As every Chelsea gardener knows, the best way to protect your garden from wind is not a solid wall or fence, but a permeable barrier like a hedge.
This filters the wind, slowing it down, letting in fresh air to circulate among your precious plants and shrubs without damaging them.
A solid barrier on the other hand lets air crash over it like a wave – and then falls at the first gale.
This is the second post inspired by an extract from ‘Leadership and The New Science’ by Margaret Wheatley, entitled “Change, Stability, and Renewal: The Paradoxes of Self-Organising Systems“
To recap: if a business has a strong frame of reference in place – its Promise of Value and its ‘way we do things round here’ – then it can be confident that any changes that occur will be consistent with that frame of reference.
This means that not only a business can afford to be open to small variations (what Holacracy calls ‘tensions’), it needs to be – especially to small, persistent variations that are driven by the people it serves – its customers.
This in turn means that it makes sense to give people full autonomy to respond to variation, because you know they will do so in line with the Promise of Value at the core of the business, so no harm will be done, and because what starts as a small variation may well turn into a new opportunity, a new product or service, a new way of doing things, that makes the business stronger and more stable over time.
Most of us like things to stay the same, we seek order and predictability. We fear that loosening control will lead to too much fluctuation and eventually chaos, so we tend to keep systems rigid and control centralised.
The paradox is that the opposite is what we need to maintain the identity and stability of our business over the long term.
Not freedom or order, but freedom and order.
Discipline makes daring possible.
Last weekend I spent a day going through my old London Business School notes before throwing them out to make room. Its 21 years since I did my Sloan Fellowship, so this stuff is bound to be out of date.
Still, I skim-read quite a bit of it – lecture notes, my coursework, case studies – along the way, and I was struck by how much of it still resonated, especially an extract from ‘Leadership and The New Science’ by Margaret Wheatley, entitled “Change, Stability, and Renewal: The Paradoxes of Self-Organising Systems“
According to Ms Wheatley, that’s not at all surprising. One of the characteristics of a self-organising system (e.g. a human being) is that “as it changes, it does so by referring to itself [autopoietically]; whatever future form it takes will be consistent with its already established identity”, “when the environment demands a new response, there is a reference point for change.”
For a business that reference point is it’s Promise of Value. The more clearly and explicitly that is spelt out, and built into the way a business works, the more resilient that business will be – not because it won’t change, but because changes will always be adopted in a way that is consistent with that Promise.
As long as the system is self-organising, that is. More on that tomorrow.
Books updated per labour hour. VAT Returns filed per labour hour. Annual Accounts filed per labour hour. Client profit margin … Read More “Productivity”
Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.
So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.
Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.
But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”
Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.
Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.
Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.
3 points:
Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.
A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.
A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.
It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.
Nothing says ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ quite like a wall. Whichever side you’re on.
Except of course that isn’t how people work.
In practice, each fort along the wall becomes the nucleus of a community, a vicus or neighbourhood, made up of the garrison and the local people who service it; adopting each others’ fashions, assimilating aspects of each others culture.
As a business, it pays to be really clear who your Promise is for; to put a metaphorical wall around ‘Us’, so that a prospect can easily tell which side they are on.
But it shouldn’t be set in stone. Walk your boundaries regularly, see where new neighbourhoods are forming and adjust accordingly.
PS my friend Lisa Settle is trekking the other Wall to raise funds for more research into Type 1 Diabetes.
I first became interested in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at school. I read everything I could about them, gradually expanding my reading to encompass their associates, friends and family, then widened further to include adjacent or overlapping art styles such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau.
Years later, I’m still surprised by finding new connections between artist craftspeople of this era and people who designed and things I actually own.
The most interesting thing about this is how organic it is – a furniture maker’s nephew becomes a glass designer, a family friend gets roped in to help with embroidery and ends up founding a needlework school.
It took longer than we would like today, but gradually, these people changed the world around them, and continue to do so.
Something worth remembering in the rush for exit.
The Shakers knew that people wouldn’t be able to resist chair-tilting, so they invented a mechanism that would make it safe for the chair and for the person.
They also made their chairs beautiful.
That’s what I call user-centric design.
When a big change comes along, imposed from outside, we tend to view it as a problem. A rock thrown in our path – unnecessarily, we think.
But its possible to view it as a welcome opportunity, a chance to pause on the road and reflect on what we’re doing, why we are doing it and who for.
If I was an accountant, now that the first part of MTD is out of the way, I’d be asking myself:
What is the job of an accountant?
Who can I best serve?
What do they really want?
How does MTD and its ramifications help me put the answers to these questions in place?
That rock might just be a signpost to a better path.
Nobody likes reporting. It gets in the way of doing the job.
Because it feels like an extra task, it gets pushed back to the last minute, and possibly even made up. Worse, it can be very tempting to request more information in a report, because ‘they’re reporting anyway’.
On the other hand, feedback is essential if a business is to thrive and evolve.
So how best to get feedback you can rely on?
Firstly, keep it simple. What is the least you need to know whether are not things are going well?
Secondly, make collecting that information a side-effect of doing the job. The trick here is to find a step in your process that creates its own trail. A step that either gives you the data you need or can act as a proxy for it. If that’s not possible, sample instead of monitoring continuously.
Of course, reporting as we know it only happens because the person doing the job is not the person making decisions about how best to do the job.
That’s where the real problem lies, and the solution to that is responsible autonomy.