Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework

Roles
May 10, 2023

Roles

One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.

It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.

Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice.  There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.

Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on.  There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it.   And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.

In The Disappearing Boss,  I use a similar idea.   A Role is a part played in a performance by a person.   It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.

Here’s an example from one of my clients.  Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:

The definition of the Ship's Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op. It covers what the Ship does,what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed.  They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships.  What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.

As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing.  One person can play many Roles.  A given Role can be played by many people.  Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.

At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable.  Worth coming back for again and again.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Order with feeling
May 2, 2023

Order with feeling

I didn’t get much reading done this weekend.

Instead I’ve been sorting fabrics.

Over the years I’ve built up an extensive collection of vintage fabrics and shirts that I’ve been intending to use for quilts.  I like the idea of recycling other people’s cast-offs into new and interesting material.

My collection was all over the place, scattered across different parts of the house, all colours jumbled together in various bags too heavy to move.

So my job over the last week or so has been to sort through it, chuck some, earmark some for passing on, and get the rest cut up for flatter storage, organised into smaller labelled bags.

It’s been hard work, but pleasant, evoking some happy memories.  I picked through a bag of scraps – far too small to actually use – remembering the velvet teddy I made for one niece; the bright Provencal backpack I made for another; the tartan dinosaur I made for a colleague’s wedding; the bean bags I made for nephews, and the enormous one I tie-dyed to commission for another colleague.  Then I threw the scraps away.

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.  I can’t draw or paint.  But give me something concrete to work with and I can create useful things that also look unexpectedly good.  Pottery, jewellery making, woodwork, patchwork – those are more my style.

Also businesses.

Give me a business, that perhaps feels a bit disorganised, a bit scattered, not quite coherent.  Yet nevertheless amazing.   I’ll teach its owners to re-arrange it into an elegant sysem for making and keeping promises that becomes more than the sum of its parts.  Ordered, scalable, yet still full of of feeling, it becomes an heirloom they’ll be even more proud to pass on.

In business as in patchwork, Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

The best of both worlds
April 11, 2023

The best of both worlds

Big businesses (or perhaps just their shareholders) crave nothing more than the certainty of increasing profits.   That’s what capitalism means.

To that end, they put a hard boundary around their businesses, turning them into closed systems, where everything is rigidly controlled, organised to maximise profit and nothing else.

The trouble is that a closed system cannot learn.  So when the life around that business changes (as it certainly will) the only way for a closed-system business to deliver the certainty it promises to shareholders is first, to eat itself, generating ‘shareholder value’ by shrivelling it’s own organs, or selling them;  or, worse, to seek to impose control onto its surroundings, turning them as rigid and sterile as itself.

Good businesses, the ones that get to stay big and profitable without financial or geopolitical engineering, are those that put a border around themselves instead.

Borders are permeable.  They allow new ideas in, act as an early warning system for change, create a safe space for experimentation.  They turn a closed system into an open one, yet retain enough control to allow a business to choose which changes they adopt, on purpose.

The best businesses add a twist to this.

They create themselves as an open system for making and keeping promises – not to shareholders, but to their customers. Profits become a side-effect of the system’s purpose. And ironically, become more certain.

They stick to their promise, always learning from their customers and their team what the world outside wants, and re-package their promise to meet that demand, adjusting the way the share and keep it along the way.

Great businesses constantly balance order with openness to get the best of both worlds, a business that can thrive forever, whatever the circumstances.

 

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty
April 5, 2023

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty

When  your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use.   That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.

The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity.   To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.

Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.

All you need to do is to build the firm core:

First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:

  • Define the people you serve in terms of psychographics, not demographics.
  • Define how you serve them in terms of their deeper needs, not passing wants.
  • Define how you achieve that in terms of values and behaviours, not external measures.

Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:

  • Identify the demographic(s) most likely to contain enough people of the right psychographic.
  • Understand what matters to them right now.
  • Identify what dis-ables the motivated.
  • Design a package that addresses what these people need right now.

Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:

  • Embodies your distinctive values and behaviours.
  • Can be played by any competent musician.
  • Enables each musician to bring their own experience and personality to their performance.
  • Allows them to create a new interpretation of your Promise when they encounter the new and unexpected.

Make sure you gather feedback:

  • From the Score as it is being played.
  • From the people you seek to serve and the people who work with you.
  • From your regulator if you have one, and your industry.
  • From the impact you makes on the people and planet around you.

Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:

  • Make sure everyone can play the whole Score.
  • Give them regular R&D time, in the company of fellow players, to tweak or re-design the Score, in response to feedback, learning each other’s strengths as they go.

Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty.  You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Big step
March 8, 2023

Big step

Repeat your Baby Step and Next Step until your entire Customer Experience Score has been written down and can be played as well as or better than you by everyone and anyone in your team.

This will take time, but the payoff is huge.

Your team will be happier and more engaged with the business.   Supported by a clear framework for the least that should happen, they can dare to delight more.  It will feel more like their business.

Your clients will notice the difference.

You’ll be able to disappear when you need to and grow the business further.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Next step
March 6, 2023

Next step

The more people who know how to do what up to now only you could do, the better.

So, once you’ve got your first section of Score written down, get the person who helped you to teach everyone else how to play it too.

Then, once everyone is familiar with it, get them to take turns performing it for real.

Collect their suggestions for improvement.   After  week or so, discuss them with your team, and apply only those that enhance your Promise of Value for the people your business serves.

That might mean automating some piece of drudgery that enables the team to spend more time with clients.   It might mean un-automating something to make a client/team experience more human for both of them.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that truly lives up to your Promise and that anyone can run as well as or better than you.

You don’t have to do this alone.

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Start here
March 2, 2023

Start here

Years ago, after a holiday in the North East, where we saw the Great North Run kick off, I decided I wanted to join in.   I’ve never been a runner, and had no clue how to begin training or where to even start.

After a bit of searching I found a handy spreadsheet online (yes it was that long ago), that would take me from 0 to 5k in about 12 weeks.

The first step was to go out, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds, run for 30 seconds, walk for 90 seconds – and repeat till 20 minutes was up.

Gradually, the proportion of running to walking stepped up, until by the end we were running for the full 20 minutes, and eventually, for forty minutes.  I could run 5k without stopping.

If contemplating 40 minutes of non-stop running when I couldn’t run a step was daunting, imagine the thought of getting everything about your Ideal Customer Experience written down as a score.  Paralysing.

Luckily, you can just get going with with a tiny part of it.   Here are some ideas of where you could begin:

  • With something really simple, almost ‘trivial’, like how you open for business each working day, and how you close.  You’ll be amazed what a difference a clear, shared routine makes for everyone.
  • With the most painful part of your Customer Experience.  Where you get most questions from clients or team members, where you have to intervene most often to put things right.
  • With the easiest part of your Customer Experience.  Where writing it down will enable you to delegate the process to others quickly, so you get the headspace to think about the more painful parts.

Like learning to run, it gets easier as you practice, especially if you have a coach alongside you correcting your stance and your style.

But the most important thing is to start.   Here.  Now.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Now share the work
February 8, 2023

Now share the work

Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.

To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.    To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.    To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.

Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this.  But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.

And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.

Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”

Two tools in one
February 6, 2023

Two tools in one

A musical score is a multi-use tool.   For the composer, its a tool for thinking, for designing.   The score gives concrete shape to the music that’s playing in their head. And once concrete, it can be more easily modified and improved, until it fully reflects their intentions.

From then on, the score also becomes a different kind of tool.  A tool for communicating that vision to the players who will be responsible for delivering it.   A tool that tells them what the performance must convery, without telling them how to do it.    Because as experienced artists, they know that already.

A score can switch between these two uses as many times as it needs to.

A Customer Experience Score works the same way.   It’s a design tool for the business owner, a communications tool for their team.    And like a musical score it can switch between these uses whenever it needs to.

Perhaps even after its composer has disappeared, if the players feel strongly enough about the original vision.