Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Systems Thinking

The Joy of Tax
July 12, 2019

The Joy of Tax

When things flow, it is sometimes possible to be wrong about their direction.   Like when you’re sitting on a train at a station, and you think it’s started moving when it’s not, because the train next to you has started moving the opposite way.

When you’re operating within a system of systems, as we all are, all of the time, it is sometimes possible to misinterpret a symptom as a cause or a cause as a symptom.

It helps to take a step away every now and then and look for the bigger picture, to try and see how things might work differently, rather than trusting your assumptions.

Writers of all kinds can help us do this.  Their assumptions may be wrong too of course, but at least they help us become aware that we’re making them.  Sometimes, they even help us change them.

 

I thoroughly recommend reading The Joy of Tax, by Richard Murphy.  Even if you don’t agree about the joy.

People will always want [insert naughty but nice product here]
July 8, 2019

People will always want [insert naughty but nice product here]

Building a business around giving people what they want, even when you know it isn’t good for them, seems like another safe option.  After all, most of us, like Oscar Wilde, can resist anything except tempation.

But what happens, when someone decides to use the ‘want’ as merely a route in, a way to deliver something much more than the immediate gratification of a fleeting desire?

Tony’s Chocolonely doesn’t simply make 100% slave-free chocolate.   Once you’ve know about it, you can’t avoid the question: “Is there slavery in the bar I’m eating now?”.

 

Happy Birthday
July 4, 2019

Happy Birthday

James Lovelock is 100 years old today.

Dr Lovelock is best known for his ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – the idea that living things interact with their non-living environment to create a synergistic, self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life.

The hypothesis has come in for a lot of criticism over the years (after all, it is a hypothesis, not a theory), but the idea of the Earth as a system seems obvious to us now.

This wasn’t the case when Lovelock developed his idea, while working at NASA in the 60’s. And for me, this is the core of his contribution – he gave scientists a new paradigm for thinking about the Earth and our relationship to it, that enabled them to improve our understanding of how it works, and how it might evolve.

That’s quite an achievement.

Happy Birthday Dr Lovelock!

Research
July 3, 2019

Research

I’ve been researching the history and theory of accounting, and I have to say I’m finding it fascinating, not least because it leads off into some very interesting side-alleys.

Along the way I found the Digital Commons Network, an excellent resource.

But the best thing is finding that I’m not wrong about some of the questions I want to ask.

What questions would you ask of Accounting?

Questions
June 28, 2019

Questions

People are asking big questions about accountancy.

Both from a technology perspective, as in this paper from Deloitte, and from a more existential perspective, exemplified by Professor Richard Murphy and the Corporate Accountability Network.

Big changes create great opportunities to re-think our models of the world as consumers and as producers.

Where do you think accountancy should go?   What should accountants do?  For whom?  What do we want from accountants?   Most importantly, what could we want?  What should we want?

Big questions, now is a good time to ask them.

Learned carelessness
June 24, 2019

Learned carelessness

Here’s a scary thought.   When their satnav says there is a road, but all they can see is water, drivers will believe the satnav, rather than their own eyes, and end up having to be rescued.

Luckily, most of the time the results of such satnav errors are not drastic – they simply start the conversation after a late arrival – “You won’t believe where the satnav took us!”

But the phenomenon behind these stories – automation bias or “learned carelessness” – is a serious problem.   Confronted with a ‘black box’, whose workings we don’t understand, and which seems on the whole to be reliable, we humans switch off, stop monitoring, and stop thinking.  “Computer says no.”

There are ways to prevent this.

You can de-mystify the ‘black box’, so people understand that it is part of a system designed and built by humans to achieve certain ends; you can frame the information provided by the system as support or advice rather than instruction, and you can engage the human brain by making the human do some of the work – especially where there are other humans involved.

Automation is great, but I want the best of both worlds.

Thanks to James Bridle for sparking this one.

 

 

 

 

Why do I need good people if I have process? Evolution.
June 21, 2019

Why do I need good people if I have process? Evolution.

Why do I need good people if I have process?

No process can be designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality.

Without good people a process-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.

Good people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur.   They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the process.

Good people spark off constraints (such as a process), they ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities.

With a solid framework to play in, good people bring a business to life – they make it human.

Connection
June 3, 2019

Connection

‘Stuff’ is just a poor substitute for what people really want – autonomy, mastery, agency, purpose and above all connection.

With that in mind, the questions any business, new or established should be asking are these:

“What do the people I serve want to become?”

and

“How can I help them get there together?”

not,

“How can I play that to get them to buy my stuff”.

Black and White
May 28, 2019

Black and White

We humans like things to be clear-cut, black-and-white, yes-or-no, all-or-nothing.

Perhaps because that appears to make choosing a solution both easier and somehow more heroic.

Reality is rarely that simple, and if we treat it that way, we are likely to end up creating a lot more work for oursleves.