Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Scaleability

Silos
February 14, 2019

Silos

Functional silos are a well-recognised problem in organisational design.

The danger is that separate functions become like fortresses, mini fiefdoms with their own internal rules, reluctant to share information with other silos, poor at ‘passing the baton’ to the next silo when needed, optimising their internal operation at the expense of the whole.

Common solutions involve finding ways to pierce the boundaries between silos – cross-functional teams, rotating people around functions, modelling processes with swim lanes to represent the function responsible.

I think the problem is more fundamental.

Functions are a manifestation of a profoundly internal view of a business. They are about the organisation and the hierarchy, not about the client or customer. They encourage people to forget the Promise the organisation makes and who it makes that Promise to.

So I believe the solution needs to be more radical too.

Instead of trying to build bridges between silos, or tunnel through them, or create elaborate schemes for inter-silo communication, we should simply re-focus the business on clients, and build our organisational framework around making and keeping our Promises to them.

The beauty of this approach is that it makes everything much clearer and simpler for everyone, and its easier to scale.

Resource Scarcity
February 11, 2019

Resource Scarcity

When a resource is expensive, it seems sensible to use it as efficiently as possible. So we batch jobs up for it, making them wait, so the expensive, and therefore scarce resource can be used to the max.

The problem with this approach is that it distorts the process, optimising a single step at the expense of the rest of it.

This distortion often persists long after the resource in question is no longer scarce. So you get GP and hospital waiting rooms; jobcentres and jury rooms, full of people in forced idleness, just so that the ‘scarce resource’ is maximally productive.

What if we designed our processes around the most critically affected role instead?

Things would look very different, and would be much more efficent overall – although the ‘scarce resource’ might feel a little less important.

Elaboration
February 6, 2019

Elaboration

Sam at Lewisham Local asked me to elaborate on what I mean by this:

‘scaling successfully is about creating an ecosystem where others can lead’

Here goes…

When you first start a small business you are in control. You make all the promises. You keep them. You are the leader of your own business.

When you can no longer keep up with demand yourself, you add more people. At first, this works, because you are offloading jobs that are easily defined (which could also be outsourced) such as bookkeeping, accounting, diary management, or you are handing over whole areas of responsibility such as sales for example, to another person and simply letting them get on with it.

Beyond a certain size though – perhaps around 5 -7 people – this approach starts to break down. You’ve run out of ‘easy to define’ jobs to offload, and the people you’ve handed responsibility to turn out to have completely different ideas about the promises you are making and how to keep them. They need watching, and controlling.

You are still the only leader, and you spend your time monitoring what other people are doing instead of working on your business. So you get stuck at this scale. You may even decide to scale back at this point, because going further just seems too hard.

What you really want is people who don’t need to be told, who can take responsibility for delivering on behalf of the business, each one of them a leader for the business.

But in order to do this, your people need an ecosystem that supports them.

For me this ecosystem looks like this:

  • It gives absolute clarity on who the business serves and what the business promises to do for them.

  • It nails down the values and behaviours that drive ‘the way we do things’ round here, setting expectations for behaviour for everyone in and around the business.

  • It is structured around processes, not functions, and certainly not management hierarchy. Processes start and end at the boundary of the organisation – they go from end-to-end, following the lifecycle of a prospect through to client and beyond. In this way the ecosystem stays focused on the people it serves. Everything that goes on inside the ecosystem is a side-effect of attracting and serving clients.

  • Processes provide clear direction on what needs to be done when, both to make the right promises to the right people, and to deliver on those promises – without specifying in excruciating detail how to do those things (although they may reference a library of techniques or ‘how-to’s that beginners may find useful).

  • Processes set out the usual run of events, without enumerating every possible scenario. This means that technical expertise still resides in the individual, who can exercise their professional judgement to handle exceptions, based on their own knowledge and experience, plus the values and behaviours expected of them.

  • It is based on roles, not individuals. Roles have clear responsibilities to clients. Roles run processes and each process is the exclusive responsiblility of one role. In effect every role-player leads their own processes. Roles may participate in processes they are not responsible for.

  • It ensures that everything is visible to everyone, and that all the resources needed to perform a role are available as and when they are needed.

  • Finally, it includes feedback mechanisms, so that it can improve and evolve. This includes rewards, which to be effective, should fairly reflect individual contributions.

In this ecosystem individuals can play more than one role, and the same role can be performed by many individuals. This is how you scale – you simply add more individuals in the roles you need.

Ideally, an individual runs an entire end-to-end process – effectively becoming a mini-business on their own, a bit like a franchise, but internal. This is how you can scale and transform to an employee-owned, employee-run business.

To begin with, you as the original leader will want to monitor and action all feedback, but roles should see everything too. Their responsibilities include improving the ecosystem based on this feedback.

Over time, as you become more confident that your people are running the business as it should be, you can let them get on with it – they will lead the business instead of you.

It takes a while to build an ecosystem like this, but once you have it, scaling becomes much easier.

That was a long elaboration – thank you for reading it.

Thank you Sam for asking it.

Off the peg or bespoke?
February 1, 2019

Off the peg or bespoke?

We tend to think of bespoke and off the peg as very much an either/or option. Not just in clothes.

It’s easy to find standard legal agreements on the internet that you can download for a few pounds, and even easier to find a lawyer who will answer your question about cost with a sharp intake of breath and “well, it depends – every case is different you see”.

We professionals can get hung up on the ‘case by case basis’ that defines us as professional and look on any level of standardisation with disdain.

I believe there are needs for the ‘tailored off the peg’ that are currently unmet, that if embraced would benefit both buyer and seller.

For example, I could buy a standard franchise agreement based on given parameters, then review it with a quaified lawyer to ensure it is up to date and covers all my specific needs. I could even buy an annual review service to make sure it stays up to date.

This isn’t just more affordable for me, its also easier for the professional to deliver, without becoming mechanical or boring for the lawyer.

Between ‘high-touch’ bespoke and ‘no-touch’ off-the-peg, there is up to date experience, built on a tried and tested standard – ‘the best touch’, if we’re open to looking for it.

Process
January 30, 2019

Process

What springs to mind when I use the word ‘process’ in conversation with people is something boring and robotic – … Read More “Process”

Top-down, bottom-up
January 23, 2019

Top-down, bottom-up

I get the feeling that top-down thinking is very unfashionable at the moment. It smacks too much of command-and-control, over-complicated buraeucracy, and having things ‘done to you’ instead of ‘done with you’ – or even ‘done by you’.

Bottom-up thinking is great for quick wins, incremental change and emergent consensus, but top-down can uncover opportunities for radical change that bottom-up thinking will miss, because you’re asking higher-level questions – “How should we keep our promise?”, rather than “How do we open the office?”.

And often, by answering these high-level questions, we can remove whole chunks of low-level procedure that would otherwise go unquestioned.

We shouldn’t let our thinking get trapped in our organisational structure.

“People will always need [insert ancient profession here]”
January 16, 2019

“People will always need [insert ancient profession here]”

Being in an industry that’s driven by compliance seems like a safe option.

But when the compliance part can be automated, outsourced or down-skilled (and it will be the compliance part that goes first), you have to offer more if you want to stay in profitable business.

There will be many incumbents who decide to step out when this happens.

That’s a great opportunity for those who want to step up.

Queues
January 10, 2019

Queues

Despite my frequent rants about self-checkouts, there is one good reason to have them.

If you only have one or two things, you don’t want to wait behind an enormous weekly shop. A self-checkout or basket-only lane is a good solution here.

Similarly, its a good idea to split the bakery queue into ‘sandwiches’ and ‘bread’, so bread buyers aren’t waiting behind the office lunch order.

Sorting a big queue into separate, differently handled sub-queues reduces queueing overall, and makes handling the different types of order easier, because you’re not switching between them all the time.

Better for everyone then.

Forcing everyone into the self-checkout queue defeats the object though.

Doing it ourselves
December 13, 2018

Doing it ourselves

Mozart could carry an entire opera in his head. But he didn’t expect his orchestra to read his mind. He wrote them a score.

A jazz composer like Art Blakey didn’t expect his band members to read his mind either.

He also wrote them a score. But he left gaps in it for them to improvise in – within the framework of the piece. The piece was different every time, and yet also the same. You can tell when its Art Blakey.

Its tempting to do it all yourself when you want to control the experience your audience has.

But better to work on creating a framework that supports your team in doing it ourselves.