Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value

Showing your work
June 28, 2021

Showing your work

I used to wonder how potters could charge so much for their pots, until I took up pottery.

Then I saw how much work went into producing a pot fit to sell.   Not just the work of potting, but also how many pots get thrown away because they broke or cracked in the kiln, or because the glaze didn’t work.  Or even because the idea itself just wasn’t good enough.  I wondered then how they could charge so little.

A brilliant way to help your prospects and clients understand the value you bring is to show your work.    To share the process by which you create that value.

It’s easier when that process is clearly, genuinely focused on them.

Bank Holiday thinking
June 1, 2021

Bank Holiday thinking

One of the things I love about Bank Holidays is that I get to spend a whole day reading.   I’m halfway through this book and there’s already interesting stuff in it.

One of the ideas I  particularly like is that of ‘pure procedural justice’, where a process inevitably leads to the desired result (in this case, a ‘fair’ one), and where the desired result can be projected beforehand according to criteria that are independent of the process applied.

Pure procedural justice is rare, unless you are dealing with a simple outcome, such as dividing a cake up equally, but it does seem to be a useful way of approaching process design:

  • What outcome do I want?
  • How could I define it before I run any process designed to achieve it?
  • How can I design a process so that I will inevitably achieve the outcome I want?
  • How could I measure the outcome independently of the process?

For processes that involve human beings, part of the answer is to abstract the desired outcome.  Rather than trying to list out every possible acceptable outcome, instead you define the characteristics of a set of possible outcomes each of which would be acceptable, even though you have no way of knowing what they are, or which you will actually get as a result of any particular run-through of the process.

That’s what your Promise of Value is for, to help you define those characteristics.

Managing what matters
May 17, 2021

Managing what matters

When you pay a traffic warden by the ticket, you’ve incentivised them to find the easy targets, not to prevent illegal parking, and certainly not to keep the roads safe for other users.   Worse, you’ve incentivised them to pursue minor infractions over major ones.

That’s why my street is full of traffic wardens just before school opens and just after it closes.  It’s why parents arrive 30 minutes before they need to in order to grab a legal parking space, wasting an hour a day just sitting in their cars.   It’s also why everywhere else in my town centre remains plagued by illegal, inconsiderate and dangerous parking.

This kind of simplistic proxy for performance has become endemic, because its easy to measure.   If you can say ‘I’ve hit target’, you’re off the hook as a person, a school, a company or a government department.   Never mind that you’ve actually made life worse for everyone, and really dreadful for some.

What gets measured gets managed, they say.   True.

So start with what you really want, then explore different, creative and possibly multiple ways to measure whether you’re achieving it.

The answer’s unlikely to be a simple tally.  And you may just come up with a completely new approach to the problem.

The monster in the office
May 14, 2021

The monster in the office

There’s a monster in the office, and everyone’s afraid.

Everyone calls it ‘the Boss’.

The owner thinks it has many heads, eating the business out of house and home, and just not caring enough what they do and how they do it.

The team thinks they know exactly who it is – the control-freak micro-manager, constantly interfering, trying to do everyone’s job and never happy with the results.

Neither are right.

Every business owner I’ve met has a vision in their head for how their business makes promises to clients and keeps them.  But there’s often a massive gap between that vision and what they’ve actually managed to communicate to the people whose help they need to achieve it.

That gap is the real monster.

Fortunately like most monsters, it disappears with daylight.

Considered adoption
May 12, 2021

Considered adoption

Contrary to the popular image, the Amish are not backward-looking.  Nor are they against new technology.   What they are against is a rush to embrace the new without considering how it might impact on their ethos and their way of life.

Once they have considered, communally, they often adapt a new technology to suit their needs.   An iron or a lamp becomes battery- or propane-powered, to preserve their separateness from the outside world.  A phone and internet connection is housed in a shared booth at a walkable distance from homes, to maintain the primacy of face-to-face communication and neighbourliness.

The resulting ‘contraptions’ might look odd to us, but the approach is one worth adopting.

Before you jump on the latest bandwagon, ask yourself:

  • Does this technology support and enhance my ability to make and keep my Promise of Value?
  • If not, how could I change to make sure it does?

If the technology can’t adapt to suit you, it probably isn’t fit for your purposes.

Collective authenticity
May 11, 2021

Collective authenticity

If authenticity is doing, not being, it follows that for a company of more than one person, achieving corporate authenticity requires everyone to be ‘doing’ what is consistent with the company’s values and personality.

How can you ensure that?

  • Be crystal clear on the Promise you make as a business.   Use that clarity to attract and recruit only those who share it.  That way you can be confident that whatever work they produce ‘from within themselves’ will align with it.
  • Support them with a Customer Experience Score to make learning easy.

Then give them the responsibility to deliver, and the autonomy to do so.

As all master craftsmen know, practice never makes perfect, but it does make authentic.

And authentic is what clients really buy into.

Motive power
April 30, 2021

Motive power

In the old model of business, marketing was something you did last.   It answered the question “How can I sell these things I’ve made?”.

Today, to be effective, marketing comes first, because it answers the question “Who can I best serve and how?”.

In this new model of business, your Promise of Value is the engine, and the motive power is empathy.   A fuel available to everyone.

Security
April 28, 2021

Security

A child, confident that her parent will be there when she needs them, is willing to leave their side, to explore and try new things.  This is how she learns to be independent.  Having an anchor you can rely on is important.

Children put into a big space and simply asked to play stay close together more or less where they’re put.  If, however they are told there are boundaries to their space, and where those boundaries are, they range more widely in their play – often right up to the boundaries.  Some of them may even test how firm those boundaries are.    This is how children learn to be creative.  Boundaries are important.

I’m not sure I’d want my business to behave literally like a family, but it is possible to give it some of the same structure to create a community.  Your Promise of Value and the processes that are driven by it are both anchor and boundaries.  Everyone can fall back on the anchor in times of stress, and push the boundaries of the system when they’re feeling adventurous.

In the space between, let them play.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Teams
April 9, 2021

Teams

The team you’ve built for your business will have things in common.   There are reasons you decided to hire them and they decided to work with you.   There are reasons that you’ve stayed together.

Some of those reasons will be around shared values, behaviours and principles.  Some of them will be to do with an alignment of vision and purpose.

Some will be entirely to do with their own personal preferences, aims and desires – perhaps proximity to home, an easier commute,  a less demanding job or even friendships formed.

Are those reasons enough for you to entrust them with the client experience?  I hope so.

But it might be better to be explicit about the values, behaviours, principles, vision and purpose.

That way you’ll both know for sure.  And be able to act accordingly.

Unwritten
March 31, 2021

Unwritten

A written constitution is certainly open to interpretation (Who exactly are ‘We, the People’?  What exactly does ‘Happiness’ mean?), but it does at least provide a tangible, concrete reference point for discussion, amendment and clarification.   It is separate, both from the people who made it and the people interpreting it right now, a thing in its own right, and therefore capable of improvement.  And at all times, citizens can compare the current culture with what that culture once aspired to be, as embodied on the constitution, and decide to act.

The unwritten is protean, slippery, even more open to interpretation, even exploitation.  But what’s worse is that the culture that surrounds it can change beyond recognition without anyone really noticing.  Until suddenly, the flag we’ve grown up with comes to stand for something rather disturbing.

Brands, whether national or corporate, are tokens of an underlying culture.   If you want that culture to persist, it’s a good idea to write it down.  An an even better idea to share it with everyone.

That way everyone can hold you to account for it.