Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process

A brilliant tool
June 16, 2023

A brilliant tool

A good tool tells you what it’s for.   So that it’s simple to understand, and simple to use.

A good tool is powerful.  So that it can be used at multiple levels of granularity.

A good tool is also simple to make.  So that it becomes accessible to everyone.

Some of the best tools are also tangible.  So that mind and body work together to embed mastery.

My friend Bev Costoya has invented a new tool that is simple, powerful, accessible and tangible, to help people like us to fully evaluate the impact of ideas on the ecosystem that surrounds us, so that we can change the world in the right direction, on purpose, instead of by accident.

It’s called the Wolf Tool,  and it is absolutely brilliant.

Jumping to conclusions
June 6, 2023

Jumping to conclusions

We humans are apt to shout ‘Eureka!’ at our first inkling of understanding.

And then rush to apply our new bit of knowledge, without thinking about what else might be true, or what the consequences might be.

We grow our understanding literally bit by bit, and fail to see the systems those bits are part of.

In our farms, we miss that microbes, plants and fungi have evolved to work together over aeons.  That animals evolved to work with microbes, plants and fungi over aeons.

So we see a thing like artificial fertiliser, or ploughing, or pesticides, or herbicides, and say “That’s the answer, let’s apply more if it.  Now! More! Faster!”

Soon we’ve destroyed the finely balanced systems that were there before.  And made ourselves more dependent on our crude and artificial methods than before.

 

In industry, we miss that humans have evolved to care for, play and work together over millenia.

So we come up with a theory that people are selfish and lazy and say “That’s the answer, let’s apply more if it.  Now! More! Faster!”.  By force if necessary.

Soon we’ve destroyed the finely balanced systems that were there before.  And made life miserable for billions.

 

The good news for our soils is that microbe generations are short, so with the right treatment, our soil microbiome can recover within just a few years.

The good news for our people is that human generations are long, so we haven’t forgetten any of our co-operative, playful and caring traits.  They are there already, just waiting to be released.

 

It’s not too late.

 

The way to regenerate our soils is through many more smaller farms, growing a wide variety of high-value vegetable crops, with no-digging, plenty of organic matter and lots of rotation.

The way to regenerate our industry is through many more smaller firms, offering a wide-variety of high-value services, with employee ownership, responsible autonomy, plenty of human interaction and lots of rotation.

 

I can’t help with farming, but business?  That’s what I’m here to do.

Learning by doing
May 11, 2023

Learning by doing

As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.

How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?

The answer is a process something like this:

  • An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish.  There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
  • The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
  • Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback.  “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”.  The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”

These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu.   It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.

The key things here are:

  • Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are.  Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time.  It’s the job.
  • Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
  • It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space.  Nobody is managing anyone else.  They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.

The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job.   Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.

These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.

Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.

After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

How would you do it?

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score
April 28, 2023

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

You may find that you need to refine an existing part of your Score.

This could mean simplifying an Activity by removing unnecessary steps.  Or spelling out what has to happen in more detail.  You might remove an Activity, or add a new one, or several.

Whatever the change, there are bound to be knock-on effects.  Perhaps you need to review Props for this part of your Score.  You might need to create a new Role.  You’ll certainly need to let your people learn and practice the new Score before you perform it for real.

This may seem like a lot of unecessary work, especially for minor adjustments.  It will be tempting to just change practices without bothering to change the Score first.

Resist that tempation.

Following through the impact of even minor changes on your Score, before implementing them in real life allows you to try different ideas and scenarios ‘on paper’, when getting it wrong and reversing back to your starting point is easiest and cheapest.

It means you get to see the full impact before you start changing anything.

It means you can share this task with everyone on the team, to get multiple perspectives and arrive at better solutions more quickly.

It also means that your Score always reflects the reality of how your business works, which keeps it useful, and even more importantly, preserves the value of your business until you’re ready to exit.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation
April 26, 2023

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.

This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.

You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online.  Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts.   Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.

Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.

For example, emails.

If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails.   Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.

This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process.   It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.

It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well.  You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients.   Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.

Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • For a human being, is this drudgery?  Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
  • Is this something that people do better than machines or software?  Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
  • Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want?  How many will we lose as a result?  How many could we attract?  Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
  • Will it be worth it?  How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services?  Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?

And above all, this one:

  • Is this consistent with my Promise of Value?

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Adjusting the system 1 – Props
April 24, 2023

Adjusting the system 1 – Props

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.

It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.

Props aren’t just physical either.  You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.

And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.

Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.

Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too.  You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.

Extrapolating consequences
April 20, 2023

Extrapolating consequences

A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:

  1. What’s causing it?
  2. Have we seen it before?
  3. Is it a trend?
  4. What happens if we do nothing?
  5. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
  6. What are the consequences of that?
    1. What happens if we do nothing?
    2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
    3. What are the consequences of that?
      1. What happens if we do nothing?
      2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
      3. What are the consequences of that?
        1. What happens if we do nothing?
        2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
        3. What are the consequences of that?
          1. What happens if we do nothing? – you get the picture.  Repeat until you are are confident to stop.

Hint: Most of us stop too soon.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

What do you do with all that feedback?
April 19, 2023

What do you do with all that feedback?

Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.

Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).

Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.

This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.

Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play,  you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.

Discipline makes evolution possible too.

Ask me how.

Services
April 17, 2023

Services

One of our case studies at London Business School, involved a company that supplied rags to industry.   Rags – textiles at the absolute end of their useful life might seem to be the ultimate commodity.  Almost worthless.   How could a business supplying them ever hope to create unmissable value for it’s customers?

Simple.

By surrounding that commodity product with deep layers of service.

By getting under the skin of it’s clients; understanding where and how they used the rags and what the problems could be.  Then making sure they more than met every rags need in the way they sold, delivered, collected and disposed of them for the client.

By maintaining that intimacy with their clients through the people they interacted with – the people who delivered and collected, so that every new need could be anticipated and added to the service.

In those days, adding service meant adding people, because people are the only way to create value for other people.

That’s still true, even if nowadays your first thought would be to build an online platform.

Technology doesn’t create new value overall, it can only make it cheaper for a particular business to deliver its service – until another particular business catches up or overtakes, or undercuts (Ever wondered why hand car washes have replaced the automated ones?  Cheap (slave) labour, makes machinery unprofitable).

So if the key to profitability is service, and service means adding people to deal with people, maybe we have an answer to the climate crisis?

Stop making things, use what we already have (e.g. enough clothing for 3 times the global population), and pay people well to support other people – regenerating our environment; housing; education; health; repair and recycling; art; music, entertainment… the list is endless.

We wouldn’t be short of work, and we might well be happier.

After all, this is how we did things for most of our existence on this planet.

One day we might realise we don’t even need money to make this work.

Cannelloni
April 6, 2023

Cannelloni

In ‘The Uncertainty Mindset’, Vaughn Tan describes an interesting situation:

The assistant chef responsible for the popular lunchtime canelloni dish can’t keep up, and despite following instructions can’t consistently get the finished dish to look as it should, so some are sent back.   This goes on for weeks.

It takes the owner walking past one lunchtime to spot the problem, discuss the problem with the assistant chef, then take the problem off to the experimental kitchen team for fixing.

It makes some sense for an innovative, high-end kitchen, operating at the cutting edge of dining to separate innovation from the everyday.   A busy restaurant needs to run like clockwork, there’s no room during service for experimentation.

But not every problem needs a separate crack team to solve it.   Given a bit of space and time outside normal service (more staff working shorter shifts), the assistant chef and their peers could probably have arrived at the same solution, which was a different method of assembly, that took up less time, less space and produced a more consistent result.   Only if that failed should the problem have perhaps been passed across to the experimental team for a deeper look at the recipe.

Given regular space and time outside normal service, the restaurant team could solve many such problems, eventually including recipe problems, learning from each other as they go until each of them is able to tweak the process almost seamlessly.  That way, the regular team also becomes the crack team.

That’s an idea that’s not just for restaurants.