The Autonomous Enterprise – Page 5 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 20, 2020

Spontaneity

My friend Harry Morrison is an actor. He’s recently started writing short, packed posts on what it’s really like to work in theatre, and guess what? It’s hard work.

I particularly liked this from today’s post:

“Even the best stand-ups have notebooks packed with all their best ‘spontaneous’ off-the-cuff quips. Their skill is in waiting for the perfect time to use them.”

There are 2 things here that a relevant for designing effective business processes:

If you haven’t rehearsed the likely scenarios, you’ll never spot that ‘perfect time’.
The biggest impact comes from realising that the unlikely scenario you’re currently in is actually ‘the perfect time’.

Process, preparation, and practice (aka ‘doing the work’, aka discipline) is what makes spontaneous creativity possible.

November 19, 2020

What’s on the inside doesn’t matter

Good Services principle no. 7: “A good service is agnostic to organisational structures”.

In other words, the way you organise your company’s resources to deliver on your Promise of Value should essentially, be invisible and irrelevant to your customers and clients.

What if you took it further, so that your team and your clients saw the same service, one from the inside, one from the outside? What if you then made those services the basis for your organisational structure?

That would make life easier for everyone, wouldn’t it?

November 18, 2020

Assume no prior knowledge

Here’s another simple solution to the confusion I experienced the other day – don’t assume I know what all you suppliers know, and include the unit of measurement with the price.

Nicely leading in to principle no. 6: “A good service requires no prior knowledge to use”.

In this mini-series of blogs, I’m working through the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as a way of exploring how Service Design principles might apply to services that are delivered through people, rather than through online systems.

My thinking is that if you think of your people as users, you can design your operational processes as services that enable your users to deliver the business promise on your behalf. And if you follow the design principles for good services, you’ll build a scalable and resilient operation.

Back then, to principle no. 6. As Lou puts it: “There is no service that will be used just by people who have used it before.”

When someone new joins your business they don’t know what you know. They don’t know how you work, even if they have years of experience in the same field. That means that they will automatically follow their own assumptions about how things work, and default to doing things the way they know. If you have deliberately made yourself exactly the same as every one of your competitors, this is fine, but I happen to think that’s unlikely.

So the question is, how do you address this? Here are some ideas:

Make as much as possible as self-explanatory as possible – like having a flat plate on the ‘push’ side of a door.
Give people a map, that shows the destinations and the different routes for getting there, and a compass for in case they get lost. Or, if you prefer a different analogy, a score to follow.
Train people in your way of doing things. Base your training on a familiar model, like learning to drive, or to fly a plane, and let them master the basics in a simulator first. Teach all the likely scenarios, not just what happens to occur during their first week with you.
Build resources that will help newbies to learn (and oldies to remember) for themselves – explainer videos, detailed instructions, useful techniques, tricks and tips. Make sure your map or score includes pointers to these, but isn’t cluttered up with them.
Include meta-services “What to do if you don’t know what to do“, “Where to look for answers.” that give people a way in.
Follow all the principles of good Product and Service Design.

In other words, “Design your company, or it will be designed for you.”

November 16, 2020

Familiarity

The trick to building a business that can scale profitably and last longer than you, is to stop managing people and empower them to manage themselves.

You can support the transition from supervision to responsible autonomy with a framework that works like handrails – supportive, available when you need them, but not overly constricting. I call this framework your ‘Customer Experience Score’.

Another way to think of it, that might be useful for you, is as a set of services that your team use to deliver on what the business does. In this mini-series of blogs, I’m working through the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as a way of exploring this idea.

Principle number 5 makes a lot of sense: “a good service works in a way that’s familiar.”

But.

What exactly does ‘familiar’ mean? The way we’ve always done it? The way everyone else does it? The way a 70-year-old expects it to happen? The way an 8-year-old expects it to happen?

I think in the end, the answer is that however you deliver it, (and there may well be more than one way) it should always feel like it is being delivered by your business. even if – especially if- it also reminds them of something else. Buying from a physical shop is a familiar experience, but Apple has it’s own way of delivering that. Buying online is familiar, but as you’d expect Apple very much has it’s own way of doing that too.

Every service your users run for the people you serve should be recognisably similar to the way your business does everything. In other words it should be congruent with your business’s unique Promise of Value. That doesn’t just reinforce the Promise for customers and clients, it reinforces it for your team too. They’ll be able to tell you when something jars before your customers do.

By all means make your services rhyme with what’s already out there. But the real trick is to build familiarity with your unique way of doing things, so your business becomes an old friend people turn to instinctively.

The right kind of familiarity breeds connection.

October 27, 2020

Reminders

We like to remind ourselves of what we have ‘to do’. But we all too easily forget the why behind them. It’s easy to get derailed by happenstance and other people’s agendas. This isn’t helped by systems that focus on tasks rather than outcomes.

True productivity (adding value) is driven by focusing on the why. What if you built a system that constantly reminds people of that?

Given the why, they can probably work out the best thing to do next.

October 23, 2020

Watching other people work

I must confess to having a bit of a thing about phone answering services. Not because I dislike them, but because I think they are one of those things that can really enhance the customer experience when done well.

You can always tell when someone is using an answering service, because you get asked more questions that you often would, and you can tell there’s a process going on. That’s a good thing, something more businesses that answer their own phones should learn to do. It would save a lot of miscommunication.

When someone providing this service does it really well, I have a genuine conversation. I am allowed to ramble a little about why I’m calling (the person I want to speak to knows I’m due to call and why), but they still get from me (not necessarily by asking me) the information they need to pass on the message – my name (including how to spell it), my business name, why I’m calling and who I want to speak to, and finally how they can get hold of me.

I can even have a separate conversation about the fact that they provide the service, which is how I found out who they were.

Its a pleasure to participate in someone doing their job with commitment intelligence and humanity. Its an enjoyable experience for me as customer, prospect or supplier as well as for the person doing it.

That’s why your Customer Experience Score^TM needs to cover everything.

PS the company was Take My Calls. When my current credit runs out, I’ll be switching to them.

October 22, 2020

Playing A Role

I’d heard of ‘The Method’ – a way of acting designed to help actors deliver more ‘authentic’ performances by mining their own emotions – “to plumb past trauma, joy, grief, euphoria, and relive those feeling states each night on the stage.”

Until yesterday, when I read this article by William Justice Bruehl, I hadn’t heard of the person who originally came up with it – Constantin Stanislavski – and certainly hadn’t heard that he revised his ideas in later life.

His new idea was much less emotionally draining for actors. Simply put, the idea is to “study the text and articulate what their character struggles to achieve – the character’s ‘objective’ – throughout the whole play, in every scene, and then to simply note what the character should feel along the way.” In other words, to put yourself in the character’s shoes, and follow the logic of the story they are telling themselves. Different interpretations of the character’s underlying objective will lead to different interpretations in performance – even though the words stay the same.

This seems to me to be a useful and doable approach for non-actors playing a customer-facing role too. A combination of discipline (the text) and freedom (to divine the ‘objective’ of the person in front of me right now), that makes for a more fulfilling experience for both sides.

You need a text though, otherwise nobody makes sense.

PS I recommend Psyche as a source of interesting things to read.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

October 20, 2020

One percent

The very best question I know for improving your process for making and keeping promises is this one:

“How can we make this 1% better today?”

1% seems like a pathetic target for improvement until you realise it compounds.

Compounding works in any direction of course, so it helps to frame the question in the direction you want without tying down the ‘how’. This takes some thinking about, but is well the effort.

Hiut Denim (who gave me the idea) has this one, for example:

“How can we reduce the environmental impact of our jeans today?”

Tiny, daily, incremental improvement are easy to start, easy to keep going as a habit, and add up sooner than you think to a ‘better’ that’s far bigger than you could ever have dreamt of.

What would your question be?

October 19, 2020

Which, What and How

You’d think that Keeping your Promise is easy to do. That’s true when everything is going to plan, but when times are hard, or the unexpected happens, it may not be so easy. It may even be impossible.

It’s at these times that questions can help you hold yourself to account for what you do and the way you do it:

Which parts of my Promise of Value are sacrosanct?

If you have more than one set of stakeholders (and it seems to me you’ll always have at least 5 – customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, your community), then you can also ask:

What’s the unbreakable promise you make to these people? (In this podcast, Brian Chesky talks to Eric Ries about making 2 or 3 unbreakable promises to each set of stakeholders)

When you know the answers to these questions, you can ask further, practically useful ones:

Which part(s) of my Promise does this activity demonstrate and uphold?
Which part(s) of my Promise does this activity contradict or undermine? If it does, how can I bring it into line? Could I do something different? Could I do it differently?

If everyone in your business is in the habit of asking these questions in the good times, you’ll be well able to do the right things, the right way, when things are bad.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Autonomous Enterprise