“If you don’t tackle the underlying organizational complexity and bureaucracy that generate the torrent of meetings and email requests, you’re not going to make much progress–no matter how clever your personal “hack” might be.“ Michele Zanini in response to: “Workers Now Spend Two Full Days a Week on Email and in Meetings“.
No matter how ambitious you are, I bet you don’t want your small business to end up like this.
If you keep the overall structure simple and the purpose clear:
Then empower your team to manage processes rather than other people, you can make sure you never do.
And that means you can grow bigger, without growing slower.
In a nutshell, instread of recruiting new team members against an extensive checklist of skills, comptencies and attributes, these elite teams (incumbents) select a likely-looking candidate (aspirant) and find out whether and how they can best work together by actually doing it for a provisional period.
During this time, the aspirant is expected to understand the role and the role-components that make it up, and to demonstrate strengths in enough of these roles to make them worth employing. They may even bring new strengths to the role, requiring a new role-component.
On the other side, the incumbents are expected to understand and test the strengths of the aspirant and recognise when one or more of their own role-components is superseded, or a completely new role-component has been created.
Only when the negotiation is satisfactory to both sides does membership become formal. In this way both sides negotiate coming together to form a new, reconfigured team.
I think this is a very interesting process that could be applied to more than elite teams, such as a growing small business that already has a Customer Experience Score in place. Role-components correspond to Activities in the Score, while Roles have responsibility for one or more parts of the Score. Having the Customer Experience Score in place makes this less risky than it might otherwise be, since everyone knows ‘the least that must happen’.
I’d use it to allow individuals to negotiate how they can best contribute to the delivery of the company’s Promise of Value, not just when they join, but throughout their career with the company, as they grow and develop.
I’d also use it to ensure that everyone knows more or less everything about the Customer Experience Score, giving flexibility and resilience to the organisation while leaving plenty of room for evolution.
Because, after all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.
As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.
How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?
The answer is a process something like this:
An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish. There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback. “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”. The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”
These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu. It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.
The key things here are:
Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are. Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time. It’s the job.
Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space. Nobody is managing anyone else. They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.
The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job. Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.
These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.
Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.
After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.
One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.
It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.
Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice. There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.
Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on. There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it. And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.
In The Disappearing Boss, I use a similar idea. A Role is a part played in a performance by a person. It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.
Here’s an example from one of my clients. Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:
It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.
What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed. They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships. What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.
As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing. One person can play many Roles. A given Role can be played by many people. Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.
At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable. Worth coming back for again and again.
I finished “The Uncertainty Mindset” this morning. Unike many management books, it’s taken me a while to finish because the book is dense with ideas and insights, so I have had to rest between reads.
I thoroughly recommend it, especially for those who wish to disrupt with their business.
In the high-end, ultra-innovative world of fine dining of the book, teams of innovators repeatedly dance with chaos, pushing themselves into some new, unknown situation (moving the restaurant to new country; organising a conference; organising food relief in hurrican-struck islands) inducing a feeling of desperation as they scramble to deliver on a promise that will be at once utterly new and utterly familiar to their clientele. Each time they dance they learn anew that they will succeed, even if they don’t yet know how. And they do succeed. Spectacularly. Then they rest, allowing themselves time to recover before they go again, on an even bigger challenge.
They can do this because they are specifically R&D teams. The day-to-day of a restaurant can’t run like this. The teams running the restaurants have a different challenge with it’s own rhythm.
What if you’re not a restaurant chain? What if you aren’t R&D? What if you simply want to evolve continuously, not necessarily radically, in response to the world around your business, through the lens of your customers? What can be learned from this approach?
It’s this aspect that I want to pursue – that dance between order and chaos, between predictbility and uncertainty that makes life so interesting.
So I’ll be reading it again, taking notes, and translating it into my own terms, so I can share it with you.
Are they worried about rents on empty offices? Those are effectively a sunk cost.
Are they worried about their teams’ jobs or wellbeing? I doubt it.
Are they worried about ‘losing control’? Are they bullies then?
Is it about status? What’s the point of being a boss when there’s nobody around to see it?
Or could it be that when frontliners demonstrate that they can achieve better results without supervision, intervention and commutes, it’s the manager’s job that’s redundant?
Hmmm…
It seems to me that for a long time, traditional corporate management has been about pushing risk and accountability downwards to the people who do the work, without giving them the rewards to match. Now the cat’s out of the bag.
It’s going to be hard to put it back.
Better then to follow through instead, and give people what they really want:
Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.
Supported of course, just not necessarily in the form of management.
I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.
Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them! Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.
Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex. And this is science.
Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.
And so do you.
Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:
Of course, if you embed your unique promise of value into the way your business works well before you decide to exit, you get all the benefits of exit, without actually having to do it.
You can even continue to grow your business at the same time.
Applied at the right time, Discipline really does make Daring possible.
