The Autonomous Enterprise – Page 4 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

February 1, 2021

The Disappearing Boss

I’ve met hundreds of small business owners, but I’ve yet to meet one who set out to be a Boss. Or at least a Boss of more than one person.

We embrace the challenge of starting a business, of finding customers, but we become Bosses reluctantly, sometimes half-heartedly, not always effectively.

Sometimes the experience of being the Boss of other people is so painful we joyfully go back to being the Boss of just ourself.

The trouble with that of course, is that the potential to create ever more value disappears along with the role we dislike so much.

There is another way to disappear as a Boss.

Instead of walking away, make yourself blend in. Enable your people to act more like Bosses, more like you.

After that it’s the more the merrier.

If you’d like to learn more about how, there’s a little welcome treat from me: Sign up for The Disappearing Boss Newsletter

January 29, 2021

Swarms look like an attractive option for decentralisation. After all, “Social insects work without supervision. In fact, their teamwork is largely self-organized, and coordination arises from the different interactions among individuals in the colony. Although these interactions might be primitive (one ant merely following the trail left by another, for instance), taken together they result in efficient solutions to difficult problems (such as finding the shortest route to a food source among myriad possible paths). The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence.'” (Corporate Rebels blog ‘Reinventing work‘)

As you know, I’m all for self-organisation, but for me it has to emerge from autonomy and a shared purpose. Ant colonies work through programming. Individual ants don’t get much say. I’d rather be a goose.

A different kind of swarming showed up this week around GameStop shares. Bottom-up collaboration between individuals.

The queen ants of Wall St. didn’t like it at all.

January 25, 2021

Mechanical ecosystems

Let’s look at the human body. Simpler, less tightly-coupled joints are held in place by muscle and cartilage, combining rigidity and strength with flexibility and adaptability. Although there is a ‘standard’ bone shape, tolerances are high, accommodating a wide range of variation in components – both across a population and within a single individual. Growth is allowed for.

At the same time, possibilities are constrained by the surrounding muscles. If there is too much play in a joint, strengthening muscles will help. If there is too little play, stretching and loosening them will allow more movement. Remediation is possible without taking anything apart, or even stopping – all that’s needed to keep things in good order is a healthy variety of movement.

Perhaps this is the sweet spot between machine and ecosystem we should aim for in a business?

January 19, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 2

Step 2 of capturing a Business Process is to work out where it really starts.

A good rule of thumb is to think about where the ‘thing’ you’re dealing with – the ‘Noun’ in your process’s name – gets created, from the perspective of the business. These are good questions to ask:

If the thing is created outside the business, where does it first come into contact with it?
If the thing is created inside the business, where does that happen? Is that where it should happen?

You can ask similar questions to find where your process really ends:

If the thing passes through the business, when does it leave?
If the thing only exists inside the business, where does it get destroyed, or archived?

It’s helpful to think about the process from its real beginning to its real end, because that’s how many opportunities for improvement can be identified, without having to go to the trouble of documenting the entire thing first. It gives you a shortcut, if you like.

January 18, 2021

Devolution

Often, when we think about delegation, we’re thinking about merely handing over execution to someone else. We’ve already worked out what needs to be done, all they have to do is reproduce that. This somewhat mechanical form of delegation works well for really simple and generic tasks such as answering the phone, booking meetings, or filling in forms, or even for generic functions such as preparing annual accounts, fulfilment, distribution, even marketing.

But for what really weighs down a business owner, delegating execution doesn’t help much.

I remember my mum telling me, when as a child I offered to go shopping for her “The shopping is the least of my worries – I still have to think about what we’re going to eat, plan the meals, and write out the list. That’s the hard bit.”

What we really want to be delegating is the thinking, the decision making – in other words, the management. And that’s hard, because it means giving up power, entrusting business outcomes to other people. It means devolution.

But devolution is what really pays off. If my siblings and I had all taken turns to ‘manage’ the household, or taken responsibility for different parts of it, I’m sure that our family horizons and opportunities would have been broadened. 9 heads – even childish ones – are always better than 1.

The good news is that as business owners we have an advantage over mum, in that we’re dealing with adults we’ve selected for shared values, principles and beliefs. Who will welcome the ability to step up and lead.

Especially if given a score to follow while they (and you) get used to the idea.

January 11, 2021

A virtuous flywheel

I love it when somebody else finds ways to say things better than I can. Here’s a great post from Corporate Rebels exploring how 2 very different companies found similar ways to turnaround and then grow:

3 Principles To Run A Company Sensibly

“both were motivated to adopt their unique methodologies to rescue the struggling companies they were leading. They wanted to save the jobs of people in their organizations. They thought this could be achieved by giving all an understanding of how the businesses were run—and then involve them in improving them. Their way of saving jobs became a new way to create jobs. These new jobs created new wealth. This wealth, was then shared with those who created it in the first place: all those in the company.”

In other words, they created a virtuous flywheel that didn’t depend on the bosses.

Sounds sensible to me. Flywheels get going faster when everyone pushes in the same direction.

January 8, 2021

How to capture a business process: Step 1

The first step in defining a business process is to work out where you want to be at the end of it. More precisely, where do you want the person you are serving to be at the end of it.

This involves stepping up a level or two from your usual narrative – from the minutiae of how it gets done to what it is you are really trying to achieve. This helps you identify ‘what’ has to happen, which in turn can open you up to different ‘hows’ for making it happen.

Write down (or better still get someone else to write down) the process you want to think about as a narrative. Then ask yourself these questions:

What things should be true after this process is completed?
Which of those things is truly meaningful to the person you are serving (your prospect, client or customer)?
- What is it that matters to them?
- What difference will they notice?
- What is it that they are paying you for?
How could you best sum that up in a two-word phrase, composed of a verb followed by a noun? This phrase should be binary, it’s either true or it’s not. You’ve either done it or you haven’t.

Now you’ve found the point of your process. It’s probably much bigger than you thought.

January 5, 2021

The joy of sameness.

Patterns are a shortcut to previous experience. They enable us to see similarities beyond a mass of detailed differences. We enjoy repetition and sameness – as long as there are enough differences to stimulate us, and keep our eye moving.

The same goes for processes. Sameness is good. A pattern is easy to grasp and easy to remember. That gives us freedom to fill in the details differently when needed.

The trouble is, when we try to communicate a process to other people, we tend to focus on the detail, not the pattern. We feel we have to capture every exception, every flourish and curlicue, every nuance. The result is a mess, that takes too long to untangle and so languishes unused and ignored. Or an unwieldy encyclopedia of micro-patterns – forms, checklists, procedures that makes it impossible to see the patterns that matter.

So if you’re trying to capture process in your business, try looking for the pattern first. Imagine you’re up a level from the process you’re trying to describe, above it, rather than in it, seeing the path through the woods rather than the immediate undergrowth.

Here’s a brilliant example of someone doing that in a completely different context, to free people from the tyranny of recipes or ready-prepared meals.

The Discipline of pattern is what makes Daring possible in execution.

Thanks to The Intuitive Cook for the inspiration.

December 17, 2020

Order without control

“Improvisation is what life does. Nothing living, from a bacterium to a blue whale, has a script for their life. This includes you. Somehow or other every living being copes with untold complexity without a plan, and always has.” Robert Poynton ‘DO/IMPROVISE’

‘The counter argument to that’, my husband replies, ‘is that these are the result of millions of generations of evolution and dead-ends. You and I don’t have that much time, which is why we plan and design’.

I agree, and to be fair, Poynton isn’t recommending that we improvise our way through life and business (although it would be interesting to explore how far we could go with that, like lilies of the field). And living things aren’t improvising randomly. That ‘somehow or other’ is underpinned by a set of simple rules for responding to things you can’t control. The driver is a process that leads to a single outcome, reproduction. The result is ‘order without control’, a self-organising system for delivering an outcome.

But without the capacity to improvise, all you have is a machine. Inflexible, slow to change and ultimately fragile.

You don’t need to build a business as a machine, with every thing designed precisely down to the nth degree. Get the driver right, then let improvisation keep it relevant. Create a process for delivering the right customer experience, driven by your unique Promise of Value. Use the process as a framework for action, that empowers your people to see the offer in the unexpected or exceptional and act accordingly.

The discipline that makes daring possible leads to order without control and a business that truly lives.

Forever if you want it to.

November 26, 2020

Streamlining

‘Streamlining’ was very fashionable back in the 1930s and 40s. Originally pure engineering, the purpose was to reduce drag over fast moving vehicles such as trains, planes and automobiles.

However, the look quickly got taken up as a badge of modernity, often accentuated with totally unnecessary, usually shiny protuberances, that looked the part, but actually increased friction. Eventually, ‘streamlining’ got applied to all sorts of things that were never going to move, never mind create drag – record players, light fittings, buildings.

The point is to remember who it’s for. That’s where Good Services principle no. 8 comes in: “A good service requires as few steps as possible to complete.” For the user. If you deliver through other people, they are effectively the user.

What does “as few steps as possible” really mean? For me, this:

Each step is a meaningful move in the right direction from the perspective of the client. This often means that steps are bigger than you’re used to thinking of. If I want to hire a car, filling a form in isn’t meaningful to me, but choosing a car from those you have available is.
Each step is completely self-contained. There is no possibility of ‘limbo’ (or purgatory). A step is complete or its not. That way, everyone knows exactly where you are in the overall process.
You couldn’t add another step to the process without muddying it.
You couldn’t remove any step from the process without breaking it.

Streamlining a process into as few steps as possible isn’t necessarily about speed either. The process itself may take a long time. Individual steps may take a long time, or there may be long gaps between them:

The service, or process, should be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and possible to deliver with minimal interaction from you, or anyone else in your business.

Of course, achieving this might mean re-organising your business. But it will be worth it.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise