Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Enabling Framework

Reproduction
January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged.  If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service.   Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible.  Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable.  Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

Supported Display
December 7, 2022

Supported Display

I took a lot of photos on my visit to the Museum of London at the weekend.  Some, because I liked the thing I was looking at, this one because I liked the way the display system worked.

It’s a very simple system.  A regular grid of holes at the back allows supports to be positioned in a variety of ways to suit what’s being displayed, from a single bronze shield found in the Thames, to a mix of bronxe daggers and swords, to these flint hand tools.  It’s highly structured, yet flexible and very effective.

But what I really liked about it was the way it’s been designed to foreground the objects, providing each one with reliable support, allowing them to seem to float; putting each one in the spotlight, so that you can appreciate the differences between them as well as the similarities.

You know where I’m going with this.

With the almost invisible support of a Customer Experience Score, your people too can shine in the spotlight – both as individuals and as part of the whole that is your business.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

A medieval carved head of a smiling woman in a wimple.

This I just liked, because it reminded me of Geraldine McEwan.

How to do big business with a tiny company
November 22, 2022

How to do big business with a tiny company

I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size.   In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.

How can he do that?

Here are some ideas.

First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it.  Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues.   Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.

Second, let your people manage themselves.   After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility.  Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though.  Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate.   Do this and you can ditch the managers.

Next, get rid of ‘admin’.   Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time.  Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job.   Do this and you can ditch the admin department.

Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service.  In essence make them a one-person instance of your business.   Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.

Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it.  Reward must follow responsibility.  Ownership must be real.  Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier
November 15, 2022

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier

The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.

That’s what makes marketing hard.   Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.

It’s the same for the people you work with.   They don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe.   They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.

That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.

The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they?  After all, you’re paying them.  They need a job.

Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business.  Micro-managing.   Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head.  Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.

So you delegate the micro-management to someone else.  Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe.  Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset.   Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head.    Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?

I believe there is a better way.   Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.

Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.

Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.

Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.

So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.

Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.

It’s quite a job to get all this in place*.  But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier.  Because everyone working the business is standing in for you.  Everyone’s a boss.

And not a manager in sight.

 

*That’s what I do.  Talk to me.

Scaling
October 20, 2022

Scaling

If you’re a micro business looking to serve more people well, consider this before you add the next person to your team:

Are you trying to make your music louder or more complex?

Getting louder is simple.  Just let each new person follow the score you play from, alongside you.   On a different instrument maybe, to give richness to the sound.  Or give them a copy of your score so they can play elsewhere or in a different timezone.   It’ll still be your music, still a personal experience for customers, only nearer to them.

Once you’ve mastered louder, making your music more complex gets easier too.  Write a new score for the new thing you want to offer, teach new or existing people to play it, and put them wherever you want, to harmonise or contrast with your existing musicians.  Better still, make sure every player is able to play every variation, in case they need to.   So you can make your complex music louder.

It’s hard to do both at once without confusing your musicians and your audience.

So if in doubt, I’d start with louder.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Following orders
September 29, 2022

Following orders

Of course there are benefits to simply following orders.  It allows people to avoid responsibility.

Which means that if you want your people to take responsibility, giving them orders won’t work.

Giving them a blank page won’t work either.

You’ll have to find another way.

Anarchy
September 27, 2022

Anarchy

Not many people know this.

I’m an anarchist.

I believe in autonomy and self-determination.   I don’t believe that anyone has the right to tell anyone else what to do – except in rare cases where doing so might save a person’s life.

I also believe in collaboration and co-operation – the getting together of autonomous individuals to achieve something much bigger than themselves.

To co-operate successfully, participants need to know what they have to do.   They need to know when it has to be done.   But that knowledge doesn’t have to come from someone telling them as they go.   It can come from a shared ‘document’ everyone can access, whenever they need to.

That’s why I like the idea of a business as an orchestra.

Often, when people think of an orchestra, they focus on the conductor.   But the conductor isn’t there to tell players what to do, they’re there to help them keep time, and to provide hints to aid this particular interpretation.   It’s up to each player to choose how to get the right sound out of their instrument at the right time.  What has to happen, when, is recorded by the composer in a score.

The conductor is a role, like a cellist or percussionist, not a position in a hierarchy.   In fact it’s perfectly possible to run a succesful orchestra without a conductor – you simply get people to take turns.

What really pulls an orchestra together is the score – a map of the sound experience to be created for an audience.

The person behind the score is the composer.  They’re the one whose legacy lasts longest, and scales furthest.

So if you’re an employer, and like me, you have a problem with being told what to do, consider rethinking your role.

How could you make yourself a conductor rather than a boss?

Or even better, how could you make yourself a composer?

 

Hint: talk to me about becoming a Disappearing Boss.

Metaphors
September 5, 2022

Metaphors

A metaphor is a shortcut to understanding.

Faster than a speeding bullet, an idea moves fully-formed and sharp as nails, from my head to yours.

The problem is that if a metaphor doesn’t capture some deep truth, it’s actually pernicious.  Dust thrown into the eyes.   A quick and easy way to lie.

The elephant in the room is that everything that matters is far too complex to be captured in a single metaphor.  We live in systems, not storybooks.

So maybe it’s time to see our metaphors for what they are – millstones round our necks, stopping us from making progress.

Let’s abandon them, and find better ways to imagine how the world goes round.

Planning
September 2, 2022

Planning

Here’s a question for next time you feel you need to plan for a big event or outcome:

“What’s the minimum you need to do to enable your people to make it happen?”

The answer might surprise you.

It will almost certainly be less than you thought.

And leave much more room for your people to shine.

Re-creation
August 31, 2022

Re-creation

Back in 1960 Albert B. Lord published a book called “The Singer of Tales“.

In it he shows that in a culture without writing, epic poems and stories are not shared by memorising them word for word, line for line.   Each and every performance – even from the same speaker,  is a reconstruction, a re-creation.

A storyteller is able to do this because they work within an enabling framework, in the form of some key constraints. For example:

  • The storyline is well-known by everyone, so things have to happen in the order they are meant to happen.
  • The heroes and heroines are well-known to everyone, they are recognised by certain key characteristics, summed up in familiar phrases.  These phrases must appear, attached to the right people in the story (or perhaps mis-attached for comic effect) for it to be ‘true’.
  • A poem must follow a particular rhyme and rhythm or metre.   This severely limits the number of words it is possible to use, and therefore the number of words the reciter has to hold in memory.
  • The storyteller operates inside a culture, which has certain expectations about how the world works.  These must be reflected in the recitation if it is to be successful.

The point is that even though each recitation effectively starts from scratch and is actually different from every other, it is perceived by both the speaker and their audience as being a word-perfect, faithful repetition of the last time they heard it.    Every telling is perceived as identical to all other tellings, because against all the criteria that matter, it is.

Once we have writing, everything changes.  Writing is of course a way of putting knowledge ‘in the world’, rather than ‘in the head’.  But there are drawbacks.  Multiple versions of an epic poem get written down, but from now on they are read, not re-created.  All too often a single version becomes canonical – the one against which all others are judged.   We gain in practicality, but lose sponteneity, creativity, surprise.

It seems to me though that it is possible to have the best of both worlds:

  • The bones of a storyline are written down so everything happens in the right order;
  • Key roles are written down so they can be identified and clearly signalled;
  • Stock phrases and formulas are given to act as starters for ten until practice has enabled a person to generate their own;
  • Cultural boundaries are clearly stated – “the least that should happen is…”, “Remember this part of our Promise of Value here”.

That’s what makes a good Customer Experience Score.   Enough constraints to ensure the experience is perceived as consistent, plenty of room for a given person to make that experience personal.  Written down so everyone can learn it, practice it and improve it. On purpose.