Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Productivity

Wasted effort
April 17, 2019

Wasted effort

It’s easy to get very excited about increasing efficiency through digitalisation, automation and AI.

But in the excitement we can forget that by ‘increasing efficiency’ what we are really trying to do is reduce ‘waste’, or to put it better, ‘wasted effort’.

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ falls under 3 categories:

  1. ‘Mura’ or wasted effort due to variation
  2. ‘Muri’ or wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.
  3. ‘Muda’ also known as the “seven forms of wasted effort”

Muri seems like the kind of wasted effort we should always try to eliminate (and interestingly, is the least talked about).

Otherwise, what makes effort wasted?

Quite simply that the customer is not willing to pay for it.

This seems blindingly obvious. Less obvious is the necessary implication – that if a customer is willing to pay for effort, it is not wasted.

So if a certain type of customer is happy to pay extra to be treated differently, this is not Mura. If a customer is willing to pay to have their papers picked up in person, this is not Muda.

The customer’s perception of value is your source of profit. Don’t throw it out with the bathwater.

Overhead
March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

Leeway – but not complete freedom
February 17, 2019

Leeway – but not complete freedom

Quilts have often been made collaboratively, especially in America, where the idea of making a quilt in components (called blocks) really took off. This method meant a quilt top could be assembled very quickly, since the production of blocks was effectively parallelised. If you wanted a bigger quilt, you simply enlisted more friends.

Once the component blocks were completed, they were sewn together to make the top, which was then tacked together with the filling and backing layers. Then everyone got together again to quilt the 3 layers into a single unified whole – the finished quilt.

As well as speeding up the making, this block method allows considerable leeway to the individual contributors. In this Friendship quilt, each contributor has chosen their own block design, but they’ve clearly been given a colour scheme to work with, and at least some fabrics have been shared – its leeway, but not complete freedom.

The result is a bedcover that looks coherent, but is still lively and full of interest. An excellent example of balancing tight rules with interpretive latitude.

Those quiltmakers knew a lot about creative collaboration.

Process
January 30, 2019

Process

What springs to mind when I use the word ‘process’ in conversation with people is something boring and robotic – … Read More “Process”

Work about work
December 20, 2018

Work about work

This graph comes from a 2012 article by McKinsey, on improving productivity for ‘interaction workers’ through the use of ‘social technologies’ for example, collaboration tools such as Slack etc:

The diagram shows that about 60% of what these people do is what McKinsey calls ‘work about work’.

But I also wondered what an ‘interaction worker’ is. Here’s a useful definition I found:

“These include managers, salespeople, teachers, and customer service reps, as well as skilled professionals whose jobs require them to spend a lot of their time interacting with other people. These interactions are with other employees, customers, and suppliers, and involve using their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions.“

The implication of the McKinsey article is that by making these interactions easier and quicker, the ‘work about work’ is reduced, and enormous productivity gains are possible.

I’m sure that’s true, but I think there’s are a couple of deeper questions worth asking:

Which of these interactions are truly productive – in the sense of adding value for the customer?

Which could we strip out altogether?

For me, the obvious answer here is management.

People who routinely ‘use their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions’ can usually manage themselves.

So the really productive question is how to enable that?

Practice makes perfect
December 19, 2018

Practice makes perfect

Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.

A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.

By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.

Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.

This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.

And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.