Process Design – Page 21 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 27, 2019

Decisions

One of the easiest ways to overcomplicate a process that is designed to be run by humans is to spell out every possible decision.

That’s not to say decision trees like the one above aren’t useful in helping people to think through options or scenarios, they are. But often it’s impossible to pre-identify every possible scenario – especially where other living things are involved – and the attempt to include everything we can imagine in a process simply slows down its execution.

For the most part, simple, black & white, truly binary decisions can be automated.

For everything else we want people to think before they act. In which case the best instruction starts with “Use your judgement and experience, together with your knowledge of our purpose and values”.

June 25, 2019

Reification

Humans are very good at taking ideas or feelings that are abstract, implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible, and giving them a concrete form, so that we can reason about them as if they have a real physical presence.

We do it all the time, with maps; forms; questionnaires, diagrams; musical scores; plans; and especially software. Those familiar icons on your phone or laptop screen are reifications of the idea of a dustbin, or a filing system, just as the original dustbin was a reification of the idea of ‘a place to collect rubbish’.

This is OK when we know that we are doing it. When we look at a map, we know it isn’t the territory. But when we give the map a voice that tells us where to go next, we forget that it is a map, and treat it as if it is real – more real than the territory.

But the most dangerous thing about this aspect of reification is that some ideas and feelings are possibly inexpressible, which means that in order to capture them, we must simplify them, reduce them, lose nuance – lose meaning.

We’ve all filled in questionnaires, for serious purposes or for fun, where some of the answers don’t really fit with our experience. But we have to choose one, so we go with an answer that is the nearest, or which captures one aspect of it. By the time everyone does that, the people who formulated the questionnaire have created a model of the group of questionnaire answerers that in fact does not capture the reality at all.

That’s fine if it was just for fun, but what if that model is then used to build the ‘systems’ (not necessarily software) and institutions that surround us? It becomes the reality, and woe betide you if you don’t quite fit.

So, it’s important to be aware that the map is not the territory. The way we model the world around us is not the world, and other models are available – even if we haven’t dreamed them up yet.

And, I think, its important to leave inexpressible things unexpressed. Some parts of the score should be left to the imagination of the musician. They’re usually the most memorable parts of each performance.

June 21, 2019

Why do I need good people if I have process? Evolution.

Why do I need good people if I have process?

No process can be designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality.

Without good people a process-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.

Good people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur. They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the process.

Good people spark off constraints (such as a process), they ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities.

With a solid framework to play in, good people bring a business to life – they make it human.

June 19, 2019

Why do I need process if I have good people? Responsibility

Why do I need process if I have good people?

Having a process to follow while they learn, gives people confidence that they are doing the right thing.

Once people are confident that they know what they are doing, they don’t wait to be made accountable – they take responsibility.

With the confidence of a process behind them, your good people can pretty much manage themselves.

June 12, 2019

Browsers welcome

I’m old enough (just) to remember when you weren’t really supposed to go into a shop unless you were serious about buying.

You couldn’t just see what they had. As soon as you were through the door an assistant pounced on you.

Soon, retailers realised that letting people browse increased sales. Times had changed. People had spare cash. They were no longer buying to fill a need, but to fill a mood.

Today, of course, browsing is always welcome.

Only now, online retailers do the equivalent of chasing you down the street with stuff you browsed – “Hey, you looked at this and didn’t buy it! Why don’t you buy it? Go on, you know you want to really!”.

Desperation is not a good look. It’s not healthy either – especially if it works.

May 30, 2019

Process

People are ambivalent about ‘process’.

For some it feels like a way to ensure consistency, a helpful prop to support them in what they have to do.

For others, its a straitjacket, that turns people into robots.

I prefer to think of it as a springboard. Something with enough give to be able to support different people, and enough resistance to help them really take off.

May 17, 2019

Processes, procedures, workflows

The terms ‘workflow’, ‘procedure”, ‘process’ are often used interchangeably. I think it’s useful to distinguish between them, because they are doing different things.

A workflow does what it says – it describes how responsibility for an activity flows around your organisation as if it was a physical thing moving between departments – a purchase order is raised, goes to X to be reviewed, then to Y to be authorised, then to department Z to be actioned.

A procedure describes the steps needed to complete a specific activity, e.g. Raise Purchase Order, in the same way as a recipe describes how to prepare a specific dish e.g. a Lemon Drizzle Cake. Like a recipe, it assumes you know how to do the steps – whisking an egg-white, or completing a purchase order form.

Processes are like the storylines of a film or novel. As in a film, or novel, each character has their own storyline, and is changed by it. And like a film or a novel, its best to start from the top and work down – to the point where you can define individual scenes or procedures. Unlike a film or novel, an organisation has many individuals playing the same roles, both over time and in parallel, so needs to leave some room for improvisation.

Its relatively straightforward to capture a procedure, or even a workflow, its much harder to capture process. But that’s where the real value is for an organisation, because to live the story, everyone needs to understand the story.

May 10, 2019

Metrics

If a business is a system for making and keeping promises, how do you measure its performance?

Some metrics:

How many promises you make, and how many you keep.
How much someone pays you to keep your promise to them.
How much it costs you to make a promise, and how much to keep it.
How much it costs you to resource, monitor and improve the way you make and keep your promises.

You could add:

How much it costs the planet for you to run this system.
How much you increase these things for yourself, your team and your clients:
- Agency
- Mastery
- Autonomy
- Purpose
- Community

Simple.

May 9, 2019

Systems and processes

Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.

So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.

Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.

But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”

Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.

Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.

Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.

3 points:

Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.
A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.
A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.

It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.

April 29, 2019

User-centric

The Shakers knew that people wouldn’t be able to resist chair-tilting, so they invented a mechanism that would make it safe for the chair and for the person.

They also made their chairs beautiful.

That’s what I call user-centric design.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Process Design