The Autonomous Enterprise – Page 22 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 11, 2019

Second Nature

Do you remember your first driving lesson?

I do. At the end of it I wondered how on earth I was going to be able to remember everything – never mind watch out for pedestrians and other traffic!

But after several lessons I got the hang of it, and eventually of course driving became second nature. To a point where some nights I got home from work almost without realising it.

We humans are able to make a lot of things second nature. Walking, driving, playing the cello, or rugby, or chess.

We do this by repeating certain combinations of actions until they become habit. We no longer need to think about them. That frees us up to to concentrate on the exceptions – those things outside the habitual that are going to prove interesting or dangerous.

But too much reliance on pure habit can also be dangerous. I bet you’ve had to go back to your car after half an hour of shopping because you can’t remember locking it, even though you’re sure you did.

That’s why pilots have checklists. To make a habit of the actions that must be done, and then to make sure they perform those actions consciously every time.

What’s the relevance of this for business? Well, you need to actively create this interesting tension between habit and consciousness:

If you want people to develop a particular set of habits (rather than their own), you need to specify what those desired habits are, and get people to practice them.
If you want to ensure that certain key actions are always done, you have to find a way to make people aware they are doing them.

Then you can happily let them play with the exceptions.

Discipline makes daring possible.

April 10, 2019

Delegation

A quick trawl of the internet found me these definitions of the verb “to delegate”:

to give (part of one’s work, power, etc) to someone else.
to send or name someone as a representative, as the one to do a job, etc.
to entrust to another.
to appoint as one’s representative.
to authorize and send (another person) as one’s representative.
to commit or entrust to another.
to entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.
send or authorize (someone) to do something as a representative.
to give or commit (duties, powers, etc) to another as agent or representative; depute.
to send, authorize, or elect (a person) as agent or representative.

In most cases the meaning is not ‘doing your work for you’, but ‘acting on your behalf’.

In other words, the key relationship is not between you and the person you delegate to, but between you and the clients they serve as if they were you.

Not employees. Agents. Or ambassadors.

People you can trust to do the right thing.

April 8, 2019

Best Practice

One of the challenges in any business, particularly one with a written score, is how to share best practice.

People will continually find better ways to do things and new things to do. And as long as they are congruent with the promise we make, that’s exactly what we want.

But at the same time this is a kind of entropy – a gradual divergence from the original score for the ‘way we do things round here’ that eventually leads to a completely different piece being played – and an irrelevant score.

Not having a score at all doesn’t resolve this issue – it just makes it invisible. On the other hand, updating the score can end up as one of those jobs nobody has time or inclination to do.

How to overcome this challenge?

I think one answer at least might be regular group practice, where everyone gets together and plays out improvements they want to share – backed up by evidence of improved performance.

A ‘scribe’ takes notes and incorporates agreed improvements into the existing score – perhaps based on a vote, or even as alternative options.

Group practice reminds us that we are custodians of a Promise, collaborating to produce an experience that embodies that Promise for our audience – an experience built on the efforts of those who’ve gone before us, enhanced by those we work with, and most importantly, to be carried on by those who come after.

That sounds like a culture doesn’t it?

April 5, 2019

Exit

Investors and business angels have a clear exit strategy – grow fast for 3-5 years, sell up and crystallise the gains. Happily, this strategy often coincides with that of the entrepreneur, who wants to get this business idea going, and then move on to the next.

Most small business owners don’t have an exit strategy, or certainly don’t start with one.

Thinking about exit often only happens when some event reminds us of our mortality. If that doesn’t happen, the business simply winds down to nothing alongside its owner.

Partly this is due to our natural tendency to think short-term; partly because we simply can’t imagine ourselves without our business, and partly because we don’t believe our business could survive without us.

Perhaps then, rather than focus on our own exit, we could focus instead on the future life of our business as we would focus on the future life of our child – with the aim of making it independent?

If a business was a child, we would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves us, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.

This doesn’t mean you exit your business with nothing, it just changes who you might sell it to.

Who better than the people who helped you raise it?

April 2, 2019

Dismantling the E-myth

In his E-myth books, Michael Gerber identifies three key roles in a business: the entrepreneur, who drives the vision for the business; the technician, who does the work, and the manager who acts as a bridge between them, planning and organising the work of technicians to achieve the entrepreneur’s vision.

If the vision is shared by everyone, do you then need managers?

I don’t think so, but you do still need management – a way for the technicians to know what they have to do, and how well they are achieving the vision, so they can work out for themselves how best to move forwards.

This is great news for small business owners, because I’ve only ever met one person who wanted to be a manager.

If the vision is explicit and shared, and technicians manage themselves, do you then need an entrepreneur?

No, but you do need entrepreneurship – a way for technicians to see new ways to deliver the vision profitably.

So, if you can push both management and entrepreneurship down to the people who actually do the work, what happens to the entrepreneurs who founded it?

Their baby will have grown up, to be independent, autonomous with their original vision still in its DNA.

They get to choose what they do next.

March 28, 2019

Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth”.

We tend to focus on the lever, but the ‘place to stand’ is just as important.

Without sure footing, the lever can’t get purchase.

When you know the essentials are being done consistently, you can experiment at the edges to make things better.

Discipline makes daring possible.

March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

March 21, 2019

Rules

It’s often said that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. That’s true. But what’s the strategy for maintaining Culture?

Here’s mine:

An explicit Promise of Value: principles, behaviours, values, purpose, “the way we do the thing we’re here to do”.
Customer-focused Roles: the parts played in delivering the Promise, “how what we’re doing now relates to our customer”
A floor: the lower bound of what’s acceptable, “the least we should do”.
Process: what has to happen in order to deliver the outcomes that share and keep our Promise, “our score”.

The autonomous enterprise doesn’t need a ruler, but it does need rules.

March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

March 6, 2019

Replicating

As Ray Kroc understood, recreating the look is not enough to make your new outlet convincing, no matter how faithfully you do it.

What matters is what happens inside.

Replicate that and you’ve got an asset you can scale.

It’s difficult, especially where ‘clockwork’ isn’t the feel you’re after, but it is possible.

The trick is to think up a level or two from the obvious.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise