Scaleability – Page 27 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 18, 2021

Purposes

What’s your business for?

Is it to give you a job? Is it to make you money? Or is it to make money for someone else? Or for a cause?

Is it to make you happy? Is it a means for you to express yourself? Is it a means for you to do what you really enjoy outside of work?

Is it to give other people a job? Is it a means for them to express themselves? Is it a way for them to grow and transform? Is it a way for them to make money, or do what they really enjoy outside work?

Is it to make your clients or customers happy? Is it a means for them to express themselves? A way for them to grow and transform?

Is it your way to make your me-shaped dent in the universe? Or your way to help everyone involved make a we-shaped dent in the universe?

The answer is rarely simple. And it probably changes over time.

Depending on your answers, it may or may not matter that the business will end when you do.

If it does matter, what are you going to do about it?

February 25, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 4

Now you have the story of your process written down, you can start to identify its components.

Read through the narrative, and pick out the names of things that get mentioned along the way. These will become ‘Props’, like the theatrical term for “an object used on stage or screen by actors during a performance.“

Props might be software e.g. “I enter the prospect’s details into the CRM System/Salesforce/Hubspot“; physical objects or their digital equivalents: “The prospect signs our non-disclosure agreement”, “I send an email to the client acknowledging receipt”. Props can also be implied: “I call the client” means there must be a telephone Prop of some kind.

One Prop in particular will stand out as being the thing that is being worked on by the process, the thing that is the point of the process. The star of the process, if you like. For example the key Prop in a process “File Annual Accounts”, is unsurprisingly, a thing called ‘Annual Accounts’.

This key Prop will help you identify the key Activities that make up the process, because it will be created, transformed and finalised through the process. Each transformation of the Prop called ‘Annual Accounts’ is a separate Activity, with an outcome that is either true or false. You have a set of Draft Accounts or you don’t, there is no halfway house. Any other Props you’ve identified will find a home inside one or more of these Activities, which may themselves be a process.

As an illustration, in order to “File Annual Accounts”, you generally have to create a set of draft accounts (an Activity you might name “Draft Annual Accounts”), check that they make sense (“Verify Draft Annual Accounts”), send them to the client for approval (“Request Draft Annual Accounts Approval”), deal with any changes (“Amend Draft Annual Accounts”), finalise them (“Finalise Annual Accounts”) and finally, send them to Companies House (“File Accounts”).

In this way, following the lifecycle of the key Prop will help you define Activities and the rough order in which they must happen.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at finessing that order to take account of exceptions.

February 16, 2021

Consciousness raising

Sometimes you can’t just do, you have to think about what you’re doing.

Sometimes you can’t just think, you have to think about what you’re thinking.

Sometimes you can’t just think about what you’re doing or thinking, you have to think about how you’re thinking or doing it.

Sometimes you can’t just think about how, you have to think about why.

It would be exhausting to operate like this all the time, but every now and then, it pays to take yourself up a level or two, perhaps with the help of other people, or a book, or a video, or a podcast or a tool.

Because once you are aware of what, how and why, you can repeat your best doing or thinking, on purpose.

February 12, 2021

Big questions for accountants

I like to ask big questions of accountants in my podcast.

Professor Richard Murphy has some interesting answers.

This video of his proposes a new way of financial reporting for ‘public interest entities’ – the big corporates we all depend on for infrastructure, food supply etc., that looks at the interest of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

I think reporting this way, even if you aren’t legally required to, could give a real advantage to some smaller, more forward-thinking businesses.

If they dared to take it.

I’d love to know what you think, especially if you’re an accountant.

PS Professor Murphy has an even more interesting vision for audit.

February 10, 2021

Emotional labour

Recently I’ve been thinking about (and remembering) why being ‘The Boss’ is no fun. Or at least not for me.

It’s not the hard graft, or the long hours, or the uncertainty of income. Nor is it the responsibility to clients, or the need to exceed expectations. We knew this was part of starting a business, it’s actually what we wanted – the possibility to get more out of work than the means to live.

Being your own boss is fine. It’s being boss of others, directly or indirectly, that’s difficult. Because although you can now share the physical or mental work involved in delivery, you’ve at least doubled the emotional labour, and emotional labour is harder to share out.

The first step is to recognise that it’s a big part of what gets done. Probably the most important part too.

The next step is to make it explicit, and cover it in the manual.

February 9, 2021

Beyond startup

I’m a big fan of ‘The Lean Startup’, which I’d sum up as follows:

“The job of a startup is not to make money. It’s to find out what the market really wants.”

In other words, starting a business is about testing, refining and re-testing until you find what delivers real value, and so makes you money.

The trouble is, this can take years. There’s no shame in that. It’s just that most of us do this in an undocumented and somewhat unconscious way, internalising our findings as we go.

This means that when the time comes to expand our capacity, to meet the demand we’ve identified and finally start making the money, we struggle to communicate this vital information – who we are for, what we promise them, and how we deliver on that – to the people we need to work with, and that can lead to stunted growth.

The first step to remedying that is consciousness, which is why The Lean Startup is such a help. But what about after startup?

Here’s my solution:

Purposely design your business as a system for making and keeping promises, and improving how you do that:

That way, everyone involved in your business can stay conscious. Even after you’ve gone.

February 1, 2021

The Disappearing Boss

I’ve met hundreds of small business owners, but I’ve yet to meet one who set out to be a Boss. Or at least a Boss of more than one person.

We embrace the challenge of starting a business, of finding customers, but we become Bosses reluctantly, sometimes half-heartedly, not always effectively.

Sometimes the experience of being the Boss of other people is so painful we joyfully go back to being the Boss of just ourself.

The trouble with that of course, is that the potential to create ever more value disappears along with the role we dislike so much.

There is another way to disappear as a Boss.

Instead of walking away, make yourself blend in. Enable your people to act more like Bosses, more like you.

After that it’s the more the merrier.

If you’d like to learn more about how, there’s a little welcome treat from me: Sign up for The Disappearing Boss Newsletter

January 29, 2021

Swarms

Swarms look like an attractive option for decentralisation. After all, “Social insects work without supervision. In fact, their teamwork is largely self-organized, and coordination arises from the different interactions among individuals in the colony. Although these interactions might be primitive (one ant merely following the trail left by another, for instance), taken together they result in efficient solutions to difficult problems (such as finding the shortest route to a food source among myriad possible paths). The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence.'” (Corporate Rebels blog ‘Reinventing work‘)

As you know, I’m all for self-organisation, but for me it has to emerge from autonomy and a shared purpose. Ant colonies work through programming. Individual ants don’t get much say. I’d rather be a goose.

A different kind of swarming showed up this week around GameStop shares. Bottom-up collaboration between individuals.

The queen ants of Wall St. didn’t like it at all.

January 26, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 3

Now you know what your business process is aiming to achieve (Step 1), and you know where it really starts and ends (Step 2), you’re ready to describe it.

I’ve always found the best way to do this is to literally talk someone through it. Imagine that you are telling the story of this process to a listener, who is going to make notes. Ideally your listener would be another person, but if push comes to shove you can play both roles.

The conversation goes something like this:

As Storyteller, you start at the beginning, thinking of how it usually works. You simply tell the Listener the first thing that happens.
As Listener, you write that down, then ask: “What happens next?” , or “Then what happens?”
The Storyteller describes what happens next.
The Listener, notes it down, and asks again “What happens next?”
Repeat until the Storyteller answers “Nothing, that’s the end. We’ve got to the outcome.”

That’s it. For now. The next step is to work out the order things really need to happen in.

January 25, 2021

Mechanical ecosystems

Let’s look at the human body. Simpler, less tightly-coupled joints are held in place by muscle and cartilage, combining rigidity and strength with flexibility and adaptability. Although there is a ‘standard’ bone shape, tolerances are high, accommodating a wide range of variation in components – both across a population and within a single individual. Growth is allowed for.

At the same time, possibilities are constrained by the surrounding muscles. If there is too much play in a joint, strengthening muscles will help. If there is too little play, stretching and loosening them will allow more movement. Remediation is possible without taking anything apart, or even stopping – all that’s needed to keep things in good order is a healthy variety of movement.

Perhaps this is the sweet spot between machine and ecosystem we should aim for in a business?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability