Promise of Value – Page 13 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 18, 2020

The givens

Axioms are the foundations of ‘grammars’. They are the givens, things we don’t have to question, that we can take for granted, that are (at least to us) self-evident. Otherwise it would be nigh-on impossible to get anything done. Imagine a whole orchestra having to agree what ‘C’ means before they start playing, or having to define exactly what you mean by a ‘metre’ on every page of a set of building drawings.

For a business it’s different. Remember, “When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia”(Derek Sivers).

That means you define your own business axioms – how many times it’s acceptable to let the phone ring before you answer it, who is most important, the boss or the customer, how much it’s legitimate to care about the environment in relation to how your busines makes money.

If the grammar of your business can be written down as what I call a Customer Experience Score, the axioms that govern what that score looks, sounds and feels like are what I call your Promise of Value.

Both are unique to your business. Together, explicit or otherwise, they are the reason your best clients buy from you, stay loyal to you, and tell their friends about you. Both are worth writing down.

September 9, 2020

Trivial Pursuits

When we learn effectively we learn in stages. First we learn the rules. Then we interrogate and question ‘the rules’ to arrive at an interpretation that is meaningful for us. Finally we apply our interpretation of the rules to performance, at which point we find out if whether we have been able to communicate that meaning to our audience.

In the olden days these three stages were called Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric, collectively known as the Trivium, ‘the three’.

‘Trivial’ originally meant simply belonging to these three. It took on the meaning of ‘lesser’, ‘not serious’, ‘unimportant’ in contrast to its big brothers, the Quadrivium – the four other liberal arts of Astronomy Mathematics, Geometry and Music – the arts that could be said to provide ‘the facts’ behind ‘the rules’.

Of course these pursuits are not at all trivial. They are essential for effective performance. They all have to happen. Blindly accepting rules stifles creativity and progress. Questioning needs to lead to action, otherwise what’s the point? Action needs to be meaningful, not just for the individual but also for the audience, the community.

They also have to happen in the right order. It makes no sense to dive into performance without knowing what you are trying to communicate through that performance. It makes no sense to question before you know what the rules are supposed to be – you end up questioning everything, which makes any kind of performance almost impossible.

We know this, even though we no longer formally learn it. We see the trivial arts in operation all around us, whenever people undertake a creative endeavour, especially a collaborative one, such as putting on a play or concert, making a film, staging a ballet, creating a video game or putting up a building.

A business is another collaborative creative endeavour, that seeks to create profitable, repeat performances that delight and expand its audience. The problem for us business owners is that we have no tradition of looking at them in this way, which leads to some common problems:

In big businesses, ‘the rules’ get written down alright, but they are focused internally, not on the audience. In the worst cases, those rules become fossilised, unquestionable. Performers are given no real opportunity to use their skill and experience to interpret, to deliver outstanding performances and learn from them. The result is a classic bureaucracy: “We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able.” Dee Hock.
In micro businesses, that ‘more or less abstract representation of proposed reality’ stays firmly inside the originator’s head, and never gets written down into a script, or score, or blueprint. That makes it very difficult to grow beyond a one-man-band or a small, tightly-knit group of friends, especially if the only alternative we’ve experienced is the bureaucracy we escaped from.

It seems to me that one solution is to learn something from the other creative endeavours we know, where the ancient trivial pursuits of Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric are alive and well, even if we call them something different.

So, if you had to imagine your business was some other kind of creative, collaborative production, what would it be?

September 8, 2020

Instrumental

“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.” Eric Reis to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

“In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.” Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini in “Humanocracy”.

If all organisations are instruments, tools for making and shaping people and things, you have to ask:

“What kind of things does my business shape?” and “What kind of people does my business make?”.

The answer might seem obvious, but I’m not sure the obvious answer is always the ‘real’ one. Especially for business-to-business firms and professional services. The ‘real’ answer for you will be driven by your view of the world, but I think it’s worth exploring, because it opens up a different way of thinking about what a business is for.

For example, does an accounting practice make sets of accounts? Or does it make businesses? And in the process, does it help shape the people who work for it and with it?

I don’t know, but I can help you find out.

September 3, 2020

Avoiding Bureaucracy

For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:

“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”

Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:

“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life. We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able. An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”

In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded. As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:

The questions to ask are:

Whose lives are you bettering?
At what cost to the rest of the world?

It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.

Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that. One of which is mine.

September 1, 2020

There’s nothing new under the sun

A coal mine isn’t the kind of place that springs immediately to mind when you think of innovative, even revolutionary forms of management, but as the Corporate Rebels shared today, that’s exactly what Eric Trist found at Haighmoor Colliery, way back in the 1940s.

The article is well worth a read, but what really resonated for me were these highlights:

“Miners were recognised for ‘cycle completion’: meaning being jointly responsible for the whole extraction process.”
“The miners not only ran the mining job. They also took care of selling the coal they mined. They were responsible for the product they produced.”
“a reward policy based on a basic wage and a bonus linked to productivity of the group throughout the extraction cycle, rather than a single shift.”
“Each miner at Haighmoor could handle a half-dozen jobs. That meant each could take on multiple team roles.”
“All teams were multidisciplinary.”
because the miners could influence their own work, they continuously innovated.”

Observing these work practices, Eric Trist and his former coal miner colleague, Ken Bamforth, called the whole thing practising “responsible autonomy”.

Sound familiar?

Which begs the question:

If we already know that responsible autonomy works, why aren’t we practising it more often?

August 11, 2020

Idiot-proof

“I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.” Warren Buffet.

There are 2 ways to make a business idiot-proof.

One is to build a business that generates and shares real value, making and keeping promises to customers and continually improving how it does that. All protected from a potential ‘idiot’ at the top, because there is no top. The people who do the business run the business, the way an orchestra plays a symphony, without needing a composer to be present.

The other way is to build and protect a racket, a monopoly (Buffett calls this ‘putting a moat around the business‘), that can’t help but make extraordinary profits, no matter who’s in charge.

The first way takes investment, but for most of us, it’s the affordable option (as well as being the right one).

July 30, 2020

Wiring

One of my favourite feeds, Corporate Rebels, shared a really interesting post today “Removing Bureaucracy and Hard-Wiring Trust”

It’s a really great read, about instilling responsible autonomy into your team, clarifying the ‘compass’ that will guide individuals, and setting a few big rules for ‘How we do things round here’ ( based around “Act In the Best Interests of the Company”)

But.

Where’s the customer?

And where’s the continuity? What happens when these particular individuals move on? How do new people learn quickly?

It’s brilliant and essential to empower your people and your teams. But it’s more sustainable to include some infrastructure too.

Some actual wiring. Built around the people you serve.

July 14, 2020

Give it up.

You start your own business to take back control. To be at nobody’s beck and call. To do what you think is right by your clients.

Once you get good at that, you outsource key functions, take people on to help you deliver, and suddenly, you’ve lost it. The control has gone. You’re at the beck and call of clients, or team members, or suppliers, and it seems impossible to get people to do things the way you would.

A natural reaction is to tighten your hands on the reins, supervise more, intervene more, even to redo the work.

Micromanagement doesn’t work. You only end up working harder, being a nag, and training your people to give up trying.

Instead, give control away as soon as you can.

Not by abdicating, not even by handing it over to superstar colleagues, but by installing your DNA into the way the business works, so that it works the way you want it to when you’re not in the room.

Strangely, creating this kind of control is liberating:

For your people, because they know the outcomes they are aiming for, and what needs to happen to achieve them, plus they have the freedom to do that with flair and personality.
For you, because you can relax your vigilance, and concentrate on growing and evolving your business.
For your business, because its no longer dependent on the individuals who happen to be there at any one time.

We call this writing your Score. Because once you’ve written it, the music you and your orchestra are creating now can last forever, no matter who plays it, or how.

If you want to take back control, start by giving it all away.

July 3, 2020

Wilful Blindness

I’ve just finished reading this book, the first of 3 I ordered after hearing Margaret Heffernan on the radio last week.

It’s a worrying and challenging read, exploring and explaining just how naturally easy it is for we humans not to see what’s in right in front of our eyes.

The reasons are varied, from feelings of affinity or love, wanting to fit in or please people in authority, too rigid systems, distance and disconnection, the bystander effect, a narrow focus on money or sheer cognitive overload and exhaustion. Sometimes, in the worst scenarios, such as Grenfell Tower or Texas City, several reasons combine and exacerbate each other.

The answer is to make ourselves see better. Systematically, intentionally, but never mechanically.

We do that by encouraging diversity of thinking and argument, by thanking whistleblowers, complainers and critics instead of sidelining them.

We do it by constantly reminding ourselves of what we are in business to do – to make and keep promises to human beings, our customers, and by eliminating the hierarchies, silos and long chains of command that get in the way of that.

We do it by creating transparent ways of working that keep our promise visible and support people to hold each other accountable as human beings for seeing what’s really there, and acting on it.

And of course the irony is that if we do these things well, we will create more value and do better financially. Because its not only bad things we make ourselves wilfully blind to, its also opportunities.

June 22, 2020

This isn’t my utopia

The thing I love about reading, is that I’m always finding new ways of saying things, from people who can say them much better than me.

This midsummer weekend, I finally got round to reading the Verso edition of Utopia, by Thomas More. It was not More’s words that struck me, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s – in fact not always her words, but words she assembled, interpreted and discussed in the first of her essays included with this book: “A non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold place to be”.

“The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relationship is reversed in organisms – organic structure is determined by it’s processes”*

“The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.”**

“Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.”

“Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently Organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided. But, it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization.”***

I (like Le Guin) found Thomas More’s Utopia unsatisfactory. It is founded on force and maintained through slavery. It’s activities are determined by its structure. It is like most utopias,“the product of ‘the euclidean mind’ (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.”****

Here’s a stab at pulling this all together into something relevant for me as Gibbs & Partners:

Most human beings, including business owners, are simply trying to persevere in their existence.
Most corporates, built as machines, where structure determines process, are inimical to this. Which is why people, when they get the chance, retire, or leave and set up their own small businesses, often with no idea of growth, simply as a means of persevering in their existence.
What I’m making explicit and to an extent formalising, is an alternative, organic view of a business where process (the making and keeping of promises) determines structure. An alternative Le Guin might call yin.
By formalising this structure, I’m trying to create a blueprint for documenting the ‘laws’ of a business that enables it to be both a place where people can persevere in their own existence and a generator of the growth, innovation and profit that will create more spaces for more people to persevere in theirs. A place where it’s possible to enjoy both freedom and happiness.
I’m by no means the only person I know of trying to do something like this. I’m part of a trend, that recognises the need for humanity to make “a successful adaptation to their environment and learn to live without destroying each other.”****

As Derek Sivers puts it:

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia”.

Welcome to mine.

*Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.

**Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46-47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28-30. The version here is Le Guin’s own amalgam of the two translations.

***Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.

****Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value