Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 29 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

May 11, 2023

Learning by doing

As I mentioned yesterday, almost the biggest challenge for the food innovators in Vaughn Tan’s “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is making sure that any new experience (whether a dish, a meal or an event) is both consistent with their unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ AND completely new.

How on earth do you teach someone how to do this?

The answer is a process something like this:

An R&D chef is given the job of producing a new dish. There’s a brief, but no specification of method.
The chef prototypes it, then brings it to the team for assessment and feedback.
Together the team decide whether it has met the brief, giving constructive and concrete feedback. “The texture is wrong, our style is more xxx”, “This ingredient overpowers the others, we’re after something more yyy”. The most important piece of feedback is nearly always “like that zzz dish you made last month.”

These steps are repeated until the dish is judged fit to introduce to the restaurant menu. It’s at this point that instructions for re-creating it will be set down.

The key things here are:

Every chef does this, no matter how experienced they are or how new they are. Everyone judges everyone’s dishes all the time. It’s the job.
Feedback is concrete, pointing a chef towards the outcome without ever specifying method.
It’s a non-hierarchical and safe space. Nobody is managing anyone else. They are essentially peers (some more experienced than others) reviewing an output they all want to be proud of.

The result is that learning and reinforcing the unique ‘ethos’/’house style’/’brand’ becomes almost effortless, because it’s simply part of the job. Chefs learn all the time by doing, presenting and re-presenting the results of their work for the scrutiny of their peers.

These are businesses operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty, but I think there’s something really useful here, that could and should be incorporated into a system for making and keeping promises.

Because in truth, what we really want is a system for making and exceeding promises.

After all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

How would you do it?

May 10, 2023

Roles

One of the things that seems to make innovation easier for the companies in “The Uncertainty Mindset”, is what Vaughn Tan describes as ‘modular roles’.

It’s not clear exactly what this means, but I think its something like this: my job title might be ‘chef’, but I can do things that might seem to fall outside that description, and even within it I can specialise.

Team members discover their own and each others preferred roles within a given innovation through practice. There’s no sense of treading on anyone’s toes or ‘that’s not what I was hired for’.

Like acting, any role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on. There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone competent to play a role can play it. And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.

In The Disappearing Boss, I use a similar idea. A Role is a part played in a performance by a person. It’s defined by what the Role does during the performance, and the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.

Here’s an example from one of my clients. Its the definition of the Ship’s Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:

It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

What it doesn’t specify is how exactly the person playing the Role does that, nor the skills and comptencies needed. They are taken for granted, and they may well be different for different Ships. What matters is that responsibilities are delivered.

As Vaughn Tan has discovered, the great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing. One person can play many Roles. A given Role can be played by many people. Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business, and replicated to increase capacity.

At the same time, focusing on the ‘what’ of a Role, rather than the ‘how’, leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable. Worth coming back for again and again.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

May 9, 2023

Dancing with chaos

I finished “The Uncertainty Mindset” this morning. Unike many management books, it’s taken me a while to finish because the book is dense with ideas and insights, so I have had to rest between reads.

I thoroughly recommend it, especially for those who wish to disrupt with their business.

In the high-end, ultra-innovative world of fine dining of the book, teams of innovators repeatedly dance with chaos, pushing themselves into some new, unknown situation (moving the restaurant to new country; organising a conference; organising food relief in hurrican-struck islands) inducing a feeling of desperation as they scramble to deliver on a promise that will be at once utterly new and utterly familiar to their clientele. Each time they dance they learn anew that they will succeed, even if they don’t yet know how. And they do succeed. Spectacularly. Then they rest, allowing themselves time to recover before they go again, on an even bigger challenge.

They can do this because they are specifically R&D teams. The day-to-day of a restaurant can’t run like this. The teams running the restaurants have a different challenge with it’s own rhythm.

What if you’re not a restaurant chain? What if you aren’t R&D? What if you simply want to evolve continuously, not necessarily radically, in response to the world around your business, through the lens of your customers? What can be learned from this approach?

It’s this aspect that I want to pursue – that dance between order and chaos, between predictbility and uncertainty that makes life so interesting.

So I’ll be reading it again, taking notes, and translating it into my own terms, so I can share it with you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 4, 2023

Where power is

“We may not like to admit it, but most organizations–even those with “nice” cultures–are authoritarian by design“ – from Michele Zanini’s post yesterday.

Of course they are.

Because they are founded on a fundamental asymmetry of power.

If an employable person doesn’t work, they starve. That’s not true for their ultimate employers.

Enclosures, Poor Laws, Vagrancy acts and witch hunts were the weapons used to bring about this asymmetry, following a hundred years or so of peasants getting ‘above themselves’ after the ravages of the Black Death.

‘Austerity’, ‘inflation control’, ‘reforms’ to education, healthcare and the welfare state are being used to reinforce it today.

Now, we’re not even allowed to protest about it.

It’s why government doesn’t really like small business, despite what they say, because small businesses are often more equitable (because here, employer and employee are more or less in the same boat – if they don’t work, they starve).

The good news is that this puts power in our hands. Because as small businesses we can choose how we grow, and so start to tip the balance back again, by growing differently.

Purpose-led. Equitably organised and rewarded.

The way we naturally want to be.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

May 3, 2023

The cat’s out of the bag

I see City bosses are clamouring for a return to office working again.

I wonder why?

Are they worried about rents on empty offices? Those are effectively a sunk cost.

Are they worried about their teams’ jobs or wellbeing? I doubt it.

Are they worried about ‘losing control’? Are they bullies then?

Is it about status? What’s the point of being a boss when there’s nobody around to see it?

Or could it be that when frontliners demonstrate that they can achieve better results without supervision, intervention and commutes, it’s the manager’s job that’s redundant?

Hmmm…

It seems to me that for a long time, traditional corporate management has been about pushing risk and accountability downwards to the people who do the work, without giving them the rewards to match. Now the cat’s out of the bag.

It’s going to be hard to put it back.

Better then to follow through instead, and give people what they really want:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
- Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

Supported of course, just not necessarily in the form of management.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

What do you think?

May 2, 2023

Order with feeling

I didn’t get much reading done this weekend.

Instead I’ve been sorting fabrics.

Over the years I’ve built up an extensive collection of vintage fabrics and shirts that I’ve been intending to use for quilts. I like the idea of recycling other people’s cast-offs into new and interesting material.

My collection was all over the place, scattered across different parts of the house, all colours jumbled together in various bags too heavy to move.

So my job over the last week or so has been to sort through it, chuck some, earmark some for passing on, and get the rest cut up for flatter storage, organised into smaller labelled bags.

It’s been hard work, but pleasant, evoking some happy memories. I picked through a bag of scraps – far too small to actually use – remembering the velvet teddy I made for one niece; the bright Provencal backpack I made for another; the tartan dinosaur I made for a colleague’s wedding; the bean bags I made for nephews, and the enormous one I tie-dyed to commission for another colleague. Then I threw the scraps away.

I’ve never thought of myself as an artist. I can’t draw or paint. But give me something concrete to work with and I can create useful things that also look unexpectedly good. Pottery, jewellery making, woodwork, patchwork – those are more my style.

Also businesses.

Give me a business, that perhaps feels a bit disorganised, a bit scattered, not quite coherent. Yet nevertheless amazing. I’ll teach its owners to re-arrange it into an elegant sysem for making and keeping promises that becomes more than the sum of its parts. Ordered, scalable, yet still full of of feeling, it becomes an heirloom they’ll be even more proud to pass on.

In business as in patchwork, Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 28, 2023

Adjusting the system 3 – refining the Score

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

You may find that you need to refine an existing part of your Score.

This could mean simplifying an Activity by removing unnecessary steps. Or spelling out what has to happen in more detail. You might remove an Activity, or add a new one, or several.

Whatever the change, there are bound to be knock-on effects. Perhaps you need to review Props for this part of your Score. You might need to create a new Role. You’ll certainly need to let your people learn and practice the new Score before you perform it for real.

This may seem like a lot of unecessary work, especially for minor adjustments. It will be tempting to just change practices without bothering to change the Score first.

Resist that tempation.

Following through the impact of even minor changes on your Score, before implementing them in real life allows you to try different ideas and scenarios ‘on paper’, when getting it wrong and reversing back to your starting point is easiest and cheapest.

It means you get to see the full impact before you start changing anything.

It means you can share this task with everyone on the team, to get multiple perspectives and arrive at better solutions more quickly.

It also means that your Score always reflects the reality of how your business works, which keeps it useful, and even more importantly, preserves the value of your business until you’re ready to exit.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 27, 2023

Dig deeper

“Practical tips for talking to your employees about stress and worry.” – the title of an email that landed in my inbox this morning.

I couldn’t help thinking: “What if you made sure you are never the direct or indirect source of stress and worry in the first place?”.

Work doesn’t have to be a means of squeezing the joy out of life, it can be part of creating that joy.

If your business isn’t doing that, dig deeper.

Change the system, before it gets changed for you.

Discipline makes Daring possible

April 26, 2023

Adjusting the system 2 – Automation

Once you’ve assessed the potential consequences of what you’re seeing in feedback, and decided what to do about it, you can start acting to adapt your system.

Another relatively straightforward adaptation is to automate a part of your Customer Experience Score.

This could be an entire Activity, or it might be something that makes up a small part of lots of Activities.

You could for example automate your Enrol Prospect Activity, so that people can sign up online. Or some of your Show Up Activities – for example, placing ads or posting to social media or even commenting on other people’s posts. Or your entire Keep Promise Activity, if it is relatively simple.

Having your Customer Experience Score written down makes it easier to spot where automating an oft-repeated task that is part of many larger Activities would make sense.

For example, emails.

If your business involves lots of regular communication with clients – to request information or notify them of actions taken or remind them of actions they need to take, it makes sense to automate the sending of these emails. Especially if you want the emails received to be consistent in tone and language.

This is the kind of task that people hate doing, and so take shortcuts with, because it doesn’t feel essential to the rest of the process. It’s also the kind of task that happens at the beginning of a lot of important Activities, giving plenty of opportunity for silly copy and paste errors that will make your client feel a little less valued and a little more wary about how well you’re Keeping your Promise for them.

It’s also the kind of task that’s easy to automate well. You can create templates, written by a human to a human, then use software to schedule, personalise and send them to clients. Done well, this saves time and embarassment for you and your team, without feeling robotic for your clients.

Whichever part of your Score you consider automating, here are some questions to ask yourself:

For a human being, is this drudgery? Repetitive, mechanical, requiring a level of attention that’s difficult to maintain?
Is this something that people do better than machines or software? Does it involve interaction with other humans, making it unpredictable, and requiring empathy? Or does it involve the application of creativity, experience, judgement, wisdom?
Will this lead to our clients doing more of the work themselves? Is that what they want? How many will we lose as a result? How many could we attract? Could it be an option rather than a replacement for the way we do it now?
Will it be worth it? How much capacity will this free up for us to spend on being more human or offering more valuable services? Will that save us more money than it costs to automate?

And above all, this one:

Is this consistent with my Promise of Value?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

April 25, 2023

Unicorns

For investors, a unicorn is a business that is capable of becoming a monopoly, a monopsony or something close to either. Think Google, Amazon, the ‘big four’ supermarkets – the ‘big four’ anything.

Companies like these control so much of the market that they can pretty much set their own prices and guarantee high profits for a long period.

Monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies are very good for investors and top managers.

They are very bad for free markets, innovation and consumers.

Why then would we want our governments to spend money nurturing them?

I’d rather they spent it nurturing zebras instead.