Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Process Design

Letting go of the tiger
August 16, 2023

Letting go of the tiger

During that tiger-riding phase of growing your business, when you’re growing fast, when new opportunities are coming at you thick and fast, and it feels right to take as many of them as you can; it can feel like everything is out of control.  It can feel like nothing is working as it should, so you have to be everywhere, supervising everything, checking everything, or the tiger will run away with you.

You might think that this would be the worst time to start writing down your Customer Experience Score.

You’d be wrong.

Because, by giving yourself space to get your music out of your head, you also give yourself space to think about how ‘doing things right’ can be made easier to achieve.  Sometimes ridiculously so, with a ridiculously simple change, such as creating a Prop for others to use that literally helps them see through your eyes.

Because, as you write down what till now has only been playing inside your head, you see how the part you wrote for the violins is very close to what the violas will need, and the oboes, and with a few more tweaks, the clarinets.  Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is much smaller than you thought.

And because, as you write the first few parts, and see how easy it is to get your Orchestra to play them beautifully, even when you’re not in the room, you realise that the next part you write is likely to work just as well, and the one after that, and the one after that.   Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is far less urgent than you thought.

And so you realise that you can loosen your hold.  That the tiger isn’t going to run away with you.  That you can spend time building her a generous and beuatiful reserve in which she can flourish.

You’ll never be done of course, but now you know how easy it is, you can enlist your team to help you.

And once they know as much as you do about how your business should work to make and keep its promises to customers, you can step back and enjoy watching your tiger become a streak.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

It also makes it easier.

Ask me how.

 

 

 

De-cluttering
July 21, 2023

De-cluttering

“Do you really need 10 cake slices?  Let’s get them down to one or two, shall we?”

One of the first things a professional de-clutterer will do is get rid of ‘duplicates’.

This is a strictly utilitarian view, that says one cake-slice is much like another, and ignores all the possible reasons why you might end up with 10 of them.

You might have received one as a gift, or inherited one from a parent or friend. You might have had to rush out and buy new because you couldn’t put your hand on one just when you needed it. You might have just liked the look of it.

Or you might simply be satisfying that very human urge for repetition with variation that encourages us to build collections.

All that makes choosing ‘the one’ that’s going to stay, emotional and just a bit stressful, especially if you’re made to feel judged by your inability to maintain a minimal lifestyle.

Which might be one reason I dislike de-cluttering TV programmes so much.

As you grow your small business, working out what your clients really want, and finding new ways to delight them, you acquire business processes like I acquire cake-slices.

You inherit them from your previous workplace, or maybe even the previous owner. A new employee gifts you a shiny new one.  You cobble a new one together in a rush, because you can’t quite put your hand on the one you did earlier when you need it.

Or, as happens when we’re in the thick of it, it’s simply easier to focus on the differences between cases rather than the similarities.

Luckily, business processes aren’t like cake slices. We don’t have to choose.

We can combine the best features of all of them to create one beautiful and super-useful process, with all the emotion built in, and still with room enough to deal with a new kind of cake.

That means that when I work with clients, I can start by assuming we’re going to keep everything, and work on capturing and streamlining the most salient version – the one that happens most, or is the most difficult to hand over, or the most complicated.

Usually, by the time we’ve worked through that, the owner has realised that they don’t need all the others. This new process covers all the options.

We check to make sure of course. And if, on further inspection, it turns out we do need another version, we put that in place, reusing as much of the newly designed process as we can.

No stress. No agonising over what to keep and what to throw away. No being made to feel like you are in the wrong.

Just the relief of knowing that all that clutter is now out of your head, and out of the business too.  Making it a calmer, clearer place to work for everyone, with added room for innovation.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

I’m Kirsten Gibbs, Boss Disappearer, and I can help you write your Customer Experience Score , to make your business easier to run, easier to grow and easier to build into a legacy you’ll be proud of.

Ask me how.

Making payment part of the experience
July 20, 2023

Making payment part of the experience

It’s a cliché that small businesses like me don’t like to ask for payment.   That we somehow feel guilty about asking to be paid for the value we deliver – perhaps because we don’t altogether believe in that value ourselves.

The upshot is that either we invoice late, even erratically, or we seek to make the payment aspect invisible to the client, by using a service like GoCardless for example.

But what if there was a better way?

What if you could make payment truly part of the customer experience?  In the way it often is for retail.

What if you could use every invoice to remind your client of how far they’ve come on the journey they enrolled on with you?  Of how much they’ve achieved as a result of working with you?  Of all the ideas and actions you’ve generated together?

To enable them to relive all the reasons they chose you, and the benefits they’ve gained as a result?

That might be a far from unpleasant experience for the client.

Of course to keep invoicing, you’d have to keep delivering value.

But that’s not a bad discipline to put yourself under.

After all, Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

There is no such thing as Admin
July 19, 2023

There is no such thing as Admin

If I ruled the world, there would be no such thing as admin.

 

No doing the job, and then recording that you’ve done the job.

No doing the job, then trying to remember how long it took you.

No working out how far you are through doing a job.

No going looking for the things I need to do the job.  They would simply appear when I need them as a result of another job, done by me or someone else.

No raising invoices for a job done, days or even weeks after it was done. Getting paid is an intrinsic part of doing the job.  It can also take place in parallel.

No starting a job without finishing it.  Or at least leaving it in a clearly defined and safe state.

 

There would be reporting.  It just wouldn’t be me doing it.   Doing the job would produce this information as a side-effect.  No need to create extra ‘work about work’ to do that.

There would be feedback too.  From the system to me, that tells me where I am and how I’m doing.   From other humans to me and from me to other humans about how we could make doing the job easier, faster, cheaper, more effective – for the benefit of the people we serve.

 

Let software do all the admin.  Leave the difficult, unpredictable, interesting bits of doing the job to me please.   I’m better at them than any machine.

 

My world is not so hard to achieve.  It’s possible right now.

 

All you have to do is think differently about what a job is.

Ask me how.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Revisiting the past
July 18, 2023

Revisiting the past

Today seemed like a good day to revisit this blog post, inspired four and a half years ago, by Seth Godin:

“In the last fifty years, thanks to Deming and Crosby and others, we’ve gotten significantly better at creating perfect outputs that don’t rely on heroism and luck. Design a better system, you’ll get better outputs.

I’m grateful every day for the nearly invisible perfect things that I count on… but, and I feel spoiled to say this, I take the perfect for granted.

I’m way more interested, and spend far more time and money on the imperfect things, the things that might not work, the ideas and services and products that dance around the edges.”

I agree. Over time, the perfection of processes has freed ever more of us up to spend ever more time on the interesting, edgy things – telling stories instead of fetching water, making art instead of travelling for days on end, discovering new things instead of cooking, connecting with and trusting strangers instead of only dealing with people we already know.

But I also disagree with Seth’s implication that you can only have one or the other, perfect process or interesting edge, invisible clockwork or flesh and blood.

For me the fascinating challenge is to how to combine both.

How do you put enough process in place to make sure that what should be invisible stays invisible, without restricting the free exploration that discovers new edges?

How do you ensure that clockwork-like perfection supports and enables flesh and blood to dance around the edges, making things more human, more emotional, more daring?

If a process framework is like a musical score, how do you make it more jazz than classical?

I didn’t have a perfect answer, then, and I don’t now, but I am getting closer.

  • It’s about defining a floor (even better, a springboard), ‘the least that should happen’, along with strict guardrails – your Unbreakable Promises, that constrain possible actions to what fits with your Promise of Value.
  • It’s about defining ‘what’, not ‘how’.
  • It’s about maps, not GPS tracking.
  • It’s about embracing uncertainty for its potential upside, while making sure any downside won’t kill you.
  • It’s about automating drudgery, to free humans to be human, and play.

Above all, its about giving human beings the context, the tools and the authority to think for themselves and take the consequences, good as well as bad.

It’s about freedom.  Freedom that recognises every other’s right to the same.

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

Hiding in plain sight
July 13, 2023

Hiding in plain sight

Orange Oakleaf Butterflies confuse their predators on purpose, hiding in plain sight.

In the dry season, they pretend to be a dried out dead leaf.  In the rainy season they pretend to be a damp dead leaf.  The birds, ants, spiders and wasps that eat them, already have a mental model of what a dead leaf is.   That model doesn’t include being edible.  So they ignore this leaf and carry on looking for their next meal.

 

We humans are the apex predator par-excellence.   We don’t have to pretend to be anything other than we are to survive.

Still, we confuse other people all the time.   Sometimes on purpose, most often by accident.   Because we constantly assume that our mental models are the same as everyone else’s.  We think everyone knows what we know, believes what we believe and wants what we want.

 

Take a small business:

For a shareholder or investor it’s a machine for generating dividends on their capital.

For founders it’s a way to make their unique dent in the universe.

For their accountant it’s a set of connected accounts that need to balance.

For their operations manager it’s a set of loosely related functions, one of which they probably consider to be more important than the others.

For some employees it’s simply a means to enjoy life outside work. For others it’s means to survive. For others still, play.

For customers it’s a solution to a problem, a status enhancer, a community they value or a purpose they believe in.

All these different mental models can pull a business in different directions, leading to confusion.

And as we know, a confused mind says ‘no’.

 

The answer is to get clear about what your business is here to do as soon as you can, and to present that as an explicit model everywhere.

Choose a model that is simple, easy to communicate and effective in delivering what everyone wants.

Design your business around that model, so that the way it works clearly reflects the concept behind it.

Share that model in your marketing materials, shareholder reports, filed accounts, operations manual, help guides and status reports, so that it becomes utterly familiar, whatever your role or relationship to the business.

 

That way, nobody’s confused.

Some may not like it, but they will leave you alone.   The ones that do like it will be more than happy to help you bring it to life.

 

If you’re a small business employer, looking for a model to adopt, you’ll be pleased to know that you already have one, hiding in plain sight.

And I can help you reveal it.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

A self-managing system
May 24, 2023

A self-managing system

This junction, near where I live, used to be managed by traffic lights.  It’s a busy junction on the relief road around the town centre.   It’s used by cars crossing through the town in 4 directions, buses getting into the town centre, and pedestrians heading to the shops or to catch a bus.

With traffic lights, everyone had equal priority.   Queues of cars and buses would build up, while each lane took it’s turn.  Pedestrians would wait for 5 minutes or so to get their turn.  At rush hour, the car queues would back up a long way, making everyone grumpy and selfish, blocking the junction for everyone.

Then, several years ago, it was turned into this roundabout.

A roundabout is a pretty wonderful invention.   It’s not really a thing, but a protocol, a set of rules based on responsible autonomy.  A driver chooses when to use it, responsible not just for their own safety, but also the safety of other users.    Busy roundabouts aren’t always great through, the entrance with the heaviest traffic ends up having a de-facto higher priority than the others, and at busy times, pedestrians barely get a look in.

For the best possible flow of traffic, the answer was to make the roundabout part of a shared space like this, where pedestrian crossing places (but not zebra crossings, which would give pedestrians priority) are clearly marked, and the painted roundabout gives drivers a clue how to use it, but not the priority a built-up roundabout with signage would give them over pedestrians.

The roundabout protocol governs the cars at busy times, and the uncertainty of the pedestrian crossings means at all times, everyone has to slow down, look at their fellow road users and negotiate their way across the space.

The difference this made was immediate and huge.   It’s busy at rush hours, and that makes drivers a little less likely to stop for pedestrians, but its never been as bad as it was before.

But what I only realised the other week, when I took this photo, was that in this space, the pedestrians make the roundabout work even better.

A pedestrian crossing one arm of the junction can break a flow of car traffic and give cars on another arm a chance to get on the roundabout.  So even at busy times, traffic flows more or less smoothly, because when there are more cars, there are also more pedestrians to interrupt the flow.

The best thing of all though, is that this setup enables people to see each other as people – we make eye contact, acknowledge each others’ presence and most of the time behave graciously towards each other.

It’s a self-managing system, with people at its heart.

 

What’s the relevance of this to a small business?

Well, a founder usually starts off as a set of traffic lights, controlling everything strictly from the centre.

When this gets too much, they might delegate the traffic lights job to a manager, a ‘traffic cop’.  Which isn’t much fun for the traffic cop and doesn’t change anything for road users.

Or they install policies, rules, procedures, expecting people to follow them with the same level of strictness.  Which makes things better, but still not as flexible as they could be, and certainly not as much fun.   Things still get clogged up at busy times, and pedestrians (the people) often get ignored.

My answer is to put a system like this into place:

Install a protocol based on responsible autonomy (a Customer Experience Score), into a shared space of values (your Promise of Value), that’s focused on the desired outcome (Making and Keeping your Promise to customers) and gives plenty of room for gracious flexibility.    To create a self-managing system, with people at its heart.  No supervision required.

Discipline makes Daring possible.   But only when the Discipline isn’t rigid.

Ask me how.

Circular economies
May 23, 2023

Circular economies

Humans have lived in circular economies for an awfully long time, and recognised that fact in their art, thinking and rituals.  The ancient Egyptians knew that dung beetles ensure that every day, the sun rises on a world in balance, neither knee-deep in dung, nor barren rock.

It’s only since around 1500 CE that we fell into the living linear trap required for the perpetual growth of profits – take, make, consume, waste.

Perpetual growth of what really matters – health, wellbeing, community, creativity, ingenuity, beauty, equity etc. etc. – the possibilities are literally infinite – is best served when we think in circles and eco-systems instead of  assembly lines and machines.

We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

How much better could we do it knowing what we know now?

Many people, businesses and organisations are already finding that out.

What are you waiting for?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Learning by doing
May 11, 2023

Learning by doing

As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.

How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?

The answer is a process something like this:

  • An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish.  There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
  • The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
  • Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback.  “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”.  The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”

These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu.   It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.

The key things here are:

  • Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are.  Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time.  It’s the job.
  • Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
  • It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space.  Nobody is managing anyone else.  They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.

The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job.   Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.

These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.

Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.

After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

How would you do it?

Order with feeling
May 2, 2023

Order with feeling

I didn’t get much reading done this weekend.

Instead I’ve been sorting fabrics.

Over the years I’ve built up an extensive collection of vintage fabrics and shirts that I’ve been intending to use for quilts.  I like the idea of recycling other people’s cast-offs into new and interesting material.

My collection was all over the place, scattered across different parts of the house, all colours jumbled together in various bags too heavy to move.

So my job over the last week or so has been to sort through it, chuck some, earmark some for passing on, and get the rest cut up for flatter storage, organised into smaller labelled bags.

It’s been hard work, but pleasant, evoking some happy memories.  I picked through a bag of scraps – far too small to actually use – remembering the velvet teddy I made for one niece; the bright Provencal backpack I made for another; the tartan dinosaur I made for a colleague’s wedding; the bean bags I made for nephews, and the enormous one I tie-dyed to commission for another colleague.  Then I threw the scraps away.

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.  I can’t draw or paint.  But give me something concrete to work with and I can create useful things that also look unexpectedly good.  Pottery, jewellery making, woodwork, patchwork – those are more my style.

Also businesses.

Give me a business, that perhaps feels a bit disorganised, a bit scattered, not quite coherent.  Yet nevertheless amazing.   I’ll teach its owners to re-arrange it into an elegant sysem for making and keeping promises that becomes more than the sum of its parts.  Ordered, scalable, yet still full of of feeling, it becomes an heirloom they’ll be even more proud to pass on.

In business as in patchwork, Discipline makes Daring possible.