Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework

Optimalism
January 6, 2019

Optimalism

It sometimes seems to me that the world is divided into two ways of dealing with uncertainty.

You can expect the worst, and try to protect yourself from that possibility by tightly specifying and controlling everything down to the last detail.

Or you can expect the best, and leave everything to chance.

Neither response is optimal. The first closes off opportunities to do better than expected. The second leads to drift.

A more constructive approach is to set direction, leaving latitude for serendipity, obliquity and creativity, measuring effects as you go.

That way, whatever your natural bias, the worst that happens is that things get better.

Practice makes perfect
December 19, 2018

Practice makes perfect

Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.

A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.

By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.

Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.

This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.

And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.

A business notation?
November 20, 2018

A business notation?

Here’s what I think works well:

  • Simplicity. A small number of elements with very few variations. In the above example, bubbles represent Activities, the arrows the pathways that can be taken through them.
  • Plain language – what I call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ – as spoken by ordinary people. Active verbs, combined where needed with a single noun. Together they express the desired outcome of the Activity.
  • Some rigour, but not rigidity. The aim is to communicate the what to a competent and intelligent human being, not a robot or a computer. A bit of fuzziness is tolerable if it helps to get the idea across in an uncluttered way.

The Millennial Mis-match
October 30, 2018

The Millennial Mis-match

I hear a lot from fellow small business owners about millennials and their younger successors, mostly not good.

“arrogant and entitled.”

“the attention span of a goldfish”

“think they can choose when and where they work.”,

“think they should have a say in everything.”

“won’t be told.”

“can’t stick at anything.”,

“don’t distinguish between life at work and life outside work.”

“aren’t responsible.”

“always letting me down”

I think it’s unlikely that young people today are that different from me at their age.

It’s more likely that there is a simple mismatch of what ‘work’ means.

Like me, millennials crave agency, meaning, mastery and self-fulfilment. They also crave connection. They want to collaborate and co-create, not work for.

They want responsibility.

So why not call their bluff?

Give them responsibility, and the autonomy to deliver on it.

Support them, create feedback mechanisms that tell you and them how they’re doing.

Reward them for the results they deliver, not for being ‘at work’.

It worked for me, and you never know, you might just please everyone.