Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Improve Process

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty
April 5, 2023

Rigidity is the wrong tool for dealing with uncertainty

When  your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use.   That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.

The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity.   To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.

Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.

All you need to do is to build the firm core:

First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:

  • Define the people you serve in terms of psychographics, not demographics.
  • Define how you serve them in terms of their deeper needs, not passing wants.
  • Define how you achieve that in terms of values and behaviours, not external measures.

Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:

  • Identify the demographic(s) most likely to contain enough people of the right psychographic.
  • Understand what matters to them right now.
  • Identify what dis-ables the motivated.
  • Design a package that addresses what these people need right now.

Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:

  • Embodies your distinctive values and behaviours.
  • Can be played by any competent musician.
  • Enables each musician to bring their own experience and personality to their performance.
  • Allows them to create a new interpretation of your Promise when they encounter the new and unexpected.

Make sure you gather feedback:

  • From the Score as it is being played.
  • From the people you seek to serve and the people who work with you.
  • From your regulator if you have one, and your industry.
  • From the impact you makes on the people and planet around you.

Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:

  • Make sure everyone can play the whole Score.
  • Give them regular R&D time, in the company of fellow players, to tweak or re-design the Score, in response to feedback, learning each other’s strengths as they go.

Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty.  You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Uncertainty
April 3, 2023

Uncertainty

“Where the future is uncertain, people and organizations have the freedom to influence what it becomes.” Vaughn Tan ‘The Uncertainty Mindset’

Whose idea of the future is your business shaping?

‘Tech’
March 30, 2023

‘Tech’

Some people like to push the idea that ‘tech’ will be the answer to all our woes.

And they’re right.

Just remember that ‘tech’ isn’t necessarily their tech.

Breeding deep-rooted perennial wheat and rice is ‘tech’.   Wind-powered ships are ‘tech’.  Permaculture and agro-forestry are ‘tech’.  Line-fishing is ‘tech’.  15-minute cities are ‘tech’.  A circular economy is ‘tech’.   Flint knives are ‘tech’.   Bark-cloth is ‘tech’.   All of these technologies have been used in the past and are being used right now.  We don’t even need to invent them.

But the ‘tech’ that will really save us is our imagination.   If we use it to design ways of being that will work with our planet instead of against it.

We’ve done that before too.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

HT to Dave Foulkes for the prompt.

A recommendation
March 29, 2023

A recommendation

If you’re interested in both what it means to be human, and how even in the sciences, we are trapped by our biases, I highly recommend the Radical Anthopology Group at UCL.

They run ‘London’s longest running evening class‘, for free.  You won’t always agree with them, but you’ll certainly learn something interesting and new.

Sign up on eventbrite for upcoming talks, and watch previous ones on their Vimeo page.

I’m going for this one next.

Never be ashamed of reading fiction
March 23, 2023

Never be ashamed of reading fiction

I’m never ashamed of reading fiction, and I read a lot of it, usually multiple times – everything from detective stories,  myths and legends, 18th-century epistolary novels to sci-fi and historical romances, with children’s fiction and classics along the way.

Fiction teaches me at least as much, if not more than non-fiction.

I put myself in another’s shoes, see things from multiple perspectives, hear the same things said in a plethora of different ways, experience new and different worlds I’d never encounter in real life.

Non-fiction is great, I love the new information and ideas it gives me, the different ways of interpreting how the world works.

But it’s fiction that gets me practicing the empathy and imagination I need to apply my information and ideas wisely and humanely.   Almost withour realising it, because I’m having so much fun.

I’ll never be ashamed of reading fiction.

Long may I be able to do so.

Thinking together
March 20, 2023

Thinking together

“Think for yourself, but not by yourself.”

My ear caught the phrase on Radio 4 this morning and I was intrigued.  It’s from Julian Baggini’s new book “How to think like a philosopher”  (on my shopping list already, of course).

I don’t know about you, but I am all too often guilty of thinking by myself.   Working things through on my own, running off down blind alleys, diving into rabbit holes, only to end up at a conclusion I could have looked up.

I’d have got there much quicker if I’d talked to other people.

It’s not that other people necessarily know more than I do, it’s that they might, and even if they don’t, going through my thinking out loud, to a group of people with shared values and different perspectives is bound to clarify my workings.

Luckily, when you run your business with a team, you have that like-hearted thinking club ready-made.  Encourage everyone in it to think for themselves, then do your important business thinking together.  You’ll like the results.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Transforming knowledge into know-how
February 27, 2023

Transforming knowledge into know-how

“Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them.

But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them.

And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.” Paul Graham

This is why composing your Customer Experience Score matters, and why it works.

You aren’t simply transferring your ideal Customer Experience onto paper, you’re (re-)defining it. And then sharing it.   And what you create can be further refined and honed – re-designed if necessary if it doesn’t work or when circumstances change.

That thing you currently carry around in your head can become a tool you and all the people you employ can use to make your business 100 times better than it is now.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Impacting Earth
February 17, 2023

Impacting Earth

Of course your business doesn’t just impact the people immediately involved in it.

It also impacts Earth, therefore other inhabitants too.   Possibly in ways you can’t currently see.

You may not be responsible for the entirety of the impact, but perhaps you contribute.

Just as, by outsourcing my accounting to an accountant, I don’t employ someone directly, but contribute to the employment of the people who work for my accountant, so, by using a laptop and mobile for my work, I contribute to the pollution and oppression created by a lithium mine.

The point is to be aware.  Then to ramp up the positives and minimise the negatives.

That might mean changing how you do business, or even what you do, to play your part in creating a safe and just space for humanity here on our planet:

 

One thing’s for certain, you won’t be short of work.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Impacting people
February 16, 2023

Impacting people

If what everyone really wants is something like this:

  • Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
    • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

Then your impact on people is about how much you help or hinder them in their quest to achieve it.

Do you enable people to earn enough to rise above meeting basic needs?  Do you free their time to focus on finding and following their purpose?  Do you help them to master skills and capabilities that will increase their agency and autonomy?  Do you help them connect to a community that values them?

How could you measure these things?

A good place to start might be to look at what changes when it works.   What are the symptoms of that change?  How few of them could you measure to tell you the effect your business has had?

Of course you’ll want to measure these things for your clients.

Remember to measure them for your team and yourself too.   You’re all involved.

Measuring impact
February 14, 2023

Measuring impact

The final component of feedback that matters for your business, is the impact it makes.  On your clients, your team, your family, your friends, your community and your planet.

Impact is probably also the hardest kind of feedback to measure.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

What ripples is your business pebble responsible for?