The Disappearing Boss – Page 27 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 20, 2022

Why am I doing everybody else’s job?

Your business is attracting more clients, so you take on more people to help you serve those clients. But those new people aren’t up to speed with how your business works. So they falter, and when they do, you step in and take over.

Gradually, over time, you find the faltering happens sooner, the taking over starts earlier, until one day, you wake up and ask yourself ‘Why am I doing everone else’s job?‘.

Because you’ve allowed your team to shift the burden of getting things done ‘the way we do them round here‘ to you. You’ve more than allowed them, you’ve positively encouraged them:

Stop fixing the faltering, and fix the reasons why they falter instead.

If your team falters it’s because they don’t know what you know, they don’t believe what you believe, they don’t know what you value, and they don’t have your muscle-memory of how your business works.

So, get the music of how your business works out of your head and into a shareable, updateable format. Share it with your team. Train them in it. Let them practice it.

Before you know it, they’ll be playing your music better than you.

May 17, 2022

Snowballing

It’s every new business owner’s dream. Your first customers love what you do so much that they tell their friends, who become customers. They love what you do, and tell their friends, who become customers and tell their friends, and so on…

Until suddenly it overwhelms you. You can’t keep up with demand. You can’t recruit fast enough, you can’t train people fast enough, you can’t supervise any more jobs yourself.

Soon, the referral rate has slowed. Worse, as customers become disillusioned, they warn off their friends, who warn off their friends, and so on…

Suddenly you don’t have a business any more.

What you’re experiencing is a reinforcing feedback loop (a flow of customer referrals) that hits a limit (your capacity to deliver), and slows down or even goes into reverse.

The good news is that a loop that’s gone into reverse will also eventually hit a limit, as the flow of customer referrals gets back into balance with your capacity to deliver.

The best news is that you don’t have to wait for that.

One short-term fix is to slow-down the referral rate, to give you more time to implement a longer-term fix of increasing capacity:

put your prices up – this will reduce the number of referrees who turn into customers, and give you more money to invest in increasing capacity.
create a queue – increasing waiting times gives you more time to invest in increasing capacity.

Similarly, there are short-term fixes for the capacity side too:

put wages up – this will increase the flow of potential team members who can deliver for you.
pay overtime or bonuses to your existing team – this will increase the flow of work from your existing resources. (This is probably only true for emergencies though)
use freelancers – this may increase the flow of already capable capacity into your team.

The best thing you can do for the long-term is to monitor your referral rate, because this will help you plan ahead.

The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock (such as customers) to double in size is roughly 70 divided by it’s growth rate as a percentage.

So if 5% of your customers refer each month, your pool of customers will double in 14 months. If 50% of your customers refer, you’ll have double the number of customers to deal with in just 1.4 months.

For a sustainable business, what you really want is to keep customers and capacity in balance, as you grow both. What’s counterintuitive, is that it’s monitoring flows, and the rates of flow that will help you achieve this at the speed you want.

Snowballs are only fun for a little while.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 16, 2022

Introducing systems thinking

We spend much of our time in business measuring quantities or stocks, when often what we should be looking at are flows – the processes that affect those quantities, for good or ill.

In fact, we’d learn more from looking at how those flows are changing – are they speeding up or slowing down? – and by asking why, create ourselves more options and opportunities to improve things.

We also tend to focus too much on stocks that are concrete (profit, inventory, capacity) and ignore the abstract (delight, autonomy, morale). Partly because the abstract is harder to measure, partly because we think they don’t matter.

As we all know, what gets measured, gets managed. The trouble is that managing the wrong things distorts the system. Until it no longer serves the purpose we originally envisaged. Or until it breaks.

If you’re looking for a different way of explaining – and re-designing – your world, this book is an excellent introduction to systems thinking.

This week I’ll be sharing some ideas from the book, as they apply to the systems we are all trying to create – our businesses.

You’ll recognise them.

May 5, 2022

Beyond urgency

For a long time, paid-for journalism has been in trouble.

It has relied on a model of change that it no longer monopolises. That model is based in acting as a fire alarm: find smoke, shout ‘Fire!‘ and let the outrage build until those in power do something to put the fire out.

The trouble is, anyone can shout ‘Fire‘ on social media. Plus those in power often start fires of their own, as a distraction from the big fire everyone’s worried about. The result is that there’s a lot of outrage out there, and very few fire extinguishers.

There is an alternative. Some call it Solutions Journalism, others Constructive Journalism.

This journalism says it’s no longer valuable enough to simply shout ‘Fire!‘ and expect the problem to be solved, this journalism seeks out people and places who have solved the problem already, finds out how they did it and shares that knowledge with their audience.

This journalism uses knowledge transfer to move the audience “from urgency to agency“.

Why am I telling you this?

One, because The Carbon Almanac is an excellent example of this kind of journalism. Sign up for a Daily Difference newsletter.

Two, because I think this is an excellent model of change for small, purposeful businesses to adopt too.

If you’re struggling to change, instead of shouting ‘Fire!‘ and waiting for the consultancy fire engines to arrive with the usual solution, why not seek out people and places who’ve already done what you seek to achieve, and share that learning with your team?

Even better, why not encourage your team to be the journalists and do the seeking out? Once everyone knows something is possible, it’s easier to see how you can make it happen in line with your own Promise of Value.

This post is mostly a paraphrase of this excellent speech by Professor Jay Rosen. I recommend a read of it.

Meanwhile, here are some questions I’ve extracted for you to assign to your investigative journalists:

What’s working where? (It’s a simple starting point. But so different from, “what’s broken here?”)
Who does it better than we do? (Who in North Rhine-Westphalia, who in Germany, in Europe, or around the world.)
Who has bucked the trend? (Meaning: faced the same problem, got a different result. Also called “positive outliers.”)
How did they find their way to a better outcome? (Bornstein calls this the “detective story.”)
What’s missing from our community that these other communities seem to have?

Go beyond urgency. Construct agency.

April 26, 2022

Instinct

Instinctively, I don’t like being paid by the hour or day. I’d much rather be paid for delivery of a service.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is a simple dislike of being at someone else’s beck and call. The other is to do with risk.

If I am paid by the hour, and I take longer than expected to deliver the goods, the client pays more. If I take less time than expected, they gain. They are incentivised both to pay me as low a rate as possible and to have me work as fast as possible – perhaps even more hours than we agreed.

These risks are flipped if I am paid for delivery. If I have to put more effort in than I expected, I lose. If I am able to deliver with less effort, I’m the one who gains. I am incentivised to deliver a clear result in as short a time as possible. The client gets whatever it takes to complete the job.

For a business like mine, being paid for delivery makes more sense, because I am in control of the process. Over time I can expect to get better at estimating effort, and slicker at delivery, so over time, I can expect to gain.

For a business that is not in control of the process – like shipping cargo by sail for example, the situation is different. On the whole, ships prefer to be chartered, because they can’t control the weather. There is little opportunity to gain by delivering faster. Being chartered means that even though they can’t gain, they at least don’t lose.

What was counter-intuitive (to me at least) is that this arrangement might be preferable to the client who charters them. Until yesterday.

For one of my clients, Sail Cargo Alliance, the aim isn’t just to ship goods by sail, it’s to connect a worldwide community of small producers, ships, ports, independent shops and customers. For the Alliance, paying for the ship’s time makes perfect sense, because their attitude is collaborative.

OK, they take the risk of the ship arriving late, but having control over the ship’s time creates opportunities for revenue generation that don’t exist if they are simply paying for delivery. For example, they can add passengers to the trip, or if a ship arrives early, they can offer day-sailing trips, or tours, or on-board hospitality. And by sharing any additional revenues with the ship, they might just have created the best of both worlds.

Clearly my instinct is wrong. The answer is not time or delivery, but some mixture of time and delivery that minimises the downside and maximises upside for both parties. That enriches the relationship rather than simply exploiting it. Commerce without the capitalism.

Hmm. Worth thinking about for the next project.

April 14, 2022

Why humans love change

Listening to ‘In our time’ this morning, I heard that one of the reasons our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged could be that the Rift Valley environment around them started to change relatively rapidly and unpredictably as a result of volcanic activity.

This created a new evolutionary ‘niche’ – for a species that was able to efficiently switch between environments rather than adapt efficiently to just one. Walking upright, sociality and speech are just some of the outcomes.

In other words, we’ve evolved to live in the midst of change.

To be sure, most of us prefer our change to be evolutionary rather than sudden and drastic, but I bet there’s hardly anyone you know that hasn’t undergone some sort of major shift (changed job, changed marital or parental status, moved house) in the last five years. We are programmed to explore possibilities, see opportunities, to talk about new things, to try them out – with others if we can.

Why then do corporates have such a problem with change management?

Because we’re human. We love change but we prefer to do it ourselves, than have it done to us.

April 7, 2022

What this hooey is all about

In this letter to Nirvana, pitching to produce their next album, Steve Albini sets out his Promise of Value for them to take or leave.

It’s not 100% applicable to a business like yours, (unless your business is actually a band) but there’s a lot that could be learned from it:

“I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…”

“If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.”

“I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play.”

“I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm.”

As the founder of your business, you’re the equivalent of Nirvana. You’re the live band. The customer experience you’ve carefully crafted as you grew your business is what your audience buys.

Your team, is like the records you make to get the music to more of those who want to hear it – far into the future.

Only now you are Steve Albini, and it’s your job to make sure the record delivers as if it was you:

“If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.”

Write your people a score, make sure they’re familiar with your sound and ethos, then let them play as human beings, not machines.

April 6, 2022

The entertainers and the sinking cruise ship

I’ve just caught the last half of ‘Life Changing’ on BBC Radio 4.

It’s a thrilling and hopefully infrequent illustration of why hierarchy sucks and free-playing, experimental and autonomously responsible human beings are the best.

After their cruise ship was holed, the captain hid and the senior managers ran away.

The entertainers worked out something was wrong, then, worried about the customers and the rest of the crew, did something about it. They initiated processes that saved all 581 people left on board, including themselves.

Maybe they were able to do that precisely because they weren’t on the org chart?

March 28, 2022

Unbreakable promises

A Promise of Value, properly articulated, is quite a comprehensive thing. As a kind of definition of your culture, it’s too big to reduce to an easily applicable ‘mission statment’. That’s why you have a Customer Experience Score – it embodies your Promise of Value in the actions your business takes on a day-to-day basis.

There are times though, when the Score can’t help, because the situation in front of you has never happened before, and could not have been foreseen. Often these times are crises, when your people don’t have the time to delve into the Promise of Value for guidance. They need something more immediate, concrete and practical, less open to interpretation.

This is where an Unbreakable Promise comes into its own. It’s another brilliant idea from Brian Chesky which I’ve incorporated into my Define Promise process.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have your Promise of Value defined, in all its expansive glory, identify who the key stakeholders for your business are. Obvious stakeholders are clients or customers, your team, your investors, your suppliers etc, but you can define as few or as many as you want.

Then for each stakeholder group, define a promise you will never break, based on what’s already in your Promise of Value.

Make that promise as concrete and measurable as you can. Someone in your team needs to be able to tell in a split second whether it is about to be broken, and the kind of action they should take to prevent that. It’s usually easier to phrase it negatively – “we will never…“, rather then positively “we will always…”, but whatever works for you.

Then make sure that all your different Unbreakable Promises are in accord with each other – that by keeping one, you don’t break another.

Finally, make sure everyone knows them off by heart.

Unbreakable Promises are not easy to make, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be broken. It’s impossible to predict every eventuality. But having them is a great way to set the boundaries of interpretation of your Customer Experience Score.

Discipline makes daring possible.

March 24, 2022

Seeing things from both sides

Most of the time, I model what happens in a given interaction from a single perspective – that of the organisation whose Score I’m drafting. Most of the time, that’s been OK.

But when the organisation you’re working with is actually a collection of organisations each playing different Roles, this isn’t good enough.

For example, what looks like ‘placing an order’ from one side is ‘create a consignment’ on the other. The only way to keep clear about what has to happen in order for each party to keep its Promise, is to model it in these terms.

It feels awkward and clunky, but clarity trumps elegance, every time.

Here’s a funky illustration of what I mean.

Makes me want to make one.