Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value

Is this wording better?
June 28, 2023

Is this wording better?

Yesterday, I listened to Wendell Pierce talking about jazz with James O’Brien.

He came up with a phrase that struck me:  ‘Freedom within Form’.

And I wondered, is that a better description for what I help small businesses achieve, than ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’?

I know some people have a problem with the word ‘Discipline’.

What do you think?

 

What does ‘Freedom within Form’ mean to you?

 

What does ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’, mean to you?

 

Tell me, I’d love to know.

 

Thank you!

 

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation
June 27, 2023

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation

I thoroughly recommend following Vaughn Tan on LinkedIn, or subscribing to his newsletter, on innovation and uncertainty.  He works with much larger organisations than I do of course but there is always food for thought for me on how to apply his thinking to my framework.

Today’s tasty dish is generative uncertainty, or how to make uncertainty work for you instead of against you.

A problem for any size of business is balancing consistency with opportunity.

Your clients want to broadly know what’s going to happen over the next days, weeks and months in and around your business.  And so do you.

At the same time, you want to be able to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities that might crop up and avoid or at least weather any unexpected shocks.

In other words, you want your business to stay the same, even if you want it to be bigger, and you also want it to be able to change at short notice.

Traditional management structures – hierarchy, silos, bureaucratic workflows – help to keep a business the same, by centralising control and slowing down the business’s reactions to events.  Which makes it hard to change.

Complete self-management at the front end enables a business to react rapidly, because control is distributed, but makes it much harder to stay consistent, can lead to wastefulness of shared resources, and at worst leads to entropy.

Vaughn’s solution is to design spaces where innovation is directed, (Clear Guardrails) but within that direction, is free to come up with whatever it likes (Encourage Emergence), and where the ‘parent’ organisation is prepared to put time and money into emergent ideas that look promising without knowing beforehand what that support might look like (Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support).

I think small businesses can provide this kind of space too.   Without having to introduce the usual corporate structures.

Here’s how I do it:

Clear Guardrails:

Your Promise of Value, Unbreakable Promises and Customer Experience Score are yuor Clear Guardrails:

  • Your Promise states what you are here to do and for whom.
  • Your Unbreakable Promises set the boundaries of what you are willing to compromise.
  • The Customer Experience Score provides a floor for how you do it at the moment – the least that should happen.

Encourage Emergence:

  • Every individual playing your Customer Experience Score is free to use their knowledge, experience and judgement to interpret the Score in the best way possible for the client in front of them.   That means every actual Customer Experience can be quite different, yet consistent.  When someone encounters a new situation, they can deal with it.   The Score encourages emergence.

Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support:

  • The value of encouraging emergence comes from recognising when something is an opportunity rather than an exception.   It’s unfair to expect someone to do that on the fly, so your Customer Experience Score includes an ‘Improve Process’ Activity, that runs alongside making and keeping Promises.
  • Improve Process is about regularly gathering and interpreting feedback, both as individuals running your own performances of the Score, and together as a team, to identify opportunites for both playing the existing Score better and creating new Scores to meet new challenges or opportunities.  People can give each other the flexible support they need to take advantage of useful changes.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

What do you think?

Deposition
June 20, 2023

Deposition

I’ve always been sceptical about claims that double-glazing businesses are ‘very clean, and tidy up after themselves’.

Not because I think they aren’t, but because I’ve always suspected that emphasising the ‘tidying up’ might be a way to distract from poor work on actually putting in the windows.

 

I’m wrong of course.

 

What being clean and tidy signals is a pride in the job and consideration for the customer.

A committment to leave the client’s home as least as good as it was before the job, if not better.

A willingness to conserve bits and pieces the client wants to reuse.

A willingness to fill in holes you didn’t make, because that’s what a proper job looks like.

It might cost a small amount extra – hardly anything really, because not to do a proper job is usually harder – but every little helps to build a bank of goodwill and loyalty.

 

On which to grow a business that lasts.

 

For 30 years, so far.

 

Sidcup Fascia & Soffit Ltd.

Erosion
June 19, 2023

Erosion

It starts when a subcontractor decides they’ll do what’s legal, rather than what’s current best practice.

You don’t see them as part of your team.  That’s why they’re subcontracted, so they cost you less.

 

Trouble is, they don’t see themselves as part of your team either.

They certainly don’t see your customers as theirs.

So why make any extra effort to keep your Promise.

 

Whatever that is.

 

If a customer complains, well, never mind, it’s legal.  Even if it is inconsiderate.  Even if it is different from every other installation.

Your subcontractor isn’t going to re-do work that meets the minimum standard.  You’re not going to pay them to do it again.

 

So, slowly, over time, current practice gets eroded.

Until the minimum becomes the best your customer can expect.

Especially when they have no choice.

 

What you don’t yet see, is that you’ve undermined your own foundation.

When you’ve eroded your standards away to the minimum, it isn’t hard to be better.

So as soon as a better alternative appears, you’ll have nothing left to hold you up.

Certainly not your customers.

 

I’m looking at you Openreach.

Catch it now, while you can.

Plats du jour
June 14, 2023

Plats du jour

I’m hungry, and I want lunch delivered to me at home, I can choose from at least a dozen food delivery apps, each of whom will offer me dozens of local take-aways, each of whom will offer me dozens of menu items, plus additional special menu combinations.  Or I go out to my regular restaurant, which will offer me dozens of menu items, plus additional special menu combinations.

How do I choose?

I’m looking for curtain rails, and I need them soon.  I can choose from several brands online, through dozens of suppliers on Amazon, e-bay, big-box retailers and individual shops.  Most brands and several suppliers are in all of these places.

How do I choose?

My bet is that most often, people choose what’s familiar, the dish they had for lunch yesterday, or the same day last week.  The brand they’ve heard of, or the retailer they recognise. Or the cheapest.

Because selecting what is really going to be right for me, right now, among so many choices is exhausting.

There are reasons small restaurants thrive in the centre of Paris.   One is that they serve a working population who still value a proper lunch break.  The other is that they don’t waste their customers’ valuable time making them choose what to eat.  There are only two options on the menu.

If you aren’t well known yet, and you’re not the cheapest, but you know you might be just what the people you seek to serve need, right now, don’t make them work too hard.

Fewer options makes it easier for them to try something new.

Your Discipline makes their Daring possible.

Structure, help or hindrance?
June 2, 2023

Structure, help or hindrance?

 

The people ‘growing on’ these corals don’t know what the reefs they end up will look like.

The corals will decide that.

What they do know is that they are aiming to restore as many coral reefs as they can, and that coral can grow, more safely and reliably when it is supported by an appropriate structure, that leaves it free to grow its own way, until its ready to be ‘transplanted’.

Man-made structure can be incredibly helpful when you’re trying to grow for a visionary outcome.

It just needs to be the right kind of structure.

Designed to amplify the outcome, not control it.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

How to tame the tiger
June 1, 2023

How to tame the tiger

Growing your small business from you, to a few and then a few more people can feel like riding a tiger.  Unpredictable, challenging, dangerous even.

New customers, new employees, new ideas, new ways of doing things that don’t match the customer experience you carefully crafted on your own.  Trying to match increased costs with an increase in income.  It can feel like everything just gets wilder.

The answer isn’t to cage the tiger, or to beat her into submission.

Instead, make sure she shares the values you value, tell her what you want her to do to make and keep your promises, give her a safe enclosure to roam in, and let her get on with it.

Get off her back.

Because she’s not actually a tiger.

She’s a team of people like you, who want to do the best they can, like you, in a space that gives them agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and a feeling of community, like you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Pour encourager nous autres
May 30, 2023

Pour encourager nous autres

On reflection, I’d add one more thing to Ari Weinzweig’s definition of Good Profit:

“Good Profit, I will now say, appears when multiple ecosystems are all benefited at the same time:

  • Our inner ecosystem
  • Our client’s inner ecosystem
  • The ecosystem of the organization in which the profit is produced
  • The ecosystem of the community of which that organization is a part 
  • The greater ecology of the planet”

That makes some Bad Profits easy to spot:  sell addictive and harmful substances, wrapped in plastic, powered by lithium and destined to litter the streets, to people who are desperate, or bored.  Vapes, alcohol, gambling, ultra-processed food, toxic social media.

These industries are clearly making Bad Profits at all levels except perhaps one: “The ecosystem of the organization in which the profit is produced”.  Even this is questionable – how must it feel to work for one of them?

Business making Good Profits are not as easy to spot, perhaps because one aspect of Good Profits is that they tend to be lower (which is also Good, because too much money in the hands of too few people distorts the system). So it’s important that we share them when we find them, so they can grow.

Here are a couple of examples I know:

  • New Dawn Traders:
    • An alliance of regenerative producers, sailing ships, allies at small ports and like-minded customers.  Customers buy from port allies near them .  The port allies place orders with the broker.  The sailing ship collects cargo from the producers, cares for it at sea, and delivers it to the various small ports.   Everyone gains – producers are paid better, access new markets, ships earn extra income, broker and port allies get their share and customers get top quality at fair prices. Nobody’s exploited, the earth is cared for, almost no carbon is released. Every ecosystem is nurtured.
  • Earth Runs and the 1% club:
    • People get active, trees get planted. The right kind, where needed. Carbon is captured, jobs created.  So far they’ve “planted over 130,000 trees, got over 1,750 people active, provided 1,900 days of fairly paid work for our tree-planting communities and kept the equivalent of 783kg of unwanted medals out of landfill.” Every ecosystem is nurtured.

 

You know some small businesses making Good Profits.

Please share – “pour encourager nous autres”.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Good profit, bad profit
May 25, 2023

Good profit, bad profit

The idea of ‘de-growth’ is often presented as a backward step for us, a return to a life that would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’.  What would happen if we no longer had industry making new stuff, or businesses could no longer make profit?  It all seems pretty negative.

No wonder people aren’t rushing to change their ways.

So I was really pleased to read Ari Weinzweig’s newsletter today, in which he splits ‘profit’ into ‘good profit’ and bad profit’.

“Good Profit, I will now say, appears when multiple ecosystems are all benefited at the same time:

  • Our inner ecosystem
  • The ecosystem of the organization in which the profit is produced
  • The ecosystem of the community of which that organization is a part 
  • The greater ecology of the planet”

As I’ve said before, we had businesses, markets, and profits before we had capitalism, and for sure some of those profits were bad. I’m not advocating a return to feudalism.

But what this tells me is that there is a way to think about addressing the climate crisis that can fit with our needs as small businesses.

Simply strive always to make Good Profits – that actively benefit as many of these ecosystems as we can.

I thoroughly recommend Ari’s newsletter.  The Zingerman’s Community of Companies is an inspiring and interesting ecosystem, that has thrived by going their own way.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Blackmail – the new business model?
May 17, 2023

Blackmail – the new business model?

Is it just me, or is anyone else worried/annoyed/infuriated by the rise of ‘Clubcard Prices’, ‘Nectar Prices’ and the like?

I keep a pretty good track of prices in my head, and from what I could see, ‘Clubcard Prices’ weren’t lower than the usual prices elsewhere.  It was simply an opportunity to put ‘normal’ prices up, by quite a percentage.

Harmless enough, until every other member of the supermarket cartel joins in of course.

To me it feels very much like ‘Give us your loyalty, or you’ll pay extra for everything’.

Since when has blackmail been an acceptable business model?