The Disappearing Boss – Page 29 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 7, 2022

How to capture a business process: Step 6

I’ve written quite a bit elsewhere on how to capture a business process. But I left out a step.

After you’ve thought about what the point of your business process is; where it starts; where it ends; what happens through this process; what Roles are involved; what Props are needed and how exceptions should be handled, there is one more crucial thing you need to do:

Have a go.

Your first draft will be wrong. Mine always are.

Your second draft may well be wrong. Mine frequently are.

Your third draft may not be quite right. That often happens to me.

But you can’t find any of that out unless you have a first, second, or third draft to work with. It’s very hard to follow a process that’s in your head. Much easier when you see it spelt out as a map in front of you. That’s true for you and for your colleagues.

This is how great artists work. They sketch, tentatively and hairily at first. to get the idea out of their head into a form they can work on.

I’d even go as far to say feel free to start at Step 3, with the story and just get something down. Then review it in the light of Steps 1 to 5 to refine what you have in your own head before you present it to others.

When it comes to capturing how things should work for your business, the most important step is to get it out of your head, and into a form that you and others can reason about, re-design and improve.

It will never be perfect, but it will be visible. Therefore capable of being made better

Like a great artist, keep practicing, keep sketching.

In time, your sketches will look more like finished works. But they’ll always be valuable.

February 25, 2022

Practice

In a crisis, we want people to take responsibility, assert autonomy and agency and act together as a community for a higher purpose.

To prevent that crisis from being hijacked by a subgroup with an agenda.

It helps a lot of we’ve allowed them to master doing all these things first, by practicing them as part of their daily work.

The irony is, of course, that if we did that we’d probably have fewer crises.

February 18, 2022

A good question

I can’t remember where I spotted it, but I love this question, clearly inspired by John Rawls:

“How would you design a business if you couldn’t know what position you would hold in it?”.

How would you answer?

February 16, 2022

Are there too many managers?

That was the question asked on ‘The Agenda with Steve Paikin’ the other day.

Of course it’s the wrong question.

One real question is “How do you build an organisation that takes individual competences and creates an organisational capability”. In other words, how do you co-ordinate the activities of different people into a consistent, repeatable business activity?

Another is “How do we create organisations that are as capable of as the people inside them?”. In other words, how do you make sure that individual capabilities are not stifled/wasted in the process?

If you want your business to achieve its purpose effectively and efficiently, you have to find a way of managing that addresses both of these questions.

Managers are a solution, but they aren’t the only one. And they may not be the best.

February 8, 2022

Sleep

I’ve finally found a way to lose weight effortlessly – get more sleep.

Sadly for me, this isn’t an answer. I get a good 8 hours a night. And even that may not be natural. In the past, getting those eight hours took longer. People took two sleeps, with a gap between, where they might read, chat, sew, make love or even get up and do stuff.

Industry made that impossible for most people. For the past 500 years or so we’ve gradually compressed the opportunity for sleep into a smaller and smaller timeframe. Which is of course counter-productive. Well-slept people are mare productive, and less dangerous to themselves and others.

For all the emphasis on LEAN and reducing all forms of waste, Muri – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems, is the one we consistently ignore.

One of the best ways to reduce it, is to increase the efficiency of our time at work. Automate drudgery, make sure people know what they are supposed to be doing and why, give them autonomy over how and where they do it.

The reward for the business is increased profit. A side-effect is more time for everyone – including you.

February 3, 2022

The trough of inefficiency

It’s a well-known phenomenon. As a one-person or few-person business grows and adds more people it becomes less and less efficient. As more people are added and roles are specialised, overheads are added too – of communication, coordination and support, and eventually management.

The result is that a business spends time in what Seth Godin calls The trough of inefficiency. Perhaps even getting stuck there forever.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When you started your business, you were its CEO – Chief Everything Officer. You did everything, gradually shaping a unique end-to-end process for making and keeping promises to the people you serve. A process that works.

We fall into the trough of inefficiency because we think of our businesses as pin-factories – a set of tiny, repetitive operations chained together, managed by someone who can see the bigger picture, who has the whole process in their head.

Why not simply replicate the Chief Everything Officer instead?

If you can do it, so can someone else. Especially if you tell them what you do.

Tell them your Promise, Tell them what you do to make it, and what you do to keep it. Write it down like music in a Customer Experience Score so that they can run the whole thing themselves, even when you’re not in the room.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you only need meetings for business-changing decisions, not the day-to-day.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you don’t depend on specialists. When everyone knows everything that needs doing, they can support each other.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, You don’t need managers. People co-ordinate themselves, managing their own Customer Experiences.

Even better, further growth is simple. For more impact, add more Chief Everything Officers.

A Customer Experience Score can your ladder out of the trough of inefficiency.

It works just as well as a bridge to stop you falling in in the first place.

February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones. To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong. In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast. And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing. You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude. People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation. We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed. Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

January 19, 2022

Democracy

For the ancient Athenians, elections were profoundly unsatisfactory. The idea of devolving responsibility for running Athenian life to a few people simply because they could afford to do it full time was, for them, disturbing, and likely to lead to demagoguery, factionalism, and ultimately tyranny.

So for most public offices their preferred method of selection was sortition – a random selection from a pool of eligible citizens, much like our modern jury service. Posts were held temporarily and short term, so that during his life a free Athenian could expect to serve many times in several different capacities, part of a group of people performing the same office.

Of course to our eyes, the system was far from perfect. Only free men were in the pool of eligibility, but within that pool, it didn’t matter who you were; what you did, how well you were educated, or how much you owned. If you were a free Athenian man, you could be picked and you took your turn at making Athens run smoothly.

And it meant that every free Athenian man had to be able to carry out these duties if called upon. They had to learn how things worked, as part of their education, and by participating as observers as well as actors.

It took a lot of effort to run things this way (effort freed up by slaves), but it seems to have been effective at making a life well lived (eudaimonia) possible for everyone involved.

Nowadays we’d use technology to free up people’s time and call it participatory democracy, or holacracy, or Teal, or self-management.

The Athenians just called it democracy.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss