Scaleability – Page 18 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 20, 2022

Going with the grain

We’re often told that left in a ‘state of nature’, humans would end up fighting a ‘war of all against all’, leaving life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that, not even in the dodgiest part of Manchester in the high-unemployment, welfare-cut-ridden 1980s.

This story is used (has been used for millenia) to justify hierarchy. ‘Someone needs to be in charge, because otherwise everying will go to pot.‘ And with hierarchy comes inequality. ‘I’m at the top, so I deserve more‘.

As I’m working through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ‘Mothers and Others‘, it’s becoming clear that flexibility, empathy, mutual care and co-operation aren’t just useful human traits, they are literally the traits that made us human. These behaviours evolved before our bigger brains, before language. They made our bigger brains possible. Without these behaviours, we would still be great apes, or extinct.

So a flexible, co-operative mindset based on empathy and care for others, including those currently ‘unproductive’ comes naturally to us. Anything else goes against the grain.

Suppressing our nature isn’t just bad for people’s mental health, it’s bad for business, and right now it’s sending us down the road to extinction.

We’ll need to mobilise all our natual proclivities for teamwork, ingenuity and mutual aid to prevent this.

And we’re out of practice.

That’s where small businesses come in.

Where better to get practicing empathy, co-operation and mutual support than a business that already feels more like a family than a corporation?

Who better to kick off this transition in the UK than the 1.2 million ‘bosses’ of family-sized businesses?

When better to start than now, when it’s not too late?

And why not, when you can grow your business with the grain instead of against it? Giving your business an evolutionary advantage, enabling scale without adding overhead or stress or losing what makes it unique?

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

June 16, 2022

Which side are you on?

If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” (and I recommend it), you’ll be familiar with this diagram:

But what does it practically mean for you?

If you are a business offering something new and different from what has gone before, something that could potentially disrupt the status quo, you need to understand this curve.

As an example, here’s what it means for me.

In the UK, there are around 1,018,220 businesses that employ between 3 and 10 people, including the owner. These are my overall ‘market’, the people I want to serve.

I offer a service that’s new and potentially disruptive to the status quo, so however I niche down into that market, by industry say, or geography, or business life stage, this curve comes into play. It adds another dimension to the psychographic of the people I can help most, that I have to consider when designing, marketing and delivering my service.

Here’s how it splits:

25,455 of them are Innovators. They love trying new things, what matters to them is that things are new and better than the current best option. They’ll want to know how it works (and they’ll take it apart to find out). They’re not worried about support, or infrastructure, they’re just happy to have the latest cool thing to play with. These are great people to test really new ideas on. Until they get bored and move on to the next cool new thing.

137,460 of them are Visionaries. They are interested in getting ahead, and if they can see how a thing will get them ahead of their competitors faster, they’ll go for it. They don’t mind if it’s not all there, or if there is no support. They will happily support themselves. They will ask for your thing to be redesigned to suit them though, so be prepared to maintain several versions of your thing.

346,195 of them are Pragmatists, and much more demanding. They want to know whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less than the cost of the problem. They want to know that you are a safe company to work with; that there is support, and maintenance and spare parts. As long as these things are in place they don’t care who does it, which means you can still be a small business, collaborating with other small businesses to provide a complete service. Pragmatists will only use a new thing if they believe that there are enough people like them already using it. They don’t trust Visionaries (‘flying by the seat of their pants’) and they trust Innovators even less. That gap between Pragmatists and Visionaries is The Chasm.

The same number of businesses (346,195 of them) are Conservatives. I think of these people as the ones who say ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM‘. For them what matter is whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less money. They want everyone else to be using your thing before they do. They want you to be not just safe, but respected in the marketplace. They also expect you to provide everything yourself – support, maintenance, spare parts. In other words, you have to be a big company like them. Or at least look like it.

Finally, there the 152,733 who are Skeptics. As you might imagine from their position on the distribution curve, they are the last to adopt new things, sticking stubbornly to whatever has served them well up to now, even if the new thing would serve them better.

I’m an Innovator looking to serve Visionaries.

What side of the Chasm are you on? More importantly, where are the people you seek to serve?

June 15, 2022

Catching on

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.

For many of us, this is exactly why we start a business. To build our own little utopia, where we make the rules, and get to decide how our world within a world should work.

But if we want to make a bigger impact, our model of how the world should work has to catch on. With clients, with team members, with suppliers, investors, our families and friends, our competitors.

That can only happen once the model is outside of our heads.

The good news is that getting it out of your head makes it easier for it to catch on.

June 14, 2022

Dictatorship

“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.

Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.

Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.

Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.

It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?

Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.

Participation makes daring scalable.

June 10, 2022

Radical minimalism

At this morning’s Like-hearted Leaders, listening to Gareth Dauncey’s story of how he thought up, designed and developed his Mood app, I was struck by two things.

First how radically simple he’s managed to keep it. “2 clicks to log your mood is OK, 3 is too many”

Second, how ruthlessly focused it is on helping the customer, and nobody but the customer. “100% private – you log your mood for you and nobody else.”

Radical minimalism.

Something we can all aspire to.

I found it on Google playstore by searching for ‘moodapp’, then scrolling down to see #mood

June 8, 2022

Handshake overhead

“Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.” Seth Godin, from this post.

Only if you’ve designed your business so that everyone needs someone else’s approval to get things done.

The great thing about designing your business to be more like an orchestra than a pin-factory, is that if you want to make more noise you simply add more players.

Give each new player a copy of the Customer Experience Score to follow, a bit of time to practise, then simply let them get on with it.

If everyone in your business knows how to make and keep your Promise from beginning to end, there’s no need for them to get anyone’s approval first.

Least of all yours.

May 24, 2022

Repairs

There are obvious environmental benefits to repairing things, people and processes in your business, instead of throwing them away.

But the biggest benefit is that by repairing them you learn so much more about how your business could and should work better.

Especially when everyone gets involved.

May 23, 2022

Eating your own tail

We’re used to thinking linearly – we picture our businesses and our lives as a sequence of events or processes, each of which takes an input and turns it into an output.

The trouble with this approach is that it encourages us to forget that inputs have to come from somewhere, and that outputs have to go somewhere. When we’re all working like this, we exhaust the larger system we are part of.

The answer is to find ways to eat your own tail.

Could you re-use the output from one of your processes as an input to another? A few years ago I met a tomato grower. They maximise the sunlight on their tomatoes by stripping off most of the leaves. The leaves power an anaerobic digester. The digester produces methane that is burned to generate electricity to heat the greenhouses. Carbon dioxide from the engine is also fed into the greenhouses to help the tomatoes grow faster.

The result is an almost closed, circular system.

Could you find ways to eat your own tail in your business?

If not, the answer might be to get a few businesses together and eat each other’s tails instead.

One business’s waste product is another business’s vital input. A data centre’s excess heat could keep nearby homes or facilities warm, or refrigerate a food store. A restaurant’s cardboard could become a horse’s bedding, could become a market gardener’s compost, could become a restaurant’s vegetables…

Whose tail could you bite? Who could usefully bite yours? How could you make your business and it’s environment circular?

The thing about circles is they never end. They just keep rolling along.

Today’s post is inspired by Vittles newsletter. I recommend it.

May 20, 2022

Why am I doing everybody else’s job?

Your business is attracting more clients, so you take on more people to help you serve those clients. But those new people aren’t up to speed with how your business works. So they falter, and when they do, you step in and take over.

Gradually, over time, you find the faltering happens sooner, the taking over starts earlier, until one day, you wake up and ask yourself ‘Why am I doing everone else’s job?‘.

Because you’ve allowed your team to shift the burden of getting things done ‘the way we do them round here‘ to you. You’ve more than allowed them, you’ve positively encouraged them:

Stop fixing the faltering, and fix the reasons why they falter instead.

If your team falters it’s because they don’t know what you know, they don’t believe what you believe, they don’t know what you value, and they don’t have your muscle-memory of how your business works.

So, get the music of how your business works out of your head and into a shareable, updateable format. Share it with your team. Train them in it. Let them practice it.

Before you know it, they’ll be playing your music better than you.

May 18, 2022

Letting go

Sometimes, groups of actors in a system have different goals, pulling them in different directions. These goals are perfectly reasonable from the perspective of each group, but a constant tug-of-war between groups prevents improvement.

We’re seeing a simple example of this kind of thing right now, with the ‘in the office’/’work from home’ debates and policy changes.

A firm wants people back in the office, so they decide to ban working from home. That ban just makes some people leave – to join a more accommodating competitor. The firm pulling hard in one direction hasn’t helped, it’s just made others pull harder in a different direction. The harder one side pulls, the harder the other does too.

These tugs of war can involve more than two parties – and frequently do. That makes fixing the system even more difficultr as each group pulls more and more strongly in its own preferred direction.

The answer, counterintuitively, is to let go. Stop pulling. When you do that everyone else will stop pulling too.

Then, look at everyone’s different, and from their perspective, perfectly reasonable goals.

Why do you want people in the office? Why do they want to work from home? What could you do to feel more confident that people are productive at home? How could you help them feel happier about coming back to the office.

My favourite example for this is the Swedish solution to a falling birth rate. Instead of banning abortions and birth control as Ceausescu did in Romania, which led to orphanages full of neglected and traumatised children, Sweden agreed on a higher goal of ‘every child being wanted and nurtured’, and implemented policies across the board to deliver that, that helped everyone work towards it.

What policies could you put in place that help everyone pull in the same direction?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability