Promise of Value – Page 10 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 14, 2021

Earworms

My husband works best when there is background noise. Mostly talk radio, but often music. I’m the opposite. I find talking and songs incredibly distracting. I end up listening to the words instead of paying attention to what’s in my head. It’s a good job we can work in separate rooms.

The thing I find worst of all though, is catching earworms – those snatches of song that run through your head repeatedly and with annoying frequency, sometimes recurring for weeks after I’ve heard the original.

I don’t always have to hear the whole song to get an earworm. A few notes will do, or seeing a word that reminds me of it, or feeling an emotion I associate with it.

I find earworms intensely annoying, and avoid catching them if I can. I play only instrumental music in my car, work in a quiet room, avoid radios.

But maybe earworms could be useful? Even desirable?

The vision you have for how your business makes and keeps its promise to the people it serves, is like music – your music that you’ve created. For others to play it, you need to get it out of your own head. So you write it down in a Customer Experience Score.

But where you really want it is in your team’s heads. So they don’t have to constantly refer to the score. So they can create a personal interpretation of it that suits the human being in front of them right now.

Finding a way to generate earworms from your Promise of Value might be the answer.

September 22, 2021

Joining the dots

Before the European invasion, the only use the people of the Americas had for wheels, was for pull-along toys. They used headstraps and pack-animals for carrying things, and made their clay pots by hand-building. Messages were carried by runners.

Perhaps because there were no suitable native draught animals, or because the terrain was too difficult, the possibilities of the wheel were seen, but never applied, except in play. Until of course, the Spanish introduced horses and cattle.

We tend to think of innovation as the creation of new things by a single individual. Actually, much innovation arises from joining the dots. And that only happens once the dots are in place.

Where are the dots being created in your industry? Could you join them to create something new?

September 7, 2021

Design your business or it will be designed for you

“Design your business or it will be designed for you.” It’s one of my favourite sayings, spoken by Brian Chesky of AirBnB.

But what does it actually mean? How can others design your business for you, when you’re the boss?

When you started out as a one-person band, you did everything. You tried different things to market and sell your services, and to deliver them in such a way that customers came back, or told their friends. You designed the business.

Once demand grows beyond what you can personally deliver, you have to add capacity. And every time you do that, you bring in someone else’s idea and experience of what a business looks like.

You might add capacity by automating some of what you do with software. That job management software, quote generator or CRM tool was designed by someone else, according to their vision of what a business is and how a business works. A vision that is necessarily generic, otherwise they couldn’t sell enough to be viable.

You might outsource some of what you do, your accounts, or your HR for example. Your accountant or sales agent will have their own idea of what a business is and how it works. If they’re any good they’ll try to find out more about yours, but often they’ll fall back on a generic design to fit all industries, or a design learned working elsewhere, or their own design. It’s not your area of expertise, so even though you don’t love it, you put up with it.

You might work with other small businesses like yourself, sub-contracting some of the delivery. But like yourself, they will have designed their own small business, and that design probably won’t match yours. That can prove exasperating and stressful, unless you decide it doesn’t matter that much, and accept the differences.

You might recruit a business partner, co-director, manager or experienced staff to take on some of the work you do. Almost certainly you’ll want them to have experience of business in general and your industry in particular. In other words, they’ll bring with them the design of those other businesses they’ve worked in, plus their own ideas of how to do things. If you’re very lucky, those ideas will chime with yours. If you’re not, you’ll be fighting to maintain your business design, or running through several cycles before you find ‘the right person’.

You might recruit juniors, school-leavers or graduates even, who you can ‘mould’ to suit your business design. But moulding takes time, and even they will have their own ideas of how things should be done. They need almost constant supervision and just don’t seem to get it.

You might hire a business coach or consultant to help you deal with all these problems. They too, come with baggage of what a business ‘should’ look like, learned at the Bank, or at business school, or from building their own successful businesses. They will try and shape your business to fit.

In the face of all this, you have a choice. You can supervise closely, re-do work, fight to correct what everyone else is doing ‘wrong’, or you can accept other people’s designs for your business. The first is exhausting, the second feels like it’s not your business any more.

There’s a step you can take, which can solve all of these potential problems before they happen, which is to take your business design out of your head and get it down as a shareable ‘blueprint’ everyone can work from. The Customer Experience Score for your business. That captures your unique way of making and keeping promises to the people you serve.

Your Score becomes a specification for software, an operations manual for new staff, suppliers and contractors at all levels. Above all it becomes a permanent record of your design for your business, that enables your unique creation to scale, evolve and persist through time.

Design your business, or sooner or later, you’ll be back to working in someone else’s business.

September 3, 2021

Subtraction

When we are trying to package our Promise of Value into products and services, it’s easy to think in terms of adding things. Making the list of features and benefits so long that a prospect will have to scroll through pages of copy to get to the ‘and all this for just ££££!‘ line.

What if, when you reached this point, you went away, had a cup of tea, and on your return started taking things away again.

All those bells and whistles and extras are there to justify to yourself the fees you want to charge. Or a response to your perceived competition. Just because everyone else does, doesn’t have to mean that you should.

They don’t really add value to the client. In fact they obscure the real value you can offer.

Be brave, pare away the unnecessary embellishments. Reveal the truth of your Promise. As simple as possible, but no simpler.

So that the right people – your people – will recognise it. And welcome it.

September 2, 2021

Art and business

Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?

The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.

If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.

The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.

The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.

Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.

Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.

August 26, 2021

Facts are the enemies of truth

When you create your own business, the ‘truth’ of why it exists, what it does, who it’s for and how it should work is only in your head.

If you want to grow beyond the impact you can make on your own, you have to find a way to communicate and transfer that truth to the heads of your collaborators.

At that point, we tend to replace our truth with facts. Facts are controlling, dry, objective, soulless. We try to flesh the truth out as much as possible by adding too many facts, hiding the very thing we need to reveal.

No wonder people resist, preferring to follow their own idea of the truth – however different that may be from yours. What’s really needed is a way to position your truth in the space between the people who work together to deliver it. That way everyone can access it, everyone can question it, everyone can improve it.

Your truth is your Promise of Value. The space between the people who work together to deliver it is your business.

Make a map of that space that describes how you make and keep your Promise to the people the business serves. Keep the facts minimal – just enough to indicate concrete action; allow the truth to shine through.

Leave room for interpretation, dissent and discussion. Then make sure there’s a process for reaching consensus around a new, better truth. That’s how your business will grow and evolve.

Thanks to Carlos Saba, for introducing me to the book that inspired this post. It’s well worth a read.

August 19, 2021

Customer-centric

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.

They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.

The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.

Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.

Hmmm.

Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.

August 9, 2021

Less is more

Have you ever stood in front of sweet counter full of chocolate bars? Or a wall-full of 500 pizza choices. And walked away empty-handed after a few minutes, because you couldn’t decide which to choose?

As Sheena Iyengar and her co-researchers discovered, too many choices actually makes it harder to choose something over nothing.

In a well-known experiment in a store that was famous for the extensiveness of its range, they set up a tasting station for jam. Every half an hour the choices available to taste switched from 6 jars, to 24 and back again.

More people looked and tasted when there were 24 jams to choose from. But 6 times as many people bought when there were only 4.

The lesson for packaging your Promise?

If you want people to notice you, have lots of choice. If you want them to buy, don’t make them work so hard. They’ll probably give up.

August 4, 2021

Sunflower moments

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.

His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself.” D.H. Lawrence.

That ‘third thing’, the ‘vivid relation’ between ‘me’ and the other, is a moment when we feel truly alive, connected, aware of our place in the universe. Such moments don’t only happen to artists. I’ve experienced them while shopping, walking or making dinner. The difference is I’ve never tried to capture them.

It seems to me that much of what we do as humans is about creating opportunities where those ‘sunflower moments’ – that you might also call Sawubona can happen.

What if that is what work was really for?

What if we measured our performance by that?

July 29, 2021

Bananas

Today, I saw yet another advert for alcohol made from waste food. This time, rum distilled from banana skins.

Maybe it’s me, but I can’t help thinking there are better uses for food waste – even inedible banana skins. For example, they could be turned into energy through anaerobic digestion, or composted to regenerate depleted soils.

In other words they could contribute to solving urgent, existential problems for humankind.

I’m all for enriching life. But last time I looked there were a dozen or so rums available in Sainsburys, and only one home for humans.

As humans, we have amazing resources for making change.

Let’s not waste them on gimmicks.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value