The Disappearing Boss – Page 28 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 23, 2022

Admin as a side-effect

Nobody should have to think about admin. Admin is unexciting, unrewarding, work-about-work that very few people enjoy doing.

Yet, if you want to measure performance, predict future demand and workloads, allocate resources effectively, you need some way of collecting the information you need.

The answer is to make collecting information a side-effect of doing the job.

When you drive your car, the action of the wheels traveling over the ground updates your odometer. You don’t have to create a separate spreadsheet to keep track of how many miles you cover per trip or over the lifetime of the car. Instead some basic information (the number of tyre revolutions) is collected and used to trip a counter that shows the distance covered. The information is collected purely as a side-effect of doing the job. Combined with another counter on the drive shaft it tells you your speed. So two simple side-effects give you critical information.

If you want to spend less time on admin and more time making and keeping promises for the people you serve, you need to design admin-as-a-side-effect into your Customer Experience Score.

How?

Well, it helps to start by writing your Score from the perspective of what you actually want things to happen, rather than from the perspective of how you document and track what happens.

To take a big example, it would be easy to think about creating and using a building in terms of sketching ideas, drawing up plans, creating a list of materials and quantities, but that isn’t what’s really happening. What’s really happening is more like this:

Process diagram of the life of a building

The sketches are how you track the results of your imagination, the plans are how you track your designs and feed them to the people who will construct. These things are admin, and by thinking about what is really going on, you can see better where in the process they should be created, and who by, as a result of doing the job.

This simplifies monitoring and prediction, because they can become matters of simple counting, combined with some basic parameters of the business, such as available person-hours. If you can find ways to automate this, then none of your people ever need to fill in a timesheet again. You can free them to concentrate on what really matters to the people you serve, at less cost to yourself.

Work-about-work is a waste of time and talent. It’s time we got rid of it.

March 21, 2022

Disappeared bosses

My other half gives tours at the Red House, William Morris’s first house, built by Philip Webb. He’s a volunteer with the National Trust.

The interesting thing about this is that he is one of dozens of Red House volunteers, local people, who give tours, garden, run the gift shop and the tearoom.

Every volunteer is enthusiastic about the house and its history, and all are keen to share that with visitors. They organise themselves. Because they are volunteers, they give leeway. They’ve been known to stay open late to allow for a missed train, or open early to accommodate long-distance visitors. They know what to do and each one of them does it in their own style.

There are managers on site who are full-time employees of the Trust. They monitor the finances and the maintenance and restoration of the asset – the house and gardens – but they don’t supervise anyone. In fact, most of the time, nobody sees them.

In part, this is because the Trust doesn’t have the money to fund a bloated management hierarchy. But it is probably more to do with the fact that the people who deliver the customer experience are volunteers. They do this for love, not a living. They are free to walk away at any time.

What if you treated your team as if they were volunteers? Would that change how your business delivers its Promise to the people it serves? Would you, as boss, be free to ‘disappear’, to concentrate on bigger things?

Probably.

March 18, 2022

Recipes

When you first write down your Customer Experience Score, it’s likely to be very like a recipe – a set of detailed, step-by-step instructions to create a very specific outcome.

That’s great. Recipes can be a great way for you to get stuff out of your head, and for people to build confidence.

But they can also become a trap that undermines confidence. If people have never learned the basic techniques and methods that underly any recipe, its easy for them to become reliant on having exactly the right ingredients, the right pots and pans, the right equipment and the right actions, in the right order…

That makes for a lot of work, a lot of shopping, a lot of planning and a lot of anxiety too, which makes cooking a joyless activity for many.

Cooking doesn’t always have to be ‘fun’, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be relaxed, exploratory, and sometimes, surprising. By understanding the patterns hidden in recipes, we can start to play with them, tasting and learning as we go, until eventually, we can improvise a nourishing meal out of whatever we happen to have in the kitchen.

The same is true for your Customer Experience Score – recipes can be a great start. But results will get better if you allow people to tweak and experiment and improvise a little. Just make sure to ‘taste as you go’ and things will be fine. Eventually, people won’t need the recipes, they’ll be able to improvise a great customer experience with the resources around them and the customer in front of them.

Who knows? One day, their Bara Brith will be even better than yours.

If you’d like to become an effortless cook, my friend Katerina is running a workshop next weekend.

I did this and it honestly changed my life.

March 17, 2022

How to capture a business process – Step 7

When you’re designing a process, bear in mind the reason you are doing it.

All the processes in your business are part of a system – your unique system – for making and keeping promises for the people you serve:

Your Promise System

More importantly, design it so that the person executed can see this context, and act accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll find yourselves missing the point completely.

The answer is to not think of it as a ‘process’ at all, but as a musical score. A score describes what notes to play in what order. Not because ‘that’s the way to do it’, but to evoke a desired emotional response in the listener. That’s why a score will often contain words as well as musical notes – that give hints on how to play, not just what to play.

The ‘process’ is the floor. The context is where the magic happens.

March 15, 2022

Sending and receiving

When sending and receiving, asking and getting an answer, happens asynchronously, it takes more work to get to a point where things can move forward.

This work is often invisible until you try and capture it in a Customer Experience Score.

At which point, it’s a good idea to ask: “How much of this can I make synchronous instead?”

Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve got so used to tech that allows us to operate asynchronously that we default to it.

Now we have tech that makes it much easier to operate synchronously too – even across time-zones. Perhaps that should be our new default?

March 14, 2022

Getting paid is part of the process

If you make getting paid part of the process of delivering your service, its easier to make sure it happens, on time.

Remember though, to also make it part of the customer experience.

There’s no reason why your customer shouldn’t enjoy it too.

March 11, 2022

Never done

Another thing to keep in mind as you design your Customer Experience Score:

You’re never done.

You will be wrong sometimes, you will be right more often, but you will never be finished.

Because there is no right answer.

Only the best answer for now.

That’s what makes it human, sustainable and uniquely beautiful.

March 10, 2022

How low should you go?

When you’re trying to capture your Customer Experience Score, it’s easy to get yourself bogged down in detail, trying to nail down every step of every activity to the nth degree.

You can avoid this by reminding yourself who you’re writing the process for – a competent human being, not a machine. One of the great things about humans is that you don’t need to tell them everything. They can fill in the gaps from their experience, using their skill and judgement.

So if you find yourself documenting the equivalent of ‘make a cup of tea’ in excruciating detail, you’ve gone too low. On the other hand, if everyone following your Score has to stop and ask you “What am I supposed to do here?“, you’ve stayed too high. If some of your players are too new to know already, by all means, document ‘how to make a cup of tea’. As part of their training, not part of the Score.

The only way you’ll know how near you are to the sweet spot is to do it, find out and adjust accordingly.

March 9, 2022

Untangling

One of the hardest things to get your head around when you first start thinking about your Customer Experience Score, is working out how what you do splits into different activities. When you’ve always done a bunch of tasks together, it can be hard to see how they don’t necessarily belong together in your Score.

Why does this matter?

Because the last thing you want your people to have to do is to ask themselves the equivalent of “Hang on, do I play this note or skip it?” every time they play your music.

A musical score doesn’t usually contain optional notes. You play what you see. You want your Score to work the same way.

Good questions to ask yourself to disentangle tasks and place them sensibly in your Score are:

“Does this Activity get repeated for the same client?”

“If so, do I do this task every time I do this activity?” If not, it probably belongs somewhere else, either as a step in another Activity or as an Activity in its own right.

“Where could I put it that would mean it does happen every time?” Often that’s the next Activity along in the process.

Let’s look at a simple example, setting up a new client.

When I set up a new client, I create a folder for them on my storage system. That folder contains general information about the client that is going to be useful however many times I work with them in future.

So, my ‘Set Up Client’ activity will involve creating that folder, then populating it with the information I want to keep for that client.

Whenever I start a new project, I set up a subfolder inside the client’s folder to hold information that’s specific to this project.

The only reason I’m setting up a new client is because I’m doing a project with them. So, at first glance it would be tempting to include setting up the project stuff as part of the ‘Set Up Client’ activity.

But what happens if we do a second project with this client? Does the person (who is not me) playing this Score start at Set Up Client and repeat unnecessary tasks? Or have to check whether they have been done already before they carry them out?

It would be better to have a separate ‘Set Up Project’ activity that includes the tasks that apply to setting up each and every project, and restrict ‘Set Up Client’ to only those tasks that are relevant to it.

Now, as a player, I can move from ‘Set Up Client’ to ‘Set Up Project’ seamlessly for the first project, and repeat from ‘Set Up Project’ if we work together again.

I don’t have to think about it, I can just play the notes, without getting into a tangle.

March 8, 2022

And then what?

Following on from yesterday’s post…

To create the story of the Customer Experience Score you are trying to capture, start with a question:

“What happens when a client buys this product/starts this programme/signs up for this service…?”.

Make notes of the answer, until there’s a pause.

“And then what?”

Keep asking this question until you get an answer something like: “Nothing, that’s it. That’s the end.”

It will probably take longer than you think, but you’ll have your first draft. And lots more questions.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss