Improve Process – Page 7 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 25, 2023

Contribution

As a musical instrument, the triangle is often regarded as a bit of a joke. A bit ridiculous. Not to be taken seriously.

Yet a composer includes it in their orchestration for a reason – because it’s unique sound contributes to the experience they wish to convey. Without it the composer’s promise couldn’t be kept.

When times are hard, it’s tempting to strip back on our offer. To cut down on the details of our customer experience.

Just remember, it’s your promise you’re really stripping back. Eventually it will show.

Use your natural ingenuity to find a better way to keep it instead.

January 20, 2023

“Prompt: “short, scrawny figure; hunched shoulders; weak, sagging jawline; thin, greasy hair; unkempt, unruly style; dull, lifeless eyes; lack of intelligence, confidence; wrinkled, sallow skin; excessive stubble; crooked, hooked nose; thin, pursed lips; flabby, untoned body; undefined, flabby muscles; exudes weakness, insecurity, unattractiveness; epitome of masculine ugliness; timid, self-doubting; air of nervousness, insecurity; truly a sight to avoid; unimpressive” via Midjourney v4, prompt generated by chatGPT after requesting description of the opposite of a perfect man“. Cameron Butler

“If the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to it by a machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as little time as possible may be spent on it. It is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.” William Morris

January 13, 2023

Regulation is feedback too

It may not feel like it, but regulation is simply another form of feedback for your business. It just happens to be the kind of feedback you are not allowed to ignore.

Think of it as feedback from your industry. Lessons learned by others that can save you grief. Of course not all of it is designed to help your business, sometimes it’s the result of bigger players flexing their muscle in the market, to make it harder for businesses like yours. Even that is useful feedback – telling you where the bigger players feel vulnerable. Use it to your advantage.

Since you can’t ignore regulatory feedback, it pays to have a really clear Promise, and plenty of the other kinds of feedback coming in regularly, so that you can make sure the requirements of regulation can’t unduly distort your unique way of making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.

That means that as far as possible, compliance, like admin, needs to be a side effect of doing what you’re here to do, not the other way around.

Of course you need to be compliant, but the regulator shouldn’t come first.

They’re not your customer.

December 9, 2022

Recycling

The reason we pay tolls on estuary crossings like Dartford, Humber and Cardiff, is because until very recently, most freight got shipped along our coasts. Anyone who could afford a carriage and later a car, could also afford to go the long way round.

There’s no reason we couldn’t transport most of our freight coastally again, except that we tend to assume that progress only takes one route. That we must ditch everything we ever did before, and use only new things.

That’s not true of course, we can recycle ideas, methods and technologies from the past.

And knowing what we know now, make them work better.

November 28, 2022

Human Feedback 3 – suggestions

If you make it easy for people to log ideas as they go, you’re more likely to get useful ideas for improvement, because its when they’re actually doing the job that people feel the friction. This could be as simple as a shared google doc, or as fully functional as Slack or Trello. Whatever works for you and your team.

Logging ideas is just the first step of course. The next is to review them. This is where its helpful to have dedicated time set aside. Get everyone together to review, ponder the consequences and choose which ideas to incorporate next.

Then create a schedule for implementing these improvements, seeing how they affect things, and rolling them out or back as a consequence.

If this is starting to look a bit like software development, that’s because in a way it is. Like software, your business is a system – for making and keeping promises.

We’ve learned a lot about how to improve software systems while customers are actually using them. It makes sense to apply that know-how to your Promise System too.

It involves building in good habits of observation, selection and listening to feedback. And like admin, it works best when it is as much as possible a side-effect of doing the job.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 16, 2022

After the complaint

After the complaint has been handled; once you’ve addressed the customer’s problem and left them more than happy with the result – so happy that they’ll tell their friends about what went wrong and how you put it right for them so well. After all that, there is one more job to do.

Make sure you update the way you Keep your Promise so that you don’t get the same complaint again.

Amend your Customer Experience Score.

October 7, 2022

Getting out from under

No matter how light the burden, or what a joy it is to carry, it’s good to get out from under it once in a while.

I’m disappearing off for a holiday. Back on the 19th.

Take care.

September 5, 2022

Metaphors

A metaphor is a shortcut to understanding.

Faster than a speeding bullet, an idea moves fully-formed and sharp as nails, from my head to yours.

The problem is that if a metaphor doesn’t capture some deep truth, it’s actually pernicious. Dust thrown into the eyes. A quick and easy way to lie.

The elephant in the room is that everything that matters is far too complex to be captured in a single metaphor. We live in systems, not storybooks.

So maybe it’s time to see our metaphors for what they are – millstones round our necks, stopping us from making progress.

Let’s abandon them, and find better ways to imagine how the world goes round.

August 25, 2022

Inoculation

I’ve missed out on so many diseases – whooping cough, diptheria, rubella, polio, tuberculosis – as a result of being inoculataed against them at an early age. And I am very grateful.

Now it seems that people can be ‘inoculated’ against spreading misinformation too.

By showing people youtube videos explaining the techniques used to manipulate them into liking and sharing, it seems people are more able to spot the manipulation happening in other videos.

That’s good news I think.

The bad news is that these videos are being developed by Google, who will decide which societies are ‘in need of’ inoculation.

The techniques are well known and have been used for centuries by politicians, newspapers and advertisers.

Perhaps, instead of relying on the kindness of Google,we could inoculate people early, and just start teaching this stuff in schools?