Enabling Framework – Page 14 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 14, 2021

Fractals

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.

December 17, 2020

“Improvisation is what life does. Nothing living, from a bacterium to a blue whale, has a script for their life. This includes you. Somehow or other every living being copes with untold complexity without a plan, and always has.” Robert Poynton ‘DO/IMPROVISE’

‘The counter argument to that’, my husband replies, ‘is that these are the result of millions of generations of evolution and dead-ends. You and I don’t have that much time, which is why we plan and design’.

I agree, and to be fair, Poynton isn’t recommending that we improvise our way through life and business (although it would be interesting to explore how far we could go with that, like lilies of the field). And living things aren’t improvising randomly. That ‘somehow or other’ is underpinned by a set of simple rules for responding to things you can’t control. The driver is a process that leads to a single outcome, reproduction. The result is ‘order without control’, a self-organising system for delivering an outcome.

But without the capacity to improvise, all you have is a machine. Inflexible, slow to change and ultimately fragile.

You don’t need to build a business as a machine, with every thing designed precisely down to the nth degree. Get the driver right, then let improvisation keep it relevant. Create a process for delivering the right customer experience, driven by your unique Promise of Value. Use the process as a framework for action, that empowers your people to see the offer in the unexpected or exceptional and act accordingly.

The discipline that makes daring possible leads to order without control and a business that truly lives.

Forever if you want it to.

December 15, 2020

Everything’s an offer

Yesterday I started reading ‘DO/IMPROVISE’ by Robert Poynton. It starts with another of those lovely diagrams that you only have to see to be changed by:

It’s the bit in the middle that’s powerful. ‘EAO’ stands for ‘Everything’s An Offer’.

An improv term, an ‘offer’ is what a fellow actor or audience member gives you to build on as you improvise a scene or story together. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how random it is, your job is to take it and use it to build your next offer, so that everyone can keep the scene going to a satisfactory conclusion for all. None of you know what that conclusion is until you find it.

The only part of the process you control is your own ability to spot offers, see their potential and react in a way that increases that potential for someone else.

After what 2020’s thrown at us, that might just be the attitude to cultivate for 2021.

December 2, 2020

Inclusivity

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.

November 9, 2020

Good Service

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:

Easy to find
Clearly explains its purpose
Set a user’s expectations of the service
Enable each user to complete the outcome they set out to do
Work in a way that is familiar
Require no prior knowledge to use
Agnostic of organisational structures
Minimum possible steps to complete
Consistent throughout
No dead ends
Usable by everyone, equally
Encourage the right behaviours from everyone
Quickly respond to change
Clearly explain why a decistion has been made
Make it easy to get human assistance

And in the process deliver these qualities:

It does what the user needs it to do, in a way that works for them
It’s profitable and easy to run
It does not destroy the world we live in, or negatively affect society as a whole

I would also add:

Expresses and reinforces your Promise of Value at every turn.

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.

October 27, 2020

Reminders

We like to remind ourselves of what we have ‘to do’. But we all too easily forget the why behind them. It’s easy to get derailed by happenstance and other people’s agendas. This isn’t helped by systems that focus on tasks rather than outcomes.

True productivity (adding value) is driven by focusing on the why. What if you built a system that constantly reminds people of that?

Given the why, they can probably work out the best thing to do next.

October 9, 2020

What if it works?

What happens if it works?

Every improvement we make to our business doesn’t just change the business. It changes us too. And that is a truly scary thought. What if we don’t like our future selves? What if other people don’t like them either?

We forget of course, that our self has changed with every improvement we’ve ever made, and yet we are the same person we’ve always been.

Composing your Customer Experience Score won’t make you a different person. It will simply enable more of the real you to come out.

And by bringing your whole self to bear on composing it, you’ll do the same for everyone that plays it, and everyone that experiences it.

September 14, 2020

Interference

Last Friday, the materials for our new roof were delivered. Tiles, ridge tiles, clips, battens, everything the roofers would need to start the job the following day.

Except, I spotted, the membrane that goes between joists and tiles. Without that the job couldn’t even start. To be honest, we’re relaxed about the schedule, but I knew our building company prides itself on being ahead, rather than behind, and our choice of tiles had taken time to source, so they were only just ‘on track’.

I could see the delivery driver had a pallet-load of it on his truck, so I asked the question, just in case. It wasn’t on his delivery sheet, so he called the office. They didn’t have it in the order either.

“Well I’ve got a pallet load here, so I’ll take a roll off and we can sort out the order with our client back in the office. That saves me coming back later if it is missing.”

When I told our project manager, she said that’s why they always use that building supply company, because they focus first on foremost on taking care of their clients and end-users, rather than sticking rigidly to procedure.

I’d interfered in the process wrongly, as it happened. The membrane wasn’t missing. When the roofers turned up next day, they brought a big roll of it with them, and put it back in their van once they saw it wasn’t needed.

Obviously what was really missing was a clear understanding of who’s responsible for what, apart from inside the project manager’s head. Does it always work this way? Or does that depend on the roofer? If everyone (including the client?) knows it’s always the supplier’s job to supply everything, this sort of mix-up wouldn’t happen.

What could remedy that? A Customer Experience Score.

Not a procedures manual to consult every five minutes and follow slavishly. Rather, a high-level picture of ‘what happens when’ that can be quickly and easily learnt by each new person or business that comes on board. Something that says “This is how we do things, so if you join us, you need to understand this too”. That way everyone is empowered to make sure things happen as they should, even if they don’t actually work for you.

In this case the mix-up happened the right way round. The roofers finished at 10pm on Sunday, having worked their socks off for two days. Our build is back on schedule, and I’m happy to recommend our building company to anyone.

But I’m also going to suggest a little composition.

September 7, 2020

Rules, interpretation, performance.

Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).

An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it. They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it. They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.

Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.

Performance is the source of useful feedback. Everything else is conjecture. The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first. The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience. The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.

All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.

It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance. Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.

2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:

The ‘rules’ can be sketchy, but it’s almost impossible to create outstanding performances intentionally, repeatedly and consistently without any.
Documenting the ‘rules’ is the beginning of the process, not the end.

August 14, 2020

The artist’s hand

“They say that truth is naked. I cannot admit this for any but abstract truths; in the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist.” Delacroix, ‘Journal’.

Your business is your art, your Promise of Value is your truth. Let your people be your fellow artists, and show their hands in the work.

HT to Project Gutenberg for tweeting this. They happen to be a brilliant open source for free e-books.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework