardener) is expected to know this story, to research around it and to tell it. But they can do all of that in their own way, including details and providing context as they see fit, tailored to the visitors in front of them, in their own personal style.

The most basic ‘customer experience score’ is the story everyone can tell. For a business it’s the story of how you make and keep your promise to the client.

What’s your story?

Can everyone in your business tell it?

How do you help new people learn it?

December 3, 2021

It’s me they want

It’s a trap many founders of service businesses fall into. You start off as the technician, doing everything, and at first you love it.

Then you grow your client base, and with it a team to help you serve them. Yet it seems, no matter how much you reassure them that your team is capable, no matter how much extra you charge them for the privilege, clients insist that you are the one that looks after them. Or, they insist that it’s a particular member of your team that looks after them. You get overloaded, and your team lose out on the chance to grow.

The answer is to make sure a new client or a new project starts with one of your team, not you. Perhaps random, perhaps thoughtfully matched to each others’ working styles. That means making sure everyone knows how to make and keep your business promise as well as or better than you, from start to finish. And that means articulating what that experience looks like.

There’s nothing wrong with being relationship-based – I’m all for connection between people – but the deepest relationship you want to forge is one between the client and your business, where the client’s experience will be consistently outstanding, no matter who delivers it. Not identical, consistent.

The more you enable your team to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!“, the more clients you’ll be able to delight, without killing yourself or your team in the process.

November 22, 2021

Indispensable

It feels nice to be wanted. To be the fount of all knowledge . To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question. To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making. To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware. Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak. An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first. The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive. It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make. It can easily become a trap for you. And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions. Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know. As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score. Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience. Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together. Review the score. Adjust if necessary.

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end. Get it out there.

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.

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.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework