Improve Process – Page 17 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 20, 2020

One percent

The very best question I know for improving your process for making and keeping promises is this one:

“How can we make this 1% better today?”

1% seems like a pathetic target for improvement until you realise it compounds.

Compounding works in any direction of course, so it helps to frame the question in the direction you want without tying down the ‘how’. This takes some thinking about, but is well the effort.

Hiut Denim (who gave me the idea) has this one, for example:

“How can we reduce the environmental impact of our jeans today?”

Tiny, daily, incremental improvement are easy to start, easy to keep going as a habit, and add up sooner than you think to a ‘better’ that’s far bigger than you could ever have dreamt of.

What would your question be?

September 16, 2020

Software error

It turns out that yesterday’s AWOL veg box wasn’t down to a new driver, but to a problem with the navigation software.

The driver did a great job of sorting things out. He bought a new phone, double-checked his route and corrected the mistakes. He took responsibility and did what needed to be done to really keep us happy.

Meanwhile head office was offering refunds.

Technology is brilliant, but you need a systematic way of identifying when it’s broken, as quickly as possible. Analogue visual indicators work well for this e.g.the address label on the box, a line marked on a bottle that used every day.

You also need a fall-back manual process for when the software breaks. That way, things may take a little longer, but nobody is taken by surprise, and nobody is let down. And you don’t have to compensate unnecessarily.

Do you check your phones are working every morning? Do you have backup phones? Do you keep an up-to-date back-up (maybe even hard copy) of your contacts? Do you have a process for learning from mistakes and accidents?

I’d be surprised if you do.

September 7, 2020

Rules, interpretation, performance.

Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).

An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it. They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it. They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.

Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.

Performance is the source of useful feedback. Everything else is conjecture. The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first. The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience. The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.

All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.

It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance. Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.

2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:

The ‘rules’ can be sketchy, but it’s almost impossible to create outstanding performances intentionally, repeatedly and consistently without any.
Documenting the ‘rules’ is the beginning of the process, not the end.

August 25, 2020

Stage Management

Making sure the right props are in the right place at the right time is an important job in theatre or film (check out The Goes Wrong Show for what happens when it’s not done well).

It’s an important job in business too, although it’s rarely considered as such. More often than not it turns into everybody’s job, which makes it nobody’s job, which makes it something that doesn’t happen consistently.

The answer is to think through the process your business runs (how you Share your Promise, and How you Keep your Promise) from beginning to end. As you do, you’ll identify where each business prop is used or referred to. Once you know this you can start to automate the ‘Stage Manager’ role.

Most importantly, you’ll see where it is easiest to create each prop, because that’s where the information it embodies is naturally and easily gathered.

As far as possible, you want this to happen as a side-effect of doing what people want to do anyway. This is why cloud accounting is such a brilliant thing. Clients do what they do – raise invoices, pay bills, log expenses, manage bank accounts. The side effect of all this is that all the props needed to produce a VAT return or monthly management reports are ready and waiting for the accountant to work with.

Where this isn’t possible, sharing the text of the play (your process) makes the downstream impact visible.

Salespeople, for example, are notoriously rubbish at logging client details, even though they are the people who naturally have all the information to hand. That’s because they don’t feel the impact on what comes after them. From a business perspective a sale isn’t complete until the customer has received what they paid for and is happy with it.

That means that, like the bricklayer’s labourer, part of what every salesperson produces is the productivity of the people down the line.

Your business is like a play. Each role in your business contributes to the productivity of the whole play. Recognise that in the way you reward people, and you’ve created an incentive for improvement.

August 20, 2020

One size fits no-one

Standardisation is useful. Standard shoe and clothing sizes enabled manufacture at scale, which in turn meant that more people could afford decent clothes and shoes than ever before. Standard sizes are worked out by taking averages of the actual population.

Standardised clothing works for two reasons. First because sizes are based on at most two or three dimensions. This means that any given individual is more likely to fall within an average range for a given size. There will be exceptions (I can never find gloves to fit), but they will be rare. The other reason is that clothes are soft, they have give. People can easily adjust the standard to suit themselves. You can belt a baggy shirt, or wear extra socks inside too-big shoes. A slightly too-tight dress will stretch a little. You can at least be comfortable, if not always elegant.

Averaging over multiple dimensions, especially for something rigid, like a building, an office, or a cockpit is far less successful – even dangerous. Nobody fits this kind of average, so everyone becomes uncomfortable and inefficient.

The same goes for business processes. No two businesses do things in quite the same way – not even when they are doing the same job. So forcing your way of doing things into a generic off-the-shelf pattern squeezes out diffentiation, turning you into a commodity. It also makes the people running the process both uncomfortable and inefficient.

Those are the last things you or your customers want.

The alternative isn’t to tailor everything from scratch every time.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you will have your own set of patterns for ‘the way we do things round here’.

Identify them, create templates from them. Then use them to build processes that are fully adjustable by the people who will actually use them.

Adjustable gives far better results than the average.

August 17, 2020

Advance notice

As you probably know, I have a bit of a book habit.

I read this one on Saturday, and for now all I’m going to say is that I recommend it.

I hope to share more later, but I’m asking permission first.

Have a great day!

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.

August 7, 2020

Planning for Serendipity

Did you know, the word ‘Serendipity’ was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754?

The ‘Serendip’ part refers to an old name for Sri Lanka and a Persian fairy tale about 3 princes who were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.

Lots of breakthroughs have been serendipitous – penicillin, graphene, Post-it notes, Nutella (apparently). If you go back far enough most of what we eat and drink must have been discovered serendipitously – cheese, tea, kimchi, alcohol, even cooking food at all.

Serendipity doesn’t just happen though. And of course someone has created an algorithm for it.

Serendipity is fundamentally about noticing. Mindfully observing the world and what happens in it, without a specific purpose, but open to the possibility of discovery.

Three things are key to making serendipity work:

First you need time to notice.
Second you need to be exposed to the unfamiliar.
Thirdly you need a way to capture your noticings that allows them to be retrieved and reviewed from time to time, increasing the chances of making new connections or sparking new ideas. Even better if you can retrieve and review as a diverse group of people.

None of these things are inherently expensive to do. They probably also make life more interesting.

Why not find a way to plan them into how you improve your process, daily, weekly or monthly?

You never know what might turn up.

July 31, 2020

Problem-solving

It’s hot. Too hot for me. My office is on the south side of the house, so it gets plenty of sun. And of course I’m at home, where I don’t have air conditioning.

It’s difficult to think, difficult to get down to anything, difficult to come up with ideas.

I can’t do anything to make the room cooler.

Luckily, I have at least 4 other options:

I could work on something that requires less mental energy, such as completing my expenses, or getting together my accounts information for tomorrow.
I could move myself north, into the cool side of the house.
I could sit my feet in iced water (I’m at home after all, nobody will see).
I could stop early.

Sometimes, acknowledging what you can’t change, makes you see what you can.

July 17, 2020

Flipping

This week, the problem with my broadband connection was finally sorted. After 4 months.

On the first visit the engineer ran some tests and did something with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He also checked the socket in my house and gave our arrangement the thumbs up. The speed went up again, but the fix only lasted a day. Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the second visit a new engineer ran some tests and did something else with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He also replaced the socket in my house with a new one. He explained that the reason why the fix didn’t last was because the system is set up to reduce the speed to keep the connection stable. Fair enough. The speed went up again, but only lasted a day. Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the third visit another engineer tinkered with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He ran some more tests, which determined that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house. Nothing changed. Terrible speed, and the line kept dropping.

On the fourth visit a different engineer tested the line from my end, inside the house. He then went to the cabinet half a mile away and tested the line from there. He identified that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house. So he looked for a likely location, got his ladder out and looked at the box that connects the line to the outside of my house, near the roof.

Bingo! The box was full of water. He changed the box, replaced the connectors, and everything was fine. And stayed fine.

I am delighted of course, and have nothing to complain of regarding any of the individuals involved either from my provider or from Openreach.

But I can’t help thinking that the process could be better.

I get that in a network, you have to be systematic in your search for a fault. I’ve done it myself.

Usually, you test the connection at one end, then the other, starting with the extremes. In this case, the exchange, and my socket. Then you repeat the test, working inwards through pairs of connecting nodes until you’ve narrowed down the location of the fault to a single length of wire.

But I wonder if the application of experience could shorten the process?

Maybe the answer would be to start with the shortest length of wire – between my socket and the connection at the top of my house – and work outwards from there? After all these are the parts most exposed to the elements, and most likely to fail.

It would be just as systematic and in the worst case take no longer than working from the outside in. But it could well be better for the customer as well as being quicker and cheaper for Openreach.

Or perhaps it would be even quicker and cheaper just to replace that external box every time, because it’s the weakest point in the chain and also the most accessible? That way you’re renewing the network as you go, for pence.

I don’t know. I’m not a telephone engineer. Just a process geek, who happens to be a customer.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process