Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Process Design

Rules, interpretation, performance.
September 7, 2020

Rules, interpretation, performance.

Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).

An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it.    They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it.  They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.

Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.

Performance is the source of useful feedback.   Everything else is conjecture.   The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first.   The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience.  The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.

All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.

It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance.   Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.

2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:

  1. The ‘rules’ can be sketchy, but it’s almost impossible to create outstanding performances intentionally, repeatedly and consistently without any.
  2. Documenting the ‘rules’ is the beginning of the process, not the end.

Stage Management
August 25, 2020

Stage Management

Making sure the right props are in the right place at the right time is an important job in theatre or film (check out The Goes Wrong Show for what happens when it’s not done well).

It’s an important job in business too, although it’s rarely considered as such.   More often than not it turns into everybody’s job, which makes it nobody’s job, which makes it something that doesn’t happen consistently.

The answer is to think through the process your business runs (how you Share your Promise, and How you Keep your Promise) from beginning to end.  As you do, you’ll identify where each business prop is used or referred to.  Once you know this you can start to automate the ‘Stage Manager’ role.

Most importantly, you’ll see where it is easiest to create each prop, because that’s where the information it embodies is naturally and easily gathered.

As far as possible, you want this to happen as a side-effect of doing what people want to do anyway.  This is why cloud accounting is such a brilliant thing.  Clients do what they do – raise invoices, pay bills, log expenses, manage bank accounts.  The side effect of all this is that all the props needed to produce a VAT return or monthly management reports are ready and waiting for the accountant to work with.

Where this isn’t possible, sharing the text of the play (your process) makes the downstream impact visible.

Salespeople, for example, are notoriously rubbish at logging client details, even though they are the people who naturally have all the information to hand.  That’s because they don’t feel the impact on what comes after them.   From a business perspective a sale isn’t complete until the customer has received what they paid for and is happy with it.

That means that, like the bricklayer’s labourer, part of what every salesperson produces is the productivity of the people down the line.

Your business is like a play.   Each role in your business contributes to the productivity of the whole play.   Recognise that in the way you reward people, and you’ve created an incentive for improvement.

One size fits no-one
August 20, 2020

One size fits no-one

Standardisation is useful.   Standard shoe and clothing sizes enabled manufacture at scale, which in turn meant that more people could afford decent clothes and shoes than ever before.   Standard sizes are worked out by taking averages of the actual population.

Standardised clothing works for two reasons.   First because sizes are based on at most two or three dimensions.   This means that any given individual is more likely to fall within an average range for a given size.  There will be exceptions (I can never find gloves to fit), but they will be rare.   The other reason is that clothes are soft, they have give.   People can easily adjust the standard to suit themselves.   You can belt a baggy shirt, or wear extra socks inside too-big shoes.   A slightly too-tight dress will stretch a little.   You can at least be comfortable, if not always elegant.

Averaging over multiple dimensions, especially for something rigid, like a building, an office, or a cockpit is far less successful – even dangerous.   Nobody fits this kind of average, so everyone becomes uncomfortable and inefficient.

The same goes for business processes.  No two businesses do things in quite the same way – not even when they are doing the same job.  So forcing your way of doing things into a generic off-the-shelf pattern squeezes out diffentiation, turning you into a commodity.  It also makes the people running the process both uncomfortable and inefficient.

Those are the last things you or your customers want.

The alternative isn’t to tailor everything from scratch every time.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you will have your own set of patterns for ‘the way we do things round here’.

Identify them, create templates from them.  Then use them to build processes that are fully adjustable by the people who will actually use them.

Adjustable gives far better results than the average.

 

 

Recipes do not a restaurant make.
August 18, 2020

Recipes do not a restaurant make.

I enjoy cooking, and do it every day.

When I make lunch, sometimes I follow a procedure (a recipe), but mostly I use techniques and rules of thumb I’ve learned over the years to create a simple, one-course meal out of whatever I happen to have at the time.

This kind of cooking is fine for my lunch.   My ‘Promise of Value’ to my husband is a tasty, filling and nutritious lunch.   He doesn’t really care how I get there.

For Sunday dinner though, I need more than a procedure and a set of techniques.   I’ll use several procedures (roast chicken, yorkshire pudding, accompanying vegetables, pudding), and loads of techniques (roasting, making a batter, boiling, steaming, baking).

But the thing that really makes Sunday dinner work is that I co-ordinate all the main course procedures so they finish at the same time, while pudding arrives at just the right interval later.   That’s what I call a process.

Now imagine I want to open a restaurant.

Even with a limited menu, I’ll have different tables working at different timescales, with different options.   Not only do I have to get meals cooked on time, I’ll need to make sure there are enough clean tables, dishes and cutlery.   I’ll need to greet guests, take orders, offer drinks, and serve dinners.    Several of them, all at once.

In other words one overall process (Lunch) is actually the co-ordination of multiple instances of several processes, which are in turn the co-ordination of several procedures – all designed to deliver the same Promise of Value (“Sunday Dinners like your Mother used to make”).

If I don’t work out what those processes should be, so I can deliver my Promise effectively for less than I charge, I won’t have a restaurant for long.  If I design them to over-deliver for less than I charge, I’ve got the start of a restaurant chain.

‘Process’ is a word that’s bandied about quite a bit.   Like all jargon it can be misused or misunderstood, but it’s definitely bigger than a recipe.

We all make mistakes
August 13, 2020

We all make mistakes

It’s impossible to be right all the time, especially in the midst of ‘unprecedented’ happenings.

But it is entirely possible to be transparently fair all the time.   Especially if you have a compass to guide decision-making where there is no map.

So, when you see ‘mistakes’ produced by an opaque process following an invisible compass, it’s legitimate, even necessary to ask questions:

  • Why is it like this?
  • What does this say about the compass of the people who designed it?
  • Why isn’t that compass explicit?
  • What needs to change to make the process fairer and more open next time?

With a clearly visible compass and a fair, transparent process for your business, your people can’t go far wrong.   Even when they’re not right.

As-is, Should-be
August 12, 2020

As-is, Should-be

Mozart didn’t write down his music ‘as-is’ before writing it again as ‘should-be’.

Of course not.

Like all composers, Mozart started with what he wanted the audience to hear, the ‘should-be’, translating as closely as he could what he had in his head into musical notes on paper.

I doubt if his first result was the only one.

Once you’ve got your Customer Experience Score written down, it doesn’t matter that it started as ‘should be’.   The job now is to make it your ‘as-is’, then to continually evolve it in line with the best ‘should-be’ you and your people can imagine.

Flipping
July 17, 2020

Flipping

This week, the problem with my broadband connection was finally sorted.   After 4 months.

On the first visit the engineer ran some tests and did something with the connection at the bottom of the pole.   He also checked the socket in my house and gave our arrangement the thumbs up.   The speed went up again, but the fix only lasted a day.  Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the second visit a new engineer ran some tests and did something else with the connection at the bottom of the pole.   He also replaced the socket in my house with a new one.   He explained that the reason why the fix didn’t last was because the system is set up to reduce the speed to keep the connection stable.  Fair enough.   The speed went up again, but only lasted a day.  Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the third visit another engineer tinkered with the connection at the bottom of the pole.   He ran some more tests, which determined that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house.    Nothing changed.  Terrible speed, and the line kept dropping.

On the fourth visit a different engineer tested the line from my end, inside the house.   He then went to the cabinet half a mile away and tested the line from there.   He identified that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house.   So he looked for a likely location, got his ladder out and looked at the box that connects the line to the outside of my house, near the roof.

Bingo!   The box was full of water.  He changed the box, replaced the connectors, and everything was fine.  And stayed fine.

I am delighted of course, and have nothing to complain of regarding any of the individuals involved either from my provider or from Openreach.

But I can’t help thinking that the process could be better.

I get that in a network, you have to be systematic in your search for a fault.  I’ve done it myself.

Usually, you test the connection at one end, then the other, starting with the extremes.   In this case, the exchange, and my socket.  Then you repeat the test, working inwards through pairs of connecting nodes until you’ve narrowed down the location of the fault to a single length of wire.

But I wonder if the application of experience could shorten the process?

Maybe the answer would be to start with the shortest length of wire – between my socket and the connection at the top of my house – and work outwards from there?   After all these are the parts most exposed to the elements, and most likely to fail.

It would be just as systematic and in the worst case take no longer than working from the outside in.    But it could well be better for the customer as well as being quicker and cheaper for Openreach.

Or perhaps it would be even quicker and cheaper just to replace that external box every time, because it’s the weakest point in the chain and also the most accessible?    That way you’re renewing the network as you go, for pence.

I don’t know.   I’m not a telephone engineer.   Just a process geek, who happens to be a customer.

The Big Picture
June 29, 2020

The Big Picture

When you’re new to a place the kind of map that’s useful isn’t all that detailed.    All you need is something that can tell you where you are in relation to landmarks you’ll easily find and recognise, so you can see where to head next.

This kind of ‘big picture’ never happens by accident.  It’s not an aggregation of local details.   It’s designed, top-down, on purpose as a guide for strangers.

If your business is your Utopia, why not make a map of it?   Big picture enough to let people navigate safely by themselves, or easily enlist help from a passing stranger if they go astray.

You might find you get fewer pinch points, and less people stuck down blind alleys.

On Purpose.
June 15, 2020

On Purpose.

We tend to think of keeping things as they are, of doing nothing, staying with the status quo, as the neutral option.   But of course that’s not true.

If we don’t act with intention to design our business around what’s important to us, it will still be designed, by everyone in it and the systems surrounding it.   Just not on purpose.   And not necessarily for the better.

“The system is what the system does.”

I’d rather trust to judgment than to luck.

“Design your company or it will be designed for you.” Brian Chesky, talking to Eric Ries on Out of The Crisis podcast.