Responsible Autonomy – Page 37 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 26, 2021

Facts are the enemies of truth

When you create your own business, the ‘truth’ of why it exists, what it does, who it’s for and how it should work is only in your head.

If you want to grow beyond the impact you can make on your own, you have to find a way to communicate and transfer that truth to the heads of your collaborators.

At that point, we tend to replace our truth with facts. Facts are controlling, dry, objective, soulless. We try to flesh the truth out as much as possible by adding too many facts, hiding the very thing we need to reveal.

No wonder people resist, preferring to follow their own idea of the truth – however different that may be from yours. What’s really needed is a way to position your truth in the space between the people who work together to deliver it. That way everyone can access it, everyone can question it, everyone can improve it.

Your truth is your Promise of Value. The space between the people who work together to deliver it is your business.

Make a map of that space that describes how you make and keep your Promise to the people the business serves. Keep the facts minimal – just enough to indicate concrete action; allow the truth to shine through.

Leave room for interpretation, dissent and discussion. Then make sure there’s a process for reaching consensus around a new, better truth. That’s how your business will grow and evolve.

Thanks to Carlos Saba, for introducing me to the book that inspired this post. It’s well worth a read.

August 24, 2021

Structuring emergence

The problem with a hierarchical management structure, is that it’s expensive – adding layers of overhead and transaction costs that have to be carried by the revenue-generating part of the business. Even worse, it encourages everyone working within it to focus on the wrong thing – their immediate boss. And that makes work miserable for many, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Alternatives to hierarchy, such as holacracy, co-operation and teal address this by delegating much of the management and decision-making to the people at the coal-face – no longer the bottom, but the cutting edge, where the business meets its customers.

This doesn’t reduce overhead that much because in effect, as Dr Julian Birkenshaw of London Business School observes, these structures “replace a vertical bureaucracy with a horizontal one”. Considerable interaction costs remain as people collaborate and generate consent to create emergent actions. But at least the focus is where it matters, on the customer, client or stakeholder.

It seems to me that what’s really needed is both structure and emergence. A structure that takes the thinking out of doing the right thing most of the time, but allows for emergence at the edges to respond to exceptions and to evolve. The main thing is that both the core structure and the processes for emergence are focused on the same thing – the customer, client or stakeholder.

By now, you know all about my core structure:

Even hierachy works better around this. Replace that with holacracy, co-operation, teal or responsible autonomy, and your business will fly.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 20, 2021

Pattern Books

One of the things that put good housing within reach of ordinary people was the pattern book.

Instead of designing and building each house from scratch, an architect could design a basic pattern with variations that any local builder could construct. The first owners could even personalise their home by choosing features from a list – a parquet floor here, a bay window there, a different bedroom layout.

The result was our typical suburbs, from Hampstead Garden Village through to Metroland and beyond. Houses that are enough like each other to give a pleasing sense of uniformity and rhythm, but different enough in their details to be lively.

You are the architect of your business. What if, instead of building each customer experience from scratch, you created a pattern book that your team can start from, and clients can adjust to suit their tastes?

August 19, 2021

Customer-centric

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.

They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.

The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.

Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.

Hmmm.

Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 13, 2021

Philanthropy

It probably feels great to show your love for humanity by giving away your fortune once you’ve made it.

What if you showed your love for humanity in the way you make it in the first place?

Then there’d be no need.

August 12, 2021

Sharing

I’m one of seven children. A lot of work for my mother, who was nominally ‘The Boss’ in our house.

She didn’t like it though.

She resented being the parent who had to get us to do homework, or tidy our rooms, or do the washing up. She resented being the one who shouted and told us off. She resented the fact that her contribution was taken for granted, invisible, unappreciated. Most of all she resented being the one who had to think of everything, for everyone else.

Fortunately for my mum, and as I realised later, for us, she went on strike when she was in her mid 40’s.

From that point on, if we were 16 or over, we took responsibility for ourselves. If we wanted washing done, we did it ourselves. If we wanted clothes ironed, we did it ourselves. If we didn’t like ironing, then we could choose clothes that didn’t need ironing. If we didn’t like tidying our bedrooms, we could live in a mess. If we wanted a different meal from everyone else, we could, as long as we planned and cooked it and washed up ourselves.

It was hard for my mum, because it meant we did quite often live in a mess, but it showed me at least that beyond a certain age, a family, like a small business is a collaborative affair. And that this collaboration works best when its the responsibility that’s shared, not just the work.

Being ‘The Boss’ isn’t as nearly as much fun as people think.

The solution is to make everyone the boss of themselves, within a framework of shared purpose. Everyone is better for it. Especially the business.

August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do. Often they also tell you how to do it. A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’. And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how. It’s uncomfortable. It feels wrong. Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family. You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable. If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss. Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too. So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

August 6, 2021

500 percent

I realise I forgot to mention the book pictured in my earlier blog this week.

It’s well worth a read, sadly only available on Amazon.

Here’s my takeaway from reading it:

Sustainable improvement only came when the owners, Julian and Andrew did three things:

They re-framed what a business is about: “A business exists to form contracts, and satisfy them successfully.” In other words, it’s about making promises and keeping them.
They re-designed the highest level business processes around that definition to create a framework. In other words, they created a score for people to follow, without telling them where to put their fingers.
They handed over all the work that takes place within that framework to each and every person in the business, along with the lion’s share of the rewards. Each person became in effect a virtual business running the entire end-to-end process of forming contracts and satisfying them successfully, and collaborating with peers to do so. In other words, they enabled people to fulfill all their human needs for purpose, mastery, agency, autonomy and community, not just their basic need to ‘make a living’.

As a result, the business became not just self-managing, but self-leading. In other words, they built a scalable, replicable system for making and keeping promises, that didn’t need them to be there.

If a manufacturing business can do this, then so can you.

And I’d love to help.

August 5, 2021

Handovers

When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead. Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them. Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money. You’ve introduced transaction costs. At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give. So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it. That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond. It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun. What’s not to like?