Imagine discovering not only that the universe is absolutely full of dust, but also that there is more of the universe than was previously thought, all of it hidden behind that very dust.
Just by changing the wavelength of the light you’re using to see by.
HT to Hayley Gomez and The Life Scientific for ths one.
When you buy off the shelf, you’re buying from someone who’s producing for people who do what everyone else does, the way everyone else does it. That’s what ‘mass-market’ means.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy off the shelf. Just that when you do, you should be clear that whatever you’re buying really does serve what you do, the way that you do it.
Otherwise you’ll end up having to act like everyone else.
A shame when there are other options available.
Of course your business doesn’t just impact the people immediately involved in it.
It also impacts Earth, therefore other inhabitants too. Possibly in ways you can’t currently see.
You may not be responsible for the entirety of the impact, but perhaps you contribute.
Just as, by outsourcing my accounting to an accountant, I don’t employ someone directly, but contribute to the employment of the people who work for my accountant, so, by using a laptop and mobile for my work, I contribute to the pollution and oppression created by a lithium mine.
The point is to be aware. Then to ramp up the positives and minimise the negatives.
That might mean changing how you do business, or even what you do, to play your part in creating a safe and just space for humanity here on our planet:
One thing’s for certain, you won’t be short of work.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“Entropy: Spontaneous increase in disorder of a carefully arranged system. An irreversible process, except with the input of energy.”
The energy needed to prevent entropy in your carefully arranged business system doesn’t have to only come from you.
In fact it’s better if it doesn’t.
That way a useful level of emergence is possible.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
If what everyone really wants is something like this:
Then your impact on people is about how much you help or hinder them in their quest to achieve it.
Do you enable people to earn enough to rise above meeting basic needs? Do you free their time to focus on finding and following their purpose? Do you help them to master skills and capabilities that will increase their agency and autonomy? Do you help them connect to a community that values them?
How could you measure these things?
A good place to start might be to look at what changes when it works. What are the symptoms of that change? How few of them could you measure to tell you the effect your business has had?
Of course you’ll want to measure these things for your clients.
Remember to measure them for your team and yourself too. You’re all involved.
The final component of feedback that matters for your business, is the impact it makes. On your clients, your team, your family, your friends, your community and your planet.
Impact is probably also the hardest kind of feedback to measure.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
What ripples is your business pebble responsible for?
Once you’re all working beautifully from the same Score, there’s no real need for one of you to bear all the responsibility for the performance. That heavy load, shared among many, becomes lighter for everyone.
Especially you.
There’s more than one way to become a Disappearing Boss. Maybe the best way is simply to blend yourself in?
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.
To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones. To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better. To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.
Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this. But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.
And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.
Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”
A musical score is a multi-use tool. For the composer, its a tool for thinking, for designing. The score gives concrete shape to the music that’s playing in their head. And once concrete, it can be more easily modified and improved, until it fully reflects their intentions.
From then on, the score also becomes a different kind of tool. A tool for communicating that vision to the players who will be responsible for delivering it. A tool that tells them what the performance must convery, without telling them how to do it. Because as experienced artists, they know that already.
A score can switch between these two uses as many times as it needs to.
A Customer Experience Score works the same way. It’s a design tool for the business owner, a communications tool for their team. And like a musical score it can switch between these uses whenever it needs to.
Perhaps even after its composer has disappeared, if the players feel strongly enough about the original vision.
“Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful – that is in which it takes on social value.
All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure within which it is embedded.
At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognise that one is also working on people.” David Graeber
In other words, the ‘perfect employee’ is made by how you choose to employ them.