I’m hesitating to put this out there, but I saw this model in a video a couple of weeks ago, and since then I can’t get it out of my head. Once you’ve seen it, you see its application everywhere.
The focus of Dr Ifland’s talk is processed food, but the model applies to other forms of consumption too – alcohol, tobacco, gambling, social media.
It’s scary stuff.
And yet, I’m thinking, could you use this knowledge for good? To create ‘good’ addictions?
Most of the time, I model what happens in a given interaction from a single perspective – that of the organisation whose Score I’m drafting. Most of the time, that’s been OK.
But when the organisation you’re working with is actually a collection of organisations each playing different Roles, this isn’t good enough.
For example, what looks like ‘placing an order’ from one side is ‘create a consignment’ on the other. The only way to keep clear about what has to happen in order for each party to keep its Promise, is to model it in these terms.
It feels awkward and clunky, but clarity trumps elegance, every time.
Nobody should have to think about admin. Admin is unexciting, unrewarding, work-about-work that very few people enjoy doing.
Yet, if you want to measure performance, predict future demand and workloads, allocate resources effectively, you need some way of collecting the information you need.
The answer is to make collecting information a side-effect of doing the job.
When you drive your car, the action of the wheels traveling over the ground updates your odometer. You don’t have to create a separate spreadsheet to keep track of how many miles you cover per trip or over the lifetime of the car. Instead some basic information (the number of tyre revolutions) is collected and used to trip a counter that shows the distance covered. The information is collected purely as a side-effect of doing the job. Combined with another counter on the drive shaft it tells you your speed. So two simple side-effects give you critical information.
If you want to spend less time on admin and more time making and keeping promises for the people you serve, you need to design admin-as-a-side-effect into your Customer Experience Score.
How?
Well, it helps to start by writing your Score from the perspective of what you actually want things to happen, rather than from the perspective of how you document and track what happens.
To take a big example, it would be easy to think about creating and using a building in terms of sketching ideas, drawing up plans, creating a list of materials and quantities, but that isn’t what’s really happening. What’s really happening is more like this:
Process diagram of the life of a building
The sketches are how you track the results of your imagination, the plans are how you track your designs and feed them to the people who will construct. These things are admin, and by thinking about what is really going on, you can see better where in the process they should be created, and who by, as a result of doing the job.
This simplifies monitoring and prediction, because they can become matters of simple counting, combined with some basic parameters of the business, such as available person-hours. If you can find ways to automate this, then none of your people ever need to fill in a timesheet again. You can free them to concentrate on what really matters to the people you serve, at less cost to yourself.
Work-about-work is a waste of time and talent. It’s time we got rid of it.
My other half gives tours at the Red House, William Morris’s first house, built by Philip Webb. He’s a volunteer with the National Trust.
The interesting thing about this is that he is one of dozens of Red House volunteers, local people, who give tours, garden, run the gift shop and the tearoom.
Every volunteer is enthusiastic about the house and its history, and all are keen to share that with visitors. They organise themselves. Because they are volunteers, they give leeway. They’ve been known to stay open late to allow for a missed train, or open early to accommodate long-distance visitors. They know what to do and each one of them does it in their own style.
There are managers on site who are full-time employees of the Trust. They monitor the finances and the maintenance and restoration of the asset – the house and gardens – but they don’t supervise anyone. In fact, most of the time, nobody sees them.
In part, this is because the Trust doesn’t have the money to fund a bloated management hierarchy. But it is probably more to do with the fact that the people who deliver the customer experience are volunteers. They do this for love, not a living. They are free to walk away at any time.
What if you treated your team as if they were volunteers? Would that change how your business delivers its Promise to the people it serves? Would you, as boss, be free to ‘disappear’, to concentrate on bigger things?
When you first write down your Customer Experience Score, it’s likely to be very like a recipe – a set of detailed, step-by-step instructions to create a very specific outcome.
That’s great. Recipes can be a great way for you to get stuff out of your head, and for people to build confidence.
But they can also become a trap that undermines confidence. If people have never learned the basic techniques and methods that underly any recipe, its easy for them to become reliant on having exactly the right ingredients, the right pots and pans, the right equipment and the right actions, in the right order…
That makes for a lot of work, a lot of shopping, a lot of planning and a lot of anxiety too, which makes cooking a joyless activity for many.
Cooking doesn’t always have to be ‘fun’, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be relaxed, exploratory, and sometimes, surprising. By understanding the patterns hidden in recipes, we can start to play with them, tasting and learning as we go, until eventually, we can improvise a nourishing meal out of whatever we happen to have in the kitchen.
The same is true for your Customer Experience Score – recipes can be a great start. But results will get better if you allow people to tweak and experiment and improvise a little. Just make sure to ‘taste as you go’ and things will be fine. Eventually, people won’t need the recipes, they’ll be able to improvise a great customer experience with the resources around them and the customer in front of them.
Who knows? One day, their Bara Brith will be even better than yours.
If you’d like to become an effortless cook, my friend Katerina is running a workshop next weekend.
When you’re designing a process, bear in mind the reason you are doing it.
All the processes in your business are part of a system – your unique system – for making and keeping promises for the people you serve:
Your Promise System
More importantly, design it so that the person executed can see this context, and act accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll find yourselves missing the point completely.
The answer is to not think of it as a ‘process’ at all, but as a musical score. A score describes what notes to play in what order. Not because ‘that’s the way to do it’, but to evoke a desired emotional response in the listener. That’s why a score will often contain words as well as musical notes – that give hints on how to play, not just what to play.
The ‘process’ is the floor. The context is where the magic happens.
Remember those tabloid headlines from the ’70’s, screaming about GLC money being wasted on ‘one-legged, black, lesbian, women’s groups’? What they were actually objecting to was probably a co-operative of female architects collaborating with the mostly female clients of a new GLC funded community centre to design how it should work. ‘Making Space‘ is an interesting set of essays from that time that may well revise your memories.
The system isn’t what I thought it was. It turns out capitalism has been hijacked. Read ‘Kleptopia’ while you can. It’s scary, but a lot of things make sense afterwards.
