Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 71 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

June 18, 2021

Work/play

Why do we enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons?

Because we know the rules. We know the world we’re operating in. We know our own capabilities. We know there is randomness, provided by the dice. And we know that the people we’re playing with know all that too.

Within that framework, each one of us can play freely with the skills we’re given and the attributes we acquire. We can collaborate, go it alone, or switch between the two. If we’re Dungeon Master, we can even change the rules.

Nothing is predetermined, there’s room for the unexpected, yet everything is coherent. It’s a safe space enclosing the perfect balance between constraint and freedom, between box and creativity, between process and play, between community and individual.

Life can’t be like this.

But work can.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 17, 2021

I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue

The joke hidden in the game of ‘Mornington Crescent’, played to inscrutable rules on ‘I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue’ – is that actually there are no rules. The teams make them up as they go along.

It’s an old parlour game, a jolly hoax played by a group of friends on a newcomer. Hilarious for the friends. Bewildering for the newcomer.

And it’s probably what joining your business feels like.

June 16, 2021

By heart

You don’t see The Rolling Stones following a score. Because they know the music by heart.

That doesn’t make every performance the same. On the contrary, knowing the ‘original’ by heart means they can play with it, tweak it, customise it in real time for the audience in front of them.

At first, you need a score, so you can share with everyone in the band what needs to happen to make your music.

But the score is the beginning, not the end.

June 15, 2021

Jumping jack

“Design your business, or it will be designed for you.”

In other words, if you don’t decide ‘how things get done around here’, other people will decide that for you. At best it will be your team, but it could end up being your toughest suppliers, or your most demanding customers.

You didn’t start your business to dance to someone else’s tune.

Better get your own written down then.

June 14, 2021

Amplification

The genius of a composer like Mozart, is that no matter who plays his music, or what they play it on (even a synthesiser), you know it’s Mozart.

The genius of a musician like Grappelli or Menhuin, is that no matter what they play you know it’s Grappelli or Menhuin.

A genius musician playing a genius composer amplifies the experience of both. And shows other musicians and composers what can be achieved.

It’s the score that makes this amplification possible.

Every musician get’s told what notes to play, what mood to create. No less, no more. The how is completely up to them – as long as it delivers the required experience, or better.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 11, 2021

Give us a clue

In a business, striking the right balance between control and freedom is hard.

We want the serendipity that freedom brings. To be open to emergent behaviour or trends. And increasingly, we want our workplaces to be human, places where people can exercise their natural powers of creativity, collaboration and problem solving to the benefit of the customer and the company.

But emergence without direction or foundation simply turns into entropy.

The answer is to make sure the culture doesn’t only live inside people’s heads.

Document your Promise of Value as a compass to guide everyone on your journey.

Install a floor through which nobody can fall.

Capture the high-level process as the clue that will get everyone (especially newbies) through the labyrinth safely.

Then set your people free.

June 10, 2021

Down with pin factories.

For Adam Smith the pin factory, with its production line and strict division of labour, was the epitome of efficiency. It meant that thousands more pins could be manufactured, which in turn meant more people could afford to own them.

Until eventually a pin became the epitome of worthlessness, a thing you wouldn’t bother to pick up if you dropped it. The factory model solved a production problem.

Products aren’t the only thing we make through our work. We also make people. And since Adam Smith, we’ve also known that the pin-factory approach makes unhappy people.

Humanity no longer needs to be efficient. We no longer have a production problem.

We have a distribution problem. We have an unhappiness problem. And we have a survival problem.

It’s time then, to look for a different mode of production.

One where the survival of our species is the side-effect of work that produces lives well lived for all.

We can start from the bottom up, as we grow our own small businesses:

Think orchestra, not pin-factory.

June 9, 2021

Selling up

Your business doesn’t have to get big. It should however, be capable of lasting longer than you do. Of continuing to make and keep its (your) promises long after you’ve gone.

Otherwise, all there is to sell when the time comes is your customer list.

How do you think your customers will feel about that?

The good news is that scalability equals saleability.

Which means you really can sell up, not out.

June 8, 2021

Why justice must be blind.

I’m about halfway through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. We’ve finally got to a statement of principles. Which can be informally summed up as something like this:

“All social primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”

That seems pretty obvious. Why has it taken 300 pages to get to here?

Because imagining a just system is a process.

We don’t choose where or when we’re born. We don’t choose our parents or our society or our status in that society. We don’t choose the talents or abilities we’re born with – any more than we choose our eye colour or complement of limbs. That’s all down to chance.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept what we’ve landed in. We can imagine a different kind of setup.

But to do that justly, and end up with something fair, we need a starting point that takes chance out of it. We have to take ourselves out of space and time, and imagine what we as individuals would accept if we didn’t know where we end up in the particular set-up we happen to be born in. We have to make ourselves blind, and build our picture of a just system from there.

That takes a lot of thought and empathy with all our possible selves.

It’s worth the effort, because then we can start to shape our societies to move ever closer to that ideal. Starting with what’s closest to us, our families and our businesses.

June 7, 2021

Learning from queens

We had some unexpected guests yesterday. The first I knew of it was the sound.

‘What on earth is that noise?’

I looked up from cleaning the floor, and there they were, a mass of bees madly buzzing across 3 neighbouring gardens. 15 minutes later, they were clumped together near the top of our hawthorn tree.

I looked up my nearest beekeeper on the British Beekeepers Association website, (try them before you call pest control, beekeepers will give bees a good home), and Andrew came over.

We agreed that it was too dangerous for him to try and collect the bees from the tree, so he set up a bait box, to entice them down.

While we waited over a cup of tea, he taught me a bit about bees.

A hive swarms in stages. First the queen leaves, taking half the bees with her, to set up a new colony somewhere. 10 days later, her brood of queens start to hatch, along with the other eggs she’s laid.

It used to be thought that the first queen out killed the others, but research has found that isn’t the case. As each new queen hatches they replicate the original queen’s behaviour – taking off with half the hive. Only each time the half is smaller, even though the hive grows each day as new bees hatch. So each ‘cast’ becomes progressively smaller until the last is about tennis ball sized, and will be lucky to form a viable colony that can get through the following winter.

This it makes perfect sense. The bees are all the old queen’s children. Why kill other queens when you only need half the available resources? There is no scarcity, and so no competition for them. And why kill queens when replicating a simple process maximises the chances that the colony will survive and spread?

We humans could learn a bit from bees.

PS, they’re still in our tree. If they don’t fancy the bait box, they’ll swarm again and find a new place. If you see them, remember to give them 15 minutes to settle down, then call your local beekeeper.