Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss

Resource Scarcity
February 11, 2019

Resource Scarcity

When a resource is expensive, it seems sensible to use it as efficiently as possible. So we batch jobs up for it, making them wait, so the expensive, and therefore scarce resource can be used to the max.

The problem with this approach is that it distorts the process, optimising a single step at the expense of the rest of it.

This distortion often persists long after the resource in question is no longer scarce. So you get GP and hospital waiting rooms; jobcentres and jury rooms, full of people in forced idleness, just so that the ‘scarce resource’ is maximally productive.

What if we designed our processes around the most critically affected role instead?

Things would look very different, and would be much more efficent overall – although the ‘scarce resource’ might feel a little less important.

Themes and variations
February 6, 2019

Themes and variations

A common reaction to the idea of writing a ‘score’ for a business is “That’s not possible! There are just too many variations we’d have to account for.”

The trick is not to try.

In practice, most of what happens in a business follows, or should follow a ‘usual route’. So we build the score around that ‘usual route’. That keeps it simple and uncluttered, which in turn makes it easy to follow and learn.

Variations usually occur around the technicalities of what the business is doing. They take place at the level of the musician not the score. And as a professional the musician can be safely left to use their judgement to deal with the variation.

As a more concrete example, take dog-walking. Several years ago I worked with a client to franchise their dog-walking business.

We created a ‘usual route‘ for running a dog walk. It covers collecting dogs from their homes and transporting them to the local park, taking them through exercise, training and play in the park, then reversing the process to get them all back home.

All dogs are different. They have personalities and with them preferences about how they come into contact with other dogs. These preferences need to be taken into account at various points in the dog-walking process. It would have been madness to try and include every possible preference and combination of preferences in the main process. So, instead the business owner created a separate ‘Techniques’ handbook, which contained tips and tricks for different situations.

This meant that in the manual, we could simply reference to the appropriate section in the Techniques handbook, together with an instruction along the lines of “Use your knowledge of dog behaviour and your experience of dogs to apply the appropriate technique(s). You’ll find them here ->.”

This created the right balance between dictating the ‘score’ and leaving the musician free to get on with playing it, while at the same time providing helpful hints for variations that might not happen very often.

The result was that everyone was happy. Our first franchisee was delighted: “I know exactly what I have to do.”, and the new franchisor could be confident that her service would continue to delight clients as she grew her business.

We can do this because we’re dealing with human beings, not machines.

Elaboration

Elaboration

Sam at Lewisham Local asked me to elaborate on what I mean by this:

‘scaling successfully is about creating an ecosystem where others can lead’

Here goes…

When you first start a small business you are in control. You make all the promises. You keep them. You are the leader of your own business.

When you can no longer keep up with demand yourself, you add more people. At first, this works, because you are offloading jobs that are easily defined (which could also be outsourced) such as bookkeeping, accounting, diary management, or you are handing over whole areas of responsibility such as sales for example, to another person and simply letting them get on with it.

Beyond a certain size though – perhaps around 5 -7 people – this approach starts to break down. You’ve run out of ‘easy to define’ jobs to offload, and the people you’ve handed responsibility to turn out to have completely different ideas about the promises you are making and how to keep them. They need watching, and controlling.

You are still the only leader, and you spend your time monitoring what other people are doing instead of working on your business. So you get stuck at this scale. You may even decide to scale back at this point, because going further just seems too hard.

What you really want is people who don’t need to be told, who can take responsibility for delivering on behalf of the business, each one of them a leader for the business.

But in order to do this, your people need an ecosystem that supports them.

For me this ecosystem looks like this:

  • It gives absolute clarity on who the business serves and what the business promises to do for them.

  • It nails down the values and behaviours that drive ‘the way we do things’ round here, setting expectations for behaviour for everyone in and around the business.

  • It is structured around processes, not functions, and certainly not management hierarchy. Processes start and end at the boundary of the organisation – they go from end-to-end, following the lifecycle of a prospect through to client and beyond. In this way the ecosystem stays focused on the people it serves. Everything that goes on inside the ecosystem is a side-effect of attracting and serving clients.

  • Processes provide clear direction on what needs to be done when, both to make the right promises to the right people, and to deliver on those promises – without specifying in excruciating detail how to do those things (although they may reference a library of techniques or ‘how-to’s that beginners may find useful).

  • Processes set out the usual run of events, without enumerating every possible scenario. This means that technical expertise still resides in the individual, who can exercise their professional judgement to handle exceptions, based on their own knowledge and experience, plus the values and behaviours expected of them.

  • It is based on roles, not individuals. Roles have clear responsibilities to clients. Roles run processes and each process is the exclusive responsiblility of one role. In effect every role-player leads their own processes. Roles may participate in processes they are not responsible for.

  • It ensures that everything is visible to everyone, and that all the resources needed to perform a role are available as and when they are needed.

  • Finally, it includes feedback mechanisms, so that it can improve and evolve. This includes rewards, which to be effective, should fairly reflect individual contributions.

In this ecosystem individuals can play more than one role, and the same role can be performed by many individuals. This is how you scale – you simply add more individuals in the roles you need.

Ideally, an individual runs an entire end-to-end process – effectively becoming a mini-business on their own, a bit like a franchise, but internal. This is how you can scale and transform to an employee-owned, employee-run business.

To begin with, you as the original leader will want to monitor and action all feedback, but roles should see everything too. Their responsibilities include improving the ecosystem based on this feedback.

Over time, as you become more confident that your people are running the business as it should be, you can let them get on with it – they will lead the business instead of you.

It takes a while to build an ecosystem like this, but once you have it, scaling becomes much easier.

That was a long elaboration – thank you for reading it.

Thank you Sam for asking it.

Process
January 30, 2019

Process

What springs to mind when I use the word ‘process’ in conversation with people is something boring and robotic – … Read More “Process”

The 80/20 rule
January 28, 2019

The 80/20 rule

Years ago, a coffee shop – an offshoot of a well-known brand – opened in the middle of my local shopping centre. It had a nice old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of a cafe from the ‘30s, with wait staff and a long bar where coffee etc. was prepared. Of course I tried it out.

It used a very clever, but simple process. You waited at the entrance. When there was a table ready, you were ushered over to it and given a copy of the menu. Someone came and took your order, taking the menu away once they had delivered it.

It worked beautifully. Nobody was seated at a dirty table and the staff could easily tell who was waiting to give or receive their order.

Except, if you wanted another coffee, or a friend joined you halfway through, there was no way to re-order, except by trying to catch someone’s eye. But they weren’t looking for you, they were looking for menus.

So either it wasn’t meant for spending much time in, or they hadn’t thought it through.

It’s a great idea to design a process for the 80% of cases. But you do need to make sure you can handle the exceptions in a way that still fulfills your promise.

Ownership
January 25, 2019

Ownership

“How do I get my people to think like an owner?”

Make them an owner.

Seeing it through
January 24, 2019

Seeing it through

Seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side.

But how do you achieve that when you need to be flexible in how you assign resources?

By having a clear, high-level process for handling cases, then making sure everyone knows how to run it, and that all the information needed to move that case forward is accessible to anyone who needs it at any time.

Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.

And you’ve just created a more empowering division of labour.

Top-down, bottom-up
January 23, 2019

Top-down, bottom-up

I get the feeling that top-down thinking is very unfashionable at the moment. It smacks too much of command-and-control, over-complicated buraeucracy, and having things ‘done to you’ instead of ‘done with you’ – or even ‘done by you’.

Bottom-up thinking is great for quick wins, incremental change and emergent consensus, but top-down can uncover opportunities for radical change that bottom-up thinking will miss, because you’re asking higher-level questions – “How should we keep our promise?”, rather than “How do we open the office?”.

And often, by answering these high-level questions, we can remove whole chunks of low-level procedure that would otherwise go unquestioned.

We shouldn’t let our thinking get trapped in our organisational structure.

Serialisation
January 21, 2019

Serialisation

Years ago, I worked with a client who wanted to streamline and automate how clients were onboarded and offboarded (if that is a word). They didn’t have much time to spend with me, so they gave me a copy of the checklist they used so I could get a handle on how it worked.

This checklist would get created whenever a new client signed up, and would travel around the client’s office from one person to the next, with each person doing, then ticking off the task they were responsible for.

If you have something like this (and it might be an electronic ‘checklist’), here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

“Does the next person really need to wait for me to complete my task before they can start theirs?”

If not, they probably shouldn’t be on the same checklist.