Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Humanity

Between 3 and 300
August 17, 2023

Between 3 and 300

It’s a classic story of how many small businesses grow, and then shrink again.

As the founder, you do everything.   You do the sales and marketing to get clients, you enrol them, and you deliver the service to them once they’re on board.   Gradually you refine your hand-crafted offer into a customer experience that is uniquely yours.   That most of your clients really love.  That you become known for, even though you aren’t the only person or business offering this service.

 

So you decide to scale up.   You add other people – employees, or just as often, specialist freelancers – to help you with delivery.  So you can service more clients.

Handing over means systemising the parts of the process other people can do for you, but you retain control of the parts that matter – where the process interfaces with clients.   The heart of the customer experience.  After all, you are the face of the business.  People buy people, and that means you.

At first this is great.   You can handle more clients than before, make more profit than before.  So you take on more collaborators.

But all too soon, it becomes too much.  Suddenly you are working harder than anyone else.  You feel obliged to keep your collaborators fully occupied, but that means overloading the backbone – you.

You can’t take holidays, you can barely take weekends.  And when you do snatch a break, either it gets interrupted by collaborators or clients, or you come back to extra work.   Because nobody else can fulfill your role.

 

So back down you shrink.  Not quite to the one-man band you started as, but to essentially a one-man band with specialist accompaniments, dealing with a limited number of lucky clients each year.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with this.  Of course not.  It’s your life, your business, you decide how you want to live it.

 

But if you dream of making a bigger impact, you might like to know there is another way.   That doesn’t involve ‘going corporate’.  That doesn’t mean building a machine, losing the personal feel of your business completely.

The choice isn’t between 3 people and 300.  Between being a freelancer or being a tycoon.  Between being human and being corporate.

It’s possible to systemise your personality, your values, your unique customer experience into a small business that can scale without losing its humanity.  And without killing you in the process.

You just have to go about it in a different way.

By building your business as a system for making and keeping promises to the people you serve.  A system run by and for humans, not machines.  A system that enables everyone to be a Boss, so that any one of you can take a break when you need to.

Luckily for you, I’ve worked out how to do this over a year-long programme.  My clients have reaped the rewards.

It’s called The Disappearing Boss.

And from September you’ll be able to do it yourself, as part of The Disappearing Bosses Club.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

 

Where this blog title came from
August 8, 2023

Where this blog title came from

Christmas, 2014.  I was listening to The Reith Lectures on Radio 4.

As usual, I hadn’t taken much notice of who was behind what I was listening to (I didn’t find out who played my favourite ever dance record until 30 years later).  Then the speaker said something that galvanised me.

“Discipline makes Daring possible”.

After that I had to follow up on it.

The lecture was the second of a series on “The Future of Medicine”.  The speaker was Dr Atul Gawande and the episode title was “The Century of the System”.

It “tells the story of how a little-known hospital in Austria managed to develop a complex yet highly effective system for dealing with victims of drowning.” – specifically in freezing water.  A system that could be triggered by the receptionist.

The story came from Gawande’s book, “The Checklist Manifesto“.   I tracked down a copy, bought it and devoured it in one sitting.

I thoroughly recommend it.   Not just because it shows how something as simple as a checklist can save millions of lives, also because it shows how resistant ‘professionals’ are to any kind of systemisation.

Which fed nicely into my fascination with finding that fine balance between systems and humans that makes for consistently rich and evolving customer experiences, as well as consistently rich and evolving employee experiences.

If discipline is what makes daring possible, how little of it can you get away with?

How much daring can it enable?

I don’t know.

But I’m still enjoying finding out.

Humanity
July 28, 2023

Humanity

Today’s recommendation is to read ‘Humanocracy‘ by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini; to follow them on LinkedIn, and to subscribe to their YouTube channel, ‘The New Human Movement‘

 

Yes, they are talking about big organisations.

They are also in many cases old organisations, who have lasted this long often at the top of their industry.

They are also in many cases big, old organisations who have managed to survive by changing how they run themselves.

 

What they all have in common is that they view the business as a great big collaboration of talented people, rather than a machine.

 

How big could your business get if you looked at it this way?  How long could it last?

 

You have an enormous advantage over these organisations – you haven’t gone corporate yet, so you don’t have to undo that first.

 

Take it.

 

“This is what is possible when you treat human beings like they are actually human beings”. John Ferriola.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Richness
July 26, 2023

Richness

One of the ways those who benefit most from the status quo try to put us off doing anything effective about the climate crisis is by telling us that our lives will be poorer as a result.

The truth is our lives will be different.  In the same way that my life now is different from that of my parents, and even more different from their parents before them.

Here’s my counter argument:

Humans beings are extremely creative.  We can find enjoyment, art and pleasure in the most unpromising of surroundings and the most minimal accoutrements.  We will invent (are inventing) new ways of doing the things we enjoy.

We already have lots of things to play with.  Things we’ve already made, that can be passed around, recycled, and repurposed in so many ways. People are still listening to radios their grandparents and great-grandparents listened to. We will find (are finding) ways to keep them from polluting our environment any further.

We can grow and make lots more things.  They may not be the same things we grew before, and we will have to make them in different ways, that don’t damage our chances of survival on the planet, but we are extremely creative we will find (are finding) multiple ways.

We’re being offered a form of minimalism.  We don’t have to accept it.

Which is why my recommendation for today is to take a look at Kaffe Fassett to see just how wonderful more can be.

The ability to enrich our lives doesn’t depend on money.

It depends on how we look at things.

A bit of Discplined looking can make Daring possible.

This week, I am mostly going to recommend…
July 24, 2023

This week, I am mostly going to recommend…

Blogs and books to read, people to follow, ideas to think about, actions to take.

My first recommendation this week is a blog “Funding the Future” by Professor Richard Murphy.

One of todays posts is chilling, which is why I am recommending it.

Richard pulls no punches:

“The threat created by climate change is now bigger than that which was created by Covid.

It is bigger than the threat created by the global financial crisis in 2008.

It is also likely that the threat is now at least as big as that created by the Second World War because as many people as then are now at risk from democidal governments.”

 

I don’t always agree with him, but his posts always make me think about how things could be different.

The first step to changing things is to talk about how they are, how they could be, and how we could help them change in a direction that works for all of us.

The more of us that do that, the better, because we need to move fast.

Revisiting the past
July 18, 2023

Revisiting the past

Today seemed like a good day to revisit this blog post, inspired four and a half years ago, by Seth Godin:

“In the last fifty years, thanks to Deming and Crosby and others, we’ve gotten significantly better at creating perfect outputs that don’t rely on heroism and luck. Design a better system, you’ll get better outputs.

I’m grateful every day for the nearly invisible perfect things that I count on… but, and I feel spoiled to say this, I take the perfect for granted.

I’m way more interested, and spend far more time and money on the imperfect things, the things that might not work, the ideas and services and products that dance around the edges.”

I agree. Over time, the perfection of processes has freed ever more of us up to spend ever more time on the interesting, edgy things – telling stories instead of fetching water, making art instead of travelling for days on end, discovering new things instead of cooking, connecting with and trusting strangers instead of only dealing with people we already know.

But I also disagree with Seth’s implication that you can only have one or the other, perfect process or interesting edge, invisible clockwork or flesh and blood.

For me the fascinating challenge is to how to combine both.

How do you put enough process in place to make sure that what should be invisible stays invisible, without restricting the free exploration that discovers new edges?

How do you ensure that clockwork-like perfection supports and enables flesh and blood to dance around the edges, making things more human, more emotional, more daring?

If a process framework is like a musical score, how do you make it more jazz than classical?

I didn’t have a perfect answer, then, and I don’t now, but I am getting closer.

  • It’s about defining a floor (even better, a springboard), ‘the least that should happen’, along with strict guardrails – your Unbreakable Promises, that constrain possible actions to what fits with your Promise of Value.
  • It’s about defining ‘what’, not ‘how’.
  • It’s about maps, not GPS tracking.
  • It’s about embracing uncertainty for its potential upside, while making sure any downside won’t kill you.
  • It’s about automating drudgery, to free humans to be human, and play.

Above all, its about giving human beings the context, the tools and the authority to think for themselves and take the consequences, good as well as bad.

It’s about freedom.  Freedom that recognises every other’s right to the same.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Repeating ourselves
July 10, 2023

Repeating ourselves

It looks as though humanity (actually only a small part of it) is about to repeat one of our gravest and most frequent mistakes – to start exploiting a vast and almost completely unknown resource without thinking seriously about the possible consequences.   In pursuit of materials that may well prove to be redundant in a few years.

We did it with whale oils, we did it with America’s great plains, we’re still doing it with rainforests and wetlands everywhere, and now we plan to do it with the mid-ocean ridges.

What makes it worse, is that the benefits will accrue to a few, while the harms will accrue to many, for generations to come.   We won’t even recycle the materials we extract – why bother when it’s cheaper to mine, for as long as the true cost is never accounted for?

It’s not quite too late to stop this, Greenpeace has a petition you can sign, but maybe the best thing is simply to make yourself and others aware, so they can sign too.

We humans are ingenious creatures, we don’t have to go on repeating ourselves.

We could force ourselves to think of better alternatives by making promises to our planet and our future selves.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

How to help the climate anxious
May 31, 2023

How to help the climate anxious

How do you help the climate anxious (terrified!), overwhelmed by the enormity of what they see coming?

Here’s one way:

– Help them to see the system they are in.
– Enable them to find their own way into an examination of it’s structure.
– Connect the dots, so they can find their best place to take action.
– Show them where others are already making a difference.
– Enrol them into a growing web of actors changing the system.

In other words, give them an opportunity to exercise the agency, mastery and autonomy they crave, for a mighty purpose, in a growing community of like-minded, like-hearted people.

Connect the Carbon Dots is a fine project to be part of.

Circular economies
May 23, 2023

Circular economies

Humans have lived in circular economies for an awfully long time, and recognised that fact in their art, thinking and rituals.  The ancient Egyptians knew that dung beetles ensure that every day, the sun rises on a world in balance, neither knee-deep in dung, nor barren rock.

It’s only since around 1500 CE that we fell into the living linear trap required for the perpetual growth of profits – take, make, consume, waste.

Perpetual growth of what really matters – health, wellbeing, community, creativity, ingenuity, beauty, equity etc. etc. – the possibilities are literally infinite – is best served when we think in circles and eco-systems instead of  assembly lines and machines.

We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

How much better could we do it knowing what we know now?

Many people, businesses and organisations are already finding that out.

What are you waiting for?

Discipline makes Daring possible.