Responsible Autonomy – Page 57 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 29, 2019

Effort

I saw a great demonstration years ago, which is quite fun to try for yourself.

One of your team sits in a chair, facing away from the rest of the team. Somewhere behind the chair, between it and the rest of the team, place a waste-paper bin.

The aim of the exercise is for the person in the chair to get a ball into the waste-paper bin without looking at the bin. They try first on their own. Then they try again.

This time, the team gives them feedback on how they did. First of all, the feedback is just “You missed”.

But after a couple of goes, the team get the hang of it and start giving more helpful feedback – “Too far right”, “About a foot short” etc. This gives the person in the chair information they can actually use to adjust the only thing they can control – how the ball leaves their hand.

The next thing you know, the ball lands in the waste paper bin.

Effort, with feedback, is what actually gets results.

So if you want to improve results, it makes sense to improve the effort that goes into them. And to do that you need to know where you can make adjustments, and get the right kind of feedback on any adjustments you make.

“You missed.” doesn’t cut it.

Thanks to Graham Williams for the memorable demonstration.

July 26, 2019

Parasparopagraho Jīvānām

I’ve just ordered “Jainism and Ethical Finance”, by Atul K. Shah and Aidan Rankin, so I thought I’d find out a bit more about Jainism before it arrives (to supplement the tiny bit I know from reading ‘Kim’).

Two phrases really stood out for me in the Wikipedia entry on Jainism – ‘Parasparopagraho Jīvānām‘, the Jain motto, which means something like “the function of souls is to help one another”; and ‘Anekāntavāda’, the doctrine of ‘many-sidedness’.

To quote the Wikipedia entry fully,

Anekāntavāda ‘states that truth and reality is complex and always has multiple aspects. Reality can be experienced, but it is not possible to totally express it with language. Human attempts to communicate is Naya, explained as “partial expression of the truth”.’

Parasparopagraho Jīvānām and Anekāntavāda seem like useful things to bear in mind as we try to communicate with each other. At least to me.

July 24, 2019

One year later.

Aged 11, late on a Tuesday night, and into the morning, I watched my dad run the payroll for the civil engineering firm he worked for.

I learned two things on that ‘take your daughter to work’ evening.

First, that computing wasn’t scary or even difficult, and the interesting bits were the bits the men did. Second, how fairness trumped everything for my dad.

My dad did this weekly overnight run for years, on his own. Not because it was scheduled that way, but because his peers always gave him the information late.

But no matter how late the inputs came in, the output was the men’s pay packets, and they needed them on Thursday morning, come what may. And as data processing manager, my dad saw at as his responsibility to make sure that happened, come what may.

Now of course, I question some of this. What did he do to try and improve the schedule? Did the company see him as a mug? But still I think of his favourite question – “What would be fair?”

What lessons did your dad teach you?

What are you teaching your daughters?

July 22, 2019

What makes the best process? Everyone.

The best process is one that everyone will use and improve of their own accord, because it helps them to achieve what they want:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master 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’.

The easiest way to achieve that is to involve them in its design, right from the start.

July 19, 2019

What makes a good Process? Let the person be the judge

A good process is a prompt, not a prescription. Like a musical score, or a set of building drawings, it tells people what to produce, not how to do it – they already know that, that’s why you hired them.

That means you can leave the details of execution and judgement to the person running the process. You don’t need to spell out every decision, or identify every possible scenario, or include every last detail of the ‘how to’.

You’re not programming a robot, you’re supporting an intelligent human being to take responsibility and use their own skill, experience, empathy, creativity and judgement to deliver what they, as a part of the business, have promised to the people the business serves.

So to recap, a good process is:

clear about the outcome it is designed to achieve
the responsibility of a single role, ensuring all required resources are available when and where they are needed
both map and compass, helping the person running it to get to the right destination in all circumstances – even those you couldn’t predict
a prompt, not a prescription

These things make for a process that people will actually use; that doesn’t need to be changed with every new piece of software or equipment; that is easy for new people to learn and even internalise, that allows the person responsible to ‘just get on with it’.

A process that is as simple as possible, but no simpler.

July 12, 2019

The Joy of Tax

When things flow, it is sometimes possible to be wrong about their direction. Like when you’re sitting on a train at a station, and you think it’s started moving when it’s not, because the train next to you has started moving the opposite way.

When you’re operating within a system of systems, as we all are, all of the time, it is sometimes possible to misinterpret a symptom as a cause or a cause as a symptom.

It helps to take a step away every now and then and look for the bigger picture, to try and see how things might work differently, rather than trusting your assumptions.

Writers of all kinds can help us do this. Their assumptions may be wrong too of course, but at least they help us become aware that we’re making them. Sometimes, they even help us change them.

I thoroughly recommend reading The Joy of Tax, by Richard Murphy. Even if you don’t agree about the joy.

July 5, 2019

Play

“To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.”

That’s when ‘work’ becomes ‘play’.

From “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” by David Graeber – well worth a read over the weekend.

Have a good one.

July 1, 2019

Sawubona

You can’t be seen until you learn to see.

Sawubona.

June 27, 2019

Decisions

One of the easiest ways to overcomplicate a process that is designed to be run by humans is to spell out every possible decision.

That’s not to say decision trees like the one above aren’t useful in helping people to think through options or scenarios, they are. But often it’s impossible to pre-identify every possible scenario – especially where other living things are involved – and the attempt to include everything we can imagine in a process simply slows down its execution.

For the most part, simple, black & white, truly binary decisions can be automated.

For everything else we want people to think before they act. In which case the best instruction starts with “Use your judgement and experience, together with your knowledge of our purpose and values”.

June 24, 2019

Learned carelessness

Here’s a scary thought. When their satnav says there is a road, but all they can see is water, drivers will believe the satnav, rather than their own eyes, and end up having to be rescued.

Luckily, most of the time the results of such satnav errors are not drastic – they simply start the conversation after a late arrival – “You won’t believe where the satnav took us!”

But the phenomenon behind these stories – automation bias or “learned carelessness” – is a serious problem. Confronted with a ‘black box’, whose workings we don’t understand, and which seems on the whole to be reliable, we humans switch off, stop monitoring, and stop thinking. “Computer says no.”

There are ways to prevent this.

You can de-mystify the ‘black box’, so people understand that it is part of a system designed and built by humans to achieve certain ends; you can frame the information provided by the system as support or advice rather than instruction, and you can engage the human brain by making the human do some of the work – especially where there are other humans involved.

Automation is great, but I want the best of both worlds.

Thanks to James Bridle for sparking this one.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy