Systems Thinking – Page 43 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

December 1, 2020

Dead ends

Arguably, my experience with Screwfix the other day was due to breaking this 10th principle of service design: “A Good Service should have no dead ends.”

When the local store had to close unexpectedly and temporarily, whoever was responsible for closing didn’t have authority to update the main company website. They had reached a dead-end in the process for closing a store, which in turn led to a dead-end for me, the customer.

When you’re designing a service or process it’s a good idea to start with the most straightforward and most frequently occuring case. But as soon as have this, you need to consider likely exceptions, and include them in your documentation. One important exception many forget, is that your product or service is simply ‘not for’ the person trying to use it. This is a legitimate ‘dead end’ in a way, but helping them to make an orderly and elegant exit will do no harm to your reputation.

Often, dead-ends occur when you haven’t fully considered who your users might be. Not every shopper is 100% fit and able-bodied. Heavy doors and steps become dead-ends for the disabled, frail or heavy-laden. Small print makes a web-page a dead-end for someone short-sighted. Small buttons or too-precise hand-movements create dead-ends for the arthritic or shaky-handed. As my husband found out recently, 2-factor authentication makes online banking a dead-end for those who don’t have a mobile phone.

Of course, you’ll never be able to predict every possible exception or variation, so you need to make sure your service or process always has an ‘escape route’. A good start is to enable a user (whether customer or team member) to talk to a human being with sufficient experience and authority to handle anything.

If you find this backstop is called on regularly or too often, you’ve discovered another common exception you didn’t allow for.

As long as you learn from the times the backstop is called for, your organisation will quickly learn to minimise the need for it.

November 30, 2020

How to really annoy your customers

Here’s why keeping your service consistent across channels matters. Yesterday I drove down to our nearest Screwfix trade counter, to collect stuff we needed to start laying the floor. I’d ordered these things online a few days earlier and chosen to collect rather than have it delivered. I’d dutifully waited for the SMS messages that would notify me it had arrived at my chosen store and was ready to collect. But when I turned up, the store was ‘temporarily closed’.

After navigating the labyrinth of phone messages designed to prevent you ever speaking to human being, after 10 minutes, I got through to someone, I explained my predicament. They consulted their manager.

“That store closed a few days ago. It should be open again soon.”

“The website said it was open.”

“If you google it, it says it says it’s temporarily closed.”

“Why on earth would I google it, when I’ve already ordered and paid for everything on the main website? Why would I google it when I know where the store is, and I’ve received 2 separate SMS messages telling me that my order is ready for collection?”

“Oh.”

We got it sorted after a bit of nudging. The person on the other end of the phone found me the next nearest Screwfix that had what I wanted in stock, and cancelled my order. But a slick and easy service was totally undermined by a lack of consistency.

And, I suspect, by a failure of delegation.

November 26, 2020

Streamlining

‘Streamlining’ was very fashionable back in the 1930s and 40s. Originally pure engineering, the purpose was to reduce drag over fast moving vehicles such as trains, planes and automobiles.

However, the look quickly got taken up as a badge of modernity, often accentuated with totally unnecessary, usually shiny protuberances, that looked the part, but actually increased friction. Eventually, ‘streamlining’ got applied to all sorts of things that were never going to move, never mind create drag – record players, light fittings, buildings.

The point is to remember who it’s for. That’s where Good Services principle no. 8 comes in: “A good service requires as few steps as possible to complete.” For the user. If you deliver through other people, they are effectively the user.

What does “as few steps as possible” really mean? For me, this:

Each step is a meaningful move in the right direction from the perspective of the client. This often means that steps are bigger than you’re used to thinking of. If I want to hire a car, filling a form in isn’t meaningful to me, but choosing a car from those you have available is.
Each step is completely self-contained. There is no possibility of ‘limbo’ (or purgatory). A step is complete or its not. That way, everyone knows exactly where you are in the overall process.
You couldn’t add another step to the process without muddying it.
You couldn’t remove any step from the process without breaking it.

Streamlining a process into as few steps as possible isn’t necessarily about speed either. The process itself may take a long time. Individual steps may take a long time, or there may be long gaps between them:

The service, or process, should be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and possible to deliver with minimal interaction from you, or anyone else in your business.

Of course, achieving this might mean re-organising your business. But it will be worth it.

November 23, 2020

Constructive interference

We don’t know what we don’t know. Neither do we know what our clients and colleagues don’t know. And we often take for granted the things we do know.

So, a useful thing to do every day might be to ask:

“What do I take for granted that I know, that the people I serve don’t or may not know?

How could I best share that?

It’s a ripple in a pond, but who knows where it might end up?

November 19, 2020

What’s on the inside doesn’t matter

Good Services principle no. 7: “A good service is agnostic to organisational structures”.

In other words, the way you organise your company’s resources to deliver on your Promise of Value should essentially, be invisible and irrelevant to your customers and clients.

What if you took it further, so that your team and your clients saw the same service, one from the inside, one from the outside? What if you then made those services the basis for your organisational structure?

That would make life easier for everyone, wouldn’t it?

November 18, 2020

Assume no prior knowledge

Here’s another simple solution to the confusion I experienced the other day – don’t assume I know what all you suppliers know, and include the unit of measurement with the price.

Nicely leading in to principle no. 6: “A good service requires no prior knowledge to use”.

In this mini-series of blogs, I’m working through the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as a way of exploring how Service Design principles might apply to services that are delivered through people, rather than through online systems.

My thinking is that if you think of your people as users, you can design your operational processes as services that enable your users to deliver the business promise on your behalf. And if you follow the design principles for good services, you’ll build a scalable and resilient operation.

Back then, to principle no. 6. As Lou puts it: “There is no service that will be used just by people who have used it before.”

When someone new joins your business they don’t know what you know. They don’t know how you work, even if they have years of experience in the same field. That means that they will automatically follow their own assumptions about how things work, and default to doing things the way they know. If you have deliberately made yourself exactly the same as every one of your competitors, this is fine, but I happen to think that’s unlikely.

So the question is, how do you address this? Here are some ideas:

Make as much as possible as self-explanatory as possible – like having a flat plate on the ‘push’ side of a door.
Give people a map, that shows the destinations and the different routes for getting there, and a compass for in case they get lost. Or, if you prefer a different analogy, a score to follow.
Train people in your way of doing things. Base your training on a familiar model, like learning to drive, or to fly a plane, and let them master the basics in a simulator first. Teach all the likely scenarios, not just what happens to occur during their first week with you.
Build resources that will help newbies to learn (and oldies to remember) for themselves – explainer videos, detailed instructions, useful techniques, tricks and tips. Make sure your map or score includes pointers to these, but isn’t cluttered up with them.
Include meta-services “What to do if you don’t know what to do“, “Where to look for answers.” that give people a way in.
Follow all the principles of good Product and Service Design.

In other words, “Design your company, or it will be designed for you.”

November 13, 2020

Enable outcomes

The systems and processes we build in our businesses are geared towards the outcomes we seek. All too often, those outcomes revolve around the boss, the board, or the shareholders – making targets, preparing reports, increasing share prices. The real purpose of the business – to make and keep promises for clients – gets lost, even though this is how the internal outcomes actually get achieved.

When you build a business of any size, you need to work through others, and you need to be able to trust that they can deliver as you would, without having to stand over them. I believe the best way to achieve that is to build systems and processes that support people to manage themselves.

In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use Service Design ideas to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for making and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!

A service is a process that helps a user to do something. Your team wants to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. That makes them users of the services you build.

Principle number 4 is simple, but surprisingly deep. “A good service enables a user to complete the outcome they set out to do.” Even if that outcome is bigger than your service.

The thing to remember here is that your service may be only a step towards the outcome the user is trying to achieve. We humans tend to arrive at a business with tactics: “I need social media support”, or “I need a large screen TV“, keeping the strategy behind it to ourselves “I want to launch a new product“, “I’m building a home cinema.“. Even a large service can be a tactic “I want an extension to my house.” could be a step on the way to “I’m growing my family“, or “I’m sorting my house out before we retire“, or “I’m building a property portfolio as my pension.“

Finding out more about the strategy behind the service your client has requested is key to unlocking more value for them and for you. You know you can help your client achieve the tactical outcome – that’s why they came to you. If you help them move even further towards their strategic objective, you’ll exceed your own promise to them And that creates loyalty and advocacy – even if you never make a sale.

Let me illustrate this with a story. Many years ago, I came across a young woman selling chocolate-related treats from a converted vintage ice-cream van. The treats were cold in summer, hot in winter. They were quirky and delightful, and me being me, I asked her if she’d considered franchising it. She had, and we agreed to discuss it. At the time, I was working with my friend Barnaby Wynter, and I knew he should be involved, so we both sat down with this young entrepreneur to talk about what she wanted to achieve and how we could help.

We talked for two, maybe three hours. We got her life story, her hopes, her dreams and her vision for a new kind of street life, centered around food, fairness and culture. All three of us agreed that franchising the ice-cream van wasn’t the right service for her. We could have done it. It would have been successful, but it wasn’t the outcome she was really looking for. I’m not sure even she knew that before we started our conversation, but she did by the end. That young woman went on to found KERB.

So what does this mean in practice for designing services to support your team?

First off, make sure you include a step right at the beginning of your Share Promise service that enables a team member to uncover a prospect’s overall objectives. This may be as simple as asking “What do you want to use it for?”, or “Why do you need that?”, or it may be a longer and deeper conversation, along the lines covered by a Dale Carnegie sales training course.

Next, cultivate ways to meet more of those discovered objectives yourself. That might mean adding new products or services to your offering, or it might mean building a network of trusted co-providers you can refer someone to. People in this network should be willing and able to return the favour when they are the point of entry for the client. In fact, if you start to recognise that a particular strategic objective is common, you could even create a consortium or eco-system of fellow businesses to deliver the whole package.

The outcome your users (your team) seek is to share your business’s promise, and to keep or exceed it for the people who sign up. That means that the services you design must be focused on the client, and the outcomes they are really looking for.

By enabling your team to enable your clients to achieve their larger objectives, your business will easily hit its targets, have interesting stuff to report to the board, and if that’s your thing, improve your share price.

November 5, 2020

Foraging

Mushrooms seem like fleeting things. Ephemeral. Fragile. And they are. But the mycelium that throws them up is long-lived, non-stop … Read More “Foraging”

October 30, 2020

To Do

What is a to do list, really?

Sometimes, they are steps in a process.

More often though, they are a cross section through a set of processes you are running in parallel.

That means that prioritising to dos is easier if you can see which processes will move forwards as a result.

Turning processes into to do lists has the opposite effect.

October 28, 2020

Maintenance

Maintenance. None of us want to do it. Most of us don’t even want to know it’s being done. We hide it. We put it off, and off, and off again, even though we know that ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’.

Why is that I wonder? Animals and birds seem to do maintenance instinctively. Birds pop food in one end of their nestlings, then tug poop out of the other. Nests and dens are rebuilt or cleared out regularly. How have we humans lost this?

Maintenance of all kinds is what keeps our systems and ecosystems going, but we don’t value it. We don’t even want to see that it’s being done. We hide it in basements and cupboards, offsite, even offshore. And we certainly don’t value the people who do it, we turn them into quasi-servants, invisible, ‘low-skill’, and therefore deserving only low wages.

Until something breaks. Then we love them, applaud them, can’t thank them enough. 5 minutes later, we’re ignoring them again.

Maintenance isn’t sexy, but it is essential. It’s high time we got better at it.

As a start, perhaps we should all do more of it ourselves?

I’m off to clean the oven.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking