Improve Process – Page 10 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 13, 2022

The latest batch

The latest batch of learning arrived over the weekend, courtesy of the real amazons.

There’s fiction here as well as fact. I find both illuminating.

Fiction allows us to imagine new possibilities, new solutions, to think the unthinkable.

Fact often shows us we’ve done all of those things before, actually, with success.

We just hid them, so we could forget, and stay on the hamster wheel.

One day we really will have to get off, whether we want it or not.

It’s better to be able to welcome it.

May 25, 2022

Renewables

From the perspective of the penthouse office, it’s easy to view the people below you as somehow irrelevant, or worse, as a drain on your heroic endeavour.

In fact they are one tip of the great blue iceberg of human ingenuity, creativity and enterprise that stretches down through millenia.

You and your people are the ultimate renewable and accumulating resource.

Don’t waste it.

May 24, 2022

Repairs

There are obvious environmental benefits to repairing things, people and processes in your business, instead of throwing them away.

But the biggest benefit is that by repairing them you learn so much more about how your business could and should work better.

Especially when everyone gets involved.

May 18, 2022

Sometimes, groups of actors in a system have different goals, pulling them in different directions. These goals are perfectly reasonable from the perspective of each group, but a constant tug-of-war between groups prevents improvement.

We’re seeing a simple example of this kind of thing right now, with the ‘in the office’/’work from home’ debates and policy changes.

A firm wants people back in the office, so they decide to ban working from home. That ban just makes some people leave – to join a more accommodating competitor. The firm pulling hard in one direction hasn’t helped, it’s just made others pull harder in a different direction. The harder one side pulls, the harder the other does too.

These tugs of war can involve more than two parties – and frequently do. That makes fixing the system even more difficultr as each group pulls more and more strongly in its own preferred direction.

The answer, counterintuitively, is to let go. Stop pulling. When you do that everyone else will stop pulling too.

Then, look at everyone’s different, and from their perspective, perfectly reasonable goals.

Why do you want people in the office? Why do they want to work from home? What could you do to feel more confident that people are productive at home? How could you help them feel happier about coming back to the office.

My favourite example for this is the Swedish solution to a falling birth rate. Instead of banning abortions and birth control as Ceausescu did in Romania, which led to orphanages full of neglected and traumatised children, Sweden agreed on a higher goal of ‘every child being wanted and nurtured’, and implemented policies across the board to deliver that, that helped everyone work towards it.

What policies could you put in place that help everyone pull in the same direction?

May 13, 2022

TIAAA

How often have you been told ‘It must be this way’, ‘This is just how it works’, ‘Things have always been like this’, ‘There is no alternative’?

There is always an alternative. More importantly, there are always alternatives. Always have been throughout human history. Always will be throughout whatever future we have left. Alternatives we’ve designed for ourselves as a counter to what’s on offer.

It’s just that history is told by the victors, and alternatives – especially those that work – are hidden or misrepresented by the people who benefit from the status quo.

So maybe part of our job as owners of purposeful, sustainable and humane businesses is not just to find those alternatives and explore them. It’s also to share them. To show them. To enable people to make up their own minds on which they’d rather choose.

Our models of the world are stories we tell ourselves.

Let’s not get ourselves trapped in just one.

May 11, 2022

Approaching equilibrium

Systems of all kinds can persist for long periods, staying more or less the same. Not static, but always hovering around some equilibrium value, even as they grow.

This happens because of feedback. A change in the equilibrium value triggers a change in the flow of something that affects that value. Like your central heating thermostat, which uses feedback on the actual room temperature to regulate the flow of hot water to your radiators in order to maintain a temperature that feels comfortable to you.

A business is a system too. We’re usually looking to grow it, exponentially if we can. We don’t often think of it as something we want to keep in equilibrium.

But perhaps we should.

A business is a system for making and keeping promises. That means that whatever else we might like to see, the important equilibrium value is how many promises we keep – or perhaps even how many we exceed.

If we all made that our thermostat there’s a good chance that a better kind of exponential growth would take care of itself.

May 6, 2022

Do you believe in the lifeworld?

I’ve been trying to get my head around the work of Jurgen Habermas lately. It’s interesting.

Simply put, his theories state that we humans operate in and across 2 spheres of existence:

One: the ‘lifeworld’ – where we operate in our capacity as human beings, members of communities at different levels – family, friends. communities and society; and two: the ‘system’ (or systems) where we operate as economic agents or as citizens of a state.

Freetrader, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So far so good.

The lifeworld is something we create ourselves, through what Habermas calls communicative action, a constant adjustment of norms, preferences, values and desires between ourselves and others. Adjustments we choose to make ourselves in discourse with others. We are never alone in the lifeworld. You can’t be human without other humans.

In contrast the system is created by others. We don’t get much of a say in how the economy or the state works. We don’t get to choose how we act as consumers or employees, or as clients or citizens.

We could live just in the lifeworld. As humans we did so for millenia, coming up with all sorts of creative adjustments to enable human flourishing.

The problem is that as humans we are also good at creating systems that crush that flourishing. Not necessarily intentionally. Systems that make us less than human, that sometimes run away with us.

We can’t live just in systems. So maybe, part of our job as business owners is to keep the balance weighed in favour of the lifeworld, not the system.

Luckily I think that comes naturally to most of us.

May 5, 2022

Beyond urgency

For a long time, paid-for journalism has been in trouble.

It has relied on a model of change that it no longer monopolises. That model is based in acting as a fire alarm: find smoke, shout ‘Fire!‘ and let the outrage build until those in power do something to put the fire out.

The trouble is, anyone can shout ‘Fire‘ on social media. Plus those in power often start fires of their own, as a distraction from the big fire everyone’s worried about. The result is that there’s a lot of outrage out there, and very few fire extinguishers.

There is an alternative. Some call it Solutions Journalism, others Constructive Journalism.

This journalism says it’s no longer valuable enough to simply shout ‘Fire!‘ and expect the problem to be solved, this journalism seeks out people and places who have solved the problem already, finds out how they did it and shares that knowledge with their audience.

This journalism uses knowledge transfer to move the audience “from urgency to agency“.

Why am I telling you this?

One, because The Carbon Almanac is an excellent example of this kind of journalism. Sign up for a Daily Difference newsletter.

Two, because I think this is an excellent model of change for small, purposeful businesses to adopt too.

If you’re struggling to change, instead of shouting ‘Fire!‘ and waiting for the consultancy fire engines to arrive with the usual solution, why not seek out people and places who’ve already done what you seek to achieve, and share that learning with your team?

Even better, why not encourage your team to be the journalists and do the seeking out? Once everyone knows something is possible, it’s easier to see how you can make it happen in line with your own Promise of Value.

This post is mostly a paraphrase of this excellent speech by Professor Jay Rosen. I recommend a read of it.

Meanwhile, here are some questions I’ve extracted for you to assign to your investigative journalists:

What’s working where? (It’s a simple starting point. But so different from, “what’s broken here?”)
Who does it better than we do? (Who in North Rhine-Westphalia, who in Germany, in Europe, or around the world.)
Who has bucked the trend? (Meaning: faced the same problem, got a different result. Also called “positive outliers.”)
How did they find their way to a better outcome? (Bornstein calls this the “detective story.”)
What’s missing from our community that these other communities seem to have?

Go beyond urgency. Construct agency.

May 3, 2022

Connect – your way

There’s been a lot of talk about leaving Twitter over the last few days. To be honest, I’ve contemplated it myself.

Yes, it’s increasingly shaped to serve the agenda of those with money and power, but Twitter, like all social media, is a tool, like any other. We don’t have to use it the way others want us to.

Perfectly illustrated this weekend:

On Saturday, we ventured into unknown parts of London in search of roads that share our surnames. Boxall Road is in North Dulwich, not far from the Picture Gallery, while the much more impressive-sounding Gibbs Avenue is in Upper Norwood. An interesting day’s walk, that just left us with the question ‘Why?‘

A quick post on Twitter, and sure enough, the answer came back in seconds. A certain Robert Boxall kept the old ‘Greyhound Inn’ nearby, and having made a bit of money, decided to go into property development.

Thanks Dulwich Society!

The point of this story?

Social media is a tool like any other. You choose how you want to use it. And the best way turns out to be the way we use any other means of communication – to have real conversations with real people – to make connections, not break them.

April 28, 2022

The other way around

Of course the Cui Bono? question is worth asking the other way around too.

“Who truly benefits from the way you want things to be?”

That might be why some people are resisting.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process