This weekend’s lesson from “Braiding Sweetgrass” was a lovely one for me.
4 rules for conservation:
“Only take what you need.”
“Never from the first you see (it might be the last one).”
“Never take more than half.”
“Only take what is given.”
That last one is the kicker. Sometimes the universe knows what you really need better than you, and tells you so. If you have to wrest what you think you need from the earth, break branches to pull it from the tree, if it feels like dragging blood out of a stone, whoever you’re asking isn’t ready to give themselves yet.
The only thing to do in that case, is to think about what you need, not what you want. Better still, think about what that being you’re asking to give really needs.
“There is literally no limit to the promises we can make. The only limit is to the number we are able to fulfill.”* Richard Murphy
So, if you have some energy, capability or capacity going to waste in your enterprise, get making some new promises.
Otherwise, concentrate on fulfilling the promises you’ve already made, and get building your energy, capacity and capabilities.
And if you can’t do that quickly enough, put your prices up temporarily to slow down demand while you build.
*The quote is about money of course, which is simply a promise to pay. A country like the UK, that issues its own currency, can make as many of these promises as it likes, as long as they can be delivered. It’s what Maynard Keynes meant when he said “What we can do, we can pay for.”
I’m hungry, and I want lunch delivered to me at home, I can choose from at least a dozen food delivery apps, each of whom will offer me dozens of local take-aways, each of whom will offer me dozens of menu items, plus additional special menu combinations. Or I go out to my regular restaurant, which will offer me dozens of menu items, plus additional special menu combinations.
How do I choose?
I’m looking for curtain rails, and I need them soon. I can choose from several brands online, through dozens of suppliers on Amazon, e-bay, big-box retailers and individual shops. Most brands and several suppliers are in all of these places.
How do I choose?
My bet is that most often, people choose what’s familiar, the dish they had for lunch yesterday, or the same day last week. The brand they’ve heard of, or the retailer they recognise. Or the cheapest.
Because selecting what is really going to be right for me, right now, among so many choices is exhausting.
There are reasons small restaurants thrive in the centre of Paris. One is that they serve a working population who still value a proper lunch break. The other is that they don’t waste their customers’ valuable time making them choose what to eat. There are only two options on the menu.
If you aren’t well known yet, and you’re not the cheapest, but you know you might be just what the people you seek to serve need, right now, don’t make them work too hard.
Fewer options makes it easier for them to try something new.
When your business is faced with uncertainty, rigidity is the wrong tool to use. That’s why big corporations fail in the face of change.
The challenge for a purpose-driven, legacy-focused, customer-centred small business is to be open to unknown futures without losing its identity. To keep their edges fluid and their core firm.
Fortunately, that’s relatively easy to do, because human beings are very good at dealing with uncertainty – especially the uncertainty that comes from dealing with other human beings.
All you need to do is to build the firm core:
First you define a high-level, comprehensive Promise of Value that is specific and distinctive, yet open-ended:
Define the people you serve in terms of psychographics, not demographics.
Define how you serve them in terms of their deeper needs, not passing wants.
Define how you achieve that in terms of values and behaviours, not external measures.
Package that Promise of Value into concrete products and services:
Identify the demographic(s) most likely to contain enough people of the right psychographic.
Understand what matters to them right now.
Identify what dis-ables the motivated.
Design a package that addresses what these people need right now.
Use that Promise of Value to drive the design of a Customer Experience Score for sharing and delivering on your Promise that:
Embodies your distinctive values and behaviours.
Can be played by any competent musician.
Enables each musician to bring their own experience and personality to their performance.
Allows them to create a new interpretation of your Promise when they encounter the new and unexpected.
Make sure you gather feedback:
From the Score as it is being played.
From the people you seek to serve and the people who work with you.
From your regulator if you have one, and your industry.
From the impact you makes on the people and planet around you.
Enable every player in your team to discover the combination of roles that ensures their best performances:
Make sure everyone can play the whole Score.
Give them regular R&D time, in the company of fellow players, to tweak or re-design the Score, in response to feedback, learning each other’s strengths as they go.
Once you have this in place, you can safely trust your people (and the people to come) to dance with uncertainty. You can make every one of them a Boss, and leave the future of your business safe in their hands.
When action takes place without evidence, based on bias and assumption, or merely indifference; seeing incontrovertible facts presented in a compelling format can kickstart a change in behaviour.
That’s what Florence Nightingale achieved when she sent a copy of “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army” to Queen Victoria.
There were undoubtedly many more facts Nightingale could have observed. The height of patients, their propensity to swear, their educational attainment, their places of birth.
But those facts weren’t what mattered to her. What mattered was how many were dying unnecessarily.
Data is increasingly easy to collect. Resist the temptation to use it all. Decide which facts matter to your business and measure those.
That way you’ll have a better chance of changing the right behaviours.
Cinderella’s sisters would do anything to get their feet into the glass slipper. They cut off their toes, and when that didn’t work, they tried trimming off a bit of their heels. All they did was create a bloody mess. The slipper wasn’t designed for them.
In business, it’s sometimes desirable to present your ideas in a format people are more comfortable with. That’s always something worth exploring. If you want to change minds, it’s helpful to start with the familiar as a way to introduce something new.
Be careful though.
If you find yourself mangling the idea to make it fit, this shoe is not for you.
If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” (and I recommend it), you’ll be familiar with this diagram:
But what does it practically mean for you?
If you are a business offering something new and different from what has gone before, something that could potentially disrupt the status quo, you need to understand this curve.
As an example, here’s what it means for me.
In the UK, there are around 1,018,220 businesses that employ between 3 and 10 people, including the owner. These are my overall ‘market’, the people I want to serve.
I offer a service that’s new and potentially disruptive to the status quo, so however I niche down into that market, by industry say, or geography, or business life stage, this curve comes into play. It adds another dimension to the psychographic of the people I can help most, that I have to consider when designing, marketing and delivering my service.
Here’s how it splits:
25,455 of them are Innovators. They love trying new things, what matters to them is that things are new and better than the current best option. They’ll want to know how it works (and they’ll take it apart to find out). They’re not worried about support, or infrastructure, they’re just happy to have the latest cool thing to play with. These are great people to test really new ideas on. Until they get bored and move on to the next cool new thing.
137,460 of them are Visionaries. They are interested in getting ahead, and if they can see how a thing will get them ahead of their competitors faster, they’ll go for it. They don’t mind if it’s not all there, or if there is no support. They will happily support themselves. They will ask for your thing to be redesigned to suit them though, so be prepared to maintain several versions of your thing.
346,195 of them are Pragmatists, and much more demanding. They want to know whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less than the cost of the problem. They want to know that you are a safe company to work with; that there is support, and maintenance and spare parts. As long as these things are in place they don’t care who does it, which means you can still be a small business, collaborating with other small businesses to provide a complete service. Pragmatists will only use a new thing if they believe that there are enough people like them already using it. They don’t trust Visionaries (‘flying by the seat of their pants’) and they trust Innovators even less. That gap between Pragmatists and Visionaries is The Chasm.
The same number of businesses (346,195 of them) are Conservatives. I think of these people as the ones who say ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM‘. For them what matter is whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less money. They want everyone else to be using your thing before they do. They want you to be not just safe, but respected in the marketplace. They also expect you to provide everything yourself – support, maintenance, spare parts. In other words, you have to be a big company like them. Or at least look like it.
Finally, there the 152,733 who are Skeptics. As you might imagine from their position on the distribution curve, they are the last to adopt new things, sticking stubbornly to whatever has served them well up to now, even if the new thing would serve them better.
I’m an Innovator looking to serve Visionaries.
What side of the Chasm are you on? More importantly, where are the people you seek to serve?
