Systems Thinking – Page 35 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

December 17, 2021

Unfreedom

If you need to have a job in order to live (and most of us do), then work all too easily becomes a series of power plays, tests of will between worker and supervisor, supervisor and manager, manager and director. Between subordinate and superior.

Power plays that can get nasty, because there is no way out, no safe word you can say to signal ‘Stop, I’ve had enough‘.

When everyone but the person at the top feels too afraid to disobey, and is unable to walk away in protest, what cascades down is unfreedom. Or as we might have called it in earlier times, slavery.

How much worse then, if it turns out that what you are in thrall to isn’t even human, but AI. Statistics generating targets that take no account of actual conditions on the ground – a pandemic, a storm, a tornado – with no possibility of being overidden by an intelligent human.

As a result 6 people died in this Amazon warehouse, picking stuff people don’t need, made using resources that could be better used elsewhere (or not used at all) to make money Bezos doesn’t know what to do with.

Work should not be this way, need not be this way.

Stop. I’ve had enough.

And I know where and how to change it.

December 16, 2021

Bullshit Jobs

This week, I’ve mostly been re-reading this book by David Graeber, published what seems like a lifetime ago in 2018.

In 2015, YouGov published a poll, showing that when asked whether their job “makes a meaningful contribution to the world?” 37% of respondents said ‘no’, and 13% of people said they didn’t know. That’s a terrible waste of human potential.

Until recently many of those 37% or 13% will have been furloughed, while many of the other 50% weren’t – their jobs (care workers, nurses, shop workers, bus-drivers etc) were simply too ‘key’ to allow that, or they were self-employed.

I wonder whether furlough gave some of the 37% time to re-think what they wanted from work? Is that what’s behind ‘The Great Resignation”?

What seems to be fairly clear from my re-reading of this book, is where most of those ‘bullshit jobs’ are. They’re in corporates, or privatised government agencies.

Where they aren’t is in small businesses.

One more reason why I believe bigger small businesses are the future.

December 9, 2021

Bollards

There are quite a few traffic bollards near where I live. They are there because in the past, drivers persisted in using the narrow pavements inappropriately, endangering other road users, and damaging the fabric of the public realm.

For at least one set, the need has disappeared. Lorries delivering to the school across the road used to go up onto the pavement in order to reverse through the gate. The school has since moved and widened their gate, making this manoeuvre unnecessary. The bollards remain, narrowing the pavement even further.

Bollards, like rules, are a last resort. A physical or legal barrier erected to block behaviours that have proved impossible to prevent by other means.

The trouble with this is that most bollards don’t tell you why they were erected. They seem arbitrary, so they leave behaviour untouched.

But if you design them with a bit of imagination, they can both block undesirable behaviour in the moment, and change it for the future.

In other words, rules, like bollards, are part of a process, not an event in themselves, and if you treat them that way, you’ll make them more effective.

December 6, 2021

Cultivating culture

Growing a culture is easy. You just leave an agar dish open to the air. The culture you get is a matter of what falls into your dish.

For a business, it’s the same. As soon as you add people to your business, you get a culture. As new people join, they pick up the norms, the narratives, and the identities of the people already there. The result of whatever’s fallen into your dish.

But with a framework that attracts the right things into your dish, that’s easy to grow on and around, it’s possible to grow a culture you’ve designed rather than one that happens by chance. Even if you’ve already got the wrong culture already in place.

What would your business culture look like if you designed it?

December 3, 2021

It’s me they want

It’s a trap many founders of service businesses fall into. You start off as the technician, doing everything, and at first you love it.

Then you grow your client base, and with it a team to help you serve them. Yet it seems, no matter how much you reassure them that your team is capable, no matter how much extra you charge them for the privilege, clients insist that you are the one that looks after them. Or, they insist that it’s a particular member of your team that looks after them. You get overloaded, and your team lose out on the chance to grow.

The answer is to make sure a new client or a new project starts with one of your team, not you. Perhaps random, perhaps thoughtfully matched to each others’ working styles. That means making sure everyone knows how to make and keep your business promise as well as or better than you, from start to finish. And that means articulating what that experience looks like.

There’s nothing wrong with being relationship-based – I’m all for connection between people – but the deepest relationship you want to forge is one between the client and your business, where the client’s experience will be consistently outstanding, no matter who delivers it. Not identical, consistent.

The more you enable your team to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!“, the more clients you’ll be able to delight, without killing yourself or your team in the process.

December 2, 2021

Saying it better than I can

This post from Seth is so good, I have to give it to you in full:

“Customer service is free

Most large organizations would disagree.

They hire cheap labor to answer the phone. They install recordings to mollify people who are on hold for hours. They measure the cost of the call center and put loopholes in the warranty.

When you see customer service as a cost center, all of these steps make sense. Any money spent lowering costs seems to raise profits.

But customer service is actually a profit center, for four reasons:

First, because the customer who calls you or shows up at the adjustments window is fully enrolled. Unlike just about every other moment you’ve had with them, in this moment, they are paying attention, leaning into the situation and on high alert. Everything you do here, unlike just about every other marketing interaction you have, will go on your permanent record.

Second, because your competitors have foolishly decided to treat this interaction as a cost, the chances that you can dramatically overdeliver are pretty good. You can’t make a car that’s ten times better, but you can easily produce customer service for your car customers that’s ten times better than what most manufacturers deliver.

And third, because in our industrialized economy, people love to tell stories about service. And so the word spreads (or doesn’t) based on what you’re about to do.

Finally, it’s been demonstrated again and again that the most valuable customers are the loyal ones. While your promotional team is out there making noise to get you new customers, you’d be much better off turning your existing customers into repeat customers and ambassadors.

And so, the money you spend on customer service isn’t simply free. It actually repays you many times over.”

Customer service is an opportunity to play a different game, an infinite game of connection.

The irony is that when it’s genuine, it leads to more profit, not less.

PS it’s not so different when governments spend money on people at the bottom of the pile instead of the top. They get more back than they spend. And their people flourish.

November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner. One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that. One favours planning, the other seeing what happens. This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net. A floor below which things cannot go. Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’. The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst. You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

November 29, 2021

I knew that would happen

“I knew that would happen.”

If you knew, why didn’t you do something to prevent it?

Probably because while you knew it was possible or even likely, you hoped it wouldn’t happen.

It would be much better to have a process that deals not only with the 80% of cases where nothing untoward happens, but also with the 20% of cases that don’t work like that. Or even better, one that pre-empts their occurrence.

Let’s say you’re a coffee roaster. You sell beans to lots of small independent coffee shops. It bugs you that they never plan their orders properly, often ringing up to ask for an urgent delivery at a timescale that’s impossible for you to make money on. You’ve made things clear – ‘Order before 6pm for next-day delivery’ – but still they ring at 8pm for an urgent delivery by 8am the next day. What should be exceptional is turning into the norm.

How could you pre-empt this?

You could accept that’s how they work, and find a way to deliver coffee overnight as your default. That might involve putting prices up of course, which might annoy the more forward-thinking of your customers.

You could make them order more each time, so they never run out. That would cost them more of course, and might end up in a stockpile they don’t want to carry.

You could put re-order prompts in or on your packaging, or give them the means to prompt themselves – stickers, or ‘re-order now’ cards.

You could recognise that the people using the coffee may not be the people ordering it, and make it easy for them to start an order – with a QR code on a bag, for instance – that gets confirmed with the person responsible before it’s sent out.

You could find ways to prompt them to re-order, based on how they work. That would involve asking them how they work (or even observing them as a mystery shopper?). That would cost you more up -front, but might make for a closer relationship. There probably aren’t that many different ways to run a coffee-shop, so you would quickly identify most cases. Then you could offer ordering options to new clients, knowing you have a process for dealing with them smoothly

There isn’t a right answer here, except that whenever you say “I knew that would happen”, realise that what you’ve identified isn’t just a pain for you. It’s an opportunity to cement your relationships and differentate yourself from your competitors, just by making your client’s life easier.

November 25, 2021

Autonomy

I’ve always hated being under an obligation to anyone. I’d much rather be a giver than a receiver, and I always used to try and ‘balance the books’ whenev

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking