Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss

Harmony
July 17, 2023

Harmony

Harmony isn’t only everyone singing or playing the same tune at the same time, powerful as that kind of harmony is.

Harmony can also be an active fitting together of differences so that together they sound more than the sum of the parts.

The first kind of harmony is easy to take part in.  Just sing or play along wth everyone else.

The second takes more effort, to hear what’s going on around you, keep time and co-ordinate your own music making accordingly.  An active fitting together of differences to create a much richer sound experience.

You can teach people to make the first kind of harmony just by getting them to practice.

For the second, you need a score.

Which means you have to become a composer, not an instructor.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

 

HT to Bettany Hughes for prompting this one.

There’s something about Muri
July 14, 2023

There’s something about Muri

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ is categorised 3 ways:

  • ‘Muda’ – effort that does not add value for the customer.
  • ‘Mura’ – wasted effort due to variation.
  • ‘Muri’ – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems.

Muda is the most talked about form of waste, sub-categorised into 7 further types:

  • Transport – excess movement of product.
  • Inventory – stocks of goods and raw materials.
  • Motion – excess movement of machines or people.
  • Waiting.
  • Overproduction.
  • Over-processing.
  • Defects.

Mura is often a result of Muda, and the solution to many of these issues is to standardise processes and relocate resources so they are available ‘just in time’ when and where they are needed.

The problem with this of course, is that whether an activity is Muda depends on where you draw the line around the system.  Biomass boilers are eco-efficient, as long as you don’t count the lorries trucking pellets around a country – a clear case of Transport Muda when you look at the bigger system.

What I want to think about today though, is Muri.  Wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.

There’s something about Muri that makes it the Cinderella of Lean.

It isn’t glamourous, fixing it doesn’t attract the kind of kudos Muda does.  Perhaps it’s just harder to measure.

Whatever the reason it gets left to pick up all the dirty work.

Muri is often caused by too much attention to Muda.  Redundancies are stripped out the system, leaving no room for slack.  Everything is expected to run at 100% capacity all of the time.  People are expected to do more with less, both at work and at home.

The result?

Look around you and what I think you’ll see everywhere a massive case of Muri.  People and systems – including our planetary system – stressed and overburdened to breaking point.

As a small business owner, you can’t fix it all.  But you can fix it in your business.

What if you let people work a 4-day week? or a 13-day fortnight? Or take a 2 hour lunch break?

What if you put together a flexible plan of working hours for the year that accounted for busy times and quiet times?

What if you set the example yourself by working only your official hours, having your weekend and taking a couple of weeks off every now and then?

You could do all of this, even in a service business, by paying a little attention to Muda and Muri (but not too much):

Start by writing down your Customer Experience Score , so that everyone can play it consistently.

  • Automate the parts that are drudgery for humans.
  • Leave room for variations that will delight the customer.
  • Then give people the responsibility and autonomy to get on with it, at a sensible level of capacity.

You’ll all work less hard for greater rewards.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Hiding in plain sight
July 13, 2023

Hiding in plain sight

Orange Oakleaf Butterflies confuse their predators on purpose, hiding in plain sight.

In the dry season, they pretend to be a dried out dead leaf.  In the rainy season they pretend to be a damp dead leaf.  The birds, ants, spiders and wasps that eat them, already have a mental model of what a dead leaf is.   That model doesn’t include being edible.  So they ignore this leaf and carry on looking for their next meal.

 

We humans are the apex predator par-excellence.   We don’t have to pretend to be anything other than we are to survive.

Still, we confuse other people all the time.   Sometimes on purpose, most often by accident.   Because we constantly assume that our mental models are the same as everyone else’s.  We think everyone knows what we know, believes what we believe and wants what we want.

 

Take a small business:

For a shareholder or investor it’s a machine for generating dividends on their capital.

For founders it’s a way to make their unique dent in the universe.

For their accountant it’s a set of connected accounts that need to balance.

For their operations manager it’s a set of loosely related functions, one of which they probably consider to be more important than the others.

For some employees it’s simply a means to enjoy life outside work. For others it’s means to survive. For others still, play.

For customers it’s a solution to a problem, a status enhancer, a community they value or a purpose they believe in.

All these different mental models can pull a business in different directions, leading to confusion.

And as we know, a confused mind says ‘no’.

 

The answer is to get clear about what your business is here to do as soon as you can, and to present that as an explicit model everywhere.

Choose a model that is simple, easy to communicate and effective in delivering what everyone wants.

Design your business around that model, so that the way it works clearly reflects the concept behind it.

Share that model in your marketing materials, shareholder reports, filed accounts, operations manual, help guides and status reports, so that it becomes utterly familiar, whatever your role or relationship to the business.

 

That way, nobody’s confused.

Some may not like it, but they will leave you alone.   The ones that do like it will be more than happy to help you bring it to life.

 

If you’re a small business employer, looking for a model to adopt, you’ll be pleased to know that you already have one, hiding in plain sight.

And I can help you reveal it.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

This is gold
July 7, 2023

This is gold

“There is literally no limit to the promises we can make. The only limit is to the number we are able to fulfill.”* Richard Murphy

So, if you have some energy, capability or capacity going to waste in your enterprise, get making some new promises.

Otherwise, concentrate on fulfilling the promises you’ve already made, and get building your energy, capacity and capabilities.

And if you can’t do that quickly enough, put your prices up temporarily to slow down demand while you build.

 

*The quote is about money of course, which is simply a promise to pay.  A country like the UK, that issues its own currency, can make as many of these promises as it likes, as long as they can be delivered.  It’s what Maynard Keynes meant when he said  “What we can do, we can pay for.”

The future belongs to tadpoles
July 5, 2023

The future belongs to tadpoles

What if people didn’t have to work for a living?   How would you attract people to work in your small business?

Pay would be the obvious first thought, but when people don’t have to worry about survival, money isn’t the motivator we think it is.  Not on its own.

So what would motivate someone to work with you?

Probably, good work, that enriches:

  • The ecosystem of the organization in which the profit is produced
  • The ecosystem of the community of which that organization is a part
  • The greater ecology of the planet

And also enriches:

  • Their inner ecosystem
  • The client’s inner ecosystem

By enabling each person to achieve more of what we all really want:

  • Agency – to make our own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make our dent.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than ourselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
    • Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

 

Businesses that do all this don’t look like Amazon, Google or Coca-Cola.   They look more like Nucor, or Michelin, or Haier, or Buurtzorg.

But these are the big players, the mighty toads in the big business pond.

What if you’re just a tadpole?

That’s excellent news, because you can jump into this future right now, as a Disappearing Boss.

You might even make this future happen sooner.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Coming soon, The Disappearing Bosses Club.

Flexibility
July 3, 2023

Flexibility

What if something you thought was rigid, needn’t be at all?

One of the many gems I picked up from the latest episode of The New Human Movement podcast, in which Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini interview John Ferriola, former CEO of Nucor, was this.

Since the firm started in the ’60s, they have never laid anyone off.

They have worked short hours. At least once, they have worked almost no hours making ‘quality steel, safely produced‘, which is literally what they are paid for.  When that happened in 2009, they worked in the communities around their plants  instead, because they were having an equally tough time.

So even though people didn’t earn as much pay, they remained employed.   This meant they kept their employment benefits such as health insurance, pension rights, holiday entitlements and length of tenure.

The result is of course, massive loyalty to the firm (which everyone part-owns), and zero resistance to changes that will make it more profitable (also because they get a share of unit and group-wide profits too).

Nucor’s work is seasonal anyway, so they already had this arrangement in place, it just happens to make it easier to adapt to downturns and be ahead of upturns.

Any old how, this reminded me of a ridiculously simple approach to seasonality of work, that seems to be commonplace in Europe, but not here.

In essence, you separate the way work is paid for from when it is delivered.

Here’s how:

Every year, a seasonal business works out how many hours it expects to be producing whatever it produces.

It works out what capacity it needs to have in place for the seasonal rush.

It employs that number of people.

The number of hours worked over the whole year per person is total hours/number of people.

An individual’s monthly salary works out as (total hours/number of people)/12.

Next the business agrees with each person individually how they are going to work those hours to fit with the seasonality of the business.  When they will have holidays, when they don’t need to come in at all, and when they will be working extra-long shifts.

That’s it.

The result is that the business has a predictable salary cost over the year and the right number of people actually working in it at any one time, without having to constantly drop and recruit new people.

The people have a regular monthly income they can use to plan, and space in their annual schedule to do other things – holiday, study, work another job, start a side-hustle in a meaningful way.

Both have room to be flexible if actual circumstances don’t turn out as predicted.

I came across this idea for a factory, but the product doesn’t have to be physical, it could be a service, like hotel stays, design projects, coaching hours, or haircuts.

I wonder why it has never caught on here?

Still, you could give it a try while you’re small and see what it does for you.

All you have to do is imagine that something you thought was rigid could be flexible instead, and make that flexibility work for both sides.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Is this wording better?
June 28, 2023

Is this wording better?

Yesterday, I listened to Wendell Pierce talking about jazz with James O’Brien.

He came up with a phrase that struck me:  ‘Freedom within Form’.

And I wondered, is that a better description for what I help small businesses achieve, than ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’?

I know some people have a problem with the word ‘Discipline’.

What do you think?

 

What does ‘Freedom within Form’ mean to you?

 

What does ‘Discipline makes Daring possible’, mean to you?

 

Tell me, I’d love to know.

 

Thank you!

 

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation
June 27, 2023

Regenerative Uncertainty – creating space for innovation

I thoroughly recommend following Vaughn Tan on LinkedIn, or subscribing to his newsletter, on innovation and uncertainty.  He works with much larger organisations than I do of course but there is always food for thought for me on how to apply his thinking to my framework.

Today’s tasty dish is generative uncertainty, or how to make uncertainty work for you instead of against you.

A problem for any size of business is balancing consistency with opportunity.

Your clients want to broadly know what’s going to happen over the next days, weeks and months in and around your business.  And so do you.

At the same time, you want to be able to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities that might crop up and avoid or at least weather any unexpected shocks.

In other words, you want your business to stay the same, even if you want it to be bigger, and you also want it to be able to change at short notice.

Traditional management structures – hierarchy, silos, bureaucratic workflows – help to keep a business the same, by centralising control and slowing down the business’s reactions to events.  Which makes it hard to change.

Complete self-management at the front end enables a business to react rapidly, because control is distributed, but makes it much harder to stay consistent, can lead to wastefulness of shared resources, and at worst leads to entropy.

Vaughn’s solution is to design spaces where innovation is directed, (Clear Guardrails) but within that direction, is free to come up with whatever it likes (Encourage Emergence), and where the ‘parent’ organisation is prepared to put time and money into emergent ideas that look promising without knowing beforehand what that support might look like (Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support).

I think small businesses can provide this kind of space too.   Without having to introduce the usual corporate structures.

Here’s how I do it:

Clear Guardrails:

Your Promise of Value, Unbreakable Promises and Customer Experience Score are yuor Clear Guardrails:

  • Your Promise states what you are here to do and for whom.
  • Your Unbreakable Promises set the boundaries of what you are willing to compromise.
  • The Customer Experience Score provides a floor for how you do it at the moment – the least that should happen.

Encourage Emergence:

  • Every individual playing your Customer Experience Score is free to use their knowledge, experience and judgement to interpret the Score in the best way possible for the client in front of them.   That means every actual Customer Experience can be quite different, yet consistent.  When someone encounters a new situation, they can deal with it.   The Score encourages emergence.

Be Ready to Provide Flexible Support:

  • The value of encouraging emergence comes from recognising when something is an opportunity rather than an exception.   It’s unfair to expect someone to do that on the fly, so your Customer Experience Score includes an ‘Improve Process’ Activity, that runs alongside making and keeping Promises.
  • Improve Process is about regularly gathering and interpreting feedback, both as individuals running your own performances of the Score, and together as a team, to identify opportunites for both playing the existing Score better and creating new Scores to meet new challenges or opportunities.  People can give each other the flexible support they need to take advantage of useful changes.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

What do you think?

A tool for thinking
June 21, 2023

A tool for thinking

Writing your Customer Experience Score makes you think:

About how you really want your business to work.  How it can best make and keep its Promise to clients.

About why you started it in the first place.  What it is here to do.  How it will help you leave your mark.

As you write, you use your Score to communicate your thinking to your team.

 

Also to help them think:

About how they really want to work.  How they can best make and keep their Promise to themselves.

Why they joined your business in the first place, what it is here to do.  How it will help them leave their mark.

How they can help you make your business work even better at making and keeping its Promise to clients.

 

Before long, it isn’t your business.

 

It’s our business, designed by you, refined by us.

 

You’re one Boss among many.

 

So when it’s time for you to leave.

It will be safe in our hands.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Deposition
June 20, 2023

Deposition

I’ve always been sceptical about claims that double-glazing businesses are ‘very clean, and tidy up after themselves’.

Not because I think they aren’t, but because I’ve always suspected that emphasising the ‘tidying up’ might be a way to distract from poor work on actually putting in the windows.

 

I’m wrong of course.

 

What being clean and tidy signals is a pride in the job and consideration for the customer.

A committment to leave the client’s home as least as good as it was before the job, if not better.

A willingness to conserve bits and pieces the client wants to reuse.

A willingness to fill in holes you didn’t make, because that’s what a proper job looks like.

It might cost a small amount extra – hardly anything really, because not to do a proper job is usually harder – but every little helps to build a bank of goodwill and loyalty.

 

On which to grow a business that lasts.

 

For 30 years, so far.

 

Sidcup Fascia & Soffit Ltd.