Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking

Games we play
November 23, 2021

Games we play

I was reading yesterday about 2 kinds of games – finite and infinite.  Finite games are those where the game stops when somebody wins.  They could also be called zero-sum games.  For someone to win, everyone else has to lose.  Finite and zero-sum games are based on scarcity.

Infinite games on the other hand, are not about winning, they are about keeping the game going.  The game is eternal, which means there is no scarcity.   As a player I may drop out, but the game goes on, with other players.  The game can also get bigger, there is no limit to how many people can play.

We tend to play an infinite game with our personal relationships.  We don’t keep score with our family and friends.  We assume, safely on the whole, not that a favour will be returned as a quid pro quo, but that if we are in need, help will be given.

Our assumption is that business is a zero-sum game.  Where for me to win, the planet has to lose.  Or other businesses have to lose.  Or customers have to lose.  Or where my team have to lose.

What if you assumed it was an infinite game?  That business is about keeping the game going for everyone, forever?

Would you play differently?

Three Freedoms
November 19, 2021

Three Freedoms

What is freedom, really?

Here’s a possible definition, not mine*.  Three freedoms, each building on the one before.

  1. The freedom to walk away, knowing that you will be taken in elsewhere by other people who see you as one of them.
  2. The freedom to disobey, knowing that you can ‘vote with your feet’.
  3. The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.

The third can’t happen without the first two.  Not without becoming tyranny, anyway.

These are big ideas, but since our businesses can be anything we want, we can practise them small.

 

 

*In the sense that I didn’t think of them.  They come from “The Dawn of Everything” by David Wengrow and David Graeber.

The world turned upside down
November 18, 2021

The world turned upside down

Until a couple of years ago, I throught cleaning your teeth was about cleaning your teeth.

It turns out I was wrong.  It’s about cleaning your gumline.  Because it’s not so much about getting rid of food debris, as cleaning up after the bacteria that live in your mouth.  Who breed and create debris (plaque) whether you eat or not.

There are lots of things we think we know, that actually turn out to be wrong, or at least capable of alternative interpretations.   The more alternatives we see, the more we can imagine even better ones.

If you’re up for it, here are a few of the books that have turned my world of ideas upside down:

Of course, every book does this to some extent – even the ones you’ve read before, because you can’t step into the same river twice.

Which books would you recommend?

Pinning things down
November 16, 2021

Pinning things down

When we want to examine something closely, it helps to take a snapshot of it, to capture it at a point in time, to pin it down and look at it as a specimen.   This makes it easier for us to analyse its composition and construction.

This is a useful way to gather some information, as long as we remember that for all systems, including our businesses, the natural state is to be moving, changing and renewing.

For most things worth investigating, static means dead.

Creating bandwidth
November 11, 2021

Creating bandwidth

Apparently human neurons are strikingly different from those of other mammals.   Neurons are the building blocks of our nervous system – our internal communiactions system by which we percieve and react to the world.

All neurons communicate with each other and with other cells through electrical impulses, produced by ‘ion channels’.   In general, the larger the neuron, the more ion channels it has.   Until we get to humans.

Our neurons have far fewer ion channels than expected.   We still need ion channels, but somehow we are able to get by perfectly well with less of them.

The hypothesis is that by evolving a ‘lean’ neuron model, human brains became more efficient, able to spend less energy on the basics, freeing some up to spend on more interesting things that other mammals don’t do, such as imagining.

That makes sense.  The less communication you have to do to support the usual, the more bandwidth you leave to deal with the unusual.   Or to imagine a new usual.

Our businesses could learn something from our neurons.

Rotations
October 27, 2021

Rotations

Circles are an interesting form of organisation.  Like King Arthur’s famous Round Table, nobody is ‘above’ or ‘below’ anyone else.  All are on a level.

A circle can be the basis of useful mechanisms for sharing work fairly, without the need for discussion, consensus building or command.

For instance, if you all work in an office, someone has to open up each day.   Often it’s one person’s job.   What happens when they don’t turn up?

You could decide to give everyone a key, and it’s simply the first to arrive that opens up.    But if you are the habitually early one, you might start to resent being the only one who has to do this in practice.

Or you could create an ‘opening up ‘ circle (which could include everyone) and do it by rotation.  You might even use a single set of special keys to make the mechanism visible, perhaps even more like a game.

There are probably more jobs that could be organised in this way.   You could rotate delivery drivers through different routes or rounds, to give them a change and to introduce customers to more of your team.   You could rotate people through networking events in the same way.  You could even rotate people through Roles to expand their experience and get clients used to the idea that anyone in your business can help them equally well.

The beauty of a circle is that you can start anywhere, and go clockwise or anti-clockwise.  You can choose whatever frequency you like for the rotation.  It can even accommodate absences – you just jump the gap if today’s person is missing.  Best of all, there’s no room for argument.  Everyone takes their turn, then forgets about the job until it comes round again.

No need to write up complex rotas, just draw up your circles, put them somewhere visible, and set them going.

How powerful a signal it would be if everyone, including the boss, took their spot?

Old possibilities
October 19, 2021

Old possibilities

For more than 40,000 years, human beings have been imagining and re-imagining new possibilities for how we live in the world.

We can’t stop now.

We can do better than this.

Down with management
October 12, 2021

Down with management

I’ve talked before about the application of pin-factory thinking to work that requires empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair.   This kind of thinking reduces management to supervision, control, and reporting.   Activities that are easily automated, but add little value.

No wonder we have an employee engagement problem, an innovation problem and a productivity problem.

Because we have a management problem.

People don’t need managing.  We are perfectly capable of managing ourselves, and do so every day.

We don’t need supervision and reporting.  We need communication – a vision, a score to follow, feedback on how we’re doing.

We don’t need to be controlled.   We need freedom – to make mistakes, learn from them, correct ourselves, improve how we do things.

We don’t even need to be led.   We can lead each other – the right leader, at the right time to deliver what’s required.

Down with management!

Long live responsible autonomy!

Sharing the work
October 5, 2021

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings.  He didn’t need them.  As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making.   Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office.  He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled.  The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson.  We hand-craft each and every user experience.  We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way.  We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours.   So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.‘

That’s unfair.   They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few.   Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less.   The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.

Supply chains
October 4, 2021

Supply chains

Do you remember the last CAPTCHA you filled in?  The one that asked you to click every square that had bicycles in?   How long did it take you? A few seconds? A minute?

Of course, you know that every time you do that you’re cleaning data for an AI project, or training an AI machine to get better at bicycle recognition.

To you, that piece of microwork was a distraction.  To others it’s a project.  A minute’s worth of work for an unknown customer with an unknown purpose, often far less innocuous than bicycles, paid for in cents.

These ‘projects’ are not even tasks, only tiny slices of a task.  Like the complex calculations performed by the Lyons Corner House ‘computers’, only without the employment contract, the shared office or the necessary equipment.  Without even knowing who or where the ‘computer’ before you is, nor the one after you, because actually you’re spread across continents and time-zones, in refugee camps, prisons and slums.

Now imagine trying to build any kind of working life around ‘projects’ like these.

If you thought bodged-up fire-trap factories in Bangladesh was bad, welcome to the supply chain for the software behind driverless cars, voice-assistants, smart bikes and fitness-trackers.  The supply chain of the future.  Unless we’re careful.

I recommend this book.  It’s not comfortable reading, but I think it is essential.