Responsible Autonomy – Page 32 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 8, 2022

Feedback is how we learn

A complex evolving system, such as a planet, an ecosystem or a business, learns through feedback.

That means at least 4 things:

There has to be room within the ‘normal process’ for variation.
There has to be a way of recognising repeated variations that should be part of the normal process.
There has to be a way of quickly and easily capturing these into the new ‘normal process’.
There has to be enough ‘slack’/redundancy in the whole system to make the first 3 possible and practical.

Without these, a system fossilises, becomes irrelevant and ultimately dies.

Thanks to Seth Godin for the prompt.

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.

April 6, 2022

The entertainers and the sinking cruise ship

I’ve just caught the last half of ‘Life Changing’ on BBC Radio 4.

It’s a thrilling and hopefully infrequent illustration of why hierarchy sucks and free-playing, experimental and autonomously responsible human beings are the best.

After their cruise ship was holed, the captain hid and the senior managers ran away.

The entertainers worked out something was wrong, then, worried about the customers and the rest of the crew, did something about it. They initiated processes that saved all 581 people left on board, including themselves.

Maybe they were able to do that precisely because they weren’t on the org chart?

April 4, 2022

The equality of unequals

You know your clients are individuals. With individual personalities, character traits and preferences. You know that what delights one won’t delight another.

You also know that you want them all to be delighted by your service. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

In the same way, you know that your people are individuals, with individual personalities, character traits and preferences. That what delights one won’t delight another. Yet you want all of them to be delighted to work here, because that’s how they are motivated to delight your clients. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

“But how do I keep things consistent?”

By setting boundaries for behaviour, a floor for what has to be done, then giving your people free play to experiment and explore what delight means to them and to clients.

Doing exactly the same thing every time is what machines do. Cookie-cutting is an efficient way to produce to a minimum standard at scale, but it’s rarely a delightful experience.

Equality doesn’t have to mean treating everyone the same, it can be about doing whatever it takes to produce the same outcome. And if a delighted human is your desired outcome, delighted, free-playing humans are your best means of achieving it.

March 30, 2022

Almost impossible

I loved Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday.

In it he talks about the gap in customer service between one person in your team and another – or even between the same person on a good day and a bad day – and how you might address it.

One approach is to nail everything down so much that delivery of the experience is exactly the same, no matter who is giving it. Another is to leave it to a great person doing the job, giving them “room to shine. With all the variability that entails.”

“It’s almost impossible to have both.”

Almost, but not impossible.

Hire great people, give them a Promise of Value and a Customer Experience Score, that creates a floor, but no ceiling, then set them free to interpret it in their own way.

Variations on a theme. The best of both worlds.

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.

March 21, 2022

Disappeared bosses

My other half gives tours at the Red House, William Morris’s first house, built by Philip Webb. He’s a volunteer with the National Trust.

The interesting thing about this is that he is one of dozens of Red House volunteers, local people, who give tours, garden, run the gift shop and the tearoom.

Every volunteer is enthusiastic about the house and its history, and all are keen to share that with visitors. They organise themselves. Because they are volunteers, they give leeway. They’ve been known to stay open late to allow for a missed train, or open early to accommodate long-distance visitors. They know what to do and each one of them does it in their own style.

There are managers on site who are full-time employees of the Trust. They monitor the finances and the maintenance and restoration of the asset – the house and gardens – but they don’t supervise anyone. In fact, most of the time, nobody sees them.

In part, this is because the Trust doesn’t have the money to fund a bloated management hierarchy. But it is probably more to do with the fact that the people who deliver the customer experience are volunteers. They do this for love, not a living. They are free to walk away at any time.

What if you treated your team as if they were volunteers? Would that change how your business delivers its Promise to the people it serves? Would you, as boss, be free to ‘disappear’, to concentrate on bigger things?

Probably.

March 17, 2022

How to capture a business process – Step 7

When you’re designing a process, bear in mind the reason you are doing it.

All the processes in your business are part of a system – your unique system – for making and keeping promises for the people you serve:

Your Promise System

More importantly, design it so that the person executed can see this context, and act accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll find yourselves missing the point completely.

The answer is to not think of it as a ‘process’ at all, but as a musical score. A score describes what notes to play in what order. Not because ‘that’s the way to do it’, but to evoke a desired emotional response in the listener. That’s why a score will often contain words as well as musical notes – that give hints on how to play, not just what to play.

The ‘process’ is the floor. The context is where the magic happens.

March 11, 2022

Never done

Another thing to keep in mind as you design your Customer Experience Score:

You’re never done.

You will be wrong sometimes, you will be right more often, but you will never be finished.

Because there is no right answer.

Only the best answer for now.

That’s what makes it human, sustainable and uniquely beautiful.

March 10, 2022

How low should you go?

When you’re trying to capture your Customer Experience Score, it’s easy to get yourself bogged down in detail, trying to nail down every step of every activity to the nth degree.

You can avoid this by reminding yourself who you’re writing the process for – a competent human being, not a machine. One of the great things about humans is that you don’t need to tell them everything. They can fill in the gaps from their experience, using their skill and judgement.

So if you find yourself documenting the equivalent of ‘make a cup of tea’ in excruciating detail, you’ve gone too low. On the other hand, if everyone following your Score has to stop and ask you “What am I supposed to do here?“, you’ve stayed too high. If some of your players are too new to know already, by all means, document ‘how to make a cup of tea’. As part of their training, not part of the Score.

The only way you’ll know how near you are to the sweet spot is to do it, find out and adjust accordingly.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy