Systems Thinking – Page 45 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 8, 2020

Instrumental

“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.” Eric Reis to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

“In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.” Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini in “Humanocracy”.

If all organisations are instruments, tools for making and shaping people and things, you have to ask:

“What kind of things does my business shape?” and “What kind of people does my business make?”.

The answer might seem obvious, but I’m not sure the obvious answer is always the ‘real’ one. Especially for business-to-business firms and professional services. The ‘real’ answer for you will be driven by your view of the world, but I think it’s worth exploring, because it opens up a different way of thinking about what a business is for.

For example, does an accounting practice make sets of accounts? Or does it make businesses? And in the process, does it help shape the people who work for it and with it?

I don’t know, but I can help you find out.

September 7, 2020

Rules, interpretation, performance.

Performing a piece of music isn’t simply a matter of reproducing a score (not even with a computer).

An orchestra rehearsing a piece will first read the score together; question it; interrogate what’s behind the notes to understand the composer’s intention and find better ways of expressing it. They’ll use their technical expertise to try different approaches – trying to bridge the gap between the person who wrote it and the people who will be hearing it. They’ll try out different interpretations, then agree on the interpretation to be performed.

Practising the chosen interpretation gets everyone in sync, but they will only really know if it worked through performance.

Performance is the source of useful feedback. Everything else is conjecture. The last night is unlikely to sound exactly like the first. The interpretation and it’s delivery will have been tweaked, to take account of the actual audience. The audience shows their appreciation in enthusiastic applause, repeat visits and recommendations to friends.

All creative endeavours – plays, films, dance, businesses – where people take a more or less abstract representation of proposed reality and make it real, go through a similar process.

It starts by learning the ‘rules’, proceeds through interrogation, questioning, trial and error into interpretation and performance. Every performance feeds back into future interpretations.

2 things to bear in mind if you’re looking to generate profitable, repeat performances through your business, that expand your audience:

The ‘rules’ can be sketchy, but it’s almost impossible to create outstanding performances intentionally, repeatedly and consistently without any.
Documenting the ‘rules’ is the beginning of the process, not the end.

September 3, 2020

Avoiding Bureaucracy

For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:

“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”

Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:

“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life. We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able. An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”

In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded. As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:

The questions to ask are:

Whose lives are you bettering?
At what cost to the rest of the world?

It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.

Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that. One of which is mine.

September 2, 2020

Humanocracy

This arrived yesterday evening (see why I need an extension?).

The promise is to “show you how to create an unstoppable movement to create an organization that’s fit for the future and fit for human beings.”

I’m looking forward to reading it, although I suspect it won’t go far enough for me.

I’ll keep you posted.

September 1, 2020

There’s nothing new under the sun

A coal mine isn’t the kind of place that springs immediately to mind when you think of innovative, even revolutionary forms of management, but as the Corporate Rebels shared today, that’s exactly what Eric Trist found at Haighmoor Colliery, way back in the 1940s.

The article is well worth a read, but what really resonated for me were these highlights:

“Miners were recognised for ‘cycle completion’: meaning being jointly responsible for the whole extraction process.”
“The miners not only ran the mining job. They also took care of selling the coal they mined. They were responsible for the product they produced.”
“a reward policy based on a basic wage and a bonus linked to productivity of the group throughout the extraction cycle, rather than a single shift.”
“Each miner at Haighmoor could handle a half-dozen jobs. That meant each could take on multiple team roles.”
“All teams were multidisciplinary.”
because the miners could influence their own work, they continuously innovated.”

Observing these work practices, Eric Trist and his former coal miner colleague, Ken Bamforth, called the whole thing practising “responsible autonomy”.

Sound familiar?

Which begs the question:

If we already know that responsible autonomy works, why aren’t we practising it more often?

August 25, 2020

Stage Management

Making sure the right props are in the right place at the right time is an important job in theatre or film (check out The Goes Wrong Show for what happens when it’s not done well).

It’s an important job in business too, although it’s rarely considered as such. More often than not it turns into everybody’s job, which makes it nobody’s job, which makes it something that doesn’t happen consistently.

The answer is to think through the process your business runs (how you Share your Promise, and How you Keep your Promise) from beginning to end. As you do, you’ll identify where each business prop is used or referred to. Once you know this you can start to automate the ‘Stage Manager’ role.

Most importantly, you’ll see where it is easiest to create each prop, because that’s where the information it embodies is naturally and easily gathered.

As far as possible, you want this to happen as a side-effect of doing what people want to do anyway. This is why cloud accounting is such a brilliant thing. Clients do what they do – raise invoices, pay bills, log expenses, manage bank accounts. The side effect of all this is that all the props needed to produce a VAT return or monthly management reports are ready and waiting for the accountant to work with.

Where this isn’t possible, sharing the text of the play (your process) makes the downstream impact visible.

Salespeople, for example, are notoriously rubbish at logging client details, even though they are the people who naturally have all the information to hand. That’s because they don’t feel the impact on what comes after them. From a business perspective a sale isn’t complete until the customer has received what they paid for and is happy with it.

That means that, like the bricklayer’s labourer, part of what every salesperson produces is the productivity of the people down the line.

Your business is like a play. Each role in your business contributes to the productivity of the whole play. Recognise that in the way you reward people, and you’ve created an incentive for improvement.

August 24, 2020

Invisible processes

The walls of our new extension are going up fast. It’s fascinating to watch how quickly they grow under the bricklayers hands.

In part this is because the bricklayer is good. He’s fast, accurate and meticulous.

But at least as much of the speed is due to the parallel activities of his labourer, who systematically ensures that blocks, bricks and mortar are to hand before the bricklayer needs them. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. As the wall grows, ‘to hand’ moves from atop a stack of blocks, to sat on a hop-up, to set out on a high platform rigged from trestles and scaffold boards.

It’s a whole construction/deconstruction/reconstruction process in its own right, that requires brains as well brawn, yet will leave no trace once the wall is finished. All so the bricklayer can do nothing but exercise his considerable skill.

This labouring role may be lower paid, and lower status, but it is essential if you want to get the most out of a bricklayer. In essence, the labourer’s product is the productivity of the bricklayer.

Perhaps this should inform how this kind of work is rewarded?

August 19, 2020

Mash-ups

Humans love mash-ups. Collisions of disparate ideas to form a new, even more interesting idea. Given the chance, we mash-up all the time – most obviously to make each other laugh.

Surprisingly often, a mash-up leads to a breakthrough, and even more often, these breakthrough mash-ups come from an outsider asking a ‘stupid question’ – “Why can’t I see the picture now Daddy?”, “Why can’t I cast iron the way I used to cast brass?“.

If you’re running a business, you want mash-ups to occur, but not at the expense of delivering on your promises. So how can you achieve a balance?

Keep your Promise of Value tight.
Keep your Customer Experience Score loose.
Recruit from as diverse a pool of experience, mindset, interests and backgrounds as you can.
Admit only those who buy into the Promise.
Leave room for randomness.
Create a process for capturing, testing, building and rewarding mash-ups that help you fulfil your Promise better.
If someone comes up with a great mash-up that doesn’t fit your Promise, help them to turn it into a new business.

Sparked by ‘Rebel Ideas’ by Matthew Syed, recommended and kindly given to me by Nigel Whittaker.

August 18, 2020

Recipes do not a restaurant make.

I enjoy cooking, and do it every day.

When I make lunch, sometimes I follow a procedure (a recipe), but mostly I use techniques and rules of thumb I’ve learned over the years to create a simple, one-course meal out of whatever I happen to have at the time.

This kind of cooking is fine for my lunch. My ‘Promise of Value’ to my husband is a tasty, filling and nutritious lunch. He doesn’t really care how I get there.

For Sunday dinner though, I need more than a procedure and a set of techniques. I’ll use several procedures (roast chicken, yorkshire pudding, accompanying vegetables, pudding), and loads of techniques (roasting, making a batter, boiling, steaming, baking).

But the thing that really makes Sunday dinner work is that I co-ordinate all the main course procedures so they finish at the same time, while pudding arrives at just the right interval later. That’s what I call a process.

Now imagine I want to open a restaurant.

Even with a limited menu, I’ll have different tables working at different timescales, with different options. Not only do I have to get meals cooked on time, I’ll need to make sure there are enough clean tables, dishes and cutlery. I’ll need to greet guests, take orders, offer drinks, and serve dinners. Several of them, all at once.

In other words one overall process (Lunch) is actually the co-ordination of multiple instances of several processes, which are in turn the co-ordination of several procedures – all designed to deliver the same Promise of Value (“Sunday Dinners like your Mother used to make”).

If I don’t work out what those processes should be, so I can deliver my Promise effectively for less than I charge, I won’t have a restaurant for long. If I design them to over-deliver for less than I charge, I’ve got the start of a restaurant chain.

‘Process’ is a word that’s bandied about quite a bit. Like all jargon it can be misused or misunderstood, but it’s definitely bigger than a recipe.

August 14, 2020

The artist’s hand

“They say that truth is naked. I cannot admit this for any but abstract truths; in the arts, all truths are produced by methods which show the hand of the artist.” Delacroix, ‘Journal’.

Your business is your art, your Promise of Value is your truth. Let your people be your fellow artists, and show their hands in the work.

HT to Project Gutenberg for tweeting this. They happen to be a brilliant open source for free e-books.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking