The only way to make time is to invest it in setting up systems that mean you use less of it.
The later you leave it, the more time you waste.
Or, as someone once told me:
“Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
Of course you don’t know how to capture your Customer Experience Score. You’ve never done it before.
There are many things you’ve never done before, but if you decided you wanted to learn one of them, you would know how to go about it wouldn’t you?
You might get yourself set up with whatever kit you need and have a go. That’s hard to sustain, because even before trying to acquire whatever skill you’re trying to master, you have to know what you don’t know. Years ago, I thought I’d learn to play the melodeon. I bought the wrong sort, which made it more difficult to play the tunes I wanted to learn, which in turn made it even harder to get my fingers in the right places. I didn’t last long.
Or, you could find someone who does know, check out their track record of doing it, and ask them to teach you. There’s nothing quite like learning by doing, accompanied by someone showing you how, explaining why it’s done this way and holding you accountable for doing it. That’s how I learned to speak Spanish and to do Pilates, skills that have stuck with me ever since. It’s by far the quickest way to really learn.
Of course, once you’ve acquired your new skill, the best way to carry on developing and improving it is to pass it on, and teach the others.
You might feel that writing down the Customer Experience Score for the business you founded is a bit, well, dictatorial, despotic even.
But I can tell you, having a score I can consult myself, whenever I need to is more liberating than whatever is currently locked inside your head, expressed only as “I can’t exactly explain it to you, but I know it when I see it, and right now I see you’re getting it wrong.”
Especially when you add that the first, prescriptive draft is just the beginning. Once defined and shareable, the Customer Experience Score belongs to the business, not you. It becomes open to critique, discussion, improvement by everyone.
A long time ago, we worked with a shop owner. He was adamant about the way customers should be treated when they came into his shop, lavishing attention on them to make them feel welcome and supported. Until we demonstrated that by treating one customer this way, he was actually being extremely rude and unwelcoming to whoever came in next.
Whatever it looks like, your Customer Experience Score is much better for your business outside your head.
How do you start building an archive and library of ordinary peoples’ diaries? By taking in one box of diaries.
How do you start a hot-air balloon festival? By getting two hot-air balloons together.
How do you start a sail-cargo business? With one hold of cargo.
How do you start writing your Customer Experience Score? By writing down one business process.
By starting. Small. By not worrying about what will be needed to make the big thing a success. Most of all, by moving from “Someone really ought to do something about this.” to “I’d better do something about this.”
Once you start, other people will join in.
Hat tip to Irving Finkel for inspiring this one.
My veg box supplier has been growing really fast. I’m not suprised, it’s a great scheme.
Today’s veg box has gone AWOL. It’s been delivered to someone else by mistake.
I’d bet an artichoke that there’s a new driver.
And no Customer Experience Score.
Last Friday, the materials for our new roof were delivered. Tiles, ridge tiles, clips, battens, everything the roofers would need to start the job the following day.
Except, I spotted, the membrane that goes between joists and tiles. Without that the job couldn’t even start. To be honest, we’re relaxed about the schedule, but I knew our building company prides itself on being ahead, rather than behind, and our choice of tiles had taken time to source, so they were only just ‘on track’.
I could see the delivery driver had a pallet-load of it on his truck, so I asked the question, just in case. It wasn’t on his delivery sheet, so he called the office. They didn’t have it in the order either.
“Well I’ve got a pallet load here, so I’ll take a roll off and we can sort out the order with our client back in the office. That saves me coming back later if it is missing.”
When I told our project manager, she said that’s why they always use that building supply company, because they focus first on foremost on taking care of their clients and end-users, rather than sticking rigidly to procedure.
I’d interfered in the process wrongly, as it happened. The membrane wasn’t missing. When the roofers turned up next day, they brought a big roll of it with them, and put it back in their van once they saw it wasn’t needed.
Obviously what was really missing was a clear understanding of who’s responsible for what, apart from inside the project manager’s head. Does it always work this way? Or does that depend on the roofer? If everyone (including the client?) knows it’s always the supplier’s job to supply everything, this sort of mix-up wouldn’t happen.
What could remedy that? A Customer Experience Score.
Not a procedures manual to consult every five minutes and follow slavishly. Rather, a high-level picture of ‘what happens when’ that can be quickly and easily learnt by each new person or business that comes on board. Something that says “This is how we do things, so if you join us, you need to understand this too”. That way everyone is empowered to make sure things happen as they should, even if they don’t actually work for you.
In this case the mix-up happened the right way round. The roofers finished at 10pm on Sunday, having worked their socks off for two days. Our build is back on schedule, and I’m happy to recommend our building company to anyone.
But I’m also going to suggest a little composition.
When we learn effectively we learn in stages. First we learn the rules. Then we interrogate and question ‘the rules’ to arrive at an interpretation that is meaningful for us. Finally we apply our interpretation of the rules to performance, at which point we find out if whether we have been able to communicate that meaning to our audience.
In the olden days these three stages were called Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric, collectively known as the Trivium, ‘the three’.
‘Trivial’ originally meant simply belonging to these three. It took on the meaning of ‘lesser’, ‘not serious’, ‘unimportant’ in contrast to its big brothers, the Quadrivium – the four other liberal arts of Astronomy Mathematics, Geometry and Music – the arts that could be said to provide ‘the facts’ behind ‘the rules’.
Of course these pursuits are not at all trivial. They are essential for effective performance. They all have to happen. Blindly accepting rules stifles creativity and progress. Questioning needs to lead to action, otherwise what’s the point? Action needs to be meaningful, not just for the individual but also for the audience, the community.
They also have to happen in the right order. It makes no sense to dive into performance without knowing what you are trying to communicate through that performance. It makes no sense to question before you know what the rules are supposed to be – you end up questioning everything, which makes any kind of performance almost impossible.
We know this, even though we no longer formally learn it. We see the trivial arts in operation all around us, whenever people undertake a creative endeavour, especially a collaborative one, such as putting on a play or concert, making a film, staging a ballet, creating a video game or putting up a building.
A business is another collaborative creative endeavour, that seeks to create profitable, repeat performances that delight and expand its audience. The problem for us business owners is that we have no tradition of looking at them in this way, which leads to some common problems:
It seems to me that one solution is to learn something from the other creative endeavours we know, where the ancient trivial pursuits of Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric are alive and well, even if we call them something different.
So, if you had to imagine your business was some other kind of creative, collaborative production, what would it be?
Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).
An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it. They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it. They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.
Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.
Performance is the source of useful feedback. Everything else is conjecture. The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first. The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience. The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.
All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.
It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance. Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.
2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:
For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:
“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”
Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:
“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life. We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able. An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”
In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded. As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:
“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.”
The questions to ask are:
It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.
Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that. One of which is mine.
This arrived yesterday evening (see why I need an extension?).
The promise is to “show you how to create an unstoppable movement to create an organization that’s fit for the future and fit for human beings.”
I’m looking forward to reading it, although I suspect it won’t go far enough for me.
I’ll keep you posted.