Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Transactions
November 24, 2021

Transactions

Transactions are meant to be purely functional and impersonal.   We don’t have to worry about how the person on the other side feels – or even whether they are a person.   They don’t have to worry about us either.  We both do our business and move on.

All very convenient, but not terribly satisfying.

We humans crave connection and recognition.  We love to be seen by others, and we know that the only way to be seen is to see.   We’re constantly trying to turn transactions into relationships, however brief (did you speak to the person who gave you your COVID-19 vaccine?  I expect so), and especially around the things we value.

I’m happy to pay my car tax through a faceless, characterless portal and my council tax via direct debit, but I prefer to buy my groceries in person, having a chat at the checkout as I do.  I buy my books online, from a small independent bookshop.  We are both very aware that there are people on the other side of the transaction, and often go out of our way to remind ourselves of that.

Transactions are exchanges that take place between strangers.   Or between people who want to treat each other as if they are strangers.

The danger is that by treating each other as strangers, we become strangers.   Blind to the needs of others.  Blind even to our own need to be valued as a human being.   Sublimating that need into a desire for things, or even selling our data in return for a taste of it.

We can’t escape transactions.  Our society is increasingly built around them.  But as businesses, we can do our best to deliver the relationships our clients really want.

On top of the transaction, as a bonus.

As a gift.

Games we play
November 23, 2021

Games we play

I was reading yesterday about 2 kinds of games – finite and infinite.  Finite games are those where the game stops when somebody wins.  They could also be called zero-sum games.  For someone to win, everyone else has to lose.  Finite and zero-sum games are based on scarcity.

Infinite games on the other hand, are not about winning, they are about keeping the game going.  The game is eternal, which means there is no scarcity.   As a player I may drop out, but the game goes on, with other players.  The game can also get bigger, there is no limit to how many people can play.

We tend to play an infinite game with our personal relationships.  We don’t keep score with our family and friends.  We assume, safely on the whole, not that a favour will be returned as a quid pro quo, but that if we are in need, help will be given.

Our assumption is that business is a zero-sum game.  Where for me to win, the planet has to lose.  Or other businesses have to lose.  Or customers have to lose.  Or where my team have to lose.

What if you assumed it was an infinite game?  That business is about keeping the game going for everyone, forever?

Would you play differently?

Indispensable
November 22, 2021

Indispensable

It feels nice to be wanted.  To be the fount of all knowledge .  To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question.  To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making.  To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware.  Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak.   An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first.  The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive.  It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make.  It can easily become a trap for you.  And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions.  Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know.  As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score.  Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience.  Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together.  Review the score.  Adjust if necessary.

 

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end.  Get it out there.

Three Freedoms
November 19, 2021

Three Freedoms

What is freedom, really?

Here’s a possible definition, not mine*.  Three freedoms, each building on the one before.

  1. The freedom to walk away, knowing that you will be taken in elsewhere by other people who see you as one of them.
  2. The freedom to disobey, knowing that you can ‘vote with your feet’.
  3. The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.

The third can’t happen without the first two.  Not without becoming tyranny, anyway.

These are big ideas, but since our businesses can be anything we want, we can practise them small.

 

 

*In the sense that I didn’t think of them.  They come from “The Dawn of Everything” by David Wengrow and David Graeber.

The world turned upside down
November 18, 2021

The world turned upside down

Until a couple of years ago, I throught cleaning your teeth was about cleaning your teeth.

It turns out I was wrong.  It’s about cleaning your gumline.  Because it’s not so much about getting rid of food debris, as cleaning up after the bacteria that live in your mouth.  Who breed and create debris (plaque) whether you eat or not.

There are lots of things we think we know, that actually turn out to be wrong, or at least capable of alternative interpretations.   The more alternatives we see, the more we can imagine even better ones.

If you’re up for it, here are a few of the books that have turned my world of ideas upside down:

Of course, every book does this to some extent – even the ones you’ve read before, because you can’t step into the same river twice.

Which books would you recommend?

Going further
November 17, 2021

Going further

As Seth said in his blog about pushing, pulling and leading yesterday: “One bird at the head of the flock can lead 100 others if they’re enrolled in the journey.”

And because all are enrolled in the journey, any member of the flock can and does take a turn at leading.   They are literally all in it together.

That’s what enables them to go so far.

Pinning things down
November 16, 2021

Pinning things down

When we want to examine something closely, it helps to take a snapshot of it, to capture it at a point in time, to pin it down and look at it as a specimen.   This makes it easier for us to analyse its composition and construction.

This is a useful way to gather some information, as long as we remember that for all systems, including our businesses, the natural state is to be moving, changing and renewing.

For most things worth investigating, static means dead.

Making
November 15, 2021

Making

You may think a business is simply a matter of creating, manufacturing and selling products or services.

It’s also about creating people.   We spend most of our lives at work.   So the way we work together to make, sell and deliver those products and services has a significant impact on our capabilities, capacities and beliefs.  Work changes us, forms us.

That means that a business is also about making society.  Because although ‘society’ often feels like something that’s just ‘there’ outside of us, actually it’s made by us, in the way we work, in the way we live and play outside work, in the way we think about our relationships with others.

Now you know this, you can choose to consciously create, through your business, the kind of society you want to see.  Starting with the little society of prospects, customers, suppliers and employees immediately around you.

That’s why for me, a business is not a machine for making money.  It’s a system for making and keeping promises.

Because it’s the relationships between people that are really important, not the things we make.

Gifts
November 12, 2021

Gifts

What’s your gift?  The thing you can do better than anyone else.  The thing you can’t help but do, even … Read More “Gifts”

Creating bandwidth
November 11, 2021

Creating bandwidth

Apparently human neurons are strikingly different from those of other mammals.   Neurons are the building blocks of our nervous system – our internal communiactions system by which we percieve and react to the world.

All neurons communicate with each other and with other cells through electrical impulses, produced by ‘ion channels’.   In general, the larger the neuron, the more ion channels it has.   Until we get to humans.

Our neurons have far fewer ion channels than expected.   We still need ion channels, but somehow we are able to get by perfectly well with less of them.

The hypothesis is that by evolving a ‘lean’ neuron model, human brains became more efficient, able to spend less energy on the basics, freeing some up to spend on more interesting things that other mammals don’t do, such as imagining.

That makes sense.  The less communication you have to do to support the usual, the more bandwidth you leave to deal with the unusual.   Or to imagine a new usual.

Our businesses could learn something from our neurons.