The Disappearing Boss – Page 49 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 4, 2019

Unscripted

Too often we think that treating customers the same way means putting them through the same mechanical process. In doing so we mistake customers for widgets. We also mistake our staff for widgets.

Much better to exploit the possibilities offered by human beings to create processes that are consistent without being mechanical.

The trick is to think about what must be covered as part of the process, then find a way to help the human being running that process to remember that, while giving them freedom as to how they cover it.

Take a phone call for example. Rather than scripting a sales or customer service call, why not create a simple prompt sheet, that lets the person making the call remember what must be covered, while letting them cover it as part of a natural conversation with whoever is on the other end of the phone. I’ve written an e-book showing you how.

Both sides of the conversation will feel more natural, and that makes both sides much happier to make and receive your calls.

October 2, 2019

Resonance

There is a whole family of stringed musical instruments that capitalise on resonance.

These instruments have additional ‘sympathetic’ strings, that are never touched, but are tuned to resonate in harmony with the normal strings. So when the instrument is played, a richer, more complex harmony of sound is made – almost as if the player has been given an extra hand.

Your Promise of Value is how your business is tuned. Everything you do, for customers; staff; suppliers, shareholders and the community around you needs to resonate with it.

That way, they become ‘sympathetic strings’ for your Promise, extending your reach and helping to make it truly believable.

September 27, 2019

Commuting

Get a bunch of small business owners together where I live and they’ll wax lyrical about no longer having to commute to London to work. For some it means as much as 15 hours a week to spend on something else – family; sleep; self-care or productive business.

There are good reasons why teams sometimes need to get together to work, but to me at least it seems odd to see bigger and bigger white collar factories go up in London, when most people would be more productive working from home. After all F International cracked how to do this successfully way back in the ’70s – long before the technology we have now made remote working easy.

In which case the need to commute must be about something else. A need for community perhaps? Cross-pollination? Status? Control?

I don’t know the answer, but it might be worth asking the question for your business.

September 25, 2019

Asking for help

We’re not trained to ask for help. We’re meant to be knowledgeable enough and competent enough to manage everything ourselves. We like to present as swans, serene on top, paddling madly underneath.

Independence is overrated.

Sometimes the quickest and best solution is to ask for help. And your accountant can be a good place to start.

September 18, 2019

Growing up

The thing my mum hated most about her role in our family was that she was the one who nagged us. To tidy our rooms, do our homework or put our clothes in for washing.

Because, as all grown-ups know, getting things in good order doesn’t happen by accident. There is no ‘housework fairy’ that does it all by magic.

There isn’t a book-keeping fairy either. Although many small business owners seem to think there is. There’s only your poor accountant trying to drag the information out of you in time for the deadline, or ploughing through that jumbled bag of receipts you’ve handed in, trying to make sense of them for your tax return.

One of the best things my mum did for us was to go on strike. It helped us grow up and take responsibility for keeping our own order.

Perhaps its time accountants did the same. Because keeping your business in order is far more important than housework. It’s the foundation for growing up.

September 16, 2019

Taking chances

It’s impossible to predict every possible scenario. So instead of trying to plan for every eventuality, it’s much better to simply keep your options open.

The trick is to minimise the possible downside, while allowing the upside to take care of itself. So, if you can protect your restaurant from the worst effects of a storm, you can stay open, when others around you don’t. If everyone is evacuated (including you), you’re no worse off than if you had closed anyway. If they aren’t, you’re going to be popular.

This is what it means to be antifragile – the downside won’t kill you, while the upside benefits you significantly.

The beauty of this idea is that it makes dealing with risk much simpler. All you really need is to understand what might kill you, and mitigate the effects of that – creating a floor, below which nothing can go, while leaving the ceiling open to the sky.

You can do this with business processes too. Specify “the least that should happen”, and let humans beings find new ways to add the delight.

Then ratchet up the floor.

September 13, 2019

Infrastructure

Those country lanes we love to drive down in summer were mostly built back in the 1920s and 1930s.

They were an investment in the future, both as physical infrastructure that opened up the countryside to new markets and as employment for men and their families who would have otherwise starved.

They have lasted much better than most canals and railways, because they are less prescriptive about what can travel on them, or for what purpose, which means they can cope with all kinds of traffic, from milk-cart, to ramblers to country commuters.

They form a network, combining direction and connection with flexibility. They enable autonomy.

Pretty good characteristics to aim for in a business infrastructure too. Expensive to build, but well worth the investment.

September 10, 2019

Relics

Yesterday, I drove across the Peak District, along the Derwent Valley and up through Glossop to Calderdale.

Almost the whole way, wherever there was a river below, the valley was thick with old mill buildings, built to last. Some famous, like Arkwright’s Cromford and Masson Mills, now world heritage sites. Most forgotten, derelict, or hidden in the core of industrial estates, or turned into housing.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were well over 100 cotton mills in this area, their owners rushing to embrace the new business model pioneered by Arkwright – a factory powered by water.

Within 30 years, many of them were out of business. A new technology shift had taken place, from water power to steam, which meant independence from rivers, and freedom from the size constraints imposed by valleys. Small factory owners, unable to justify the investment could no longer compete and went under.

Now of course, very little cotton is spun or woven in the UK. Yet more technology shifts meant that even large factories drifted slowly into obsolescence.

To us now, this is history. But technology is always shifting, increasingly in people-based service industries like accounting, consulting and law.

You can embrace the latest business model, or make a virtue of keeping to the old. The trick is to do it consciously, keeping an eye out for whats next.

September 9, 2019

Embracing variation

Nature loves variation.

Small errors, mishaps and mistakes make a species stronger, not weaker. They make the system antifragile.

Fine china does not love variation. Even the smallest of mishaps can cause irrecoverable damage.

If you want a business that lasts, its better to design it to be more of a system than a dinner service. But that doesn’t mean formless.

Build a strong core of values, purpose and ethos, embodied in simple high-level processes that describe ‘what’ not ‘how’, and you too can get to love variation.

And variation is what leads to evolution.

September 2, 2019

Good Design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory. Dieter Rams, Design Principle number 4.

How many times have you pulled at a door that was meant to be pushed? Or pushed a door that was meant to be pulled?

There are 4 simple design solutions that would prevent that tiny but all too frequent source of wasted energy and frustration:

Put a flat plate on the ‘push’ side and a handle on the ‘pull’ side.
Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a flat plate on both sides (because both are now ‘push’).
Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a handle on both sides (because both are now ‘pull’).
Have the door open automatically as someone approaches it.

1, 2 and 3 make the door understandable, 4 makes it self-explanatory.

We live and work among millions of designed products every day, from doors to roundabouts and office blocks to business processes, organisational structures and governments, many of which provide all too frequent sources of wasted energy and frustration.

How would you re-design them?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss