Why should I write down my Customer Experience Score, when I have good people working for me, who can work things out for themselves?
Because making good people reinvent your wheel over and over again is a shocking waste of humanity.
Humanity that could be set free to invent even better wheels, and even more exciting uses for them.
Discipline makes Daring possible
I found this excellent article by Michele Zanini yesterday: ‘Can we manage without managers?’.
It’s well worth a read, but here are the phrases that jumped out for me:
“vanguard organisations … don’t get rid of management as a set of activities (e.g., planning, allocating, reviewing)–but they syndicate it to the broader organization. “
“By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed to advancement, an organization ends up with more, not fewer leaders.“
Because actually, we want leadership without managers.
One of the objections often raised to a no-manager organisation is “If you remove layers, you’ll end up ovewhelming people at the top“. Overwhelm at the top is a common experience for growing micros.
What this article shows is that there are other, far better ways of dealing with that than adding managers. Writing down the music in your head, so that others can play it is one of them.
Why not start as you mean to grow on and make everyone a leader?
One day, the child in this photograph might expect to inherit her parents’ motorbike.
She couldn’t expect to use it until she’d learned to drive it safely, keep it in good order and register it with the appropriate authorities. If that seems like too much trouble, she might very well sell it, run it into the ground, or simply leave it to rust.
Handing over your business to your employees (or your children for that matter) isn’t enough to ensure that it will thrive afterwards. Transferring ownership transfers power, but not the ability to use that power responsibly.
Of course your people might have that ability already, but if you’re the boss of a 5 or 10 person business, it’s unlikely that you or they know that conclusively.
After the sale is almost too late to find that out. You’re not the boss any more.
So, if you’re planning to go employee-owned, or to pass your business on to your children, make sure they know how to run it before they take ownership.
This takes effort, but not as much as you might think. Like most things, the sooner you start, the better. But you could do it while the legalities of transfer are being worked out, or even include it as part of the transfer process.
The upside is you’ll have something even more worth handing over, and for all the new bosses, the ability to truly cherish it as your legacy.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
One of the things I really dislike about Microsoft Windows is the way updates barge in and trample all over my setup, like the wombat in the comparethemarket commercial. The convenience of auto-updates is more than offset by the work I have to put into getting everything back in order.
Why can’t there be a protocol for signifying which apps are critical so that any incoming update or install can avoid overwriting their registry details?
I appreciate that I may be asking the impossible, but if nobody asks, nothing will change.
So why not me?
Absorb. Adapt. Transform.
If you’ve ever experienced some kind of shock to your business – like your server being hit by lightning, or a pandemic lockdown – you’ll recognise these three phases of response, even if you went through them unconsciously.
1: Absorb: It’s all hands on deck – you double down, work harder, get people to do overtime, call in retired people, pull in help from fellow businesses or family. Whatever it takes to withstand the first effects of the shock.
2: Adapt: Things are different now. The old ways of doing, the old roles, locations and certainties don’t apply any more. Work-arounds are what’s needed, and you and your team find them.
3: Transform: Now the worst is over, you all take a breath, and think how best to change how your business works, so when a similar shock happens in the future, you’ll be ready for it. Some of your work-arounds will become part of the system, others won’t. It’s worth remembering that not all shocks are inherently undesirable – a rush of new customers from referrals is just as much of a shock to the system as a lightning strike. So it pays to think up some other possible shock scenarios and re-design and re-equip your system to cope with those too. Or at least plan how you will be able to absorb it enough to give you time to adapt and transform.
Which brings me back to the point.
Muri matters, because if people, machines and systems are already operating at 100% or over when a shock hits, it’s extremely hard to respond effectively. And only people can make systems work at over 100%. With no room to absorb, how can you possibly move on to adapt or learn to thrive in the new world by transforming? Muri destroys resilience.
My way to prepare for this is to share everything about how your business works with everyone in it.
In other words, introduce the ultimate level of redundancy – make everyone a Boss.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Ask me how.
The north is another country.
They do things differently there.
A week of walking, looking and being made to think.
Just what the doctor ordered.
And now I’m back.
Did you miss me?
What will it do?
When we start our businesses, we don’t really know.
We know what we want to do. More of the things we enjoy, less of the things we don’t, with no interference from the boss.
We have an inkling that left to ourselves, we can probably produce something much more in line with what the customer wants than we were able to as a small cog in a big machine.
Or we hope that having experienced a problem and found a new solution, there might be others who will welcome what we’ve discovered.
In truth, we don’t really know who they are, what they want, or how they want it.
That’s fine.
The job of a startup is to find that out. We need to be observant, flexible, opportunistic, open to a different who, a different what. A certain amount of thrashing is inevitable.
But once we do know who and what, thrashing no longer serves. Now we need to concentrate on how. Hand-crafting a consistent customer experience, ‘doing things that don’t scale’ until we’ve really hit the mark.
Until finally, we’ve answered the question “What will it do?”
You’re no longer a startup.
And the next challenge begins.
Because if you really have hit the mark for a significant number of people, the next question is “How can I do it like this for more people?”, “How do I replicate my actions through other people or through software so that I can reach more of the people who want what I can offer, in the way that I offer it?”
You don’t have to scale of course. You can stick with a handcrafted service and a select clientele. Just make sure they are paying you full value for that.
But if you want to reach more people, have an even bigger impact, you need to think about scaling up the system you’ve inadvertently designed.
Scaling up starts with treating it as a design, rather than a happy accident- soon to be overtaken by the next.
Which means starting by writing your design down. So there’s a reference point, a specification, an intention.
So that from now on, everyone knows what it has to do.
Otherwise how can you work how best to share the work? Or how best to automate it? Or whether the solutions you’ve chosen actually do the job? How do you know where to be flexible and where to stay firm? Or where you can leave it to the people on the ground to decide?
It doesn’t mean the design can’t change, it just means that every change is in service to what everyone knows it has to do.
And as we’re discovering with HS2, waiting until its half-built to decide exactly what it’s meant to do, is an expensive way to fail.
Discipline before you start building makes real Daring possible later.
I think quite a lot about ‘Muri’ – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems.
It’s the Cinderella of waste, mostly ignored by management consultants and gurus. Perhaps because it exposes the dark heart of capitalism. The more you sweat your ‘assets’, the more money you make. Who cares if you break them along the way, as long as your pile ends up big enough for you to move on and do it again?
Things are different inside small employer businesses – at least the ones I know.
There, the ‘assets’ most likely to be subjected to Muri are owners. They are the ones who take up all the slack. Who ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give 110%’, ‘do whatever it takes’ to keep the promises they’ve made.
Not because they’re aiming for burnout, but because they haven’t yet realised that if they share the work effectively with their team, nobody needs to overwork themselves.
‘Sharing the work effectively with your team’ is easier said than done, and easier done than you imagine, when you visualise your business operations as a musical score, and your team as an orchestra performing it over an over agin, getting better all the time.
Putting this in place could be the ultimate exercise in self care – for you, your business and your team.
And everyone will thrive as a result.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Adam Smith 1776
Smith thought the ‘invisible hand’ of the market would prevent this in the future.
He was wrong.
Perhaps its time to re-embrace the idea of ‘the commons’?
A resource, owned by no-one, managed by a rolling team to ensure its benefits can be enjoyed by everyone, including non-human communities, present and future.
What if you made your business a commons?
A resource, owned by employees (including you), managed by those employees for the benefit of present and future customers and employees?
It’s not as hard as you might think. And once you’ve commoned your business who knows where you might go commoning next?
Discipline makes Daring possible.
We all make promises, all the time. And more often than we would like, we break them.
Life happens. The unexpected happens. Sometimes they were promises we should never have made. However painful, those breaks can be understood and accepted.
To make a promise you have no intention of even trying to keep is unforgivable.