Improve Process – Page 13 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 10, 2021

Seeing straight

I’m lucky, my eyesight has always been good. Apart from one little thing. I don’t always see straight.

Sometimes, I reach for a book on the bookshelf, and come back with the one that was next to it. I’ve got used to this, so now I purposely reach for the book next to the one I really want. It works every time.

You don’t need dodgy eyes to take advantage of this simple technique. As John Kay writes in ‘Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly‘ aiming for something next to the thing we want is actually the best way to get the thing we want.

What do you really want for your business? What could you focus on that might actually deliver it?

November 9, 2021

Standards

I’m not sure the plumber appreciated me hanging around to watch. Not to begin with anyway.

But by the end of the afternoon, he was glad of it. Because by then I’d seen for myself how everything went wrong, and more importantly, I knew he was not to blame.

It wasn’t his fault the ducting wouldn’t go through the hole. That was my fault for buying the wrong size – to fit the cooker hood, but not a ‘standard’ hole. Although to be fair I didn’t know that a) there was a standard hole size and b) that my cooker hood had been built to a different standard.

It wasn’t the plumber’s fault that the old tap was so hard to remove. That was because for some reason the old tap fixings couldn’t accommodate a standard worktop depth, so the previous fitting had been slightly bodged.

It wasn’t his fault that the new tap would have to be slightly bodged in the same way, since it was identical, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that the lever came off in his hand as soon as he tested it. That was down to tap manufacturers observing no quality standards at all.

So all in all, what should have been a straightforward job, turned into a bit of a nightmare, involving the purchase of yet another (different) tap, some new hose, plus additional reducers and fixings, and of course more of the plumber’s time and skill (not least that of being a contortionist).

Will, the plumber, is only young, but even he complained that ‘in the old days’, everything was manufactured or imported to a British standard, which meant you could rely on the fact that one thing would work seamlessly with another. You could get most jobs done easily, only the really unusual was tricky.

That’s what standards are for. To make the usual easy, so you can have imagination and energy to spare to deal with the unusual.

Having a choice of standards opens up different possibilities. That’s great, as long as everyone states which standard(s) they are working to at any one time. Otherwise, all you’ve done is turn the usual into the unusual.

No wonder we have a productivity problem.

November 8, 2021

A market of one

I’ve been known to wax lyrical (or just go on about) about how your Promise of Value drives the way you design your business, so that it can’t help but deliver on the Promises you make.

But what does that actually mean in practice? How do you actually do that?

Let’s follow a thread of an example.

Your Promise of Value contains 3 sets of qualities – behaviours (the way you do things, which shades into your values), what you do (what you do to deliver benefit to your clients) and what you are (the relationship that is created between you and a client as a result).

Let’s say that one of your behaviours is ‘honest’. Among other things, that might mean that you always tell the truth. That has implications for your Share Promise process. For example, you may decide to never make claims you can’t substantiate. That might mean that for you ‘Showing Up’ is essentially about presenting the substantiation. Your 60-seconds is a story of a happy client, or your social media feed is full of testimonials, or that your website contains a live feed showing the positive impact you’re having. Or maybe the negative impact, reducing?

Always telling the truth has implications for your Keep Promise process too. It affects how you deal with a complaint, or the advice you give a client. It implies that before either of these situations arises, you must have a process for gathering as much ‘truth’ as you can. That might translate into a separate process each time (receive a complaint, research it, then get back to them), or it may mean building a process for continuously recording data you might need, as a side effect of doing the job.

Your Promise of Value isn’t just for prospects and clients, it also drives how you design your Improve Process – how you organise or re-organise the resources you have to serve your people better. How you design your measurement systems, your appraisal systems and your recruitment systems. For example, how could you test that a potential team member is ‘honest’? How would you build ‘always telling the truth’ into feedback mechanisms?

There will be other options. The form your processes take depends on other aspects of your Promise of Value – not everything all at once, but the behaviours that are most important to you and the people you serve. How does your business combine a behaviour like ‘honest’ with ‘kind’, or ‘professional’ or ‘cutting-edge’?

By embedding your Promise of Value into what you do and how you do it, your prospects, clients, employees, suppliers – all your stakeholders – experience who you are, and what you are here to do in a very concrete way. You’re showing, not telling. What you are, is what they get. And what you are is unique. You’re now in a market of one.

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.

November 2, 2021

Not all who wander are lost

Today’s ‘The Life Scientific’ focused on Sharon Peacock, a consultant in microbiology and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge; a pioneer and advocate for the application of pathogen genome sequencing in the National Health Service to tackle antibiotic resistance, and most recently, founding director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium. A network of 600 scientists constantly tracking the appearance and spread of new COVID-19 variants.

Impressive eh?

But she almost didn’t make it.

Sharon left school at 16, worked in a corner shop, then as a dental nurse (3 doors down), before deciding to train as a nurse. She had trouble getting in, because she didn’t have the science qualifications needed, and not long into her training, decided that what she really wanted to be was a doctor. She finished her nursing training, taking evening classes to get her ‘O’ levels in maths physics and chemistry. Next, she combined a job in end-of-life care with more studying – this time for the science ‘A’ levels. Finally she could apply to medical schools.

Every one of them all rejected her application without an interview. The same thing happened over the next application cycle.

Fortunately, Sharon didn’t give up. She called one of the universities and asked them to at least see her. Within a month she was at medical school. And the rest is, as they say, history. An interest in care, sparked by being a lowly dental nurse, has ended up as care on a global scale.

We almost wasted this talent, as I’m sure we waste other talents, simply because we mistake wandering for being lost. Sharon’s route to professorship was somewhat circuitous, but it wasn’t accidental, and certainly not a sleepwalk. Her intention was very clear – although possibly hard to spot on standardised application forms.

Which means we have to think carefully about how we design our recruitment processes, including questions that help us to tell the difference between wandering, drift, and sleepwalking.

Because wanderers (and drifters) bring much more to the table than mere qualifications.

October 21, 2021

Learning

“There’s an interesting rule called the 70-20-10 rule, which states that 70% of learning comes from doing, 20% comes from observing in relationship, and only 10% comes from actual instruction.”

This is from my friend Grace Judson’s leadership newsletter (well worth subscribing to).

Here’s how you might apply it if you have a Customer Experience Score in place:

Instruction: The person/people who want to develop into a new or additional Role read the Customer Experience Score, so they know what to play.
Observing in relationship: They observe someone already proficient in that Role playing the Score for real, with real clients. At this stage these clients will come under the 80% of straightforward cases.
Instruction: They read the Customer Experience Score again, this time with some real examples to draw on.
Doing+Observing in relationship: They play the Score themselves, as a practice, not with real clients, but with experienced players taking the Role of clients, or fellow newbies armed with scenarios. Start with the straightforward cases until people feel comfortable with that. You know people have learned when they are able to critique each other.
Doing: While this is fresh in their mind, they play for real, with the Score at hand for reference, with real but straightforward clients.
Doing+Observing in relationship: Hold another group practice session. This time, explore some of the 20% non-straightforward cases. Your experienced players will love coming up with examples of these!
Doing: With this fresh in their mind, and the Score at hand for reference, you can let them play for real, with any kind of real client.

It’s a good idea to hold regular reviews of the Score, as part of group practice sessions. Over time, people will internalise the Score, but not necessarily as it is written. You want to share desirable variations and eliminate the undesirable ones. Regular group practice will enable this.

It is of course possible to do all this without a Customer Experience Score. It will be harder though, because you have to spend time agreeing whose version of ‘how we do things round here’ is the right one.

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 30, 2021

Communication, not control

Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.

Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house. They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.

Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.

The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines. Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.

Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.

Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies. They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.

In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control. The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.

How about your business? What would your technical drawings look like? Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?

September 28, 2021

Timesheets

There’s a very interesting article by Alistair Barlow on AccountingWeb today, about timesheets.

Not as a tool for calculating prices, but as a tool for measuring performance.

As I discovered a couple of years ago, ‘time spent’* is a pretty accurate proxy for all costs.

That means that a relatively easy way to get an accurate picture of how much a process is costing to run, is to measure how much time is spent on running it. And this can be measured straightforwardly, by simple observation.

Timesheets are one way to observe how much a process is costing to run. But they are a pain to fill in, cost time to complete, and feel intrusive.

Much better to let each process tell you as a side-effect.

I’m working on that.

*”Duration-Based Costing: Utilizing Time in Assigning Costs” Anne-Marie Lelkes, Ph.D., CPA, Management Accounting Quarterly, Summer 2017.

September 13, 2021

Invention

I received this book on Friday and finished it on Saturday. It is, as one (female) reviewer put it “equal parts informative and infuriating”, what I call ‘a gnasher’ – where men decide that woman ‘can’t do’ something because of their biology, then make a law to prevent them doing it anyway, just in case.

Gnashing aside, this is well worth a read, if only to help us think about what the world could look like if businesses founded by women received more than 1% of UK venture capital, or if ideas that come from the old, the differently-abled or the ‘lower classes’ were taken seriously.

If ‘innovation’ wasn’t just about disruption, creative destruction and domination, but also about care, repair and contribution.

Or if we just acknowledged that we’re human animals, with bodies as well as brains.

I recommend it.

We need more mothers of invention.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process