We humans live our whole lives in a Heisenberg gymnasium – dancing between poles of certainty and uncertainty. Craving first one, then having got it, craving the other.
The truth is we can never rest, only find a way of creatively using the tension between those poles to move ourselves, our businesses, humanity and our world forwards.
Tying ourselves to one or the other can only end in tears.
Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.
Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house. They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.
Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.
The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines. Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.
Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.
Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies. They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.
In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control. The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.
How about your business? What would your technical drawings look like? Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?
What is a musical score?
It’s the music the composer(s) can hear in their head(s) captured in a way that enables other musicians to play it. It allows the composer to delegate the responsibility for producing the music to others across space and time.
You could think of it as ‘management without the managers’. I have thought of it like that.
But I’ve changed my mind. I think that just like building plans, screenplays and a Customer Experience Score, it’s more like ‘leadership without the leaders’.
A musical score doesn’t say “Do this task, then this one, and this one next”. It says “Here’s where we’re going, here’s the notes we have to hit, find your own best way to hit them, together.”
Hmmm.
What do you think?
I love my cat. She doesn’t love me back.
All she’s really interested in is food and sleep. And every now and then, a bit of attention – on her terms, when and where she wants it, never when I do. She’s lazy, greedy and selfish. She is ‘Cattus Economicus’.
She can’t help it, cats, like most mammals, have evolved that way.
But not us humans. Somewhere in our distant past, we evolved new instincts of collaboration, co-operation, altruism. Because we needed those traits to survive.
‘Homo Economicus’ is a convenient fiction, that tells us more about the economists and politicians who use it than the people they like to apply it to. In their eyes, you and I and most of the people we know are less than human, to be treated is if all we care about is food and sleep.
We know better. We know that we collaborate, co-operate and help each other out all the time. We know that we need to exercise these pro-social instincts more than ever if we are to solve the pressing problems our species faces.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.
We’re no pussycats.
Decades ago, I rescued my mother from a tiny rock, in a shallow sea. No big deal you might think, but she had poor eyesight, vertigo, and couldn’t swim. She was used to staying on the sand. She was panicking, hiding it because she’s our mum, and supposed to be in charge.
I might have been tempted to shout from my place halfway up the beach: “Just step in, it’s not deep, you’ll be fine!”
But I didn’t. I paddled out to her, took her by the hand, and helped her to put one foot down and the water and see just how shallow it was. I got her to put her next foot down, letting her lean on me until she felt steady on her feet.
Then I let her walk by herself the rest of the way.
When what you offer is new, it is also scary. It doesn’t matter that you know the rock is tiny and the sea is shallow. Your prospect doesn’t know that, not emotionally, where it matters.
Don’t just shout from a distance, move to where they are, accompany them on the first steps of their journey. Then let them move forward with dignity.
They’ll remember that for the rest of their life.
When we think of innovation, we tend to think of physical or digital technologies embodied in products or apps.
Management is a technology too.
And as Michele Zanini, co-author with Gary Hamel of ‘Humanocracy‘ observed only last Friday:
“Our research suggests that the longest-lasting competitive advantages come from innovation in management systems and practices, not from business or operating model innovation. So diligently pursuing management innovation pays off handsomely.”
And the good news is that small businesses on the cusp of scaling are best placed to take advantage of this.
I learned a new concept this morning: ‘Founder’s syndrome’. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
The founder responds to increasingly challenging issues by accentuating the above, leading to further difficulties.[29] Anyone who challenges this cycle will be treated as a disruptive influence and will be ignored, ridiculed or removed. The working environment will be increasingly difficult with decreasing trust. The organization becomes increasingly reactive, rather than proactive. Alternatively, the founder or the board may recognize the issue and take effective action.[30]
A lot of this looks to me like the classic painful transition from one-person-band, to few-person-band, to full-blown company. Which is really the transition from a small, personal, human-scaled business to a large, impersonal capitalist corporation. The founder wants to keep things personal and true to their original vision. New owners or new management want to make things efficient, corporate and therefore impersonal. As far as the founder is concerned, they want to make it ‘someone else’s business‘. Of course the founder resists.
There is a preventive for ‘Founder’s syndrome’.
Embed the founding vision and personality into the operating processes of your business before you try to scale, with a Customer Experience Score. You’ll be able to scale without managers, even without investors other than the people you serve. The best of both worlds: personal, true to the original vision and magnifying your impact.
Even better, once it’s built into the way your business works, your Score takes on a life of it’s own, nurtured and improved by everyone in the business. It becomes harder for anyone to interfere – even you.
Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?
The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.
If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.
The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.
The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.
Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.
Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.
Of course, inspiration on its own isn’t enough. Inspiration needs a starting point, a constraint, something to bounce off, spark to or rebel against.
The maker of this ‘crazy’ quilt was already constrained by the assortment of odd-shaped leftovers they had. Perhaps also by the limited colours they’d been given. They decided to impose another constraint – the nine square layout. The result isn’t random. Nor is it purely functional. It satisfies more than the need to keep warm at night.
Why would someone do this?
We humans like order as much as we like wildness. We desire both certainty and uncertainty, rules and license. Pulled by these opposites, we find the tension between them uncomfortable.
So we turn it into the most delightful thing of all – art. Capturing a fleeting, but satisfying moment of balance between the two. The ‘right’ balance is elusive, every time we try, the result is different. That’s what keeps artists in practice. The ‘right’ balance is also personal. That’s what gives each artist their own style.
If you want your business to feel human, it needs to be a place where art can happen.
You can’t dictate the artistic solutions. But you can create the required level of tension, by imposing rules, order and constraints.
If those constraints are designed around making and keeping your promise to the people you serve – if they define a floor, but no ceiling – you’ll have created a safe, exciting and human space for everyone.
Especially you.
Over the long weekend, I had a good rummage through some of my quilting books. It was interesting to come back to them after a gap of a few years as they’ve been in storage while we built the extension.
What struck me going through them now, was just how prescriptive some of the project instructions are – specifying exactly which fabrics to use – down to the manufacturer, designer, range and colourway – exactly how to cut the fabric up to get the required number of pieces, and exactly how to sew them together to make a quilt top. They are instructions for making a replica of a particular quilt.
I don’t know why, but I find this approach quite disturbing. Perhaps because it feels like it isn’t really creative. If I follow the instructions to the letter I’ll get a carbon copy of the quilt in the picture. There’ll be nothing of me in it. There’s no real learning in it either. I learn to follow instructions to replicate a particular quilt, that’s it.
By contrast other books – generally the older ones, are quite freestyle – specifying only ‘light’ or ‘dark’ fabrics together with the number of different shapes needed – assuming that you know how to cut a square or a triangle (or that you’ll refer to the ‘how-to’ section at the beginning of the book). Some even include pictures of different versions of the same patchwork pattern, so you can see how the look changes with different fabrics. These are recipes for making a kind of quilt. Recipes I am encouraged to make my own, right from the beginning. I learn to think about colours and how they work together, I learn how to think about cutting. Most importantly, I learn about my own taste. I learn a process I can apply to different starting materials to generate my own unique results.
For me, the difference between these approaches shows the difference between workflow and process. Workflow turns human beings into mindless replicators. Process frees them to be creative.
Imitation or inspiration. Which would you rather encourage in your team?