Systems Thinking – Page 42 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 14, 2021

Fractals

I was delighted to see Matt Black Systems feature again in this week’s Corporate Rebels blog. I’ve told their story so often, since I visited them back in 2012.

I’m even more delighted to see that they offer consulting on how to apply their fractal model for businesses.

The fundamental thing that makes that model work, as I discovered on my visit, is responsible autonomy. Enabled by process. Rewarded by profit.

That makes it a natural model that can work in any business.

They’ve also published a book. It’s been ordered. Of course.

January 11, 2021

I love it when somebody else finds ways to say things better than I can. Here’s a great post from Corporate Rebels exploring how 2 very different companies found similar ways to turnaround and then grow:

3 Principles To Run A Company Sensibly

“both were motivated to adopt their unique methodologies to rescue the struggling companies they were leading. They wanted to save the jobs of people in their organizations. They thought this could be achieved by giving all an understanding of how the businesses were run—and then involve them in improving them. Their way of saving jobs became a new way to create jobs. These new jobs created new wealth. This wealth, was then shared with those who created it in the first place: all those in the company.”

In other words, they created a virtuous flywheel that didn’t depend on the bosses.

Sounds sensible to me. Flywheels get going faster when everyone pushes in the same direction.

January 8, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 1

The first step in defining a business process is to work out where you want to be at the end of it. More precisely, where do you want the person you are serving to be at the end of it.

This involves stepping up a level or two from your usual narrative – from the minutiae of how it gets done to what it is you are really trying to achieve. This helps you identify ‘what’ has to happen, which in turn can open you up to different ‘hows’ for making it happen.

Write down (or better still get someone else to write down) the process you want to think about as a narrative. Then ask yourself these questions:

What things should be true after this process is completed?
Which of those things is truly meaningful to the person you are serving (your prospect, client or customer)?
- What is it that matters to them?
- What difference will they notice?
- What is it that they are paying you for?
How could you best sum that up in a two-word phrase, composed of a verb followed by a noun? This phrase should be binary, it’s either true or it’s not. You’ve either done it or you haven’t.

Now you’ve found the point of your process. It’s probably much bigger than you thought.

January 5, 2021

The joy of sameness.

Patterns are a shortcut to previous experience. They enable us to see similarities beyond a mass of detailed differences. We enjoy repetition and sameness – as long as there are enough differences to stimulate us, and keep our eye moving.

The same goes for processes. Sameness is good. A pattern is easy to grasp and easy to remember. That gives us freedom to fill in the details differently when needed.

The trouble is, when we try to communicate a process to other people, we tend to focus on the detail, not the pattern. We feel we have to capture every exception, every flourish and curlicue, every nuance. The result is a mess, that takes too long to untangle and so languishes unused and ignored. Or an unwieldy encyclopedia of micro-patterns – forms, checklists, procedures that makes it impossible to see the patterns that matter.

So if you’re trying to capture process in your business, try looking for the pattern first. Imagine you’re up a level from the process you’re trying to describe, above it, rather than in it, seeing the path through the woods rather than the immediate undergrowth.

Here’s a brilliant example of someone doing that in a completely different context, to free people from the tyranny of recipes or ready-prepared meals.

The Discipline of pattern is what makes Daring possible in execution.

Thanks to The Intuitive Cook for the inspiration.

December 17, 2020

Order without control

“Improvisation is what life does. Nothing living, from a bacterium to a blue whale, has a script for their life. This includes you. Somehow or other every living being copes with untold complexity without a plan, and always has.” Robert Poynton ‘DO/IMPROVISE’

‘The counter argument to that’, my husband replies, ‘is that these are the result of millions of generations of evolution and dead-ends. You and I don’t have that much time, which is why we plan and design’.

I agree, and to be fair, Poynton isn’t recommending that we improvise our way through life and business (although it would be interesting to explore how far we could go with that, like lilies of the field). And living things aren’t improvising randomly. That ‘somehow or other’ is underpinned by a set of simple rules for responding to things you can’t control. The driver is a process that leads to a single outcome, reproduction. The result is ‘order without control’, a self-organising system for delivering an outcome.

But without the capacity to improvise, all you have is a machine. Inflexible, slow to change and ultimately fragile.

You don’t need to build a business as a machine, with every thing designed precisely down to the nth degree. Get the driver right, then let improvisation keep it relevant. Create a process for delivering the right customer experience, driven by your unique Promise of Value. Use the process as a framework for action, that empowers your people to see the offer in the unexpected or exceptional and act accordingly.

The discipline that makes daring possible leads to order without control and a business that truly lives.

Forever if you want it to.

December 16, 2020

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that

Of course life isn’t really an improv show.

In business and sometimes in life we have an idea of where we want to go, where we want to end up. What ‘Everything’s An Offer’ really means is that you should take things that happen outside your control (Covid-19, Brexit, losing a client or prospect, that unexpected pregnancy) as a potential gift, rather than a threat or a thwart.

You probably already do this on holiday, when you’re playing. A few years ago my husband and I were in Graz, having a few days off. We were headed to a particular part of town to see something, but we decided to wander ‘in the general direction’ and see what we found.

We smelt the offer first – a lovely, fruity, alcoholic whiff from what what looked like a garage at the bottom of a block of flats. Then we saw the stills it was coming from. We stopped and looked into the door of the ‘garage’ to see if we could make sense of it; spoke to the guy loading up a van. He pointed us across the road to the distillery shop. Hazelnut schnapps (among several delicious flavours). An offer we couldn’t refuse. We bought a bottle, then carried on wandering towards our destination.

Nassim Taleb calls this being a ‘flâneur‘, someone who walks, not aimlessly, but open to deviation that has no downside and might lead to an upside. Its a crucial element of being antifragile.

You don’t have to to take up an offer, unless it helps you get to where you want to be, or to somewhere more interesting that you hadn’t foreseen, but it helps to tell yourself “Here’s an offer. Could it help or hinder?” before you decide. The answer isn’t always obvious.

December 7, 2020

Coming unstuck

Our new extension has been the cat’s favourite place to be for several weeks now. She’s refused to move for any reason – hoovering, sanding, cutting and painting leave her cold. She’s loved tucking herself in between bags of plaster, or atop bumpy piles of tools, or inside empty boxes.

So far, she’s stayed safe. Over the last week we have cut and laid over 20 square metres of flooring. She did pretty well at keeping out of the glue we spread down – until the last 1/2 metre.

It was at this point I was grateful to the chemists that designed the glue. I grabbed her and simply wiped her gluey paws with a wet J-cloth. Job done, minimal fuss, no repercussions.

It’s a reminder that when you design a product or a service, you have to assume that one day, someone or some thing, who doesn’t know what you know, with no clue about what it is, or what it does, is going to encounter it. And in that case ‘do no harm’ has to be your watchword.

What would happen if a cat metaphorically traipsed through your nicely laid glue?

Do you even know?

December 4, 2020

Contexts

One of the many things I like about Lou Downe’s book “Good Services”, is that it goes beyond the boundaries of the service, even of the business. For example, as part of principle number 12: “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”, this comes up:

“A good service is good for everyone

Users

Staff

Your organisation

The world”

Here’s a useful tool for judging how your business is doing with that:

Check out the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for more useful tools and ideas on this. Including how ‘the doughnut’ varies across countries and the world – opening up some astonishing opportunities for business as a force for good.

Do you remember writing your name out as a child? Locating your intensely individual self inside progressively larger contexts until you reached ‘The Universe’?

When did we forget how to do that?

It’s a game worth repeating now and then.

December 3, 2020

What gets measured, gets done.

“Good Services” principle number 12 is “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”

The “right behaviours” are up to you. They are the behaviours that live up to the Promise you have made to prospects and clients. You can encourage them to happen by building in reminders of why an Activity or Process gets done, and by making sure the right things are measured and rewarded – or more importantly, that the wrong things aren’t.

An old example: A Chinese emperor offered a financial reward for dead rats. The intention was to reduce the population of rats plaguing the country. The outcome was that people started breeding rats to get the reward.

A recent example: Under Tony Blair, GPs were given a target of no more than 48 hours waiting time for an appointment. The intention was to have GP practices create more capacity. The outcome was that it became impossible to book an appoint more than 48 hours in advance, and almost impossible to get an appointment at all.

A financial example: CEOs of listed companies are often rewarded through share options. The intention is that by prudent management and investment, the business generates more value for shareholders. The outcome is often a slow decline followed by a sudden collapse of the business, as CEOs find ‘easier’ ways to raise the share price that actually damage the viability of the business.

We humans are lazy AND ingenious. If you want people to do ‘the right thing’, you have to make that the easiest and most rewarding option. You have to build processes that go with the grain.

Designing those processes takes thought and effort. It means cycling through some difficult questions:

What do I really want people to do? How do I really want them to behave?
If I want them to do that, how do I measure it? Is that easy to capture or does it make more work?
If I use this as the measure, what else might be done to achieve it? Do I want that?

…and back again to the beginning.

It’s hard work, that requires going against the grain. But the payoff is well worth it, for everyone.

December 2, 2020

Inclusivity

The 11th principle outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” “A good service is usable by everyone, equally”, follows on from the previous one, and similarly, gets broken when companies don’t think hard enough about who their users are, and what the circumstances of that user might realistically be at the time they need to use the service. Nowadays it’s very hard to get a decent job without having a bank account, and impossible to get a bank account without having somewhere to live. That makes getting a proper job much harder than it should be for someone who is homeless – even if they have just become homeless and jobless through no fault of their own.

I’m exploring these principles from a different perspective, that of a business that delivers through other people. From this perspective, your team are your users, and services are the processes you build to help them share and deliver your promise on your behalf.

Looked at this way, it seems to me that principle no 11 is hardly ever applied inside companies. We expect every employee to conform to an impossible ideal of whatever is ‘normal’ for us – perfectly fit, permanently healthy, well-balanced and educated. We expect them to behave as if they have nobody to consider except themselves. We assume they are willing and able to fit their home-life around the demands of the business.

A little reflection on how your own life has changed over the years should make it obvious that this is unrealistic and unfair. And coronavirus has made many realise that it isn’t that difficult to put right.

So, as you design the services through which your team will deliver, thereby earning their living, make sure they are able to do that whatever their circumstances. Enable flexible working, remote working, part-time working, job-sharing. Make the process adaptable, so that each person can adjust things to suit their abilities and working style. Measure results instead of attendance. Make admin and reporting a side-effect of the process and ensure feedback is sent when and where it has the best effect.

The brilliant thing is that by making your services deliverable by anyone, you make it easier for everyone, and give yourself a wider, deeper pool of talent to draw on. By making the job easier for your team, you’ll deliver better results for your clients, and your business.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking