Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 21, 2018

In praise of Maps

The idea of making a journey foolproof isn’t a new one.

Published nearly 350 years ago, John Ogilby’s road map isn’t so different from your GPS device – simply follow the route from one point to the next, as if you’re travelling in a straight line from London to Harwich.

This is great when everything works as expected.

When it doesn’t its useful to have a more accurate idea of the direction you’re taking, where you’re headed and what’s around you along the way. That way you can quickly work out a practical alternative for getting to your destination.

By all means optimise the routine with a GPS.

Just make sure everyone also has access to the map.

November 20, 2018

A business notation?

Here’s what I think works well:

Simplicity. A small number of elements with very few variations. In the above example, bubbles represent Activities, the arrows the pathways that can be taken through them.
Plain language – what I call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ – as spoken by ordinary people. Active verbs, combined where needed with a single noun. Together they express the desired outcome of the Activity.
Some rigour, but not rigidity. The aim is to communicate the what to a competent and intelligent human being, not a robot or a computer. A bit of fuzziness is tolerable if it helps to get the idea across in an uncluttered way.

November 19, 2018

Frameworks for Collaboration

Whenever we want people to collaborate on a complex project – each person contributing their own expertise – we find a way to share information about what we’re trying to create.

Whether the project is a religious ceremony; a dance; a film or a building, we have no problem with using simple, clear, shared notations that help everyone involved to understand what needs to be done without getting bogged down in the detail of how to do it.

We’re happy to let each person be responsible for the how, as long as it delivers the what we asked for (or better).

Why do we make it so hard for the people in our businesses to do the same?

November 16, 2018

The Promise

Every great business is founded on a promise.

Not to shareholders.

Not to staff.

To prospects and customers.

The promise of a change that’s yearned for, that’s worth more than the money in my pocket.

A promise you do your utmost to keep.

All businesses have such a promise, it shows, but it isn’t always articulated explicitly.

Making it explicit, and sharing it with your team is the first step in building a framework that enables them to deliver it on your behalf.

The first (and last) rule of your enabling framework:

If in doubt, remember the promise, then do what it takes to deliver that.

November 15, 2018

Barriers to growth

A 2013 research paper from the now defunct Department for Business Innovation and Skills identified reasons why small businesses – those employing between 0 and 9 staff – didn’t want to grow much bigger, if at all.

Here are two that struck me:

“I’d lose too much control of the business.”
“I’d have to spend too much time managing other people.”

These can be solved quite simply, but not easily:

Create a framework for “what we promise to our clients” and “the way we do things round here” that enables you to:
Let people manage themselves.

That way you get the best of both worlds.

November 14, 2018

Oversight

How do you know when someone is doing a good job?

Is it by seeing them do it? Is it by reading a report of the results or hearing about them from someone? Is it by doing the job with them?

We know from NLP that individuals have a preferred ‘channel’ for taking in information, and not surprisingly, information about how well a person is working is no exception.

More interesting perhaps is that time comes into it too.

How do you get convinced enough that you don’t need to watch that person anymore?

For some people, once is fine. Others need a few occurrences. A few people are never quite convinced and have to keep checking.

This means that for some business owners, the temptation is to delegate a job, then watch over that person to make sure they are doing it right, which clearly defeats the purpose.

The other temptation – just as dangerous – is to assume after one occurrence (or a few), that everything is fine, only to uncover a disaster when the person is off sick or on holiday or leaves.

However you get personally convinced about how well a person is doing their job, it pays to have a means of confirming that this is still the case over longer periods of time.

First, make sure the person taking on the job knows the business outcome they are trying to achieve and the activities that are needed to get there.

Then create a process for spot checking that helps them and you to stay reassured that all is well, and that can catch any problems early.

Then let them get on with it.

(this blog was originally published in LinkedIn).

November 13, 2018

Good Company

What makes us feel free?

Agency – making our ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe
Mastery – learning new skills
Autonomy – being free to choose how we make our dent
Purpose – doing this for something bigger than ourselves.
Community – doing all this with ‘people like us’.

A business can be a great place to make this possible. Even better when “those that create value in the company benefit directly from the value they create”.

There’s a reason we originally called them ‘Companies”.

November 12, 2018

By their fruits…

You can probably complete that sentence.

For me, it means that it isn’t the badge you wear that tells people what you stand for, it’s what you do and how you behave. The badge is just our shortcut for knowing what to expect.

Of course, over time, the badge becomes a proxy for the behaviour, and if you’re cynical you can exploit this fact.

So yesterday, our towns were festooned with poppies, and our TV schedules rammed with Remembrance, while actual ex-servicemen are homeless, in prison or committing suicide, and many who lost their lives, parents, or childhoods in the last war are seeing the social contract they fought to bring about being dismantled before their very eyes.

Yes, you can get away with just wearing the badge, but eventually, the doing will out.

That’s true for businesses too.

November 9, 2018

Education

When we first moved into our house 30 years ago, there was a Safeways supermarket in the high street. Every night there were bargains to be had, as fresh food was marked down for quick sale. Every Christmas, the fresh turkeys sat on the shelves until Christmas Eve, when, seemingly out of the blue, a gang of eager shoppers would hover around the shop assistant as they marked those same turkeys down for a quick sale.

Within a couple of years, Safeways had gone. I wasn’t surprised.

Today, with the barrage of Christmas advertising already well under way, I spotted ‘Christmas Eve Boxes’ in the window of a pop-up Christmas shop.

How long will it be before we’re giving ‘1st of December boxes’?

And how long before we’re complaining that “Young people today can’t do deferred gratification”?

November 8, 2018

Two views on franchising

Some people think that successful franchises can only be built on a certain kind of business – one where the job can be reduced to something like painting by numbers, or following a sequence of pictures – e.g. making pizzas or burgers, cleaning cars or ovens or fixing windscreen chips.

This view is based on the notion that franchising is all about systemising (“Macdonaldising”) work procedures down to the nth degree of detail so that you can get inexperienced and therefore cheap people to do it – almost off the street. These people might as well be robots (and almost certainly will be soon).

I think there’s a much more interesting way to think of franchising. Which is that it supports a form of responsible autonomy – enabling a skilled, competent individual to use their judgement to deliver consistently excellent service, without the need for detailed procedures, because they understand how everything they do contributes to an overall process of winning and serving a client.

The first view forces people to follow a specific, spelled-out system, which as a result becomes very easy to copy.

The second builds a system that supports people to be people, which makes it pretty well impossible to copy, and capable of delivering much higher value. It also makes it much more fun to be part of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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