Promise of Value – Page 8 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 7, 2022

Archaeology

I’ve been reading a book on ‘Women in Prehistory’, in which the author quite rightly expresses caution about inferring social structures from archeological finds.

That reminded me an episode of ‘The Goodies‘, in which Bill Oddie attempts to reconstruct a prehistoric creature from a fragment of fossilised bone. The resulting creature is preposterous, because Bill’s assumptions about what the bone was and where it came from in the original animal are completely wrong.

It isn’t only ancient history that can be misinterpreted in this way.

If an archaeologist discovered your abandoned business tomorrow, what could they infer about how it works from the artefacts left behind?

What do today’s new joiners and new customers have to infer from the systems, people and processes they encounter when they arrive?

The advantage of writing down your Customer Experience Score is that nobody has to guess, or reconstruct the symphony from a single note.

There’s room for different interpretations of course, but they are very unlikely to be preposterous.

June 6, 2022

What if you were wrong?

It’s June 2340. You’re about to retire.

You haven’t sold your business. That doesn’t worry you. No, not at all. Because over the last 30 years of running your business, every decision you’ve ever made; every view you’ve ever held; every comment you’ve ever uttered and every single idea you’ve ever had, has been recorded in a database, along with full details of the circumstances in which you made, held, uttered or had them.

The database will run your business for you. You’ll still be the Boss, you just won’t be there.

That’s probably just as well.

What if the circumstances never repeat?

What if your decisions, views and ideas could have been better?

What if you were just plain wrong?

A business is not an algorithm.

It’s an ecosystem of actions driven by values and emotions. For making and keeping promises. By humans to humans. More than the sum of its parts.

Far too precious to hold on to for the sake of it. And much more robust than you think it is.

Especially if you plan your disappearance beforehand.

HT to Bev Costoya for inspiring this.

May 9, 2022

Being an ancestor

As I get older, I am more conscious that I am not immortal. It’s quite hard to imagine my life 20 or 30 years from now.

But then, I never did think that far ahead – not even when I could reasonably expect to have another 30, 40 or even 70 years ahead of me.

Would I have made different decisions if I had?

It is of course impossible to foresee the future, so the question would have to be about impact and ripple effects rather than concrete, specific results, but ancestor questions are well worth asking, of one’s self and one’s business:

“What impact do I want to make on my generation?”

“What impact do I want to make on the next generation?”

“What impact do I want to make on the generation after that?;

“And the one after that?”

…

We can’t know how they’ll live.

We can know whether we have made living harder or easier for them.

And it’s not too late to change what we do. Especially if we change together.

May 4, 2022

A Promise of Value

I’m liking this new website from 37Signals, who’ve just renamed themselves back from Basecamp.

It’s one of the clearest, simplest and most comprehensive expressions of a Promise of Value I’ve seen.

What would yours look like if you wrote it out this way?

April 27, 2022

The scientific method

We constantly observe the world around us. We form certain assumptions about how it works and why it works that way.

But we rarely take things further and actually test those assumptions with an experiment. If we did, we’d find out that they are often incorrect. Which might lead us to draw new conclusions and most importantly take different actions as a result.

“The scientific method” isn’t just for science. It’s a great way to approach building your business ‘on purpose’.

Using it to understand your customers better is a profitable place to start.

April 19, 2022

You’re welcome!

I used to think that the first step in Keeping your Promise was setting up the client – getting everything in place to be able to deliver your service to them smoothly and efficiently.

How very functional of me.

Now I feel differently.

Sure, your client has enrolled with you on their journey, but they are probably already feeling a little buyer’s remorse, questioning whether this really is the right thing for them. What they need now is the reassurance that you will continue to ‘see’ them as a human being, not just as a ‘thing’ to be processed.

So, start your Keep Promise with a welcome. Get the metaphorical bunting out. Find a way to make your new client feel safe, special, and seen.

It doesn’t have to be over the top. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be the same for everyone. It does need to be congruent with your Promise of Value.

How could you show new clients they are welcome?

April 7, 2022

What this hooey is all about

In this letter to Nirvana, pitching to produce their next album, Steve Albini sets out his Promise of Value for them to take or leave.

It’s not 100% applicable to a business like yours, (unless your business is actually a band) but there’s a lot that could be learned from it:

“I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…”

“If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.”

“I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play.”

“I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm.”

As the founder of your business, you’re the equivalent of Nirvana. You’re the live band. The customer experience you’ve carefully crafted as you grew your business is what your audience buys.

Your team, is like the records you make to get the music to more of those who want to hear it – far into the future.

Only now you are Steve Albini, and it’s your job to make sure the record delivers as if it was you:

“If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.”

Write your people a score, make sure they’re familiar with your sound and ethos, then let them play as human beings, not machines.

March 28, 2022

Unbreakable promises

A Promise of Value, properly articulated, is quite a comprehensive thing. As a kind of definition of your culture, it’s too big to reduce to an easily applicable ‘mission statment’. That’s why you have a Customer Experience Score – it embodies your Promise of Value in the actions your business takes on a day-to-day basis.

There are times though, when the Score can’t help, because the situation in front of you has never happened before, and could not have been foreseen. Often these times are crises, when your people don’t have the time to delve into the Promise of Value for guidance. They need something more immediate, concrete and practical, less open to interpretation.

This is where an Unbreakable Promise comes into its own. It’s another brilliant idea from Brian Chesky which I’ve incorporated into my Define Promise process.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have your Promise of Value defined, in all its expansive glory, identify who the key stakeholders for your business are. Obvious stakeholders are clients or customers, your team, your investors, your suppliers etc, but you can define as few or as many as you want.

Then for each stakeholder group, define a promise you will never break, based on what’s already in your Promise of Value.

Make that promise as concrete and measurable as you can. Someone in your team needs to be able to tell in a split second whether it is about to be broken, and the kind of action they should take to prevent that. It’s usually easier to phrase it negatively – “we will never…“, rather then positively “we will always…”, but whatever works for you.

Then make sure that all your different Unbreakable Promises are in accord with each other – that by keeping one, you don’t break another.

Finally, make sure everyone knows them off by heart.

Unbreakable Promises are not easy to make, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be broken. It’s impossible to predict every eventuality. But having them is a great way to set the boundaries of interpretation of your Customer Experience Score.

Discipline makes daring possible.

February 21, 2022

An infinite gamer

I listened to a short tribute to Barry Cryer on Friday. Of course I found it funny.

It was also clear that he was an extremely generous person. It seems that what he cared about was keeping good comedy going, and he did that by encouraging it wherever he found it. He laughed at everyone else’s jokes, called his fellow comedians on their birthdays, and rang them also after every radio show he heard to congratulate them on their performance. He considered every comedian a fellow comedian, even the younger ones who thought him old hat. He mentored some of them, laughed with and congratulated others.

All I could think as I was listening to the programme was that if you want to know what it actually looks like to play an ‘infinite game’, you just need to look at the life of Barry Cryer. Seriously.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Promise of Value