Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 56 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

February 14, 2022

Resilience

When I finally worked out what was going wrong with my website last week I was appalled.

It was a miracle I hadn’t felt the consequences much sooner. Only the fact that the internet is literally a world-wide web, full of redundancy and alternative routes had kept everything working for so long.

That’s because it’s an ecosystem, and in an ecosystem variation and redundancy is actually what keeps it stable over time.

A machine, in contrast, would have simply stopped long ago.

If something wasn’t quite right in your business, would you want it to carry on working, or would you prefer it to stop immediately?

If you want to make sure it carries on, you might want to build in some redundancy, and some tolerance for variation.

February 9, 2022

Packaging to serve

The great thing about your Promise of Value is that defining it can start with you. Your values, abilities and personality act as a kind of mirror, reflecting the kind of people you can best serve.

At some point though, you have to map what you can offer onto what those people actually want and need. You have to make it concrete, and describe it in terms that mean something to them, that make it easy for them to buy, rather than for you to sell.

That’s what I call Packaging your Promise, and I’m having to find new words for how to do it, because most common terms are seller-centric – ‘identifying a market’, ‘positioning your product’, ‘channels’ and ‘routes to market’ etc. That’s a problem, because you’re not selling – in fact you can’t ‘sell’, because as my good friend Barnaby Wynter puts it “Put simply, the buyer has taken control of the buying process”.

What you’re actually trying to do is help the people you serve to buy what’s best for them right now to deliver what’s good for them in the long-term.

And that changes everything.

February 8, 2022

Who is it for?

As this fascinating video about pavements (sidewalks) shows, one of the most critical things to think about when you design … Read More “Who is it for?”

Sleep

I’ve finally found a way to lose weight effortlessly – get more sleep.

Sadly for me, this isn’t an answer. I get a good 8 hours a night. And even that may not be natural. In the past, getting those eight hours took longer. People took two sleeps, with a gap between, where they might read, chat, sew, make love or even get up and do stuff.

Industry made that impossible for most people. For the past 500 years or so we’ve gradually compressed the opportunity for sleep into a smaller and smaller timeframe. Which is of course counter-productive. Well-slept people are mare productive, and less dangerous to themselves and others.

For all the emphasis on LEAN and reducing all forms of waste, Muri – wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing people, equipment or systems, is the one we consistently ignore.

One of the best ways to reduce it, is to increase the efficiency of our time at work. Automate drudgery, make sure people know what they are supposed to be doing and why, give them autonomy over how and where they do it.

The reward for the business is increased profit. A side-effect is more time for everyone – including you.

February 7, 2022

Packaging a Promise

Your Promise of Value is a big thing. And unless you’re promising basics, like ‘enough to eat’ or ‘being able to stay warm in the cold’ or ‘staying alive’, it’s likely to be somewhat abstract – ‘be more confident’, ‘be more beautiful’, ‘be more healthy’, ‘be more happy’.

I may want to ‘be more confident’, but I can’t just buy ‘confidence’. There has to be something concrete I can buy or do that delivers confidence as a result – like a nose job, or a diet, or a new suit, or a private education.

Turning your Promise into something the people you serve can actually buy is Packaging, and the golden rule of Packaging is that it’s about them, not you.

That means you have to know the people you seek to serve really well. What are their motivations? What are the constraints on that motivation? How can you configure what you offer to overcome those constraints and unleash their motivation?

If the constraint is money, the answer might be small packets – that’s how Poundland works – goods are packaged to a price point, so quantities change, but not the price. Or it might be something that makes it cheaper for you to produce or transport, like a bag-in-box for wine or olive oil.

If the constraint is time, the answer might also be small packets, but it could be on-demand delivery, or a draw-down, or a subscription.

If the constraint is attention, the answer might be creating space for focus.

If the constraint is impetus, the answer might be a time limit.

The actual constraints your people are working under will vary, which might mean creating different packages for different groups of people. But be careful not to turn choice into a barrier.

Remember it’s about making it easy for them to buy, not for you to sell. And however you package it, it mustn’t fall short on your Promise.

February 4, 2022

Universal vs One Size Fits All

‘One size fits all’ is not the same as ‘universal’.

One size fits all actually fits nobody. Universal adjusts to fit anyone.

One size fits all starts from the perspective of its maker. Universal starts from the perspective of its end-user.

When you design your business as a system for making and keeping promises, universal is what you’re aiming for.

Almost by definition that means it has to be human.

February 3, 2022

The trough of inefficiency

It’s a well-known phenomenon. As a one-person or few-person business grows and adds more people it becomes less and less efficient. As more people are added and roles are specialised, overheads are added too – of communication, coordination and support, and eventually management.

The result is that a business spends time in what Seth Godin calls The trough of inefficiency. Perhaps even getting stuck there forever.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When you started your business, you were its CEO – Chief Everything Officer. You did everything, gradually shaping a unique end-to-end process for making and keeping promises to the people you serve. A process that works.

We fall into the trough of inefficiency because we think of our businesses as pin-factories – a set of tiny, repetitive operations chained together, managed by someone who can see the bigger picture, who has the whole process in their head.

Why not simply replicate the Chief Everything Officer instead?

If you can do it, so can someone else. Especially if you tell them what you do.

Tell them your Promise, Tell them what you do to make it, and what you do to keep it. Write it down like music in a Customer Experience Score so that they can run the whole thing themselves, even when you’re not in the room.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you only need meetings for business-changing decisions, not the day-to-day.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, you don’t depend on specialists. When everyone knows everything that needs doing, they can support each other.

If everyone’s a Chief Everything Officer, You don’t need managers. People co-ordinate themselves, managing their own Customer Experiences.

Even better, further growth is simple. For more impact, add more Chief Everything Officers.

A Customer Experience Score can your ladder out of the trough of inefficiency.

It works just as well as a bridge to stop you falling in in the first place.

February 1, 2022

Smarter than we thought

It’s long been assumed that people find it harder to compare between high-value options than between low-value ones. To put it concretely, we’re supposed to find it harder to compare a £350,000 house and a £355,000 house, than to compare a £90,000 house and a £95,000 one.

The idea is that although the size of the difference in value might be the same in both cases, as the proportion of the difference shrinks, comparison becomes harder.

It turns out this assumption is wrong. In a recent study, researchers found that not only are we more accurate in our selections, when more value is at stake, we can also be fast. And when we are given context – in other words, we know there’s a lot at stake – we consciously slow down to make our decision better.

This has some implications for pricing. You can’t take a ‘nobody will notice the extra £xxx’ attitude. People will expect to see higher value for a higher price, and they can tell the difference.

Perhaps more interesting are the implications for delegation. We’re smarter than we thought.

You can trust your people with bigger decisions than you might have assumed. Especially if you give them the context to make them in.

January 31, 2022

Early learning

In the olden days, there was only one button you could use to request the bus driver to stop, and in the outskirts of Newcastle, where I grew up, only one person could press it – the bus conductor.

No exceptions.

There were other rules too. There was a special school bus, which only allowed children on board. And where there was a school bus, children weren’t allowed on the normal (rush-hour) buses.

No exceptions.

Until my first day at primary school.

My mum wanted to take me on my first day. It was a fair way to go, so she thought we’d get the bus.

But I wasn’t allowed on the ordinary bus. She wasn’t allowed on the school bus.

No exceptions.

My mum argued:

“It’s her first day, I want to take her myself.“

No exceptions.

“It’s just for the first day”

No exceptions.

“Surely you’ve had this happen before?”

No exceptions

It wasn’t just stubbornness on her part. She realised that it wasn’t just her, it was every mum that missed out.*

She staged a 1-mum sit in until she got her way.

In theory, having separate buses during rush-hour was a great idea. But the people who designed it hadn’t thought of the human aspect – that most mums would want to accompany their child to their first day at school. If they had thought of it, it could have been easily accommodated, with an extra bus on the first day of a new school year, and exceptions allowed in between.

Instead they made the whole experience stressful for everyone.

I don’t know if my mum changed anything permanently, but at least she tried.

We were late for school, but I learned something useful that morning.

If you think something is wrong, don’t just put up with it, do something.

*I should mention that my mum had form. At her school, she’d successfully negotiated a permanent change of uniform for 16 – 18 year old girls – away from St Trinan-style gymslips to a more comfortable and becoming blouse and skirt ensemble.