Scaleability – Page 23 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 11, 2021

Creating bandwidth

Apparently human neurons are strikingly different from those of other mammals. Neurons are the building blocks of our nervous system – our internal communiactions system by which we percieve and react to the world.

All neurons communicate with each other and with other cells through electrical impulses, produced by ‘ion channels’. In general, the larger the neuron, the more ion channels it has. Until we get to humans.

Our neurons have far fewer ion channels than expected. We still need ion channels, but somehow we are able to get by perfectly well with less of them.

The hypothesis is that by evolving a ‘lean’ neuron model, human brains became more efficient, able to spend less energy on the basics, freeing some up to spend on more interesting things that other mammals don’t do, such as imagining.

That makes sense. The less communication you have to do to support the usual, the more bandwidth you leave to deal with the unusual. Or to imagine a new usual.

Our businesses could learn something from our neurons.

November 9, 2021

Standards

I’m not sure the plumber appreciated me hanging around to watch. Not to begin with anyway.

But by the end of the afternoon, he was glad of it. Because by then I’d seen for myself how everything went wrong, and more importantly, I knew he was not to blame.

It wasn’t his fault the ducting wouldn’t go through the hole. That was my fault for buying the wrong size – to fit the cooker hood, but not a ‘standard’ hole. Although to be fair I didn’t know that a) there was a standard hole size and b) that my cooker hood had been built to a different standard.

It wasn’t the plumber’s fault that the old tap was so hard to remove. That was because for some reason the old tap fixings couldn’t accommodate a standard worktop depth, so the previous fitting had been slightly bodged.

It wasn’t his fault that the new tap would have to be slightly bodged in the same way, since it was identical, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that the lever came off in his hand as soon as he tested it. That was down to tap manufacturers observing no quality standards at all.

So all in all, what should have been a straightforward job, turned into a bit of a nightmare, involving the purchase of yet another (different) tap, some new hose, plus additional reducers and fixings, and of course more of the plumber’s time and skill (not least that of being a contortionist).

Will, the plumber, is only young, but even he complained that ‘in the old days’, everything was manufactured or imported to a British standard, which meant you could rely on the fact that one thing would work seamlessly with another. You could get most jobs done easily, only the really unusual was tricky.

That’s what standards are for. To make the usual easy, so you can have imagination and energy to spare to deal with the unusual.

Having a choice of standards opens up different possibilities. That’s great, as long as everyone states which standard(s) they are working to at any one time. Otherwise, all you’ve done is turn the usual into the unusual.

No wonder we have a productivity problem.

November 4, 2021

Gen Z

Gen Z are demanding what every generation before them has always wanted – #autonomy, #purpose #agency #mastery #community.

Good for them!

Give it to them. And watch your business scale.

November 2, 2021

Not all who wander are lost

Today’s ‘The Life Scientific’ focused on Sharon Peacock, a consultant in microbiology and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge; a pioneer and advocate for the application of pathogen genome sequencing in the National Health Service to tackle antibiotic resistance, and most recently, founding director of the COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium. A network of 600 scientists constantly tracking the appearance and spread of new COVID-19 variants.

Impressive eh?

But she almost didn’t make it.

Sharon left school at 16, worked in a corner shop, then as a dental nurse (3 doors down), before deciding to train as a nurse. She had trouble getting in, because she didn’t have the science qualifications needed, and not long into her training, decided that what she really wanted to be was a doctor. She finished her nursing training, taking evening classes to get her ‘O’ levels in maths physics and chemistry. Next, she combined a job in end-of-life care with more studying – this time for the science ‘A’ levels. Finally she could apply to medical schools.

Every one of them all rejected her application without an interview. The same thing happened over the next application cycle.

Fortunately, Sharon didn’t give up. She called one of the universities and asked them to at least see her. Within a month she was at medical school. And the rest is, as they say, history. An interest in care, sparked by being a lowly dental nurse, has ended up as care on a global scale.

We almost wasted this talent, as I’m sure we waste other talents, simply because we mistake wandering for being lost. Sharon’s route to professorship was somewhat circuitous, but it wasn’t accidental, and certainly not a sleepwalk. Her intention was very clear – although possibly hard to spot on standardised application forms.

Which means we have to think carefully about how we design our recruitment processes, including questions that help us to tell the difference between wandering, drift, and sleepwalking.

Because wanderers (and drifters) bring much more to the table than mere qualifications.

November 1, 2021

New tunes

“Research carried out by Oxford Economics found that it takes recently hired professional workers 28 weeks to reach optimum productivity – which has an attached cost of £25,200 per employee.”

Why is that?

Because even if your new hire has worked in your industry for years, they haven’t worked in your business before. They don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe, and don’t do things the way you do them.

You may have started out as a one-man-band, doing covers. But by now you play your own music, nobody else’s. That’s why your best clients love you. That means that no matter how experienced, every new person that joins your team has to learn new tunes.

Maybe it’s time you got that music out of your head? So others can learn to play it more easily and more quickly. Bringing their own personality and flair to the performance right from the start.

And you can spend less time telling them where to put their fingers.

October 21, 2021

Learning

“There’s an interesting rule called the 70-20-10 rule, which states that 70% of learning comes from doing, 20% comes from observing in relationship, and only 10% comes from actual instruction.”

This is from my friend Grace Judson’s leadership newsletter (well worth subscribing to).

Here’s how you might apply it if you have a Customer Experience Score in place:

Instruction: The person/people who want to develop into a new or additional Role read the Customer Experience Score, so they know what to play.
Observing in relationship: They observe someone already proficient in that Role playing the Score for real, with real clients. At this stage these clients will come under the 80% of straightforward cases.
Instruction: They read the Customer Experience Score again, this time with some real examples to draw on.
Doing+Observing in relationship: They play the Score themselves, as a practice, not with real clients, but with experienced players taking the Role of clients, or fellow newbies armed with scenarios. Start with the straightforward cases until people feel comfortable with that. You know people have learned when they are able to critique each other.
Doing: While this is fresh in their mind, they play for real, with the Score at hand for reference, with real but straightforward clients.
Doing+Observing in relationship: Hold another group practice session. This time, explore some of the 20% non-straightforward cases. Your experienced players will love coming up with examples of these!
Doing: With this fresh in their mind, and the Score at hand for reference, you can let them play for real, with any kind of real client.

It’s a good idea to hold regular reviews of the Score, as part of group practice sessions. Over time, people will internalise the Score, but not necessarily as it is written. You want to share desirable variations and eliminate the undesirable ones. Regular group practice will enable this.

It is of course possible to do all this without a Customer Experience Score. It will be harder though, because you have to spend time agreeing whose version of ‘how we do things round here’ is the right one.

October 14, 2021

Earworms

My husband works best when there is background noise. Mostly talk radio, but often music. I’m the opposite. I find talking and songs incredibly distracting. I end up listening to the words instead of paying attention to what’s in my head. It’s a good job we can work in separate rooms.

The thing I find worst of all though, is catching earworms – those snatches of song that run through your head repeatedly and with annoying frequency, sometimes recurring for weeks after I’ve heard the original.

I don’t always have to hear the whole song to get an earworm. A few notes will do, or seeing a word that reminds me of it, or feeling an emotion I associate with it.

I find earworms intensely annoying, and avoid catching them if I can. I play only instrumental music in my car, work in a quiet room, avoid radios.

But maybe earworms could be useful? Even desirable?

The vision you have for how your business makes and keeps its promise to the people it serves, is like music – your music that you’ve created. For others to play it, you need to get it out of your own head. So you write it down in a Customer Experience Score.

But where you really want it is in your team’s heads. So they don’t have to constantly refer to the score. So they can create a personal interpretation of it that suits the human being in front of them right now.

Finding a way to generate earworms from your Promise of Value might be the answer.

October 5, 2021

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings. He didn’t need them. As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making. Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office. He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled. The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson. We hand-craft each and every user experience. We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way. We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours. So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.‘

That’s unfair. They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few. Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less. The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.

September 30, 2021

Communication, not control

Yesterday evening I watched ‘the very long and very beautiful history of technical drawing’ on the #Railnatter podcast.

Boulton and Watt’s industry disrupting atmospheric engines were the size of a house. They couldn’t be factory built and transported, there was no railway then.

Instead, the firm sent technical drawings to the customer so that local engineers could build the engine on site.

The same technical drawings enabled later, different engineers to maintain, repair, relocate and upgrade these engines. Or, back at Boulton and Watt, to design new, better engines – on paper, cheaply.

Even later, they’ve enabled modern engineers to recreate these engines for our edification and delight.

Technical drawings aren’t even only for techies. They were often used to explain complex ideas and processes to clients, funders and the wider public.

In other words, technical drawings, like musical scores, building plans and other tools we use to collaborate around are about communication, not control. The kind of communication across space and time that allows a business to scale across space and time.

How about your business? What would your technical drawings look like? Do you have them, or are they only in your (or someone else’s) head?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability