Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking

Managing what matters
May 17, 2021

Managing what matters

When you pay a traffic warden by the ticket, you’ve incentivised them to find the easy targets, not to prevent illegal parking, and certainly not to keep the roads safe for other users.   Worse, you’ve incentivised them to pursue minor infractions over major ones.

That’s why my street is full of traffic wardens just before school opens and just after it closes.  It’s why parents arrive 30 minutes before they need to in order to grab a legal parking space, wasting an hour a day just sitting in their cars.   It’s also why everywhere else in my town centre remains plagued by illegal, inconsiderate and dangerous parking.

This kind of simplistic proxy for performance has become endemic, because its easy to measure.   If you can say ‘I’ve hit target’, you’re off the hook as a person, a school, a company or a government department.   Never mind that you’ve actually made life worse for everyone, and really dreadful for some.

What gets measured gets managed, they say.   True.

So start with what you really want, then explore different, creative and possibly multiple ways to measure whether you’re achieving it.

The answer’s unlikely to be a simple tally.  And you may just come up with a completely new approach to the problem.

Motive power
April 30, 2021

Motive power

In the old model of business, marketing was something you did last.   It answered the question “How can I sell these things I’ve made?”.

Today, to be effective, marketing comes first, because it answers the question “Who can I best serve and how?”.

In this new model of business, your Promise of Value is the engine, and the motive power is empathy.   A fuel available to everyone.

Security
April 28, 2021

Security

A child, confident that her parent will be there when she needs them, is willing to leave their side, to explore and try new things.  This is how she learns to be independent.  Having an anchor you can rely on is important.

Children put into a big space and simply asked to play stay close together more or less where they’re put.  If, however they are told there are boundaries to their space, and where those boundaries are, they range more widely in their play – often right up to the boundaries.  Some of them may even test how firm those boundaries are.    This is how children learn to be creative.  Boundaries are important.

I’m not sure I’d want my business to behave literally like a family, but it is possible to give it some of the same structure to create a community.  Your Promise of Value and the processes that are driven by it are both anchor and boundaries.  Everyone can fall back on the anchor in times of stress, and push the boundaries of the system when they’re feeling adventurous.

In the space between, let them play.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Rescuing babies
April 21, 2021

Rescuing babies

Sometimes, all it takes to solve a new problem is to revisit an old technology, applying the best of the new technologies we’ve developed since we last used it, to make it work far better than last time.

Sail Cargo is one such solution, using ancient technologies in a 21st century way.

Another is Homespun/Homegrown – where the old textile town of Blackburn will grow and make it’s own jeans using the even more ancient technologies of flax and woad, alongside some thoroughly modern manufacturing, marketing and distribution methods.

Babies don’t have to be thrown out with bathwater.

You can fish them out first, and help them grow up gracefully.

Freedom Rules
April 12, 2021

Freedom Rules

“Freedom … is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating”  ‘The Utopia of Rules’, David Graeber 2015

Without rules, we get nothing done.

With only rules, we get nothing done.

The interesting challenge is to create a set of rules that enable the creativity that will in turn makes new rules necessary, while at the same time ensuring that each cycle of new rules never becomes stifling.

It seems to me that’s only possible when everyone shares in the work of creating the rules and breaking them.

Not like. The same
April 8, 2021

Not like. The same

Sometimes, a process that looks like it could be a pattern isn’t.

If the same thing happens in the same way every time, and it’s performed by the same Role using the same Props, then what you have isn’t processes that are alike.   You have the same process, repeated exactly as part of several larger processes.

As an example, take dealing with a visitor to your office.   Often this is the responsibility of a particular Role.  They greet the visitor, take their coat, show them to a waiting area and offer them a drink.  It makes no difference why the visitor is here, what happens afterwards or who deals with them next, the process is exactly the same whether the visitor is a client, a prospective employee or a tax inspector.

In this case, it’s better to define the process once, and include it in the Customer Experience Score wherever it occurs.  You could call it ‘Receive Guest’, define it the first time you identify it (for example as part of your ‘Enroll Prospect’ process) then refer to it elsewhere (for example, in Handle Tax Inspection, Recruit Team Member, Hold Social Event).

Identical twins, triplets, even quintuplets are a wonderful thing in humans.  We don’t mind that they make more work because they’ll each grow to be unique human beings.

You don’t want them in your Customer Experience Score though.  The extra work they create there is pointless.

Pattern vs Catch-all
April 7, 2021

Pattern vs Catch-all

When designing your Customer Experience Score, you often uncover processes that follow a specific pattern.

For example, you want a client to have a similar experience every time you request information from them – perhaps you send an email, then immediately follow up with a phone call or a text, or both.   Perhaps you call, then follow up with an email. After a while, you might remind the client if they haven’t responded.  There might be a limit to the number of times you do that.

However you want the experience to be, you want that experience to be consistent across all the information requests you might make, so it’s tempting to lump all these different processes intoa single catch-all process.

That’s a mistake.  Although the pattern is the same, each individual process turns out to be slightly different.  The information being requested is different, the purpose is different, the priority, urgency and timescales may be different.  The Roles involved may be different.  The Props will definitely be different.

These differences will out, and somewhere in the depths of what looks like a simple process, you’ll end up having to include some way of spelling out what actually happens in each case.  It usually involves a complicated list of “If you’re dealing with A, do B; if you’re dealing with C, do D;…”

And so on.

The key is to remember why you’re writing your Customers Experience Score, which is to enable someone else in your team to perform the process as well as or better than you.  That is best achieved by making each process self-containedly easy to follow, without cluttering it up with decisions about alternative possibilities.

When Google gives you directions for getting from your house to that beauty spot you love, it gives you full directions for each and every route, even though most will start with the same turn out of your street, and end with the same turn into your destination.    Imagine trying to find your way with directions that say “If you’re following route A, turn right at the next roundabout.  If you’re following Route B proceed straight across.   If you’re following Route C, turn right.”

You’d take longer, annoy fellow drivers along the way, and probably get lost a few times.  You might even give up and go home.  That’s the last thing you want your team to do when they’re delivering your Promise to clients.

A pattern is a pattern, nothing more.  Use it to design in consistency that reinforces your Promise of Value.

A catch-all, on the other hand, makes everyone work harder, for no extra benefit.

Slow burn
April 1, 2021

Slow burn

Every now and then, my husband has a big bonfire in the garden.  I must admit they make me nervous.   I find myself compelled to watch them well into the night to make sure they’re properly out before I go to bed.   I’ve been known to resort to water, just to be absolutely sure.

I much prefer an incinerator.   Contained, controlled, slow-burning but often more intense, an incinerator gets the job done with less risk and almost no need of supervision.

For me, on purpose beats all-out, every time.

Whatever Easter means to you, enjoy the break.

See you Tuesday.

How to capture a business process: Step 5
March 26, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 5

When sketching out a process it helps to start with the most straightforward case.  The one where everything goes right, or at least goes as expected.   Once you have this laid out, you can identify exceptions.

I find it helps to think of the whole process as a river.  The straightforward case is the main, well-worn channel, but there may be parts that break off and loop round before coming back into the main flow.

So, for example, your straightforward case for preparing a set of annual accounts for a client assumes you have all the information already, the client approves your draft immediately and you can go straight on to filing them.  But what happens if you don’t have all the information?  Or the client doesn’t bother to get back to you with approval?  The process needs to deal with these too.  These are alternative routes through the process – loops in your process river if you like.  And that’s exactly how I like to represent them.

Here’s another example.  For a maintenance business, the ‘straightforward’ case is the typical reactive, unscheduled job: