Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Humanity

Automate Drudgery
August 10, 2020

Automate Drudgery

I’m a firm believer in automating drudgery – boring, repetitive unsatisfying work, often physically hard, and often involving tasks that we humans really aren’t that good at.

So I welcome software that automates sending emails, or makes it easier to book people onto a job, or does my bank reconciliation for me.

But every time we automate, we insert a veil beween us and the people we serve, making it easier to forget why we are doing the work – to help another human being flourish.  As layers build, it becomes all too easy to slip into thinking about people as mere statistics, rather than the flesh and blood individuals they are.

The way to counteract this is to consciously use the energy and attention released by automation to make a deeper connection with the person on the other side.

For the people who spend their lives behind whole walls of automation and disconnection, this will feel ‘wasteful’.  It isn’t.

It’s an investment that will pay off handsomely, for both sides.

Transience for the long term
August 5, 2020

Transience for the long term

For as long as there have been humans, we have wanted to have the world remember, somehow, that ‘I was here’.

It won’t.

But if we embrace our transience and instead of using our energy to hoard – stuff, money, power, love – we use it to create systems that enrich people and planet, other human beings will.

For a little while at least.

“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.

Wilful Blindness
July 3, 2020

Wilful Blindness

I’ve just finished reading this book, the first of 3 I ordered after hearing Margaret Heffernan on the radio last week.

It’s a worrying and challenging read, exploring and explaining just how naturally easy it is for we humans not to see what’s in right in front of our eyes.

The reasons are varied, from feelings of affinity or love, wanting to fit in or please people in authority, too rigid systems, distance and disconnection, the bystander effect, a narrow focus on money or sheer cognitive overload and exhaustion.   Sometimes, in the worst scenarios, such as Grenfell Tower or Texas City, several reasons combine and exacerbate each other.

The answer is to make ourselves see better. Systematically, intentionally, but never mechanically.

We do that by encouraging diversity of thinking and argument, by thanking whistleblowers, complainers and critics instead of sidelining them.

We do it by constantly reminding ourselves of what we are in business to do – to make and keep promises to human beings, our customers, and by eliminating the hierarchies, silos and long chains of command that get in the way of that.

We do it by creating transparent ways of working that keep our promise visible and support people to hold each other accountable as human beings for seeing what’s really there, and acting on it.

And of course the irony is that if we do these things well, we will create more value and do better financially.  Because its not only bad things we make ourselves wilfully blind to, its also opportunities.

This isn’t my utopia
June 22, 2020

This isn’t my utopia

The thing I love about reading, is that I’m always finding new ways of saying things, from people who can say them much better than me.

This midsummer weekend, I finally got round to reading the Verso edition of Utopia, by Thomas More.  It was not More’s words that struck me, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s – in fact not always her words, but words she assembled, interpreted and discussed in the first of her essays included with this book: “A non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold place to be”.

“The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relationship is reversed in organisms – organic structure is determined by it’s processes”*

“The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.”**

“Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.”

“Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently Organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided.   But, it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization.”***

I (like Le Guin) found Thomas More’s Utopia unsatisfactory.   It is founded on force and maintained through slavery.   It’s activities are determined by its structure.   It is like most utopias,“the product of ‘the euclidean mind’ (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.”****

Here’s a stab at pulling this all together into something relevant for me as Gibbs & Partners:

  • Most human beings, including business owners, are simply trying to persevere in their existence.
  • Most corporates, built as machines, where structure determines process, are inimical to this.   Which is why people, when they get the chance, retire, or leave and set up their own small businesses, often with no idea of growth, simply as a means of persevering in their existence.
  • What I’m making explicit and to an extent formalising, is an alternative, organic view of a business where process (the making and keeping of promises) determines structure.   An alternative Le Guin might call yin.
  • By formalising this structure,  I’m trying to create a blueprint for documenting the ‘laws’ of a business that enables it to be both a place where people can  persevere in their own existence and a generator of the growth, innovation and profit that will create more spaces for more people to persevere in theirs.  A place where it’s possible to enjoy both freedom and happiness.
  • I’m by no means the only person I know of trying to do something like this.  I’m part of a trend, that recognises the need for humanity to make “a successful adaptation to their environment and learn to live without destroying each other.”****

As Derek Sivers puts it:

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws.  This is your utopia”.

Welcome to mine.

 

*Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.

**Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46-47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28-30. The version here is Le Guin’s own amalgam of the two translations.

***Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.

****Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

Empathetic Magic
June 2, 2020

Empathetic Magic

One way to make rain, is to pour water through a sieve.   The idea is that by imitating something like rain ourselves, real rain will fall.

We call this sympathetic magic, and the more people involved, the better.   If we all ‘make rain’ together, “The Rainmaker” is bound to respond.  This kind of group rainmaking is probably the origin of the myth of the Danaides.

There is a better kind of magic.  Where we all act as if we are the kind of people we’d love to live with.  Seeing our neighbours and fellows as human beings, very like us, yet not us, and all the more interesting for that, even when they are being ‘difficult’.

That’s empathetic magic.   It works.  And the more people involved, the better.

If you read one book during lockdown
May 18, 2020

If you read one book during lockdown

Another read-in-one-go-over-the-weekend book, I recommend.  “Lost Connections”, by Johann Hari.

Appropriate for Mental Health Awareness Week and beyond.

This is a book about what happens to human animals when they don’t get what they need from life:

  • Agency – to make my own unique dent in the universe
  • Mastery – to be continually learning and developing my talents
  • Autonomy – to choose how I make my dent
  • Purpose – to do all the above for something larger than myself
  • Community – in the company of like-minded people
  • Status – and to find my place in that community

It’s also about ways to put it right.

Luckily, for small business owners, putting it right is not that hard.

We can simply make sure everything we do in our businesses contributes at least something towards these things for the people we work with, the people we work for, and ultimately for ourselves.

It starts by reading this book.

And then maybe this one.

Long reads for a long weekend
May 7, 2020

Long reads for a long weekend

As human beings we are complex sytems, inhabiting complex systems.

Some of these are natural – weather, plate tectonics, ecosystems, the galaxy; some we’ve made up ourselves.  And of course, through the social systems we invent, we impact some of the natural ones.

The more we’ve understood our bodies – the physical system we inhabit – the better we’ve been able to cure, contain or prevent individual suffering and maximise the potential for individual flourishing.   The more we’ve understood the natural systems we operate in, the better we’ve been able to exploit or enhance them to our benefit.

As businesses we operate within social systems, and if we want to maximise the potential for it’s individual flourishing, it pays to understand those systems better.

They’re both a long read, but with a bank holiday weekend ahead, Capital in the 21st Century and its sequel Capital and Ideology are a great place to start to understand the social system that’s had the biggest impact on everything in our world for the last 250 years.

If reading is not your thing, Capital is available as a documentary film too.

Remember, all models are wrong, so it’s worth exploring as many as you can.   Some of them may prove useful.

Let it be
April 21, 2020

Let it be

Over the weekend, as well as reading, I listened to wise words from Scott Perry, of Creative on Purpose:

“Acceptance of what is opens the door to what is possible.”

It’s difficult to avoid grieving over what you’ve lost, which includes the future you thought you were going to have.

It is lost.    There is nothing we can do about that.

But other futures are open to you.   Different futures.   Better futures.  Because you can make them so.   At least, you can do your best to make them so.

The first step in a process of recovery is to accept what is, now.