Process Design – Page 10 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner. One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that. One favours planning, the other seeing what happens. This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net. A floor below which things cannot go. Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’. The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst. You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

November 29, 2021

I knew that would happen

“I knew that would happen.”

If you knew, why didn’t you do something to prevent it?

Probably because while you knew it was possible or even likely, you hoped it wouldn’t happen.

It would be much better to have a process that deals not only with the 80% of cases where nothing untoward happens, but also with the 20% of cases that don’t work like that. Or even better, one that pre-empts their occurrence.

Let’s say you’re a coffee roaster. You sell beans to lots of small independent coffee shops. It bugs you that they never plan their orders properly, often ringing up to ask for an urgent delivery at a timescale that’s impossible for you to make money on. You’ve made things clear – ‘Order before 6pm for next-day delivery’ – but still they ring at 8pm for an urgent delivery by 8am the next day. What should be exceptional is turning into the norm.

How could you pre-empt this?

You could accept that’s how they work, and find a way to deliver coffee overnight as your default. That might involve putting prices up of course, which might annoy the more forward-thinking of your customers.

You could make them order more each time, so they never run out. That would cost them more of course, and might end up in a stockpile they don’t want to carry.

You could put re-order prompts in or on your packaging, or give them the means to prompt themselves – stickers, or ‘re-order now’ cards.

You could recognise that the people using the coffee may not be the people ordering it, and make it easy for them to start an order – with a QR code on a bag, for instance – that gets confirmed with the person responsible before it’s sent out.

You could find ways to prompt them to re-order, based on how they work. That would involve asking them how they work (or even observing them as a mystery shopper?). That would cost you more up -front, but might make for a closer relationship. There probably aren’t that many different ways to run a coffee-shop, so you would quickly identify most cases. Then you could offer ordering options to new clients, knowing you have a process for dealing with them smoothly

There isn’t a right answer here, except that whenever you say “I knew that would happen”, realise that what you’ve identified isn’t just a pain for you. It’s an opportunity to cement your relationships and differentate yourself from your competitors, just by making your client’s life easier.

November 16, 2021

Pinning things down

When we want to examine something closely, it helps to take a snapshot of it, to capture it at a point in time, to pin it down and look at it as a specimen. This makes it easier for us to analyse its composition and construction.

This is a useful way to gather some information, as long as we remember that for all systems, including our businesses, the natural state is to be moving, changing and renewing.

For most things worth investigating, static means dead.

November 10, 2021

Seeing straight

I’m lucky, my eyesight has always been good. Apart from one little thing. I don’t always see straight.

Sometimes, I reach for a book on the bookshelf, and come back with the one that was next to it. I’ve got used to this, so now I purposely reach for the book next to the one I really want. It works every time.

You don’t need dodgy eyes to take advantage of this simple technique. As John Kay writes in ‘Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly‘ aiming for something next to the thing we want is actually the best way to get the thing we want.

What do you really want for your business? What could you focus on that might actually deliver it?

November 8, 2021

A market of one

I’ve been known to wax lyrical (or just go on about) about how your Promise of Value drives the way you design your business, so that it can’t help but deliver on the Promises you make.

But what does that actually mean in practice? How do you actually do that?

Let’s follow a thread of an example.

Your Promise of Value contains 3 sets of qualities – behaviours (the way you do things, which shades into your values), what you do (what you do to deliver benefit to your clients) and what you are (the relationship that is created between you and a client as a result).

Let’s say that one of your behaviours is ‘honest’. Among other things, that might mean that you always tell the truth. That has implications for your Share Promise process. For example, you may decide to never make claims you can’t substantiate. That might mean that for you ‘Showing Up’ is essentially about presenting the substantiation. Your 60-seconds is a story of a happy client, or your social media feed is full of testimonials, or that your website contains a live feed showing the positive impact you’re having. Or maybe the negative impact, reducing?

Always telling the truth has implications for your Keep Promise process too. It affects how you deal with a complaint, or the advice you give a client. It implies that before either of these situations arises, you must have a process for gathering as much ‘truth’ as you can. That might translate into a separate process each time (receive a complaint, research it, then get back to them), or it may mean building a process for continuously recording data you might need, as a side effect of doing the job.

Your Promise of Value isn’t just for prospects and clients, it also drives how you design your Improve Process – how you organise or re-organise the resources you have to serve your people better. How you design your measurement systems, your appraisal systems and your recruitment systems. For example, how could you test that a potential team member is ‘honest’? How would you build ‘always telling the truth’ into feedback mechanisms?

There will be other options. The form your processes take depends on other aspects of your Promise of Value – not everything all at once, but the behaviours that are most important to you and the people you serve. How does your business combine a behaviour like ‘honest’ with ‘kind’, or ‘professional’ or ‘cutting-edge’?

By embedding your Promise of Value into what you do and how you do it, your prospects, clients, employees, suppliers – all your stakeholders – experience who you are, and what you are here to do in a very concrete way. You’re showing, not telling. What you are, is what they get. And what you are is unique. You’re now in a market of one.

November 2, 2021

Not all who wander are lost

Today’s ‘The Life Scientific’ focused on Sharon Peacock, a consultant in microbiology and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge; a pioneer and advocate for the application of pathogen genome sequencing in the National Health Service to tackle antibiotic resistance, and most recently, founding director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium. A network of 600 scientists constantly tracking the appearance and spread of new COVID-19 variants.

Impressive eh?

But she almost didn’t make it.

Sharon left school at 16, worked in a corner shop, then as a dental nurse (3 doors down), before deciding to train as a nurse. She had trouble getting in, because she didn’t have the science qualifications needed, and not long into her training, decided that what she really wanted to be was a doctor. She finished her nursing training, taking evening classes to get her ‘O’ levels in maths physics and chemistry. Next, she combined a job in end-of-life care with more studying – this time for the science ‘A’ levels. Finally she could apply to medical schools.

Every one of them all rejected her application without an interview. The same thing happened over the next application cycle.

Fortunately, Sharon didn’t give up. She called one of the universities and asked them to at least see her. Within a month she was at medical school. And the rest is, as they say, history. An interest in care, sparked by being a lowly dental nurse, has ended up as care on a global scale.

We almost wasted this talent, as I’m sure we waste other talents, simply because we mistake wandering for being lost. Sharon’s route to professorship was somewhat circuitous, but it wasn’t accidental, and certainly not a sleepwalk. Her intention was very clear – although possibly hard to spot on standardised application forms.

Which means we have to think carefully about how we design our recruitment processes, including questions that help us to tell the difference between wandering, drift, and sleepwalking.

Because wanderers (and drifters) bring much more to the table than mere qualifications.

September 13, 2021

Invention

I received this book on Friday and finished it on Saturday. It is, as one (female) reviewer put it “equal parts informative and infuriating”, what I call ‘a gnasher’ – where men decide that woman ‘can’t do’ something because of their biology, then make a law to prevent them doing it anyway, just in case.

Gnashing aside, this is well worth a read, if only to help us think about what the world could look like if businesses founded by women received more than 1% of UK venture capital, or if ideas that come from the old, the differently-abled or the ‘lower classes’ were taken seriously.

If ‘innovation’ wasn’t just about disruption, creative destruction and domination, but also about care, repair and contribution.

Or if we just acknowledged that we’re human animals, with bodies as well as brains.

I recommend it.

We need more mothers of invention.

September 7, 2021

Design your business or it will be designed for you

“Design your business or it will be designed for you.” It’s one of my favourite sayings, spoken by Brian Chesky of AirBnB.

But what does it actually mean? How can others design your business for you, when you’re the boss?

When you started out as a one-person band, you did everything. You tried different things to market and sell your services, and to deliver them in such a way that customers came back, or told their friends. You designed the business.

Once demand grows beyond what you can personally deliver, you have to add capacity. And every time you do that, you bring in someone else’s idea and experience of what a business looks like.

You might add capacity by automating some of what you do with software. That job management software, quote generator or CRM tool was designed by someone else, according to their vision of what a business is and how a business works. A vision that is necessarily generic, otherwise they couldn’t sell enough to be viable.

You might outsource some of what you do, your accounts, or your HR for example. Your accountant or sales agent will have their own idea of what a business is and how it works. If they’re any good they’ll try to find out more about yours, but often they’ll fall back on a generic design to fit all industries, or a design learned working elsewhere, or their own design. It’s not your area of expertise, so even though you don’t love it, you put up with it.

You might work with other small businesses like yourself, sub-contracting some of the delivery. But like yourself, they will have designed their own small business, and that design probably won’t match yours. That can prove exasperating and stressful, unless you decide it doesn’t matter that much, and accept the differences.

You might recruit a business partner, co-director, manager or experienced staff to take on some of the work you do. Almost certainly you’ll want them to have experience of business in general and your industry in particular. In other words, they’ll bring with them the design of those other businesses they’ve worked in, plus their own ideas of how to do things. If you’re very lucky, those ideas will chime with yours. If you’re not, you’ll be fighting to maintain your business design, or running through several cycles before you find ‘the right person’.

You might recruit juniors, school-leavers or graduates even, who you can ‘mould’ to suit your business design. But moulding takes time, and even they will have their own ideas of how things should be done. They need almost constant supervision and just don’t seem to get it.

You might hire a business coach or consultant to help you deal with all these problems. They too, come with baggage of what a business ‘should’ look like, learned at the Bank, or at business school, or from building their own successful businesses. They will try and shape your business to fit.

In the face of all this, you have a choice. You can supervise closely, re-do work, fight to correct what everyone else is doing ‘wrong’, or you can accept other people’s designs for your business. The first is exhausting, the second feels like it’s not your business any more.

There’s a step you can take, which can solve all of these potential problems before they happen, which is to take your business design out of your head and get it down as a shareable ‘blueprint’ everyone can work from. The Customer Experience Score for your business. That captures your unique way of making and keeping promises to the people you serve.

Your Score becomes a specification for software, an operations manual for new staff, suppliers and contractors at all levels. Above all it becomes a permanent record of your design for your business, that enables your unique creation to scale, evolve and persist through time.

Design your business, or sooner or later, you’ll be back to working in someone else’s business.

August 31, 2021

Imitiation or inspiration

Over the long weekend, I had a good rummage through some of my quilting books. It was interesting to come back to them after a gap of a few years as they’ve been in storage while we built the extension.

What struck me going through them now, was just how prescriptive some of the project instructions are – specifying exactly which fabrics to use – down to the manufacturer, designer, range and colourway – exactly how to cut the fabric up to get the required number of pieces, and exactly how to sew them together to make a quilt top. They are instructions for making a replica of a particular quilt.

I don’t know why, but I find this approach quite disturbing. Perhaps because it feels like it isn’t really creative. If I follow the instructions to the letter I’ll get a carbon copy of the quilt in the picture. There’ll be nothing of me in it. There’s no real learning in it either. I learn to follow instructions to replicate a particular quilt, that’s it.

By contrast other books – generally the older ones, are quite freestyle – specifying only ‘light’ or ‘dark’ fabrics together with the number of different shapes needed – assuming that you know how to cut a square or a triangle (or that you’ll refer to the ‘how-to’ section at the beginning of the book). Some even include pictures of different versions of the same patchwork pattern, so you can see how the look changes with different fabrics. These are recipes for making a kind of quilt. Recipes I am encouraged to make my own, right from the beginning. I learn to think about colours and how they work together, I learn how to think about cutting. Most importantly, I learn about my own taste. I learn a process I can apply to different starting materials to generate my own unique results.

For me, the difference between these approaches shows the difference between workflow and process. Workflow turns human beings into mindless replicators. Process frees them to be creative.

Imitation or inspiration. Which would you rather encourage in your team?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Process Design