It takes a lot of work to maintain a garden like this.
And the only way to renew or change it is to uproot everything and start again.
Much better to build a garden that can evolve with little tending. Even at the cost of some untidiness.
That’s where the delightful surprises come from.
I’m fascinated by the tension between process and freedom, between order and chaos, between prescription and exploration. So naturally I couldn’t resist buying these books to find out how people working in a completely different discipline approach the same issue.
In the first book I’m reading, ‘The Uses of Disorder’, the author describes the difficult transition people have to make through adolescence – that stage where we have the ability to fully exercise our powers as human beings, but without any life-experience to guide us. We have to find our own identity, but identity is forged though experience – messy, uncomfortable and maybe even distressing. This prospect makes some people frame an identity for themselves in advance, as a way of avoiding experience.
Most of us ‘grow out’ of this stage as we are unavoidably exposed to otherness, but some people continue to close themselves off to anything that might undermine it. The author’s point is that this doesn’t just happen on an individual level, but also at the level of a group or community, which is where this starts to get interesting.
For these authors, a city is a framework that can be enabling or disabling. And what makes it enabling is a certain amount of disorder, because disorder enables people to encounter the different, the new and the alternative. In other words, disorder helps us to grow aand thrive as human beings by opening up possibilities. So if you want to city (or any community) to enable people to thrive, you want it to be somewhat disorderly. Not so disorderly that people get no chance to absorb change, but disorderly enough to allow people to find their own change.
Similarly if you want your business to help the people in and around it (including clients) to thrive, you want it to be a bit disorderly – not so disorderly that people don’t know what to do, but disorderly enough that people can find and create their own change. You want controlled disorder.
The good news is, I think, that you can design it in. Which is why I use the idea of a Customer Experience Score, rather than a process. With your Customer Experience Score as the floor, you can safely leave room for exploration and interpretation.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
I did a little bit of research this morning, using data from the Office for National Statistics.
By my calculation there are around 82,595 what I might call ‘ordinary’ private sector businesses (employing 1 – 19 people) who have commercial electricity contracts expiring by December this year.
Anecdotally (from radio phone-ins and Twitter), companies like these are being asked to sign new contracts for electricity at around 10 times their current rate.
That is simply unsustainable for most. Many will be forced to close, costing up to 314,790 people their jobs and removing up to £60,255,000,000 in turnover from the economy.
If I include businesses employing up to 49 people, we’re looking at losing up to 280,279 businesses, 524,974 jobs and £121,344,002,000.
I’m all for bosses disappearing. Not their businesses though. I’d like to see them flourish.
Which is why we need to cherish our ordinary businesses.
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.
Find (or make) a new one.
A metaphor is a shortcut to understanding.
Faster than a speeding bullet, an idea moves fully-formed and sharp as nails, from my head to yours.
The problem is that if a metaphor doesn’t capture some deep truth, it’s actually pernicious. Dust thrown into the eyes. A quick and easy way to lie.
The elephant in the room is that everything that matters is far too complex to be captured in a single metaphor. We live in systems, not storybooks.
So maybe it’s time to see our metaphors for what they are – millstones round our necks, stopping us from making progress.
Let’s abandon them, and find better ways to imagine how the world goes round.
Stick insects confuse their predators on purpose. They pretend to be a twig. A predator already has a mental model of what a twig is and how it works, which doesn’t include being edible. So it leaves the insect ‘twig’ alone.
We humans confuse people all the time. Sometimes on purpose, most often by accident. We assume that our mental model of the thing we’re building will be obvious to everyone who buys it, uses it or operates it. Yet that is rarely the case.
Take a small business. For a shareholder or investor it’s a machine for generating returns. For founders it’s a way to make a dent in the universe or their route to a coveted lifestyle. For their accountant it’s a set of connected accounts. For an operations manager it’s a set of loosely related functions, one of which they probably consider to be the most important. For some employees it’s a means to enjoy life outside work. For others it’s a lifeline, and for others still a vocation. For a customer it’s a solution to a problem.
Conflicting mental models pull people in different directions and make the thing you’re building confusing, less effective and ultimately unusable.
The answer?
If you’re a small business owner, you might like to use mine:
It works well, if you want to create a business that can last or that can grow.
Or both, if that’s what you want.
When there’s a heatwave on, the best thing for me to do is to sit still and read. Or colour in.
The reason I have such a big library is that I can’t help following threads from one book to another. Sometimes I keep on picking up new threads, often I go back on myself and revisit old favourites.
Eventually they all get darned in together, to make something new and familiar, well-worn and stronger, decorated by repairs.
Like a Pearly King’s suit, or my lovely old linen sheet, too fine and lovely to throw away, so kept just for heatwaves.
I’m facing a really interesting challenge at the moment.
Over many years I’ve developed a methodology, notation and software for capturing a Customer Experience Score in a way that suits people rather than machines. My notation is very simple. There aren’t many rules, and even those are only casually enforced.
This is because it’s all about making it easy for ordinary mortals. Whether that’s a business owner wanting to capture their desired customer experience or one of their colleagues wanting to learn what’s needed to deliver that experience. My aim is to make the software easy to learn and easy to use, and above all flexible so that the people using it can start scrappy, and build up to whatever level of detail works for them.
My challenge now is that some of those humans want to generate something more formal from their Score, something that needs clear rules to produce an output.
It’s interesting because it’s showing me how fuzzy (and sometimes inconsistent) my logic is. This is fine for humans, because humans are perfectly capable of interpreting fuzziness, and in any case I want to leave plenty of room for interpretation. It’s not so fine for software.
One approach would be to make the tool more rigorous, more constrained, more precise. In other words, to make it more machine-like. But that would mean adding levels of detail that would soon become excruciating for any ordinary mortal.
No, my work is all about liberating humans to be human, so I have to find another way, and I think it’s this: If humans are good with fuzziness and nuance, and machines are not, let the machine ignore all that and concentrate on the essentials.
For stupid machines, the answer might just be to keep it simple.
You’re probably familiar with the decision-makig matrix from Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’:
Davidjcmorris, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The problem is that this diagram doesn’t tell you what to do when everything is urgent, which is how things tend to be by the time we humans get round to dealing with them.
The answer is I think, to start dealing with all of them, focusing first on the things that will either have most impact, or will enable you to still be around to deal wth the other urgent things.
A story in today’s Science X Newsletter illustrates this perfectly.
Methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but only hangs around in the atmosphere for about 10 years. So by reducing our methane emissions quickly (especially if we use captured methane to replace new fossil fuels along the way), we can have a big and rapid impact on global warming, while our strategies for dealing with CO2 are taking longer to have an effect.
Like so much else with the climate crisis, we already have solutions to hand, we just need to pick them up and use them.
What do you do when everything is urgent?
Take a deep breath.
Remind yourself that it’s not too late.
Then get started.
Discipline makes Daring possible.