Process Design – Page 7 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 10, 2022

Radical minimalism

At this morning’s Like-hearted Leaders, listening to Gareth Dauncey’s story of how he thought up, designed and developed his Mood app, I was struck by two things.

First how radically simple he’s managed to keep it. “2 clicks to log your mood is OK, 3 is too many”

Second, how ruthlessly focused it is on helping the customer, and nobody but the customer. “100% private – you log your mood for you and nobody else.”

Radical minimalism.

Something we can all aspire to.

I found it on Google playstore by searching for ‘moodapp’, then scrolling down to see #mood

May 17, 2022

It’s every new business owner’s dream. Your first customers love what you do so much that they tell their friends, who become customers. They love what you do, and tell their friends, who become customers and tell their friends, and so on…

Until suddenly it overwhelms you. You can’t keep up with demand. You can’t recruit fast enough, you can’t train people fast enough, you can’t supervise any more jobs yourself.

Soon, the referral rate has slowed. Worse, as customers become disillusioned, they warn off their friends, who warn off their friends, and so on…

Suddenly you don’t have a business any more.

What you’re experiencing is a reinforcing feedback loop (a flow of customer referrals) that hits a limit (your capacity to deliver), and slows down or even goes into reverse.

The good news is that a loop that’s gone into reverse will also eventually hit a limit, as the flow of customer referrals gets back into balance with your capacity to deliver.

The best news is that you don’t have to wait for that.

One short-term fix is to slow-down the referral rate, to give you more time to implement a longer-term fix of increasing capacity:

put your prices up – this will reduce the number of referrees who turn into customers, and give you more money to invest in increasing capacity.
create a queue – increasing waiting times gives you more time to invest in increasing capacity.

Similarly, there are short-term fixes for the capacity side too:

put wages up – this will increase the flow of potential team members who can deliver for you.
pay overtime or bonuses to your existing team – this will increase the flow of work from your existing resources. (This is probably only true for emergencies though)
use freelancers – this may increase the flow of already capable capacity into your team.

The best thing you can do for the long-term is to monitor your referral rate, because this will help you plan ahead.

The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock (such as customers) to double in size is roughly 70 divided by it’s growth rate as a percentage.

So if 5% of your customers refer each month, your pool of customers will double in 14 months. If 50% of your customers refer, you’ll have double the number of customers to deal with in just 1.4 months.

For a sustainable business, what you really want is to keep customers and capacity in balance, as you grow both. What’s counterintuitive, is that it’s monitoring flows, and the rates of flow that will help you achieve this at the speed you want.

Snowballs are only fun for a little while.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 16, 2022

Introducing systems thinking

We spend much of our time in business measuring quantities or stocks, when often what we should be looking at are flows – the processes that affect those quantities, for good or ill.

In fact, we’d learn more from looking at how those flows are changing – are they speeding up or slowing down? – and by asking why, create ourselves more options and opportunities to improve things.

We also tend to focus too much on stocks that are concrete (profit, inventory, capacity) and ignore the abstract (delight, autonomy, morale). Partly because the abstract is harder to measure, partly because we think they don’t matter.

As we all know, what gets measured, gets managed. The trouble is that managing the wrong things distorts the system. Until it no longer serves the purpose we originally envisaged. Or until it breaks.

If you’re looking for a different way of explaining – and re-designing – your world, this book is an excellent introduction to systems thinking.

This week I’ll be sharing some ideas from the book, as they apply to the systems we are all trying to create – our businesses.

You’ll recognise them.

May 11, 2022

Approaching equilibrium

Systems of all kinds can persist for long periods, staying more or less the same. Not static, but always hovering around some equilibrium value, even as they grow.

This happens because of feedback. A change in the equilibrium value triggers a change in the flow of something that affects that value. Like your central heating thermostat, which uses feedback on the actual room temperature to regulate the flow of hot water to your radiators in order to maintain a temperature that feels comfortable to you.

A business is a system too. We’re usually looking to grow it, exponentially if we can. We don’t often think of it as something we want to keep in equilibrium.

But perhaps we should.

A business is a system for making and keeping promises. That means that whatever else we might like to see, the important equilibrium value is how many promises we keep – or perhaps even how many we exceed.

If we all made that our thermostat there’s a good chance that a better kind of exponential growth would take care of itself.

April 28, 2022

The other way around

Of course the Cui Bono? question is worth asking the other way around too.

“Who truly benefits from the way you want things to be?”

That might be why some people are resisting.

April 21, 2022

Cui bono?

There’s a question worth asking whenever someone says “that doesn’t work” or “we can’t do that”, or “that’s not worth investigating”.

“Who benefits from the way things are right now?”

Those are the people you really need to convince.

April 20, 2022

Just in time

When you’re setting up a client in your systems for the first time, it’s tempting to ask up front for everything you will need for the journey.

Resist.

If your tailor is making you an overcoat, you don’t expect them to measure your inside leg.

Only ask for what you need right now, to get the client started. Otherwise you’ll overwhelm them with unexpected (and to them, unnecessary, perhaps even unnerving) work, to get information that may well have changed by the time you actually need it.

Keep your information gathering aligned with what you’re doing together. That keeps it feeling natural, and you’ll have all the right information when you need it – just in time.

March 31, 2022

The next step

Just because you’ve got someone over the threshold, doesn’t mean you stop guiding. The destination may be obvious to you, but is it to your client?

The next step is difficult to take if you don’t where it is, or where it leads.

March 30, 2022

Almost impossible

I loved Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday.

In it he talks about the gap in customer service between one person in your team and another – or even between the same person on a good day and a bad day – and how you might address it.

One approach is to nail everything down so much that delivery of the experience is exactly the same, no matter who is giving it. Another is to leave it to a great person doing the job, giving them “room to shine. With all the variability that entails.”

“It’s almost impossible to have both.”

Almost, but not impossible.

Hire great people, give them a Promise of Value and a Customer Experience Score, that creates a floor, but no ceiling, then set them free to interpret it in their own way.

Variations on a theme. The best of both worlds.

March 28, 2022

Unbreakable promises

A Promise of Value, properly articulated, is quite a comprehensive thing. As a kind of definition of your culture, it’s too big to reduce to an easily applicable ‘mission statment’. That’s why you have a Customer Experience Score – it embodies your Promise of Value in the actions your business takes on a day-to-day basis.

There are times though, when the Score can’t help, because the situation in front of you has never happened before, and could not have been foreseen. Often these times are crises, when your people don’t have the time to delve into the Promise of Value for guidance. They need something more immediate, concrete and practical, less open to interpretation.

This is where an Unbreakable Promise comes into its own. It’s another brilliant idea from Brian Chesky which I’ve incorporated into my Define Promise process.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have your Promise of Value defined, in all its expansive glory, identify who the key stakeholders for your business are. Obvious stakeholders are clients or customers, your team, your investors, your suppliers etc, but you can define as few or as many as you want.

Then for each stakeholder group, define a promise you will never break, based on what’s already in your Promise of Value.

Make that promise as concrete and measurable as you can. Someone in your team needs to be able to tell in a split second whether it is about to be broken, and the kind of action they should take to prevent that. It’s usually easier to phrase it negatively – “we will never…“, rather then positively “we will always…”, but whatever works for you.

Then make sure that all your different Unbreakable Promises are in accord with each other – that by keeping one, you don’t break another.

Finally, make sure everyone knows them off by heart.

Unbreakable Promises are not easy to make, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be broken. It’s impossible to predict every eventuality. But having them is a great way to set the boundaries of interpretation of your Customer Experience Score.

Discipline makes daring possible.