We humans live our whole lives in a Heisenberg gymnasium – dancing between poles of certainty and uncertainty. Craving first one, then having got it, craving the other.
The truth is we can never rest, only find a way of creatively using the tension between those poles to move ourselves, our businesses, humanity and our world forwards.
Tying ourselves to one or the other can only end in tears.
Before the European invasion, the only use the people of the Americas had for wheels, was for pull-along toys. They used headstraps and pack-animals for carrying things, and made their clay pots by hand-building. Messages were carried by runners.
Perhaps because there were no suitable native draught animals, or because the terrain was too difficult, the possibilities of the wheel were seen, but never applied, except in play. Until of course, the Spanish introduced horses and cattle.
We tend to think of innovation as the creation of new things by a single individual. Actually, much innovation arises from joining the dots. And that only happens once the dots are in place.
Where are the dots being created in your industry? Could you join them to create something new?
Middlemarch is my favourite work of fiction precisely because George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) succeeds so well in this endeavour.
Not everyone in the book is good, or beautiful, or admirable or likeable, but by the end you feel they are all worthy of the investment of your attention. Even the ‘villains’. You may not approve of everything they do, but you at least understand how they got there. Not through being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but through being human, by the choices they take at each little fork in the road, how they justify those choices to themselves and how that leads to the route taken at the next fork, and the next.
Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways I know to expand my horizons. I’ve ‘met’ far more people through fiction than I could ever hope to meet in the flesh, from all sorts of backgrounds, times and places. Practising empathy for these characters, written by and about people outside my comfort zone is great practice towards doing it for real.
I know quite a few businesses who keep a library of business books for their team. Perhaps its time to add some fiction.
“Design your business or it will be designed for you.” It’s one of my favourite sayings, spoken by Brian Chesky of AirBnB.
But what does it actually mean? How can others design your business for you, when you’re the boss?
When you started out as a one-person band, you did everything. You tried different things to market and sell your services, and to deliver them in such a way that customers came back, or told their friends. You designed the business.
Once demand grows beyond what you can personally deliver, you have to add capacity. And every time you do that, you bring in someone else’s idea and experience of what a business looks like.
You might add capacity by automating some of what you do with software. That job management software, quote generator or CRM tool was designed by someone else, according to their vision of what a business is and how a business works. A vision that is necessarily generic, otherwise they couldn’t sell enough to be viable.
You might outsource some of what you do, your accounts, or your HR for example. Your accountant or sales agent will have their own idea of what a business is and how it works. If they’re any good they’ll try to find out more about yours, but often they’ll fall back on a generic design to fit all industries, or a design learned working elsewhere, or their own design. It’s not your area of expertise, so even though you don’t love it, you put up with it.
You might work with other small businesses like yourself, sub-contracting some of the delivery. But like yourself, they will have designed their own small business, and that design probably won’t match yours. That can prove exasperating and stressful, unless you decide it doesn’t matter that much, and accept the differences.
You might recruit a business partner, co-director, manager or experienced staff to take on some of the work you do. Almost certainly you’ll want them to have experience of business in general and your industry in particular. In other words, they’ll bring with them the design of those other businesses they’ve worked in, plus their own ideas of how to do things. If you’re very lucky, those ideas will chime with yours. If you’re not, you’ll be fighting to maintain your business design, or running through several cycles before you find ‘the right person’.
You might recruit juniors, school-leavers or graduates even, who you can ‘mould’ to suit your business design. But moulding takes time, and even they will have their own ideas of how things should be done. They need almost constant supervision and just don’t seem to get it.
You might hire a business coach or consultant to help you deal with all these problems. They too, come with baggage of what a business ‘should’ look like, learned at the Bank, or at business school, or from building their own successful businesses. They will try and shape your business to fit.
In the face of all this, you have a choice. You can supervise closely, re-do work, fight to correct what everyone else is doing ‘wrong’, or you can accept other people’s designs for your business. The first is exhausting, the second feels like it’s not your business any more.
There’s a step you can take, which can solve all of these potential problems before they happen, which is to take your business design out of your head and get it down as a shareable ‘blueprint’ everyone can work from. The Customer Experience Score for your business. That captures your unique way of making and keeping promises to the people you serve.
Your Score becomes a specification for software, an operations manual for new staff, suppliers and contractors at all levels. Above all it becomes a permanent record of your design for your business, that enables your unique creation to scale, evolve and persist through time.
Design your business, or sooner or later, you’ll be back to working in someone else’s business.
Letting ‘art’ into a business feels wrong somehow. Surely the point of business is predictability, conformity, delivering to specification? How can you let people ‘do art’ on this without losing these things?
The kind of precision we usually think of when we think about ‘predictability, conformity, delivering to specification’, is really only necessary for manufacturing. Even then, the manufacturing part is only a fraction of what makes up the customer experience.
If art happens in that tense space between rules and license, restriction and freedom, certainty and uncertainty, you can at least control what happens on one side of the space. You can specify ‘the least we should do’, with as much precision as you like. That means there is no downside to the art that can take place, only upside. You can predict that specification will be met at least, perhaps exceeded.
The output of artists constantly evolves, as they explore that space of tension between the rules they’ve set themselves and whatever it is that they wish to express. Each individual work is a specific response to that tension, different from every other, but taken together, the whole body of work is coherent. You can tell it’s all from the same artist.
The thing your business exists to express is your Promise of Value. Everyone in the business is trying to create art in the tense space between your Promise of Value and the floor you’ve defined. Each individual making and keeping of your Promise – or customer experience – is a specific response to that tension, different from each other, but coherent, taken as a whole. You can tell they’re all from the same studio. You can predict that every response will conform to your Promise of Value.
Looked at this way, your job as business owner is not to control individual output, but to define the space – the studio if you like – where your people, your artists, can create output that delights the people you serve.
Why would you do this? Because art commands higher prices than factory-made. People value human.
Of course, inspiration on its own isn’t enough. Inspiration needs a starting point, a constraint, something to bounce off, spark to or rebel against.
The maker of this ‘crazy’ quilt was already constrained by the assortment of odd-shaped leftovers they had. Perhaps also by the limited colours they’d been given. They decided to impose another constraint – the nine square layout. The result isn’t random. Nor is it purely functional. It satisfies more than the need to keep warm at night.
Why would someone do this?
We humans like order as much as we like wildness. We desire both certainty and uncertainty, rules and license. Pulled by these opposites, we find the tension between them uncomfortable.
So we turn it into the most delightful thing of all – art. Capturing a fleeting, but satisfying moment of balance between the two. The ‘right’ balance is elusive, every time we try, the result is different. That’s what keeps artists in practice. The ‘right’ balance is also personal. That’s what gives each artist their own style.
If you want your business to feel human, it needs to be a place where art can happen.
You can’t dictate the artistic solutions. But you can create the required level of tension, by imposing rules, order and constraints.
If those constraints are designed around making and keeping your promise to the people you serve – if they define a floor, but no ceiling – you’ll have created a safe, exciting and human space for everyone.
Especially you.
What’s the difference between a good stew and a great stew?
Time.
Sometimes, leaving things alone for several hours is the best thing you can do. And as of course you know, the very best stews are tasted the day after you cooked them.
Time is an ingredient we frequently forget to add, and not just to our cooking. If you’ve got something knotty you’re working hard on or thinking really deeply about, a long bank holiday weekend is an excellent opportunity to add time.
Over the next 3 days, let whatever it is do its thing. Let it braise, brew, tenderise, meld. By Tuesday you’ll find yourself with something really tasty.
Till then, enjoy the break.
When you create your own business, the ‘truth’ of why it exists, what it does, who it’s for and how it should work is only in your head.
If you want to grow beyond the impact you can make on your own, you have to find a way to communicate and transfer that truth to the heads of your collaborators.
At that point, we tend to replace our truth with facts. Facts are controlling, dry, objective, soulless. We try to flesh the truth out as much as possible by adding too many facts, hiding the very thing we need to reveal.
No wonder people resist, preferring to follow their own idea of the truth – however different that may be from yours. What’s really needed is a way to position your truth in the space between the people who work together to deliver it. That way everyone can access it, everyone can question it, everyone can improve it.
Your truth is your Promise of Value. The space between the people who work together to deliver it is your business.
Make a map of that space that describes how you make and keep your Promise to the people the business serves. Keep the facts minimal – just enough to indicate concrete action; allow the truth to shine through.
Leave room for interpretation, dissent and discussion. Then make sure there’s a process for reaching consensus around a new, better truth. That’s how your business will grow and evolve.
Thanks to Carlos Saba, for introducing me to the book that inspired this post. It’s well worth a read.
The problem with a hierarchical management structure, is that it’s expensive – adding layers of overhead and transaction costs that have to be carried by the revenue-generating part of the business. Even worse, it encourages everyone working within it to focus on the wrong thing – their immediate boss. And that makes work miserable for many, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid.
Alternatives to hierarchy, such as holacracy, co-operation and teal address this by delegating much of the management and decision-making to the people at the coal-face – no longer the bottom, but the cutting edge, where the business meets its customers.
This doesn’t reduce overhead that much because in effect, as Dr Julian Birkenshaw of London Business School observes, these structures “replace a vertical bureaucracy with a horizontal one”. Considerable interaction costs remain as people collaborate and generate consent to create emergent actions. But at least the focus is where it matters, on the customer, client or stakeholder.
It seems to me that what’s really needed is both structure and emergence. A structure that takes the thinking out of doing the right thing most of the time, but allows for emergence at the edges to respond to exceptions and to evolve. The main thing is that both the core structure and the processes for emergence are focused on the same thing – the customer, client or stakeholder.
By now, you know all about my core structure:
Even hierachy works better around this. Replace that with holacracy, co-operation, teal or responsible autonomy, and your business will fly.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.
They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.
The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.
Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.
Hmmm.
Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.