Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 130 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

January 1, 2019

Earth Story

It’s become a bit of an annual tradition in our house to watch ‘Earth Story’ from beginning to end between Christmas and New Year.

And every year, I find myself thinking about why I enjoy watching it so much.

I love the fact that many of the scientists involved including the presenter, Aubrey Manning, are middle-aged or old. There is wisdom here as well as adventure. Many of these ‘old’ scientists made these exciting discoveries in their youth, and now younger people are following on.

I love that they collaborate so much across the world, feeding off and building on each others’ discoveries (sometimes by accident) to build an incredibly comprehensive picture of how the earth works.

I love that the topic is huge and complex, and that the documentary brings everything together in a way that takes you through the various discoveries and processes involved, until you too say to yourself “So that’s how it works”.

I love that it is a clear, straightforward, scientific, scholarly presentation. There’s no faux jeopardy, no contrived drama, no patronising. The subject is wondrous and dramatic enough to stand on its own. There’s no agenda other than to educate.

And at the end of the 8 hours, I sit back every time and think 3 things:

First, Earth is an amazing place. It’s been going a lot longer than we have, and it will happily carry on for a long while without us.

Second, people are amazing. Look at what we can do – not just the thinking and hypothesising, but the technology that allows us to observe and prove our hypotheses.

Third, there’s nothing we can do about how the planet works. The status quo will not hold forever. Whether we are speeding it up or not, the planet is going to get hotter or colder and cause us enormous difficulties.

So if we want our human story to be part of the earth story for a little longer, the answer has to lie in changing the things we can change – our societies, our priorities, our ways of living together, our ways of living on the planet – we made all these things, we can remake them.

Perhaps we could practise on smaller problems first – hunger, poverty, exploitation, how to enable anyone and everyone to live well, wherever on earth they happen to be?

Here’s to 2019.

December 24, 2018

Thank you

Thank you!

May 2019 bring everything you wish for.

I’ll be back on the 1st January.

December 20, 2018

Making Allowances

We humans have a tendency to assume that everyone else is the same as us – the same age, the same level of fitness; the same abilities; the same knowledge – until proven otherwise.

Usually, we design our systems and processes around these assumptions, and get heavy doors, high kerbs, long-ways-round walking routes, short crossing times; interfaces that require precise and accurate finger-control, or clear eyesight, or sharp hearing.

We’ll all get old.

I suspect that if we designed for that, things would be a lot easier for everyone, right now.

Work about work

This graph comes from a 2012 article by McKinsey, on improving productivity for ‘interaction workers’ through the use of ‘social technologies’ for example, collaboration tools such as Slack etc:

The diagram shows that about 60% of what these people do is what McKinsey calls ‘work about work’.

But I also wondered what an ‘interaction worker’ is. Here’s a useful definition I found:

“These include managers, salespeople, teachers, and customer service reps, as well as skilled professionals whose jobs require them to spend a lot of their time interacting with other people. These interactions are with other employees, customers, and suppliers, and involve using their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions.“

The implication of the McKinsey article is that by making these interactions easier and quicker, the ‘work about work’ is reduced, and enormous productivity gains are possible.

I’m sure that’s true, but I think there’s are a couple of deeper questions worth asking:

Which of these interactions are truly productive – in the sense of adding value for the customer?

Which could we strip out altogether?

For me, the obvious answer here is management.

People who routinely ‘use their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions’ can usually manage themselves.

So the really productive question is how to enable that?

December 19, 2018

Practice makes perfect

Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.

A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.

By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.

Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.

This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.

And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.

December 17, 2018

I’d rather be a Goose

One of my favourite books as a child, and still a favourite today, is T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King”.

Some of the most striking episodes in the novel are when the young Arthur is turned into various different animals, to learn about people and different ways of organising society.

The ant colony is metaphor for totalitarianism, based on hierarchy, blind loyalty and complete control, whereas the goose colony represents a liberal society based on nuclear families, mutual respect and emergent leadership.

The ants are completely bound by rules and regulations, the geese are bound by a common purpose and philosophy.

Of course these are metaphors, but when I read of things like Amazon’s patents for a wristband that tracks workers’ hand movements and ‘nudges’ them in the right direction, I do worry that we’re veering too far towards anthood.

December 16, 2018

Augmented Humanity

This week I caught a few minutes of an interesting conversation on the radio.

The speaker was Dr Vivienne Ming, and the snippet I caught was about the age-old problem of IT, now a problem of AI – namely, that in order to find the best solution to a problem, you have to truly understand the problem first.

More than that, you have to work out the best solution before you apply technology to automate it. And that’s the really hard part, as Amazon found out.

Process is great, but only if it augments our humanity – and like AI, the goal of process should be to as Dr Ming says, to “take the best of what people can do and make it even better by leveraging what machines can do” – to make processes that “challenge us to be better people.”

We could start by recognising ourselves and others as people first.

December 13, 2018

Doing it ourselves

Mozart could carry an entire opera in his head. But he didn’t expect his orchestra to read his mind. He wrote them a score.

A jazz composer like Art Blakey didn’t expect his band members to read his mind either.

He also wrote them a score. But he left gaps in it for them to improvise in – within the framework of the piece. The piece was different every time, and yet also the same. You can tell when its Art Blakey.

Its tempting to do it all yourself when you want to control the experience your audience has.

But better to work on creating a framework that supports your team in doing it ourselves.

December 12, 2018

Not doing it yourself

Small business owners like us can easily become control freaks.

Not because we need to be in control of other people, but because we care about making sure our clients get the experience they deserve, the one we promised them.

Sometimes we think its easier to do it ourselves rather than delegate the job to someone else, because we’re under pressure and properly getting someone else into a position where they can do it as well as (or better) than we could takes time, energy and intellectual effort.

So we take the easy route (again) and do it ourselves ‘because it’s quicker’.

That’s a trap.

It’s much better to take the hit of time and energy now, because this will make growth easier in the long run.

More importantly, doing everything ourselves means we never make the space to dream up new, better ways of delighting the people we serve, to dare more, give more and strengthen the bonds we have with them. That’s what really builds a business that will outlast us.

If you need more convincing, work through the exercise illustrated above, and work out the true opportunity cost of doing everything yourself – not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of your own fulfilment.

Why do it yourself if someone else can do it better and more joyfully?

December 11, 2018

Doing it Yourself (again)

One of the interesting things I noticed about Gothenburg was an absence of what you might call ‘flunky’ jobs.

In the numerous coffee bars, bakeries and lunchtime restaurants I visited (in the interests of research of course), I saw no wait staff, nobody clearing tables. Instead, customers picked up their own orders, and cleared away their own mess as they left – in one restaurant we even cleared our plates and sorted our dishes into trays ready for the dishwasher.

It was as if nobody felt they had to increase their own status by having someone else adopt an unnecessarily menial one (even as a paid role). How very grown-up.

The sincerest service takes place between equals.