Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework

We all make mistakes
August 13, 2020

We all make mistakes

It’s impossible to be right all the time, especially in the midst of ‘unprecedented’ happenings.

But it is entirely possible to be transparently fair all the time.   Especially if you have a compass to guide decision-making where there is no map.

So, when you see ‘mistakes’ produced by an opaque process following an invisible compass, it’s legitimate, even necessary to ask questions:

  • Why is it like this?
  • What does this say about the compass of the people who designed it?
  • Why isn’t that compass explicit?
  • What needs to change to make the process fairer and more open next time?

With a clearly visible compass and a fair, transparent process for your business, your people can’t go far wrong.   Even when they’re not right.

Give it up.
July 14, 2020

Give it up.

You start your own business to take back control.   To be at nobody’s beck and call.   To do what you think is right by your clients.

Once you get good at that, you outsource key functions, take people on to help you deliver, and suddenly, you’ve lost it.   The control has gone.   You’re at the beck and call of clients, or team members, or suppliers, and it seems impossible to get people to do things the way you would.

A natural reaction is to tighten your hands on the reins, supervise more, intervene more, even to redo the work.

Micromanagement doesn’t work.   You only end up working harder, being a nag, and training your people to give up trying.

Instead, give control away as soon as you can.

Not by abdicating, not even by handing it over to superstar colleagues, but by installing your DNA into the way the business works, so that it works the way you want it to when you’re not in the room.

Strangely, creating this kind of control is liberating:

  • For your people, because they know the outcomes they are aiming for, and what needs to happen to achieve them, plus they have the freedom to do that with flair and personality.
  • For you, because you can relax your vigilance, and concentrate on growing and evolving your business.
  • For your business, because its no longer dependent on the individuals who happen to be there at any one time.

We call this writing your Score.  Because once you’ve written it, the music you and your orchestra are creating now can last forever, no matter who plays it, or how.

If you want to take back control, start by giving it all away.

“Not with the people I’ve got” Or, how to waste talent efficiently.
July 13, 2020

“Not with the people I’ve got” Or, how to waste talent efficiently.

Back in the 70’s there was a TV series called ‘The Troubleshooter’.

Each week, captain of industry Sir John Harvey-Jones would visit an ailing British manufacturing company, and advise them on how to turn around their fortunes.

One of his insights really stuck in my mind.   It goes something like this:

“These people working for you, have a rich life outside work, where they build complex systems, run clubs, manage budgets, research everything there is to know about their particular interest, invent things.  You make them leave all of that at the door.   What a waste!”

Whenever I tell people about Matt Black Systems, a manufacturing company with no managers, no administrators, and almost no overheads, the reply I most often get is “I couldn’t do that, not with the people I’ve got.”

It’s not the people that are the problem, it’s our model of what a business is.   50 years on from ‘The Troubshooter’, we’re using AI and automation to track and reward attendance, not contribution.

That’s an efficient waste of talent.

Stakeholders
June 18, 2020

Stakeholders

I’ve written before about multiple stakeholders, so I was pleased to hear what Brian Chesky shared about who he considers to be the stakeholders of Airbnb.

Yes, shareholders.    But also employees (who also hold equity), visitors, hosts, suppliers, partners and the communities they operate in.

What particularly struck me was the way Chesky has designed in consideration for each set of stakeholders into the way the business works.  

Here are his recommended first steps for setting up in business:

  1. Define your core values.
  2. Define your principles – the things you believe to be true that other businesses don’t.
  3. Write down all your stakeholders.
  4. Then, for each stakeholder set, define 2 or 3 promises you make to them that you will never break.

I love this!  It means that a business is a system for making and keeping promises – to all its stakeholders.

Sometimes, its impossible to keep all your stakeholders happy, as Airbnb found right at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.  But it seems that for Airbnb, knowing the promises they’ve pledged to keep has helped them to do the right things, in the right way, as far as they can. 

And in the long run, this is what keeps the public wanting you to exist.

*Freeman, R. & Reed, Dl. (1983). Stockholders and Stakeholders: A New Perspective on Corporate Governance. California Management Review. 25. 10.2307/41165018. 

Deep and deliberate delegation
May 4, 2020

Deep and deliberate delegation

I re-read this book by Dave Stitt over the weekend, and frankly, it made me jealous.

It is just so good.

Clearly and simply written, sharing tools and techniques I’ve never seen before, it delivers a really powerful combination of thought and action, insight and how-to, theory and process.

All of which makes it a much deeper, more thought-provoking read than most business books, yet still one that prompts you to get on and have a go for yourself.

If you are taking stock of how you delegate in your business, with a view to doing it much, much better, I thoroughly recommend this book.

Deep and deliberate.   Pretty good rules to do business by.

Working to a pattern
February 28, 2020

Working to a pattern

It’s hard to imagine making any garment successfully without having a pattern to work to and a picture of what the finished product should look like.

Yet we expect our teams to do exactly that every day.

With predictably ill-fitting results.

Beware the black box.
February 3, 2020

Beware the black box.

The great thing about a musical score is that it tells you what to play, not how.   It tells you which notes, in which order and at what speed.  It can also give you hints about the mood you’ll be trying to create.

What it doesn’t tell you is how to play those notes.   It assumes you know.   Neither does the score dictate what instrument is used.   As long as you produce the right notes, in the right order and at the right speed to produce the required mood, you can play them on anything – from a crumhorn, to an electric guitar, to a computer – and the listener will probably recognise the music.

This is what gives a musical score longevity.  It can be picked up centuries after it was originally written, played with completely different instruments by completely different people, yet sound broadly the same as when it was first performed.

Imagine what would have happened if Mozart had simply taught his musicians their parts by rote, tightly coupling the ‘what must happen’ with the ‘how we make it happen at the moment’.

He would have created a black box, that could make music only for as long as the specific players he taught could remember it, or the instruments they used were available.  A black box limited by the number of people Mozart could physically teach; that would be impossible to interrogate, update or re-interpret; that would quickly become obsolete.

If you seek longevity or scale for your enterprise, keep ‘what must happen’ separate from ‘how we make it happen at the moment’.  Given the ‘what’, future generations will be able to work out ‘how’ for themselves.

Civilisation
January 21, 2020

Civilisation

Once people had seen a wheel, they didn’t have to invent it.  They used it to improve a process – moving heavy things, hunting, war, playing.

Once people in England had seen a brick house, they didn’t have to invent it.   They used it as a model for building new, bigger,  more comfortable houses.  Then they used it as a model to build more comfortable and permanent houses for more people.

Once people saw the internet, they didn’t have to invent it.   They used it to re-invigorate old processes – shopping, talking, sharing information.

Once you have a process for doing something, you don’t have to invent it.   You can build on it to regenerate old processes you want to keep, or to create new processes that were not possible before.  You can use it to come up with a much better version.

Our civilisation is built on streamlining processes to make room for inventing new ones.

Many people see ‘process’ as restrictive, stultifying, oppressive.

That’s not because it’s process, it’s because people are inventing the wrong things.

Taking chances
September 16, 2019

Taking chances

It’s impossible to predict every possible scenario.   So instead of trying to plan for every eventuality, it’s much better to simply keep your options open.

The trick is to minimise the possible downside, while allowing the upside to take care of itself.   So, if you can protect your restaurant from the worst effects of a storm, you can stay open, when others around you don’t.  If everyone is evacuated (including you), you’re no worse off than if you had closed anyway.  If they aren’t, you’re going to be popular.

This is what it means to be antifragile – the downside won’t kill you, while the upside benefits you significantly.

The beauty of this idea is that it makes dealing with risk much simpler.  All you really need is to understand what might kill you, and mitigate the effects of that – creating a floor, below which nothing can go, while leaving the ceiling open to the sky.

You can do this with business processes too.  Specify “the least that should happen”, and let humans beings find new ways to add the delight.

Then ratchet up the floor.