Improve Process – Page 8 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 16, 2022

Keep it simple, stupid

I’m facing a really interesting challenge at the moment.

Over many years I’ve developed a methodology, notation and software for capturing a Customer Experience Score in a way that suits people rather than machines. My notation is very simple. There aren’t many rules, and even those are only casually enforced.

This is because it’s all about making it easy for ordinary mortals. Whether that’s a business owner wanting to capture their desired customer experience or one of their colleagues wanting to learn what’s needed to deliver that experience. My aim is to make the software easy to learn and easy to use, and above all flexible so that the people using it can start scrappy, and build up to whatever level of detail works for them.

My challenge now is that some of those humans want to generate something more formal from their Score, something that needs clear rules to produce an output.

It’s interesting because it’s showing me how fuzzy (and sometimes inconsistent) my logic is. This is fine for humans, because humans are perfectly capable of interpreting fuzziness, and in any case I want to leave plenty of room for interpretation. It’s not so fine for software.

One approach would be to make the tool more rigorous, more constrained, more precise. In other words, to make it more machine-like. But that would mean adding levels of detail that would soon become excruciating for any ordinary mortal.

No, my work is all about liberating humans to be human, so I have to find another way, and I think it’s this: If humans are good with fuzziness and nuance, and machines are not, let the machine ignore all that and concentrate on the essentials.

For stupid machines, the answer might just be to keep it simple.

August 11, 2022

What do you do when everything is urgent?

You’re probably familiar with the decision-makig matrix from Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’:

Davidjcmorris, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The problem is that this diagram doesn’t tell you what to do when everything is urgent, which is how things tend to be by the time we humans get round to dealing with them.

The answer is I think, to start dealing with all of them, focusing first on the things that will either have most impact, or will enable you to still be around to deal wth the other urgent things.

A story in today’s Science X Newsletter illustrates this perfectly.

Methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but only hangs around in the atmosphere for about 10 years. So by reducing our methane emissions quickly (especially if we use captured methane to replace new fossil fuels along the way), we can have a big and rapid impact on global warming, while our strategies for dealing with CO2 are taking longer to have an effect.

Like so much else with the climate crisis, we already have solutions to hand, we just need to pick them up and use them.

What do you do when everything is urgent?

Take a deep breath.

Remind yourself that it’s not too late.

Then get started.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 9, 2022

Where the system ends

When the idea for Crossrail was first floated years ago, I thought nothing of it. Abbey Wood station is 3 miles away. Too far to walk, and not a pleasant walk either. So I forgot about it.

Until TFL created a new bus route that took in the new station.

The thing that makes the new Elizabeth Line work for people like me isn’t the big, expensive part – the Crossrail system, it’s the bus that connects us to it. And that, plus all the other new bus routes created to serve the Elizabeth Line is what makes the expensive part worth all the investment.

Knowing where your business system ends matters.

Tempted to cut a ‘peripheral’ service for your customers?

Be careful. It may actually be the enabler for your core business.

August 5, 2022

Side-effects

There’s another bit of feedback we should be using to improve our businesses – our side-effects.

Side effects are not necessarily intentional, but they are real.

They’re not necessarily negative either.

If as business owners, we truly want to ‘make the world a better place’, our improvement process must include getting feedback on our side-effects, then acting to minimise the damaging ones and maximise the enriching.

Otherwise we’re just not really viable.

Because one day, the negatives come back to bite us.

August 4, 2022

How much value you create

One of my favourite stories from business school was this one:

A sheet steel manufacturer was looking to sell their steel at a premium.

They looked carefully at who their customers were, and the process they went through to get their job done.

Their main customers were white goods manufacturers. Now, steel doesn’t come out of the mill white, so these customers needed a paint shop where they sprayed the shaped steel casings of their products white. There’s a reason they’re called ‘white goods’. Offering other colours would mean adding another paint shop or creating an expensive change-over process for your single paint shop.

The steel manufacturer worked out that by adding a small cost to their own production process, they could save their customers a large cost and enable them to offer their goods at a premium. It’s easier to paint sheet steel when it’s flat, at the end of your production process. So that’s what the steel manufacturer did.

“Buy steel from us and you can have any colour you like. And de-commoditise your products to boot”.

You don’t have to ask your clients intrusive questions about their finances to measure – or at least estimate – the value you create for them. You just have to understand something about how their business works.

Some things to think about:

If you save them money, how much? What does that add up to over time?
If you save them time, how much? What was that time costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you save them effort, how much? What was that costing them before you? What does it cost them now?
If you enable them to get more from the same level of resources, how much? How much does that add up to over time?
Does any of this enable them to sell more, or to sell at a higher price? How much more? How much higher? That’s part of the value you add too.

Measuring how much value you create for clients isn’t easy. It is possible.

If you put your mind to understanding your clients first.

August 3, 2022

How people feel about how you do it

Finding out how people feel about how you do what you do is a bit harder to do than working out costs, because you can’t automate clients.

But if you stick to the idea of making it part of the process, you increase your chances of getting good feedback when you need it.

Remember those events you’re interested in? When a prospect makes an enquiry; when a prospect becomes a client; when you welcome a client onboard, when the particular promise you made to this client has been kept.

You probably already send an email in response to those events, possibly even several emails along the way. Why not include a simple satisfaction survey as appropriate?

The important thing here is to keep it really simple – no typing required, just clicks, and no taking the client off to some tedious questionnaire.

Keep the format to a prompt on a dimension that matters to them followed by a simple ‘It’s all good’/’It’s not good’, plus an option to explain if moved to do so. If people have strong feelings about how you do what you do, they will want to share them. It’s good customer care to enable that. Even better, an option to have someone call them to find out more. Keep the number of prompts down to 2 or 3 if you can.

One more thing. ‘People’ doesn’t have to just mean clients. Your team are people, your suppliers are people, your neighbours are people. Some of your shareholders are people. Finding out how they feel about how you do what you do might prompt some really interesting improvements.

A little bit of Discipline makes Caring possible.

August 2, 2022

What it costs you to do

An entire industry has grown out of working out what it costs a business to do the things it does. Along with a panoply of tools and techniques. When I was studying at London Business School, I loved it.

It turns out that there is a simple measure that’s good enough for most cases.

Time. Or more accurately, duration.

If you know how many clients you deal with, how long it takes for each client to go through your Share and Keep Promise process, and what your total operating costs are over that time period, then you know what it costs you to do what you do for each client you serve.

If you don’t like the answer you can drill down into Share Promise or Keep Promise to find out where things could work better. And so on.

So how do you measure duration?

By logging events that are of interest and adding up the time that’s elapsed between them.

I’m sure you already note these events: when a prospect makes an enquiry; when a prospect becomes a client; when you welcome a client onboard, when the particular promise you made to this client has been kept.

You may even collect them automatically – they’re in your CRM, or your accounting system, they might even be in your workflow management system. String them together for each client and you’ve got some extremely useful data. Combine this with some other equally simple metrics and you’ve got the kind of process feedback you can use to grow your business efficienty and sustainably if that’s what you want.

A little bit of Discipline makes a lot of Daring possible.

August 1, 2022

Improvement

Improving how you make and keep your promises starts with feedback.

You don’t need to start with the whole thing – just the bit you are currently uneasy about. So, if you’re attracting plenty of business right now, you can skip Share Promise and concentrate on Keep Promise. Or if you’re confident you can Keep promise efficiently and effectively, but want to reach more clients, start with Share Promise. If you’re looking to move into new markets, start with Package Promise.

Wherever you start, there are only really 3 things you need to measure:

what it costs you to do
how people feel about how you do it
and ideally, how much value you create for your client as a result

And if you can measure these as a side-effect of doing the job, so much the better.

That way you don’t even have to be there.

July 29, 2022

Do what’s obvious

My friend Kevin Steinlechner gave me a brilliant piece of advice this morning:

“Do the obvious thing.“

We’re so easily seduced by the novel, the arcane, the difficult thing. The thing that will impress everyone around us, and make them think we’re a genius.

But we can often have more impact by simply acting on the obvious.

Like talking to the people we wish to serve.

Like giving your team the ability and autonomy to Share and Keep your Promise on your behalf.

Like paying people enough to actually live on.

Like banning single-use plastics.

Like insulating homes.

Like leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

These things are so obvious, why haven’t we already done them?

July 28, 2022

A thought…

What is it exactly that the people you serve are trying to achieve? What’s the job they are trying to get done? (Hint: it’s not ‘buy your product or service’).

How do they go about getting that job done? What’s the process they follow to achieve it? What difficulties do they encounter in that process? How can you remove those difficulties for them? How can you make the process simpler/easier/cheaper/safer/more effective?

What if you organised your business around these things, instead of around your own job to be done? (Hint: that’s probably ‘sell my products/services’)

Just a thought.