Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process

A soft system
August 21, 2023

A soft system

Your system for making and keeping promises looks self-contained:

disappearing boss course card

but of course it isn’t.

The processes that form it’s skeleton are firm, and the Promise that drives them changes rarely, but like any living system the edges are soft and sensitive.   The skin of your business interacts with the outside world and with other systems – buildings, computer networks, prospects, clients, suppliers, collaborators, family, friends and community.

This is the frontline of your business.  This is where it learns what it needs to do to adapt.

Listen to it.

Absorb its teachings into your bones.

Grow.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Letting go of the tiger
August 16, 2023

Letting go of the tiger

During that tiger-riding phase of growing your business, when you’re growing fast, when new opportunities are coming at you thick and fast, and it feels right to take as many of them as you can; it can feel like everything is out of control.  It can feel like nothing is working as it should, so you have to be everywhere, supervising everything, checking everything, or the tiger will run away with you.

You might think that this would be the worst time to start writing down your Customer Experience Score.

You’d be wrong.

Because, by giving yourself space to get your music out of your head, you also give yourself space to think about how ‘doing things right’ can be made easier to achieve.  Sometimes ridiculously so, with a ridiculously simple change, such as creating a Prop for others to use that literally helps them see through your eyes.

Because, as you write down what till now has only been playing inside your head, you see how the part you wrote for the violins is very close to what the violas will need, and the oboes, and with a few more tweaks, the clarinets.  Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is much smaller than you thought.

And because, as you write the first few parts, and see how easy it is to get your Orchestra to play them beautifully, even when you’re not in the room, you realise that the next part you write is likely to work just as well, and the one after that, and the one after that.   Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is far less urgent than you thought.

And so you realise that you can loosen your hold.  That the tiger isn’t going to run away with you.  That you can spend time building her a generous and beuatiful reserve in which she can flourish.

You’ll never be done of course, but now you know how easy it is, you can enlist your team to help you.

And once they know as much as you do about how your business should work to make and keep its promises to customers, you can step back and enjoy watching your tiger become a streak.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

It also makes it easier.

Ask me how.

 

 

 

Express yourself
August 7, 2023

Express yourself

Starting a business is largely about you.  Expressing your passions, your purpose, your vision.

But it can’t be only about you.

The secret is to express yourself in a way that resonates with other people.   That allows them to express something about themselves too.

Some will want to be customers, others will want to help you do more of it, still others will want to bask in the glow of your success.

Your business starts with you.  But it mustn’t end there.

Building it as a system for making and keeping promises is an excellent way to remind yourself of this.

 

Discipline makes daring Possible

Richness
July 26, 2023

Richness

One of the ways those who benefit most from the status quo try to put us off doing anything effective about the climate crisis is by telling us that our lives will be poorer as a result.

The truth is our lives will be different.  In the same way that my life now is different from that of my parents, and even more different from their parents before them.

Here’s my counter argument:

Humans beings are extremely creative.  We can find enjoyment, art and pleasure in the most unpromising of surroundings and the most minimal accoutrements.  We will invent (are inventing) new ways of doing the things we enjoy.

We already have lots of things to play with.  Things we’ve already made, that can be passed around, recycled, and repurposed in so many ways. People are still listening to radios their grandparents and great-grandparents listened to. We will find (are finding) ways to keep them from polluting our environment any further.

We can grow and make lots more things.  They may not be the same things we grew before, and we will have to make them in different ways, that don’t damage our chances of survival on the planet, but we are extremely creative we will find (are finding) multiple ways.

We’re being offered a form of minimalism.  We don’t have to accept it.

Which is why my recommendation for today is to take a look at Kaffe Fassett to see just how wonderful more can be.

The ability to enrich our lives doesn’t depend on money.

It depends on how we look at things.

A bit of Discplined looking can make Daring possible.

Unusual perspectives
July 25, 2023

Unusual perspectives

Today, I’m recommending Jason Fried’s blog.

As I’m sure you know, Jason wrote “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work“, a book well worth reading if you haven’t already.

Jason writes from the perspective of a business that is ‘big enough’, doesn’t need to be bigger, and is primarily a vehicle for improving the lives of its customers and employees.

Nowadays that’s quite the radical view, and it gives him a very different perspective on all the things businesses do, or are told they should do which is really refreshing and always makes me think.

If you’d like an even more radical perspective on what business could be, I also recommend Ari’s Top 5 by Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses.

And if you’d like to create your own, more rounded perspective on business and it’s place in the world, I recommend the Wolf Tool from Bev Costoya.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Revisiting the past
July 18, 2023

Revisiting the past

Today seemed like a good day to revisit this blog post, inspired four and a half years ago, by Seth Godin:

“In the last fifty years, thanks to Deming and Crosby and others, we’ve gotten significantly better at creating perfect outputs that don’t rely on heroism and luck. Design a better system, you’ll get better outputs.

I’m grateful every day for the nearly invisible perfect things that I count on… but, and I feel spoiled to say this, I take the perfect for granted.

I’m way more interested, and spend far more time and money on the imperfect things, the things that might not work, the ideas and services and products that dance around the edges.”

I agree. Over time, the perfection of processes has freed ever more of us up to spend ever more time on the interesting, edgy things – telling stories instead of fetching water, making art instead of travelling for days on end, discovering new things instead of cooking, connecting with and trusting strangers instead of only dealing with people we already know.

But I also disagree with Seth’s implication that you can only have one or the other, perfect process or interesting edge, invisible clockwork or flesh and blood.

For me the fascinating challenge is to how to combine both.

How do you put enough process in place to make sure that what should be invisible stays invisible, without restricting the free exploration that discovers new edges?

How do you ensure that clockwork-like perfection supports and enables flesh and blood to dance around the edges, making things more human, more emotional, more daring?

If a process framework is like a musical score, how do you make it more jazz than classical?

I didn’t have a perfect answer, then, and I don’t now, but I am getting closer.

  • It’s about defining a floor (even better, a springboard), ‘the least that should happen’, along with strict guardrails – your Unbreakable Promises, that constrain possible actions to what fits with your Promise of Value.
  • It’s about defining ‘what’, not ‘how’.
  • It’s about maps, not GPS tracking.
  • It’s about embracing uncertainty for its potential upside, while making sure any downside won’t kill you.
  • It’s about automating drudgery, to free humans to be human, and play.

Above all, its about giving human beings the context, the tools and the authority to think for themselves and take the consequences, good as well as bad.

It’s about freedom.  Freedom that recognises every other’s right to the same.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

There’s something about Muri
July 14, 2023

There’s something about Muri

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ is categorised 3 ways:

  • ‘Muda’ – effort that does not add value for the customer.
  • ‘Mura’ – wasted effort due to variation.
  • ‘Muri’ – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems.

Muda is the most talked about form of waste, sub-categorised into 7 further types:

  • Transport – excess movement of product.
  • Inventory – stocks of goods and raw materials.
  • Motion – excess movement of machines or people.
  • Waiting.
  • Overproduction.
  • Over-processing.
  • Defects.

Mura is often a result of Muda, and the solution to many of these issues is to standardise processes and relocate resources so they are available ‘just in time’ when and where they are needed.

The problem with this of course, is that whether an activity is Muda depends on where you draw the line around the system.  Biomass boilers are eco-efficient, as long as you don’t count the lorries trucking pellets around a country – a clear case of Transport Muda when you look at the bigger system.

What I want to think about today though, is Muri.  Wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.

There’s something about Muri that makes it the Cinderella of Lean.

It isn’t glamourous, fixing it doesn’t attract the kind of kudos Muda does.  Perhaps it’s just harder to measure.

Whatever the reason it gets left to pick up all the dirty work.

Muri is often caused by too much attention to Muda.  Redundancies are stripped out the system, leaving no room for slack.  Everything is expected to run at 100% capacity all of the time.  People are expected to do more with less, both at work and at home.

The result?

Look around you and what I think you’ll see everywhere a massive case of Muri.  People and systems – including our planetary system – stressed and overburdened to breaking point.

As a small business owner, you can’t fix it all.  But you can fix it in your business.

What if you let people work a 4-day week? or a 13-day fortnight? Or take a 2 hour lunch break?

What if you put together a flexible plan of working hours for the year that accounted for busy times and quiet times?

What if you set the example yourself by working only your official hours, having your weekend and taking a couple of weeks off every now and then?

You could do all of this, even in a service business, by paying a little attention to Muda and Muri (but not too much):

Start by writing down your Customer Experience Score , so that everyone can play it consistently.

  • Automate the parts that are drudgery for humans.
  • Leave room for variations that will delight the customer.
  • Then give people the responsibility and autonomy to get on with it, at a sensible level of capacity.

You’ll all work less hard for greater rewards.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Repeating ourselves
July 10, 2023

Repeating ourselves

It looks as though humanity (actually only a small part of it) is about to repeat one of our gravest and most frequent mistakes – to start exploiting a vast and almost completely unknown resource without thinking seriously about the possible consequences.   In pursuit of materials that may well prove to be redundant in a few years.

We did it with whale oils, we did it with America’s great plains, we’re still doing it with rainforests and wetlands everywhere, and now we plan to do it with the mid-ocean ridges.

What makes it worse, is that the benefits will accrue to a few, while the harms will accrue to many, for generations to come.   We won’t even recycle the materials we extract – why bother when it’s cheaper to mine, for as long as the true cost is never accounted for?

It’s not quite too late to stop this, Greenpeace has a petition you can sign, but maybe the best thing is simply to make yourself and others aware, so they can sign too.

We humans are ingenious creatures, we don’t have to go on repeating ourselves.

We could force ourselves to think of better alternatives by making promises to our planet and our future selves.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Your help please
June 30, 2023

Your help please

When I talk about a Customer Experience Score in these posts, what immediately comes into your mind?

 

  • a number

 

  • a piece of music

 

  • something else : ___________________________

 

Let me know.

Thank you!