Scaleability – Page 20 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 14, 2022

Why humans love change

Listening to ‘In our time’ this morning, I heard that one of the reasons our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged could be that the Rift Valley environment around them started to change relatively rapidly and unpredictably as a result of volcanic activity.

This created a new evolutionary ‘niche’ – for a species that was able to efficiently switch between environments rather than adapt efficiently to just one. Walking upright, sociality and speech are just some of the outcomes.

In other words, we’ve evolved to live in the midst of change.

To be sure, most of us prefer our change to be evolutionary rather than sudden and drastic, but I bet there’s hardly anyone you know that hasn’t undergone some sort of major shift (changed job, changed marital or parental status, moved house) in the last five years. We are programmed to explore possibilities, see opportunities, to talk about new things, to try them out – with others if we can.

Why then do corporates have such a problem with change management?

Because we’re human. We love change but we prefer to do it ourselves, than have it done to us.

April 13, 2022

The surest route to profit

The world is running out of phosphorus, a major component of fertiliser. We humans mine it, spread it on our fields, and then allow it to leach out of the soil into rivers and then oceans, where it remains, lost to us.

We can’t synthesise it artificially, so once the mines run out, that’s it. In our zeal for increasing the ‘profitability’ of our farming systems, we’ve reduced the system to its bare bones, and sacrificed it’s sustainability.

It doesn’t have to be like this. It turns out there is a way of capturing phosphorus before it becomes lost to us.

It’s called wildlife.

As we find so often, we live inside carefully balanced, complex systems, and those things we thought were pests, unnecessary, or nice to haves turn out to be crucial.

What makes ecosystems stable is richness – their complexity, multiplicity and variety. That means that wherever we humans seek to create new systems of our own, from cities to small businesses, we should look to enrich what surrounds us.

It’s our best insurance policy, and the surest route to profit. Just not the quickest.

April 11, 2022

What everyone really wants

What do your people really want?

The same things you do:

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, with 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.

If you escaped corporate life to set up on your own, you’ve almost certainly found that having these things at work didn’t just make you happier, it made your work better too.

Pass it on. It will be worth it.

April 7, 2022

What this hooey is all about

In this letter to Nirvana, pitching to produce their next album, Steve Albini sets out his Promise of Value for them to take or leave.

It’s not 100% applicable to a business like yours, (unless your business is actually a band) but there’s a lot that could be learned from it:

“I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…”

“If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.”

“I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play.”

“I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm.”

As the founder of your business, you’re the equivalent of Nirvana. You’re the live band. The customer experience you’ve carefully crafted as you grew your business is what your audience buys.

Your team, is like the records you make to get the music to more of those who want to hear it – far into the future.

Only now you are Steve Albini, and it’s your job to make sure the record delivers as if it was you:

“If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.”

Write your people a score, make sure they’re familiar with your sound and ethos, then let them play as human beings, not machines.

April 4, 2022

The equality of unequals

You know your clients are individuals. With individual personalities, character traits and preferences. You know that what delights one won’t delight another.

You also know that you want them all to be delighted by your service. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

In the same way, you know that your people are individuals, with individual personalities, character traits and preferences. That what delights one won’t delight another. Yet you want all of them to be delighted to work here, because that’s how they are motivated to delight your clients. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.

“But how do I keep things consistent?”

By setting boundaries for behaviour, a floor for what has to be done, then giving your people free play to experiment and explore what delight means to them and to clients.

Doing exactly the same thing every time is what machines do. Cookie-cutting is an efficient way to produce to a minimum standard at scale, but it’s rarely a delightful experience.

Equality doesn’t have to mean treating everyone the same, it can be about doing whatever it takes to produce the same outcome. And if a delighted human is your desired outcome, delighted, free-playing humans are your best means of achieving it.

March 30, 2022

Almost impossible

I loved Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday.

In it he talks about the gap in customer service between one person in your team and another – or even between the same person on a good day and a bad day – and how you might address it.

One approach is to nail everything down so much that delivery of the experience is exactly the same, no matter who is giving it. Another is to leave it to a great person doing the job, giving them “room to shine. With all the variability that entails.”

“It’s almost impossible to have both.”

Almost, but not impossible.

Hire great people, give them a Promise of Value and a Customer Experience Score, that creates a floor, but no ceiling, then set them free to interpret it in their own way.

Variations on a theme. The best of both worlds.

March 28, 2022

Unbreakable promises

A Promise of Value, properly articulated, is quite a comprehensive thing. As a kind of definition of your culture, it’s too big to reduce to an easily applicable ‘mission statment’. That’s why you have a Customer Experience Score – it embodies your Promise of Value in the actions your business takes on a day-to-day basis.

There are times though, when the Score can’t help, because the situation in front of you has never happened before, and could not have been foreseen. Often these times are crises, when your people don’t have the time to delve into the Promise of Value for guidance. They need something more immediate, concrete and practical, less open to interpretation.

This is where an Unbreakable Promise comes into its own. It’s another brilliant idea from Brian Chesky which I’ve incorporated into my Define Promise process.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have your Promise of Value defined, in all its expansive glory, identify who the key stakeholders for your business are. Obvious stakeholders are clients or customers, your team, your investors, your suppliers etc, but you can define as few or as many as you want.

Then for each stakeholder group, define a promise you will never break, based on what’s already in your Promise of Value.

Make that promise as concrete and measurable as you can. Someone in your team needs to be able to tell in a split second whether it is about to be broken, and the kind of action they should take to prevent that. It’s usually easier to phrase it negatively – “we will never…“, rather then positively “we will always…”, but whatever works for you.

Then make sure that all your different Unbreakable Promises are in accord with each other – that by keeping one, you don’t break another.

Finally, make sure everyone knows them off by heart.

Unbreakable Promises are not easy to make, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be broken. It’s impossible to predict every eventuality. But having them is a great way to set the boundaries of interpretation of your Customer Experience Score.

Discipline makes daring possible.

March 24, 2022

Seeing things from both sides

Most of the time, I model what happens in a given interaction from a single perspective – that of the organisation whose Score I’m drafting. Most of the time, that’s been OK.

But when the organisation you’re working with is actually a collection of organisations each playing different Roles, this isn’t good enough.

For example, what looks like ‘placing an order’ from one side is ‘create a consignment’ on the other. The only way to keep clear about what has to happen in order for each party to keep its Promise, is to model it in these terms.

It feels awkward and clunky, but clarity trumps elegance, every time.

Here’s a funky illustration of what I mean.

Makes me want to make one.

March 23, 2022

Admin as a side-effect

Nobody should have to think about admin. Admin is unexciting, unrewarding, work-about-work that very few people enjoy doing.

Yet, if you want to measure performance, predict future demand and workloads, allocate resources effectively, you need some way of collecting the information you need.

The answer is to make collecting information a side-effect of doing the job.

When you drive your car, the action of the wheels traveling over the ground updates your odometer. You don’t have to create a separate spreadsheet to keep track of how many miles you cover per trip or over the lifetime of the car. Instead some basic information (the number of tyre revolutions) is collected and used to trip a counter that shows the distance covered. The information is collected purely as a side-effect of doing the job. Combined with another counter on the drive shaft it tells you your speed. So two simple side-effects give you critical information.

If you want to spend less time on admin and more time making and keeping promises for the people you serve, you need to design admin-as-a-side-effect into your Customer Experience Score.

How?

Well, it helps to start by writing your Score from the perspective of what you actually want things to happen, rather than from the perspective of how you document and track what happens.

To take a big example, it would be easy to think about creating and using a building in terms of sketching ideas, drawing up plans, creating a list of materials and quantities, but that isn’t what’s really happening. What’s really happening is more like this:

Process diagram of the life of a building

The sketches are how you track the results of your imagination, the plans are how you track your designs and feed them to the people who will construct. These things are admin, and by thinking about what is really going on, you can see better where in the process they should be created, and who by, as a result of doing the job.

This simplifies monitoring and prediction, because they can become matters of simple counting, combined with some basic parameters of the business, such as available person-hours. If you can find ways to automate this, then none of your people ever need to fill in a timesheet again. You can free them to concentrate on what really matters to the people you serve, at less cost to yourself.

Work-about-work is a waste of time and talent. It’s time we got rid of it.

March 21, 2022

Disappeared bosses

My other half gives tours at the Red House, William Morris’s first house, built by Philip Webb. He’s a volunteer with the National Trust.

The interesting thing about this is that he is one of dozens of Red House volunteers, local people, who give tours, garden, run the gift shop and the tearoom.

Every volunteer is enthusiastic about the house and its history, and all are keen to share that with visitors. They organise themselves. Because they are volunteers, they give leeway. They’ve been known to stay open late to allow for a missed train, or open early to accommodate long-distance visitors. They know what to do and each one of them does it in their own style.

There are managers on site who are full-time employees of the Trust. They monitor the finances and the maintenance and restoration of the asset – the house and gardens – but they don’t supervise anyone. In fact, most of the time, nobody sees them.

In part, this is because the Trust doesn’t have the money to fund a bloated management hierarchy. But it is probably more to do with the fact that the people who deliver the customer experience are volunteers. They do this for love, not a living. They are free to walk away at any time.

What if you treated your team as if they were volunteers? Would that change how your business delivers its Promise to the people it serves? Would you, as boss, be free to ‘disappear’, to concentrate on bigger things?

Probably.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability