Ma.
The gaps between things.
The pauses between words or notes.
The white space on a page.
“a holder within which things can exist, stand out and have meaning.”*
“the emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled.”*
The places where we can come alive for each other.
Let’s leave room in our processes for ma.
*from Wawaza.com
What if a business became a place where people co-operate to create value, in the form of products and/or services that will help their clients to live in the just space for humanity ? A business makes a profit of the money it receives from those others more than covers all the costs of delivering the goods.
So far, so good.
And?
Why does this kind of business need to make a profit? So it can expand.
Why does this kind of business need to expand? So it can help more people to live in the just space for humanity.
This could be a flywheel that doesn’t lead inexorably to self-destruction.
Or one that we might even decide to stop.
Shouldn’t we be switching to it?
A business is a place where people co-operate to create value, in the form of products and/or services that others want. A business makes a profit of the money it receives from those others more than covers all the costs of delivering the goods.
So far, so good.
But.
Why does a business need to make a profit? So it can expand.
Why does a business need to expand? So it can make more profit.
For the last 200 years this flywheel has driven everything that humans do.
Last year, we saw it slow down a bit, and caught a glimpse of what we’re missing.
Are we sure we want to get back on it?
NASA engineers had noticed a problem with the O-rings used to seal joints in the boosters of the Challenger space shuttle. When the weather was cold at launch time, the O-rings failed to seal the gaps properly. But they couldn’t quantify the effects, so were not allowed to act on their concerns. After all, the NASA engineering watchword was : “In God we trust. All others bring data.”
But what if you don’t have data? Does that mean you just leave it to God?
Of course not.
As Richard Feynman said at the enquiry following the disaster “If you don’t have data, you must use reason.”
Our processes must allow for that.
If the sleep of reason produces monsters, imagine what wonders we create when we combine data with waking reason, driven by humanity?
Our processes must be designed for that.
HT to Abishek Chakraborty for the prompt.
At the end of my road there lives a builder. His house has been a mess for years.
I know commercial knitters who wear old jumpers out at elbow, and doctors who smoke, drink and eat junk food.
As a business owner, it’s helpful to ask yourself – regularly if possible – ‘If I was my client, what would I be telling myself to do?’
Then follow your own advice, the way you’d expect a client to.
If nothing else, you’ll find out what it feels like to be your client.
As aboriginal Australians know, the way to deepen learning is to make it immersive. They also know that practising scenarios before you encounter them speeds up the process.
We small businesses have our own form of immersive learning. We call it ‘throwing them in at the deep end’.
Somehow, we hope that through this experience, newbies will learn to make and keep promises on behalf of the business as well as we do. Of course, many don’t, and some just drown.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if pilots learned by being ‘thrown in the deep end’. I prefer what actually happens. They learn in a simulator. A safe space – the paddling pool if you like – where they can be immersed in what if feels like to fly a plane, and systematically run through all the scenarios they may have to cope with – taking off, landing, turbulence, bid strikes, engine failures, and so on.
You and I can feel safe getting on a plane because pilots have literally been through all these experiences many times before they get anywhere near a real cockpit, at the head of a tubeful of passengers and crew.
Why not do the same for your prospects and clients? Build a simulator for your business, program it with likely scenarios and use it to train new people, or practise new services before you deliver them, or explore how you could do things differently. Make it a psychologically safe space and it will be fun, team-bonding and surprisingly productive. It will become a practise space people use regularly to improve your customer experience score.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
I’m not remotely into football, but inevitably I catch the odd England game – or at least snippets of them.
What’s struck even me this time round, has been the aim to win rather than merely not lose. There’s been a definite effort to actively score more goals than their opponents, rather than get away with letting fewer goals in, or relying on penalty shoot-outs.
This is not rocket science. If you try and score goals, while preventing the other side from scoring against you, you give yourself more chances to win, and win conclusively. It also makes for a much more exciting game to watch and to play – for both sides.
Delightful as it is to win, winning isn’t everything. How you win matters. The process matters. And speaks volumes about your priorities.
With a few exceptions, atoms don’t like to be alone.
They prefer to join with other atoms. They can’t help themsleves, they’re just built that way.
If they stick to their own kind, together they make an element. A useful building block. When they combine with different atoms, they create a compound, generating properties none of the constituents have on their own.
Almost all the interesting things in our varied world are the result of atoms combining with atoms that are different from themselves, repeating the process until something durable emerges.
Inter-connection with different others is our natural state.
We can’t help ourselves, we’re just built that way.
Atom by atom.
…the mice will continue with whatever processes are in place.
Do you want them to be yours or theirs?
How do you embed ‘process knowledge’ – the knowledge of how to do things – into other people’s heads across space and/or time?
Well the first step is obviously to get it out of your head first. Then you have to communicate it to others in a way that is easily absorbed yet also ‘sticky’.
One familiar way is through apprenticeship – repeated physical practice under the eye of a master. Great over time, although slow, harder to apply over space.
Another familiar way is to write things down – in manuals, standard operating procedures, process maps. This solves the problem of space as well as time, but is actually notoriously un-‘sticky’. Nobody likes reading manuals – in fact most people hate it.
So the best way is to create some combination of scribing and physical practice that combines the best of these approaches.
And that’s just what aboriginal Australians have been doing for around 40,000 years. They preserve their culture – their ‘way of doing things’ through a complex combination of activities that includes mapping, painting and sculpture of all kinds, song, dance and actual doing, tied to a landscape that acts as both operating territory and memory jogger.
What’s interesting is how even the ‘scribing’ is so physical and multisensory – maps can be physical representations that are walked around; memorisation takes the form of songs and stories attached to landmarks. Painting or dancing is not just a way of representing an activity, its a form of doing it.
We process mappers and manual writers could learn a lot from this approach.
Hmmm.
Watch this space.