Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Roles
May 10, 2023

Roles

One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.

It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.

Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice.  There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.

Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on.  There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it.   And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.

In The Disappearing Boss,  I use a similar idea.   A Role is a part played in a performance by a person.   It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.

Here’s an example from one of my clients.  Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:

The definition of the Ship's Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op. It covers what the Ship does,what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed.  They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships.  What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.

As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing.  One person can play many Roles.  A given Role can be played by many people.  Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.

At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable.  Worth coming back for again and again.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Dancing with chaos
May 9, 2023

Dancing with chaos

I finished “The Uncertainty Mindset” this morning.   Unike many management books, it’s taken me a while to finish because the book is dense with ideas and insights, so I have had to rest between reads.

I thoroughly recommend it, especially for those who wish to disrupt with their business.

In the high-end, ultra-innovative world of fine dining of the book, teams of innovators repeatedly dance with chaos, pushing themselves into some new, unknown situation (moving the restaurant to new country; organising a conference; organising food relief in hurrican-struck islands) inducing a feeling of desperation as they scramble to deliver on a promise that will be at once utterly new and utterly familiar to their clientele.  Each time they dance they learn anew that they will succeed, even if they don’t yet know how.  And they do succeed. Spectacularly.   Then they rest, allowing themselves time to recover before they go again, on an even bigger challenge.

They can do this because they are specifically R&D teams.   The day-to-day of a restaurant can’t run like this.  The teams running the restaurants have a different challenge with it’s own rhythm.

What if you’re not a restaurant chain?  What if you aren’t R&D?  What if you simply want to evolve continuously, not necessarily radically, in response to the world around your business, through the lens of your customers?  What can be learned from this approach?

It’s this aspect that I want to pursue – that dance between order and chaos, between predictbility and uncertainty that makes life so interesting.

So I’ll be reading it again, taking notes, and translating it into my own terms, so I can share it with you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Order with feeling
May 2, 2023

Order with feeling

I didn’t get much reading done this weekend.

Instead I’ve been sorting fabrics.

Over the years I’ve built up an extensive collection of vintage fabrics and shirts that I’ve been intending to use for quilts.  I like the idea of recycling other people’s cast-offs into new and interesting material.

My collection was all over the place, scattered across different parts of the house, all colours jumbled together in various bags too heavy to move.

So my job over the last week or so has been to sort through it, chuck some, earmark some for passing on, and get the rest cut up for flatter storage, organised into smaller labelled bags.

It’s been hard work, but pleasant, evoking some happy memories.  I picked through a bag of scraps – far too small to actually use – remembering the velvet teddy I made for one niece; the bright Provencal backpack I made for another; the tartan dinosaur I made for a colleague’s wedding; the bean bags I made for nephews, and the enormous one I tie-dyed to commission for another colleague.  Then I threw the scraps away.

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.  I can’t draw or paint.  But give me something concrete to work with and I can create useful things that also look unexpectedly good.  Pottery, jewellery making, woodwork, patchwork – those are more my style.

Also businesses.

Give me a business, that perhaps feels a bit disorganised, a bit scattered, not quite coherent.  Yet nevertheless amazing.   I’ll teach its owners to re-arrange it into an elegant sysem for making and keeping promises that becomes more than the sum of its parts.  Ordered, scalable, yet still full of of feeling, it becomes an heirloom they’ll be even more proud to pass on.

In business as in patchwork, Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Unicorns
April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either.   Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.

Adjusting the system 1 – Props
April 24, 2023

Adjusting the system 1 – Props

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

One of the simplest adaptations can be to add, remove, repurpose or refine a Prop – a thing a team member needs to play a Role.

It might be as simple as adding a new set of teaspoons to your kitchen area; adding a footrest to a workstation or replacing computers and laptops.

Props aren’t just physical either.  You might refine an online form you use to capture information or upgrade software, or replace that software with something new, that supports your Customer Experience Score better, or more cheaply.

And like any good theatre, or film production company, you’ll recycle and re-purpose Props – that old computer may no longer cope with the demands made on it, but perhaps it can become a backup location for important data, or perform some less onerous task, or be cannibalised to contribute to a new machine.

Thinking about everything you use in your business as a Prop – there to support your people in delivering the customer experience – means you can be more considered in how you choose what to buy, and how you use it.

Remember to be considered in how you dispose of it too.  You never know, your cast-offs could become essential Props for someone else.

Employee Ownership
April 21, 2023

Employee Ownership

You already know you want your employees to own your business.

How about getting them to run it too?

That would enable them to really take ownership.

And if you enable them to do that before you hand it over, you get to go, or stay, as and when you please.

It only takes a year.

Ask me how.

Extrapolating consequences
April 20, 2023

Extrapolating consequences

A few questions to ask about feedback of all kinds:

  1. What’s causing it?
  2. Have we seen it before?
  3. Is it a trend?
  4. What happens if we do nothing?
  5. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
  6. What are the consequences of that?
    1. What happens if we do nothing?
    2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
    3. What are the consequences of that?
      1. What happens if we do nothing?
      2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
      3. What are the consequences of that?
        1. What happens if we do nothing?
        2. Do we want what happens if we do nothing?
        3. What are the consequences of that?
          1. What happens if we do nothing? – you get the picture.  Repeat until you are are confident to stop.

Hint: Most of us stop too soon.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

What do you do with all that feedback?
April 19, 2023

What do you do with all that feedback?

Well, you can ignore it, and carry on working according to your existing assertions about how the system works.

Or you can examine it, and decide whether your existing assertions remain valid (or maybe valid enough for now).

Or you can examine it, and decide whether you need to change those assertions, and how you work within the system.

This can be more difficult than it looks, because you need to be conscious of your assertions, and of how you currently work.

Fortunately, if you have your Promise of Value clearly defined and articulated, and a working Customer Experience Score in play,  you’ll know both well enough to be able to extrapolate the consequences of what you see in the feedback, and see where things need to be redesigned.

Discipline makes evolution possible too.

Ask me how.

Sellers beware
April 13, 2023

Sellers beware

When my mother sold her architect-designed corner-plot bungalow, the buyers told her they were aiming to set up their son in it.  They quibbled over everything, nibbled away at the asking price until in the end, she sold for much less than she’d hoped.

Then they knocked it down and built 3 new executive homes on the plot.

There are many reasons why a trade buyer would want your business.

If you care about what happens to it, to your staff and to your clients after you’ve exited, it’s worth knowing what those reasons could be, because buyers are not necessarily going to tell you:

  • They want your client list, but not your staff, offices or name.
  • They want your brand, but not the effort that goes into maintaining it.
  • They want your market share, to add to theirs, so they look good to potential investors or buyers, but not your staff, or your products and services.
  • They want to take you out as a competitor.
  • They want your business as part of a portfolio.
  • They want to run it themselves as a going concern.

Whatever the reason, they’ll usually want you to stay on as a consultant, and the final price will be dependent on performance during the transition.  And all too often that transition destroys value, while you have to watch it happen.

Just as it’s easier to protect the value of your house by making sure it’s in tip-top condition with everything working like clockwork, it’s easier to protect your business’s value if you’ve systemised it.  Even easier if you’ve also documented that system in a Customer Experience Score.

Doing so also opens up other exit opportunities:

  • Pass it on to family, who already know it runs profitably without you.
  • Sell it to your employees, who already know how to run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to one or more of your fans, who already know that your team can run it profitably without you.
  • Sell it to a like-minded entrepreneur, who wants to see your legacy carry on.
  • License it to any one of the above, on condition that is run the way you’ve designed it to run, in return for a percentage of the profits.

Build your unique promise of value into the way your business works before you sell, that way you’ll get to realise it all and leave a legacy other will recognise as yours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.