Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process

Diagnosis
November 18, 2019

Diagnosis

If you want to improve anything, you have to know how well it is already working.   That of course means measurement.

We tend to think that this means measuring output.   But that isn’t enough.

Measuring the total profit in my business tells me whether or not I’m doing well, it doesn’t tell me where to look for the the source of my success or failure.

What’s also needed is a measurement of flow.   How fast, or how slowly, do prospects and clients travel through my business?   Are there any leaks?   Are there blockages?

It so happens that the simplest way to measure this for a business is time spent working on a process.   So the better defined your processes are, the more diagnostic the measurement can be.

The good news is that you can start at Share Promise and Keep Promise, and learn downwards from there.

Good design is innovative
August 20, 2019

Good design is innovative

“The possibilities for progression are not, by any means, exhausted.   Technological development is always offering new opportunities for original designs.   But imaginative design always develops in tandem with improving technology, and can never be an end in itself.”  Dieter Rams, Design Principle number 1.

New technologies allow us to re-think or even re-imagine how we do things, so we can do them better – whatever ‘better’ means: faster; slower; more consistently; more easily; more naturally; more thoroughly.

The metal case meant the radiogram could take up less space, and also meant the speakers put out a truer sound.   But a metal lid rattled when the machine was used.   Plexiglass solved that problem, and in doing so meant that the controls could move to the top of the machine, which in turn meant that how to use it could become more obvious to anyone who’d never seen it before.

True advances require both novel technology and imagination, the two things bouncing creatively off each other, opening up possibilities.  Imagination makes technology human.

Without both imagination and advancing technology, all we can do is embellish, or worse, over-complicate.    Neither of which adds value.

Metrics
May 10, 2019

Metrics

If a business is a system for making and keeping promises, how do you measure its performance?

Some metrics:

  • How many promises you make, and how many you keep.

  • How much someone pays you to keep your promise to them.

  • How much it costs you to make a promise, and how much to keep it.

  • How much it costs you to resource, monitor and improve the way you make and keep your promises.

You could add:

  • How much it costs the planet for you to run this system.

  • How much you increase these things for yourself, your team and your clients:

    • Agency

    • Mastery

    • Autonomy

    • Purpose

    • Community

Simple.

Systems and processes
May 9, 2019

Systems and processes

Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.

So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.

Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.

But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”

Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.

Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.

Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.

3 points:

  1. Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.

  2. A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.

  3. A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.

It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.

Practice makes perfect
December 19, 2018

Practice makes perfect

Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.

A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.

By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.

Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.

This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.

And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.

Not doing it yourself
December 12, 2018

Not doing it yourself

Small business owners like us can easily become control freaks.

Not because we need to be in control of other people, but because we care about making sure our clients get the experience they deserve, the one we promised them.

Sometimes we think its easier to do it ourselves rather than delegate the job to someone else, because we’re under pressure and properly getting someone else into a position where they can do it as well as (or better) than we could takes time, energy and intellectual effort.

So we take the easy route (again) and do it ourselves ‘because it’s quicker’.

That’s a trap.

It’s much better to take the hit of time and energy now, because this will make growth easier in the long run.

More importantly, doing everything ourselves means we never make the space to dream up new, better ways of delighting the people we serve, to dare more, give more and strengthen the bonds we have with them. That’s what really builds a business that will outlast us.

If you need more convincing, work through the exercise illustrated above, and work out the true opportunity cost of doing everything yourself – not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of your own fulfilment.

Why do it yourself if someone else can do it better and more joyfully?