Scaleability – Page 26 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 8, 2021

Why justice must be blind.

I’m about halfway through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. We’ve finally got to a statement of principles. Which can be informally summed up as something like this:

“All social primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”

That seems pretty obvious. Why has it taken 300 pages to get to here?

Because imagining a just system is a process.

We don’t choose where or when we’re born. We don’t choose our parents or our society or our status in that society. We don’t choose the talents or abilities we’re born with – any more than we choose our eye colour or complement of limbs. That’s all down to chance.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept what we’ve landed in. We can imagine a different kind of setup.

But to do that justly, and end up with something fair, we need a starting point that takes chance out of it. We have to take ourselves out of space and time, and imagine what we as individuals would accept if we didn’t know where we end up in the particular set-up we happen to be born in. We have to make ourselves blind, and build our picture of a just system from there.

That takes a lot of thought and empathy with all our possible selves.

It’s worth the effort, because then we can start to shape our societies to move ever closer to that ideal. Starting with what’s closest to us, our families and our businesses.

June 7, 2021

Learning from queens

We had some unexpected guests yesterday. The first I knew of it was the sound.

‘What on earth is that noise?’

I looked up from cleaning the floor, and there they were, a mass of bees madly buzzing across 3 neighbouring gardens. 15 minutes later, they were clumped together near the top of our hawthorn tree.

I looked up my nearest beekeeper on the British Beekeepers Association website, (try them before you call pest control, beekeepers will give bees a good home), and Andrew came over.

We agreed that it was too dangerous for him to try and collect the bees from the tree, so he set up a bait box, to entice them down.

While we waited over a cup of tea, he taught me a bit about bees.

A hive swarms in stages. First the queen leaves, taking half the bees with her, to set up a new colony somewhere. 10 days later, her brood of queens start to hatch, along with the other eggs she’s laid.

It used to be thought that the first queen out killed the others, but research has found that isn’t the case. As each new queen hatches they replicate the original queen’s behaviour – taking off with half the hive. Only each time the half is smaller, even though the hive grows each day as new bees hatch. So each ‘cast’ becomes progressively smaller until the last is about tennis ball sized, and will be lucky to form a viable colony that can get through the following winter.

This it makes perfect sense. The bees are all the old queen’s children. Why kill other queens when you only need half the available resources? There is no scarcity, and so no competition for them. And why kill queens when replicating a simple process maximises the chances that the colony will survive and spread?

We humans could learn a bit from bees.

PS, they’re still in our tree. If they don’t fancy the bait box, they’ll swarm again and find a new place. If you see them, remember to give them 15 minutes to settle down, then call your local beekeeper.

June 1, 2021

Bank Holiday thinking

One of the things I love about Bank Holidays is that I get to spend a whole day reading. I’m halfway through this book and there’s already interesting stuff in it.

One of the ideas I particularly like is that of ‘pure procedural justice’, where a process inevitably leads to the desired result (in this case, a ‘fair’ one), and where the desired result can be projected beforehand according to criteria that are independent of the process applied.

Pure procedural justice is rare, unless you are dealing with a simple outcome, such as dividing a cake up equally, but it does seem to be a useful way of approaching process design:

What outcome do I want?
How could I define it before I run any process designed to achieve it?
How can I design a process so that I will inevitably achieve the outcome I want?
How could I measure the outcome independently of the process?

For processes that involve human beings, part of the answer is to abstract the desired outcome. Rather than trying to list out every possible acceptable outcome, instead you define the characteristics of a set of possible outcomes each of which would be acceptable, even though you have no way of knowing what they are, or which you will actually get as a result of any particular run-through of the process.

That’s what your Promise of Value is for, to help you define those characteristics.

May 24, 2021

Improvising

The last year or so has forced us all to improvise.

Faced with extreme uncertainty, this is a rational response. Improvisation enables us to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t in a rapidly shifting world. It helps us to try new things, change direction, discover new opportunities.

In effect, the last year turned us all back into new businesses.

If your new new business was able to improvise its way into growth, now might be a good time to pause, take stock and reconfigure it into something more intentional. Make the experiment that paid off repeatable and scaleable. So you can carry on growing on purpose.

Remember to leave some room for improvisation though – it’s how you’ll see the next challenge coming.

May 14, 2021

The monster in the office

There’s a monster in the office, and everyone’s afraid.

Everyone calls it ‘the Boss’.

The owner thinks it has many heads, eating the business out of house and home, and just not caring enough what they do and how they do it.

The team thinks they know exactly who it is – the control-freak micro-manager, constantly interfering, trying to do everyone’s job and never happy with the results.

Neither are right.

Every business owner I’ve met has a vision in their head for how their business makes promises to clients and keeps them. But there’s often a massive gap between that vision and what they’ve actually managed to communicate to the people whose help they need to achieve it.

That gap is the real monster.

Fortunately like most monsters, it disappears with daylight.

April 14, 2021

Disappearing

There are two ptarmigans in the picture. Did you spot them?

There’s more than one way to disappear.

The obvious way is to take yourself out of the picture. The less obvious solution is to blend in.

Not by matching yourself to the background, but by making yourself indistinguishable from the others around you.

What if, like Spartacus, you could enable and inspire everyone else in your team to behave as if they were you, the original? You would no longer stand out. In fact you’d no longer even have to be there.

It starts by thinking differently about what your business is.

Issue 2 of The Disappearing Boss is out today.

April 12, 2021

Freedom Rules

“Freedom … is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating” ‘The Utopia of Rules’, David Graeber 2015

Without rules, we get nothing done.

With only rules, we get nothing done.

The interesting challenge is to create a set of rules that enable the creativity that will in turn makes new rules necessary, while at the same time ensuring that each cycle of new rules never becomes stifling.

It seems to me that’s only possible when everyone shares in the work of creating the rules and breaking them.

April 8, 2021

Not like. The same

Sometimes, a process that looks like it could be a pattern isn’t.

If the same thing happens in the same way every time, and it’s performed by the same Role using the same Props, then what you have isn’t processes that are alike. You have the same process, repeated exactly as part of several larger processes.

As an example, take dealing with a visitor to your office. Often this is the responsibility of a particular Role. They greet the visitor, take their coat, show them to a waiting area and offer them a drink. It makes no difference why the visitor is here, what happens afterwards or who deals with them next, the process is exactly the same whether the visitor is a client, a prospective employee or a tax inspector.

In this case, it’s better to define the process once, and include it in the Customer Experience Score wherever it occurs. You could call it ‘Receive Guest’, define it the first time you identify it (for example as part of your ‘Enroll Prospect’ process) then refer to it elsewhere (for example, in Handle Tax Inspection, Recruit Team Member, Hold Social Event).

Identical twins, triplets, even quintuplets are a wonderful thing in humans. We don’t mind that they make more work because they’ll each grow to be unique human beings.

You don’t want them in your Customer Experience Score though. The extra work they create there is pointless.

April 7, 2021

Pattern vs Catch-all

When designing your Customer Experience Score, you often uncover processes that follow a specific pattern.

For example, you want a client to have a similar experience every time you request information from them – perhaps you send an email, then immediately follow up with a phone call or a text, or both. Perhaps you call, then follow up with an email. After a while, you might remind the client if they haven’t responded. There might be a limit to the number of times you do that.

However you want the experience to be, you want that experience to be consistent across all the information requests you might make, so it’s tempting to lump all these different processes intoa single catch-all process.

That’s a mistake. Although the pattern is the same, each individual process turns out to be slightly different. The information being requested is different, the purpose is different, the priority, urgency and timescales may be different. The Roles involved may be different. The Props will definitely be different.

These differences will out, and somewhere in the depths of what looks like a simple process, you’ll end up having to include some way of spelling out what actually happens in each case. It usually involves a complicated list of “If you’re dealing with A, do B; if you’re dealing with C, do D;…”

And so on.

The key is to remember why you’re writing your Customers Experience Score, which is to enable someone else in your team to perform the process as well as or better than you. That is best achieved by making each process self-containedly easy to follow, without cluttering it up with decisions about alternative possibilities.

When Google gives you directions for getting from your house to that beauty spot you love, it gives you full directions for each and every route, even though most will start with the same turn out of your street, and end with the same turn into your destination. Imagine trying to find your way with directions that say “If you’re following route A, turn right at the next roundabout. If you’re following Route B proceed straight across. If you’re following Route C, turn right.”

You’d take longer, annoy fellow drivers along the way, and probably get lost a few times. You might even give up and go home. That’s the last thing you want your team to do when they’re delivering your Promise to clients.

A pattern is a pattern, nothing more. Use it to design in consistency that reinforces your Promise of Value.

A catch-all, on the other hand, makes everyone work harder, for no extra benefit.

March 26, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 5

When sketching out a process it helps to start with the most straightforward case. The one where everything goes right, or at least goes as expected. Once you have this laid out, you can identify exceptions.

I find it helps to think of the whole process as a river. The straightforward case is the main, well-worn channel, but there may be parts that break off and loop round before coming back into the main flow.

So, for example, your straightforward case for preparing a set of annual accounts for a client assumes you have all the information already, the client approves your draft immediately and you can go straight on to filing them. But what happens if you don’t have all the information? Or the client doesn’t bother to get back to you with approval? The process needs to deal with these too. These are alternative routes through the process – loops in your process river if you like. And that’s exactly how I like to represent them.

Here’s another example. For a maintenance business, the ‘straightforward’ case is the typical reactive, unscheduled job:

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability