Responsible Autonomy – Page 30 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 27, 2022

Purchasing power

Eggs may not seem like a big deal, but when it comes to dealing with climate change, every little helps, especially when done by a lot of people.

Here are 4 egg producers doing something towards reducing the impact factory egg farming has on our planet.

And here are a few questions you can start to ask about all the small things you buy:

Where is it made?
Where is most of it actually made (before the label’s added)?
Who by?
How is it made?
Where do the inputs come from? How are they produced?
Where do the outputs go? How are they made harmless?
What alternatives are there?

It’s not too late to take meaningful action to save our future on the planet.

Before you can act, you need to be informed. The market won’t do this. Especially when it isn’t working properly and a few mega-companies control huge swathes of production.

We have to inform ourselves. Then tell our friends.

I learned about these egg producers through ‘The Daily Difference‘ from The Carbon Almanac. Why not sign up yourself?

Contrary to what we’re told, it’s not too late, provided we all take action.

June 23, 2022

Regenerating business

What is it that people 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.

We want to be citizens. Collaborating with purpose on something bigger than ourselves.

What if, instead of building our businesses to sell stuff – that might create a fleeting sensation of one or more of these things, we built them as a means to enable people to genuinely achieve these things?

We could repair and enrich our world instead of impoverishing it.

It’s not too late for Disicpline to make Daring possible.

June 22, 2022

Subjects, Consumers, Citizens

If humans are naturally empathetic, flexible and co-operative, how come it feels like we’ve lost that?

Because we fall for stories. Stories where our empathy and flexibility can be used against us.

I’m into the last of my 4 new books: ‘Citizens‘ by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, and I’m so glad I’m reading it after Sarah Hrdy’s one.

According to Jon and Ariane, we’ve trapped ourselves in certain stories – stories that we didn’t create, but which had enough advantages for us in them to be accepted.

The first is the Subject story – one man at the top of our tribe has the right to tell everyone else what to do. The rest of us are subject to his will, whether we like it or not. The deal is meant to be that in return, the man at the top will take care of us, make sure we are fed and housed and can live our little lives. The downside of this story is that there’s not much room for movement. Your place is fixed and you know it. The upside is that you can sneak in quite a private life on the side. For an interesting exploration on how this story might have come about, I recommend ‘On Kings‘ by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins.

The second is the Consumer story – we are not a subject, we are a free person! Free, that is, to choose between whatever options are given. The deal here is that we can be whoever we want to be, as long as it involves buying stuff. The more, the better. We aren’t encouraged to think about how that stuff is made, by whom, or what effect it might be having on other people and the planet. We aren’t encouraged to think at all. Our job is simply to consume. The Consumer story likes community, likes tribes. Tribes encourage people to compete with each other in buying stuff. The upside of this story is that as a Consumer we can fully express our indivduality in a myriad of ways. The downside of this story is that we feel disconnected, lonely, unfulfilled somehow, and there’s only so much stuff you can fit into one lifetime.

The third story is the Citizen story. In this story we are empathetic, co-operative, flexible. We recognise that we are part of something more than a community or a tribe, that we are individuals who are also part of a society. A society we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this story we make and re-make society from the bottom up, collaboratively, deliberately, consciously. The downside of this story is that it takes a lot of effort, it means taking responsibility not just for ourselves, but for others, and it means participating with others in a messy process. The upside is that this is our natural story, and the more we practice it, the better we get at it.

How do these stories play out in your business?

Are your clients or customers simply Consumers? Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?

Are your people Subjects? Knowing their place. Living their ‘real life’ outside the workplace, doing just enough to keep you happy? Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?

And you? Are you a King, worrying about who’s after the top spot? Or are you a Citizen, building a little society that will both outlast you and remember you as its founder?

Citizenship makes Daring possible.

June 20, 2022

Going with the grain

We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.

This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.

As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.

So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.

Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.

We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.

And we’re out of practice.

That’s where small businesses come in.

Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?

Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?

When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?

And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

June 15, 2022

Catching on

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

For many of us, this is exactly why we start a business. To build our own little utopia, where we make the rules, and get to decide how our world within a world should work.

But if we want to make a bigger impact, our model of how the world should work has to catch on. With clients, with team members, with suppliers, investors, our families and friends, our competitors.

That can only happen once the model is outside of our heads.

The good news is that getting it out of your head makes it easier for it to catch on.

June 14, 2022

Dictatorship

“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.

Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.

Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.

Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.

It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?

Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.

Participation makes daring scalable.

June 9, 2022

Writing it down

Sometimes, it seems we business owners have a problem with writing things down.

On the one hand we think we have to pin down every last detail; dot every i; cross every t and cover every eventuality, so that absolutely nothing can go wrong. On the other hand, we fear that writing down anything at all will somehow stop our people thinking for themselves.

The answer is to sketch. Make a picture, not a document.

We humans are very good at working out what’s going on from sketches, outlines and broad strokes. We can follow the basics, and use our imaginations to fill in the rest.

If your ‘business imaginations’ are bounded by a clear and comprehensive Promise of Value, a sketch of what has to happen to make and keep that Promise is usually enough to be helpful without stifling imagination. You can always elaborate further where needed.

A sketch is much better than an excruciatingly detailed tome that we’d never have time to read.

And way better than a blank sheet of paper.

It’s discipline that makes daring possible.

June 8, 2022

Handshake overhead

“Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.” Seth Godin, from this post.

Only if you’ve designed your business so that everyone needs someone else’s approval to get things done.

The great thing about designing your business to be more like an orchestra than a pin-factory, is that if you want to make more noise you simply add more players.

Give each new player a copy of the Customer Experience Score to follow, a bit of time to practise, then simply let them get on with it.

If everyone in your business knows how to make and keep your Promise from beginning to end, there’s no need for them to get anyone’s approval first.

Least of all yours.

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.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy