Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Instinct and intention
July 11, 2022

Instinct and intention

In the late 18th century it was tough to be a sailor in the Royal Navy.   Discipline was harsh, pay was low, the food was terrible and battles were deadly.   Especially if you were part of a gun crew.

Firing a cannon was far from simple, it took several steps and required good co-ordination and careful timing.   The equivalent of a modern Formula1 pitstop.   Plus of course all the time you were firing, the enemy was firing at you, shattering the hull of your own ship into lethal splinters.

The bosses expected gun crews to work by instinct.  Their thinking was that in the midst of battle, when your life depended on it you would naturally do the best job you could.

A new boss changed all that.   His radical idea was to look at what the best gun crews did, then train every crew to work as they did, practicing until every crew performed the best it could – consistently and on purpose.

“A waste of good ammunition” said his bosses.

Horatio Nelson insisted and got his way.

The rest as they say, is history.

Instinct can get you a long way, but if you want to go further, you need intention.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Yet more thoughts on Packaging your Promise – Timing
July 8, 2022

Yet more thoughts on Packaging your Promise – Timing

The function of your Package is to enable the transformation the client desires.

Its format is about delivering that transformation effectively, in a way that suits their motivation and ability.

Timing is about how long that should take.  Balancing the urgency of the need against the practicalities of learning, absorbing and doing that will actually sustain the transformation beyond the journey.

Questions to ask:

  • How long does it take to complete the whole thing – to get from where they are now, to where they want to be, with you?
  • How much time does the Client need to devote to this?
  • If there are natural breaks, should there be gaps between for consolidation or implementation?
  • What’s the right pace? Where’s the balance between having time to do it and maintaining momentum?
  • When does it end?
  • Is maintenance required once the desired transformation has been achieved?

Of course, thinking about these things inevitably sparks more ideas about the format, and possibly ideas for further Packages.

And of course the underlying questions are still:

  • How can you make it as easy as possible for them to do, so they don’t give up along the way?
  • How do you make it as easy as possible for you to deliver, so that you can scale?

More thoughts on packaging your Promise – Format
July 7, 2022

More thoughts on packaging your Promise – Format

The function of your Package is to enable the transformation the client desires.

Its format is about delivering that transformation effectively, in a way that suits their motivation and ability.

Some questions to ask:

  • Could it be a product?
  • Could it be a service?
  • Could it be ‘self-service’, ‘on-demand’ or ‘do-it-yourself’?
  • Could it be live? In-person? Virtual? In a cohort or community?
  • Could it be a combination of any or all of these?
  • Could clients support each other?  How?

The underlying questions for all of these are:

How can you make it as easy as possible for them to do, so they don’t give up along the way?

How do you make it as easy as possible for you to deliver, so that you can scale?

Some more thoughts on packaging – Function
July 6, 2022

Some more thoughts on packaging – Function

What does your Packaged Promise have to do?   How far does it go to help your client get from where they are now to where they want to be?

Some questions to ask:

  • Can I do the whole job in one go?
  • Is that really doable, by me and by the client?
  • If not, how do I break it up so that the client can see progress, without being overwhelmed by the size of the task in front of them?

And an insight from that last question:

If there is progress, there must be a process.   So what is it?   How do I get my client from where they are now, to where they want to be?

  • Can I describe that as a process in a way that makes sense to the client? 
  • Where are the ‘natural’ breaks in that process? Can I match Packages to those?
  • How can I keep the client motivated to continue the journey?

Sharing the process with the client before they start their journey, helping them to locate themselves while they are on it and celebrating milestones as you go can all help.

And a final question prompted by a conversation with Adam Forbes:

  • How small could you make those Packages?
  • How could you turn each step on the journey into a tiny or atomic habit?

After all, as any pub landlord or fountain owner could tell you – those single, small denomination coins soon add up.

Hmmm.

Reinventing the wheel
July 5, 2022

Reinventing the wheel

Before you can Package your Promise of Value effectively, you need to know these things about the people you serve:

  • the situation(s) in which they find themselves
  • the transformation they seek – their Job to be Done, and how motivated they are by their situation to achieve it.
  • how your Promise of Value is likely to appeal to them
  • how you can help them to get their Job to be Done done better than the alternatives – even, possibly, that you are the only way they can get this Job to be Done, done
  • how able they are likely to be to take up your Promise

Once you know these things, you can begin to design one or more Packages to suit the needs, motivation and ability of the people you serve.

There are 4 things you need to consider when designing a Package:

  • Function – how far does the Package go to help your client get from where they are now to where they want to be? To get their Job to be Done, done?
  • Format – how will you physically get that benefit into their hands?
  • Timing – is the Package a one-off intervention or is it delivered over a longer time-frame? Is there an end to it?
  • Price – how much does the Package need to cost to profit both parties?

I’m thinking out loud here, re-inventing the wheel for myself as usual.

What do you think?

Tell me, I’d love to know.

A tender impact
July 4, 2022

A tender impact

Patrick Hurley takes a huge blank piece of paper, thinks about what he wants to draw – ‘It’s going to be a ring, I want it to have depth, it will be made of squares‘ – marks a few points for guidance.

Then he draws.   In a single continuous line.

From a distance the result has impact.   There’s a clear structure, a vision – you might almost say a purpose to it.

Up close, you feel tenderness for the humanity of it.  The wobbles, the inconsistencies, the variation, the failure to keep to the ‘perfect’ alignment.

‘It’s like life,‘ says Patrick ‘You can only go forward, if you make a mistake, do better next time, or do something that atones for it.’

Yes.

Work is part of life.  So why not approach it this way too?  Create a framework with clear boundaries, a goal and a method for achieving it.  Then let everyone add their own humanity.

Impact with tenderness.

Find Patrick and more of his work on instagram: @hurleyman03.

Love/Hate
June 30, 2022

Love/Hate

There is much about being in charge of a company that every owner loves:

  • being part of a team,
  • working towards a common purpose
  • camaraderie
  • feeling that you’re not on your own
  • seeing ideas come up from others – better than any you could have dreamed up
  • seeing people grow and develop as a result of working with you – not just at work
  • Seeing your vision come to life.
  • The feeling of ‘I made this’.

There is also much about being in charge of a company that every owner seems to hate:

  • telling people what to do
  • making sure that they are doing it
  • worrying about whether they will do it properly
  • checking that they have done it properly
  • doing it again yourself when they haven’t
  • telling them they didn’t do it properly
  • telling them (again) how you want it done
  • dealing with disappointed clients
  • performance reviews
  • finding and hiring the right people
  • seeing them go
  • being the last to leave
  • being the last to have a holiday
  • being the last to be paid
  • not getting to do any of the ‘real’ work

What if you could have the bits you love, without the bits you hate?

You can, if you think about where the bits you hate come from.

If you were building an office block, or putting on a play, or making a film, you would have something that told people exactly what it is you’re trying to create.  You’d have plans, a script and stage directions, a storyboard.   If you were writing a symphony you’d have a score.

These things don’t just describe the outcome, they document how it is arrived at.

It’s not the bricklaying or the carpentry you’re worried about, you know your team know how to do that. What you’re worried about as an owner is the look and feel of the thing, the experience the audience – your client – will have of the finished article.

When you started your business you lovingly and painstakingly handcrafted the client experience yourself, in collaboration with the people who ‘got’ what you can do for them.

You expanded your business first by freeing up more of your own time – by handing over specific jobs that require specialist skills – bricklaying, joinery, accountancy, hr, phone answering. These are generic jobs, with their own rules that specialists learn.   But there comes a point where you have to hand over parts of the customer experience itself, whether that’s sales or delivery.

This is where the problems start.

The solution is startlingly simple.

Create a description of the customer experience and how to deliver it, that ensures everyone starts from the same level of understanding as you.

That way everyone gets what they love.

5 principles for composing your Customer Experience Score
June 28, 2022

5 principles for composing your Customer Experience Score

Principle 1: Remember why you’re doing it.

Everything you do in your business is done in service of making and keeping Promises to the people you serve.

This is the bigger picture:

You need to remember that when you compose your Score, and you need to ensure that your people will remember it every time they play it.

Principle 2: Not how it is now, but how you really want it to be.

As soon as you’ve written it down, your Score becomes your new ‘As-is’.  Until you improve it again.  You’ll never get to ‘To-be’.

Principle 3: The person playing this will be a human being like you.

You’re not composing for a robot, or a computer.  You’re composing for a human, who can fill in any gaps from their experience, knowledge and skill.   They need prompts, not instructions.  They’ll probably suggest improvements.

Principle 4: Have a golden rule for dealing with the unexpected, and a recovery process for when things go wrong

You can’t predict every eventuality.   Things change.   So it pays to have a ‘golden rule’ that allows anyone to deal with them in line with your Promise.

Similarly, mistakes are bound to happen.  The way you deal with them is part of your Promise.  And there is a way to make errors work for you and actually strengthen your Promise: Be human.

Principle 5: Admin is a side-effect of doing the job

You want to spend as much time as possible on the thing that pays – making and keeping Promises to the people you serve.   Everything else is  a side-effect.  But you have to design your business to work that way.

The first piece of admin to treat like this, is getting paid.   Make it part of the process – even if it’s the final note of your Score.  That way you can make sure it happens, on time, every time.  Especially if you also make it part of the customer experience.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

And if you dare, I can bring the discipline.

Regenerating business
June 23, 2022

Regenerating business

What is it that people want?

  • Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) 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’.
  • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

We want to be citizens.  Collaborating with purpose on something bigger than ourselves.

What if, instead of building our businesses to sell stuff – that might create a fleeting sensation of one or more of these things, we built them as a means to enable people to genuinely achieve these things?

We could repair and enrich our world instead of impoverishing it.

It’s not too late for Disicpline to make Daring possible.

Subjects, Consumers, Citizens
June 22, 2022

Subjects, Consumers, Citizens

If humans are naturally empathetic, flexible and co-operative, how come it feels like we’ve lost that?

Because we fall for stories.   Stories where our empathy and flexibility can be used against us.

I’m into the last of my 4 new books: ‘Citizens‘ by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, and I’m so glad I’m reading it after Sarah Hrdy’s one.

According to Jon and Ariane, we’ve trapped ourselves in certain stories – stories that we didn’t create, but which had enough advantages for us in them to be accepted.

The first is the Subject story – one man at the top of our tribe has the right to tell everyone else what to do.  The rest of us are subject to his will, whether we like it or not.   The deal is meant to be that in return, the man at the top will take care of us, make sure we are fed and housed and can live our little lives.   The downside of this story is that there’s not much room for movement.   Your place is fixed and you know it.   The upside is that you can sneak in quite a private life on the side.  For an interesting exploration on how this story might have come about, I recommend ‘On Kings‘ by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins.

The second is the Consumer story – we are not a subject, we are a free person!  Free, that is, to choose between whatever options are given.  The deal here is that we can be whoever we want to be, as long as it involves buying stuff.   The more, the better.   We aren’t encouraged to think about how that stuff is made, by whom, or what effect it might be having on other people and the planet.  We aren’t encouraged to think at all.  Our job is simply to consume.   The Consumer story likes community, likes tribes.  Tribes encourage people to compete with each other in buying stuff.   The upside of this story is that as a Consumer we can fully express our indivduality in a myriad of ways.  The downside of this story is that we feel disconnected, lonely, unfulfilled somehow, and there’s only so much stuff you can fit into one lifetime.

The third story is the Citizen story.  In this story we are empathetic, co-operative, flexible.  We recognise that we are part of something more than a community or a tribe, that we are individuals who are also part of a society.  A society we make, and could just as easily make differently.  In this story we make and re-make society from the bottom up, collaboratively, deliberately, consciously.   The downside of this story is that it takes a lot of effort, it means taking responsibility not just for ourselves, but for others, and it means participating with others in a messy process.   The upside is that this is our natural story, and the more we practice it, the better we get at it.

How do these stories play out in your business?

Are your clients or customers simply Consumers?  Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?

Are your people Subjects?  Knowing their place.  Living their ‘real life’ outside the workplace, doing just enough to keep you happy?  Or are they Citizens, helping to shape the little society that is your business?

And you?  Are you a King, worrying about who’s after the top spot?  Or are you a Citizen, building a little society that will both outlast you and remember you as its founder?

Citizenship makes Daring possible.