Humanity – Page 8 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 26, 2021

Stories we tell ourselves

If you knew the stories your family, friends, colleagues, employees and clients are telling themselves you’d be astonished.

The stories we tell ourselves aren’t true. They often don’t help. We keep them to ourselves, but they leak out in our actions, and so how others see us.

What’s the story your business tells itself? Does it help?

If not, share it with your team, and see how you can change it. Your customers and your profits will see the difference.

November 15, 2021

Making

You may think a business is simply a matter of creating, manufacturing and selling products or services.

It’s also about creating people. We spend most of our lives at work. So the way we work together to make, sell and deliver those products and services has a significant impact on our capabilities, capacities and beliefs. Work changes us, forms us.

That means that a business is also about making society. Because although ‘society’ often feels like something that’s just ‘there’ outside of us, actually it’s made by us, in the way we work, in the way we live and play outside work, in the way we think about our relationships with others.

Now you know this, you can choose to consciously create, through your business, the kind of society you want to see. Starting with the little society of prospects, customers, suppliers and employees immediately around you.

That’s why for me, a business is not a machine for making money. It’s a system for making and keeping promises.

Because it’s the relationships between people that are really important, not the things we make.

November 3, 2021

Measuring what really matters

Here’s a simple question we can ask ourselves, our businesses and our societies, every day:

“How can I/we reduce the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere today?”

Because as Sir David Attenborough points out, that’s the measure that matters to us all right now.

October 19, 2021

Old possibilities

For more than 40,000 years, human beings have been imagining and re-imagining new possibilities for how we live in the world.

We can’t stop now.

We can do better than this.

October 6, 2021

A plea for sparrows

Just round the corner from me, a builder has grubbed up around 30 metres of privet hedge that used to surround the plot. It was a lovely hedge, even when it got untidy, but more than that, it was home for dozens of house sparrows.

You might not think that’s a problem, but homebody house sparrows don’t move when their home habitat is destroyed, they just die out.

That’s why house sparrows are now on the red list of conservation concern. London lost 60% of its sparrows over just 10 years from 1994 to 2004. Gardens are still being paved over, hedges and shrubs grubbed up.

Sparrows aren’t exotic, or glamorous, but they’re becoming rare. I for one would hate to lose them.

October 4, 2021

Supply chains

Do you remember the last CAPTCHA you filled in? The one that asked you to click every square that had bicycles in? How long did it take you? A few seconds? A minute?

Of course, you know that every time you do that you’re cleaning data for an AI project, or training an AI machine to get better at bicycle recognition.

To you, that piece of microwork was a distraction. To others it’s a project. A minute’s worth of work for an unknown customer with an unknown purpose, often far less innocuous than bicycles, paid for in cents.

These ‘projects’ are not even tasks, only tiny slices of a task. Like the complex calculations performed by the Lyons Corner House ‘computers’, only without the employment contract, the shared office or the necessary equipment. Without even knowing who or where the ‘computer’ before you is, nor the one after you, because actually you’re spread across continents and time-zones, in refugee camps, prisons and slums.

Now imagine trying to build any kind of working life around ‘projects’ like these.

If you thought bodged-up fire-trap factories in Bangladesh was bad, welcome to the supply chain for the software behind driverless cars, voice-assistants, smart bikes and fitness-trackers. The supply chain of the future. Unless we’re careful.

I recommend this book. It’s not comfortable reading, but I think it is essential.

October 1, 2021

Certainty/Uncertainty

We humans live our whole lives in a Heisenberg gymnasium – dancing between poles of certainty and uncertainty. Craving first one, then having got it, craving the other.

The truth is we can never rest, only find a way of creatively using the tension between those poles to move ourselves, our businesses, humanity and our world forwards.

Tying ourselves to one or the other can only end in tears.

September 21, 2021

Cattus Economicus

I love my cat. She doesn’t love me back.

All she’s really interested in is food and sleep. And every now and then, a bit of attention – on her terms, when and where she wants it, never when I do. She’s lazy, greedy and selfish. She is ‘Cattus Economicus’.

She can’t help it, cats, like most mammals, have evolved that way.

But not us humans. Somewhere in our distant past, we evolved new instincts of collaboration, co-operation, altruism. Because we needed those traits to survive.

‘Homo Economicus’ is a convenient fiction, that tells us more about the economists and politicians who use it than the people they like to apply it to. In their eyes, you and I and most of the people we know are less than human, to be treated is if all we care about is food and sleep.

We know better. We know that we collaborate, co-operate and help each other out all the time. We know that we need to exercise these pro-social instincts more than ever if we are to solve the pressing problems our species faces.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.

We’re no pussycats.

September 6, 2021

Greeding

When, as kids, we had scoffed our own sweetie allowance, and wanted more, we’d have a go at appropriating the shares of our younger siblings. This rarely took the form of outright theft. We knew that was wrong. So we’d find other less obvious ways to achieve the same result.

We cajoled, we pleaded, we promised swaps. When that failed we bullied.

My parents called this behaviour ‘greeding’ – manipulating others into giving up their share, so you can have more.

We grew out of it, but it feels like an awful lot of greeding goes on in the grown-up world – beyond the obvious thefts, ponzi schemes and cons.

Banks put small businesses into debt with ‘recovery programmes’, taking over their assets once they’ve gone bankrupt. Firms force individuals to sell their homes for needed healthcare, raid pension funds to pay private equity loans.

Seed companies patent f1 hybrid seeds, forcing small farmers around the world into destitution. Soft drinks manufacturers negotiate first call on local water supplies, leaving ordinary people to pay more for less.

Manufacturers shut their eyes to child labour, slavery, invasion and habitat destruction in their supply-chains.

All so they can build up the means to do more of the same.

It’s called accumulation by dispossession. It’s happened throughout human history, of course. But not everywhere, not all the time. For the last 500 years we’ve relied on a system that can’t work without it.

And that can only end in tears.

September 2, 2021

Art and business

Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?

The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.

If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.

The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.

The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.

Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.

Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Humanity