Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

She changes
December 11, 2020

She changes

“Good Services” principle number 13: “A good service should respond to change quickly”

The key here is ‘respond to’.   This is about reflecting relevant changes in the user and understanding the implications of those changes for the user.

A simple example: I’ve just had a call from my insurance broker.  They wanted to speak to my husband about renewing his car insurance.   He was insured with them, until he got rid of the car a couple of years ago.   Somewhere that change has not been propagated through the system.   Of course that doesn’t mean that they should never call him – he may have bought a new car since – but it would be a different, more appropriate call, that doesn’t start with “We see your renewal is coming up…”.

Automatic propagation isn’t always appropriate of course, so the best option might be to let the user notify a change then let them also specify where it should propagate to, perhaps with the least contentious options pre-checked to make the ‘usual route’ easier.

This could have an interesting side-effect of making people more conscious of where their data is held and for what purposes, putting them even more in control.

Giving back control – there’s a thought.

Them and Us
December 9, 2020

Them and Us

Here’s a scary set of statistics from “Good Services” :

A 2014 study found that up to 60% of the cost of UK government services arose from calls and casework.   Not that surprising perhaps, until you delve deeper and find that of those calls, 43% were chasing the status of a case, 52% were ‘how-to’ questions, 5% were complaints, and only 2% were to do with complex cases that needed human intervention.

In other words, at least 95% of all calls received were unnecessary – should have been unnecessary, either for the caller to make or the responder to handle

That’s a lot of wasted effort, that could have been better spent designing systems that helped people get what they needed.

Designing and implementing good services is not rocket science or cutting-edge, or even particularly expensive.    All it takes is empathy and care.

Putting yourself on the side of ‘them’ instead of ‘us’.

Prompts
December 8, 2020

Prompts

Every year my insurance broker calls me up to remind me that I need to renew.   This is good.   I … Read More “Prompts”

Coming unstuck
December 7, 2020

Coming unstuck

Our new extension has been the cat’s favourite place to be for several weeks now.  She’s refused to move for any reason – hoovering, sanding, cutting and painting leave her cold.  She’s loved tucking herself in between bags of plaster, or atop bumpy piles of tools, or inside empty boxes.

So far, she’s stayed safe.  Over the last week we have cut and laid over 20 square metres of flooring.  She did pretty well at keeping out of the glue we spread down – until the last 1/2 metre.

It was at this point I was grateful to the chemists that designed the glue.  I grabbed her and simply wiped her gluey paws with a wet J-cloth.   Job done, minimal fuss, no repercussions.

It’s a reminder that when you design a product or a service, you have to assume that one day, someone or some thing, who doesn’t know what you know, with no clue about what it is, or what it does, is going to encounter it.   And in that case ‘do no harm’ has to be your watchword.

What would happen if a cat metaphorically traipsed through your nicely laid glue?

Do you even know?

Contexts
December 4, 2020

Contexts

One of the many things I like about Lou Downe’s book “Good Services”, is that it goes beyond the boundaries of the service, even of the business.   For example, as part of principle number 12: “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”, this comes up:

“A good service is good for everyone

Users

Staff

Your organisation

The world”

Here’s a useful tool for judging how your business is doing with that:

Check out the Doughnut Economics Action Lab for more useful tools and ideas on this. Including how ‘the doughnut’ varies across countries and the world – opening up some astonishing opportunities for business as a force for good.

Do you remember writing your name out as a child?  Locating your intensely individual self inside progressively larger contexts until you reached ‘The Universe’?

When did we forget how to do that?

It’s a game worth repeating now and then.

What gets measured, gets done.
December 3, 2020

What gets measured, gets done.

 

“Good Services” principle number 12 is “A good service encourages the right behaviours from staff and users.”

The “right behaviours” are up to you.  They are the behaviours that live up to the Promise you have made to prospects and clients.  You can encourage them to happen by building in reminders of why an Activity or Process gets done, and by making sure the right things are measured and rewarded – or more importantly, that the wrong things aren’t.

An old example:  A Chinese emperor offered a financial reward for dead rats.   The intention was to reduce the population of rats plaguing the country.  The outcome was that people started breeding rats to get the reward.

A recent example: Under Tony Blair, GPs were given a target of no more than 48 hours waiting time for an appointment.   The intention was to have GP practices create more capacity.  The outcome was that it became impossible to book an appoint more than 48 hours in advance, and almost impossible to get an appointment at all.

A financial example: CEOs of listed companies are often rewarded through share options.  The intention is that by prudent management and investment, the business generates more value for shareholders.  The outcome is often a slow decline followed by a sudden collapse of the business, as CEOs find ‘easier’ ways to raise the share price that actually damage the viability of the business.

We humans are lazy AND ingenious.  If you want people to do ‘the right thing’, you have to make that the easiest and most rewarding option.  You have to build processes that go with the grain.

Designing those processes takes thought and effort.  It means cycling through some difficult questions:

  • What do I really want people to do? How do I really want them to behave?
  • If I want them to do that, how do I measure it?  Is that easy to capture or does it make more work?
  • If I use this as the measure, what else might be done to achieve it?  Do I want that?

…and back again to the beginning.

It’s hard work, that requires going against the grain.  But the payoff is well worth it, for everyone.

Inclusivity
December 2, 2020

Inclusivity

The 11th principle outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services”  “A good service is usable by everyone, equally”, follows on from the previous one, and similarly, gets broken when companies don’t think hard enough about who their users are, and what the circumstances of that user might realistically be at the time they need to use the service.  Nowadays it’s very hard to get a decent job without having a bank account, and impossible to get a bank account without having somewhere to live.   That makes getting a proper job much harder than it should be for someone who is homeless – even if they have just become homeless and jobless through no fault of their own.

I’m exploring these principles from a different perspective, that of a business that delivers through other people.   From this perspective, your team are your users, and services are the processes you build to help them share and deliver your promise on your behalf.

Looked at this way, it seems to me that principle no 11 is hardly ever applied inside companies.    We expect every employee to conform to an impossible ideal of whatever is ‘normal’ for us – perfectly fit, permanently healthy, well-balanced and educated.  We expect them to behave as if they have nobody to consider except themselves.   We assume they are willing and able to fit their home-life around the demands of the business.

A little reflection on how your own life has changed over the years should make it obvious that this is unrealistic and unfair.  And coronavirus has made many realise that it isn’t that difficult to put right.

So, as you design the services through which your team will deliver, thereby earning their living, make sure they are able to do that whatever their circumstances.   Enable flexible working, remote working, part-time working, job-sharing.  Make the process adaptable, so that each person can adjust things to suit their abilities and working style.  Measure results instead of attendance.  Make admin and reporting a side-effect of the process and ensure feedback is sent when and where it has the best effect.

The brilliant thing is that by making your services deliverable by anyone, you make it easier for everyone, and give yourself a wider, deeper pool of talent to draw on.   By making the job easier for your team, you’ll deliver better results for your clients, and your business.

 

Dead ends
December 1, 2020

Dead ends

Arguably, my experience with Screwfix the other day was due to breaking this 10th principle of service design: “A Good Service should have no dead ends.”

When the local store had to close unexpectedly and temporarily, whoever was responsible for closing didn’t have authority to update the main company website.   They had reached a dead-end in the process for closing a store, which in turn led to a dead-end for me, the customer.

When you’re designing a service or process it’s a good idea to start with the most straightforward and most frequently occuring case.  But as soon as have this, you need to consider likely exceptions, and include them in your documentation.  One important exception many forget, is that your product or service is simply ‘not for’ the person trying to use it.  This is a legitimate ‘dead end’ in a way, but helping them to make an orderly and elegant exit will do no harm to your reputation.

Often, dead-ends occur when you haven’t fully considered who your users might be.   Not every shopper is 100% fit and able-bodied.  Heavy doors and steps become dead-ends for the disabled, frail or heavy-laden.  Small print makes a web-page a dead-end for someone short-sighted.  Small buttons or too-precise hand-movements create dead-ends for the arthritic or shaky-handed.  As my husband found out recently, 2-factor authentication makes online banking a dead-end for those who don’t have a mobile phone.

Of course, you’ll never be able to predict every possible exception or variation, so you need to make sure your service or process always has an ‘escape route’.  A good start is to enable a user (whether customer or team member) to talk to a human being with sufficient experience and authority to handle anything.

If you find this backstop is called on regularly or too often, you’ve discovered another common exception you didn’t allow for.

As long as you learn from the times the backstop is called for, your organisation will quickly learn to minimise the need for it.

How to really annoy your customers
November 30, 2020

How to really annoy your customers

Here’s why keeping your service consistent across channels matters.   Yesterday I drove down to our nearest Screwfix trade counter, to collect stuff we needed to start laying the floor.   I’d ordered these things online a few days earlier and chosen to collect rather than have it delivered.   I’d dutifully waited for the SMS messages that would notify me it had arrived at my chosen store and was ready to collect.  But when I turned up, the store was ‘temporarily closed’.

After navigating the labyrinth of phone messages designed to prevent you ever speaking to human being, after 10 minutes, I got through to someone, I explained my predicament.   They consulted their manager.

“That store closed a few days ago.  It should be open again soon.”

“The website said it was open.”

“If you google it, it says it says it’s temporarily closed.”

“Why on earth would I google it, when I’ve already ordered and paid for everything on the main website?  Why would I google it when I know where the store is, and I’ve received 2 separate SMS messages telling me that my order is ready for collection?”

“Oh.”

We got it sorted after a bit of nudging.  The person on the other end of the phone found me the next nearest Screwfix that had what I wanted in stock, and cancelled my order.   But a slick and easy service was totally undermined by a lack of consistency.

And, I suspect, by a failure of delegation.