The Autonomous Enterprise – Page 12 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 26, 2020

Writer’s block

Like many people, I guess, I’m finding it harder to write every day during this crisis. Who wants to listen to me? What have I got to say that is worth saying? I’m not famous. I’m not powerful. I don’t feel relevant.

But.

I can read, and learn and think, and listen. And I can pass on stuff I think will help.

So here are 3 things I learned this morning that I think are worth sharing:

Out on my early morning walk, more people said ‘good morning’, ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ than I’ve ever had before. We said these things at least 2 metres apart, but we said them. Keeping our physical distance has given us an excuse to really see each other. I hope we can keep this politeness up. It feels good.
Richard Murphy shared this article today, from Tomas Pueyo on Government’s options for dealing with coronavirus. It is well worth a read. Science is always good.
Richard Murphy also shared his own AccountingWEB article today, on looking to the future. I’m going to quote the last 2 paragraphs here, because I think he’s right, we have to start thinking about this stuff now:

“Reaction five: Recovery

But the fifth, and crucial stage, is the one we need to already anticipate, however, overwhelmed we now feel. This will be the recovery stage, and although that might seem a long way off at present (and the wait may well seem interminable) it will happen. When it does, there will be at least as many problems as there or now, and in the immediate months to come. These need to be planned for, and good accountants will be doing that very soon.

Picking up a mothballed business and returning it to a thriving state is not easy. It demands a lot of working capital. Many businesses will have almost none. As a result, all the usual problems from overtrading will rear their ugly heads remarkably quickly when the recovery begins, and those businesses that might have made it through the immediate crisis might then discover that they cannot make it to the end of the year unless they begin to plan now.

Planning for the future

Many of us are facing enforced time at home, with too much Netflix for company. My suggestion is that anyone with responsibility for a business should use at least some of this time to think about their plans to reopening their activities when this crisis is over.

Deciding what goods, services, outlets and staff are key to that process, and working out how to phase the returns to normal is critical to survival. In particular, new product mixes, ways of delivery, supply chains and customer interactions all need to be thought about if success is to be likely.

This is not the time to sit and do nothing if businesses are to survive. There’s a massive amount to do. And now is the time to do it.”

So that gives me my theme for the next few weeks or months. How to use the unsettlement of the current crisis to think differently about how we do things, and lay the foundations for a more secure, sustainable and profitable future business.

Phew! I can feel useful again.

PS Seth Godin is right. There is no such thing as writer’s block. You just have to write.

March 25, 2020

How to quickly capture a business process/procedure/work instruction

With teams suddenly dispersed, all that tacit knowledge of ‘what it is we’re trying to do, and how to do it’, is much harder to access. You can’t simply shout across the office “How do I do X again?”

It will be very tempting to start automating everything. But you need to think about what you’re automating first, else you can get trapped in the software manufacturer’s model of how your business should work.

So here ‘s a quick guide to capturing ‘What we do round here’ that will work over Zoom, Skype etc.

Key Principles:

Assume competence.
The quicker you test it, the quicker you can improve it.
If it feels like you’re trying to fit too much in, you probably are.
It’s a prompt, not a novel.
Practice makes perfect.
It’s about the process not the people.

How to go about it:

Start with the most critical process.
Get someone else to help you.
Sketch the whole thing as a series of bubbles – 7 plus or minus one should cover it.
Start with the 80% case.
Start at the very beginning.
Carry on right to the end.
Think ‘Get Outcome’.

Follow the rapid improvement cycle:

You tell a colleague how it works, they write it down
They do it, following what you told them.
You observe, and where it goes wrong, between you, you modify the instructions to get the outcomes you want.
You clarify how it really works (not how you think it works).
They suggest ways to make it easy for them to do.
They write up the improved version.
Save the latest version where everyone can get at it.

Repeat until you have a work instruction/procedure/process that can be run reliably by anyone who needs to.

Automate the bits humans shouldn’t be doing. Then let the humans get on with the rest.

March 20, 2020

Learning together – online

Following on again from yesterday’s post, if you know your business is going to be quiet for the next few weeks or months, here are some courses I recommend (I’ve done most of them, some of them more than once).

They could be for you or for your team.

A whole bunch from Akimbo Workshops (Seth Godin and friends)

The Bootstrappers Workshop, ideal if you are still getting your business idea off the ground (which in my case was 5 years after I’d started!)

The Marketing Seminar, will make you think really hard about who you are for, and what you really do for them. Highly recommended.

The Podcasting Workshop, a brilliant thing for graduates to do instead of an internship, and for experts too. (I haven’t done this one, you can probably tell!)

The Freelancers Workshop, Seth calls himself a freelancer, so you’re in good company.

The Story Skills Workshop, with Bernadette Jiwa, a master of daily storytelling.

And if you’re really looking to use this downtime to hit the ground running later, there’s the AltMBA, as it suggests a leadership and management workshop, that is more intense that the others.

You’ll never be the same after any of these workshops. And the brilliant thing about them is that you aren’t doing them alone. The format requires you to interact with your fellow students, to help each other, constructively critique each other and encourage each other. By doing so, you learn far more yourself. And they are not expensive.

If you prefer to work on your own, many of these are also available on Udemy.

Last but by no means least, here’s something a little more local, but equally good: Seeds to Success from Anwen Cooper, of Get Fruitful Marketing starting April. I’ve been working with Anwen for about a year now, and the difference she has helped me to make is enormous.

March 19, 2020

Quiet reading

Following on from yesterday’s post, here are some suggestions for reading when things are quieter. Hopefully the weather will also be fine enough by then to do this out in the fresh air:

What to Do when It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn). Seth Godin. Available from Porchlight books.
The Three Ways of Getting Things Done. Hierarchy, Heterarchy and Responsible Autonomy in organizations. Gerald Fairtlough. Available from the Triarchy Press.
Change the Game: Share the Work. Building a business that works better for everyone (especially you). Kirsten Gibbs. Available from The Endless Bookcase. Or come to my virtual book launch on the 7th April, and get your own signed copy!
The Checklist Manifesto. How to get things right. Atul Gawande. Available from Profile Books.
Holacracy. The revolutionary management system that abolishes hierarchy. Brian J. Robertson. Available from Penguin.
A Beautiful Constraint. How to transform your limitations into advantages, and why its everyone’s business. Adam Morgan & Mark Barden. Available from Wiley.

Especially though I like today’s post from Corporate Rebels. The Ultimate Remote Work Policy?

Everything above is about supporting and enabling that, on both sides.

March 16, 2020

Succession planning

We usually take a regal, personal view of succession in a business. An heir is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.

This approach is fraught with difficulties. We put off the selection, training and all that, because we’d rather not face our own mortality, and because to do all that takes time out from running the business. The heir we choose may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. There may not be anyone already in the business that we want to be our heir.

There is a more rational, systemic approach.

Build a business around a clearly defined customer experience process, that gives people the confidence to know what they are doing without constraining their personality and individuality. Give people clear roles to play and all the resources at their fingertips to play them well. Train them to perform more than one role, so they can have variety of work, you have redundancy in the system and the customer learns that they can happily deal with anyone in the business.

Built this way, a business more or less runs itself, giving you more options for succession, including sale at its full value. You could even leave it to your employees.

Now there’s a legacy to be proud of.

March 12, 2020

Money trees

Professional gardeners often advise on how to buy the best trees. Choose something healthy and bushy, with plenty of growth potential. Choose a plant that’s actually in flower – that way you know it will look as you want. Check the roots to see if they are vibrant. All good.

It’s the advice that follows that’s harder to take: Take off any flowers or fruit. Trim back the branches. Trim the roots. Keep it weed-free, feed it regularly and prune it carefully until it’s mature.

The idea behind this is that a) the plant is more able to cope with the shock of being moved from pot to garden and b) by sacrificing growth now, we get more, better growth later, and a much better contribution to the garden. Given the right treatment at the start, and the right kind of nurturing as it grows, a tree will embed itself beautifully into its garden and last for years. It will scale. Then it will more or less look after itself.

You could say a business is like a tree – a money tree if you like. A focus on growth (especially rapid growth) can can undermine its health and leave it susceptible to the next hurricane that blows. Much better to spend some initial effort making it scaleable.

Then you can sit back and enjoy it.

March 9, 2020

Out of touch

Before mobile phones, you had no choice about being out of touch outside working hours. You either got everything done during the working day or you didn’t. Even if you worked late, you could properly relax at home.

If you knew you were going to be away from your desk for a few days, you left it so that someone else in the office could pick up a call and handle things in your absence. You could concentrate on the job you were actually doing.

If you needed to get a report written or a complex spreadsheet set up, you deliberately took yourself out of reach of the banter, ‘quick questions’ and interruptions. You could give the job the attention it deserved.

All of this made us more productive, not less. And we were probably less anxious and stressed too.

Now, putting yourself out of touch has to be intentional.

And it’s a skill worth learning, for everyone’s sake.

March 6, 2020

Silver lining?

I wonder how many people will be working from home over the next few months? And how many of the professional service businesses they work for, like accountants, solicitors, surveyors, architects, will realise that this is a completely practicable way of working?

Of course, it will focus the minds of everyone in the business on what really matters on measuring performance – deliverables and results rather than attendance or time spent, and it may require support tools to be put in place (nowadays easily and cheaply available on the cloud).

But if they do this, many businesses will realise that they can trust their teams to do what’s needed, when it’s needed, without surveillance, and that may mean they start looking at how they can support responsible autonomy even more effectively.

That could be a deep silver lining to the coronavirus cloud.

March 5, 2020

Be more mushroom

A mushroom is a metaphor for a short-lived momentary thing, that springs up quickly and dies just as quickly.

Yet this mushroom behaviour is deceptive, because the mushroom is founded on something much bigger and more durable. A mycelium.

A mycelium is a wonderful thing. It connects each and every mushroom within its network to every other, across space and time. They share a common genesis, even through they may pop up in very different habitats.

What’s more, each mushroom (if not picked early) throws out spores, also invisible, that spreads the network even further, until you have something like the mycelium in Nevada that covers over 800 hectares of ground, and is over 2,000 years old.

Not a bad model for a movement, or for a business that aspires to become a movement.

Be more mycelium.

It’s easier to do than you think.

Huge thanks to the open food network UK for letting me borrow their metaphor.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise