Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that
December 16, 2020

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that

Of course life isn’t really an improv show.

In business and sometimes in life we have an idea of where we want to go, where we want to end up.   What ‘Everything’s An Offer’ really means is that you should take things that happen outside your control (Covid-19, Brexit, losing a client or prospect, that unexpected pregnancy) as a potential gift, rather than a threat or a thwart.

You probably already do this on holiday, when you’re playing.  A few years ago my husband and I were in Graz, having a few days off.   We were headed to a particular part of town to see something, but we decided to wander ‘in the general direction’ and see what we found.

We smelt the offer first – a lovely, fruity, alcoholic whiff from what what looked like a garage at the bottom of a block of flats.  Then we saw the stills it was coming from.   We stopped and looked into the door of the ‘garage’ to see if we could make sense of it; spoke to the guy loading up a van.   He pointed us across the road to the distillery shop.   Hazelnut schnapps (among several delicious flavours).  An offer we couldn’t refuse.   We bought a bottle, then carried on wandering towards our destination.

Nassim Taleb calls this being a ‘flâneur‘, someone who walks, not aimlessly, but open to deviation that has no downside and might lead to an upside.  Its a crucial element of being antifragile.

You don’t have to to take up an offer, unless it helps you get to where you want to be, or to somewhere more interesting that you hadn’t foreseen, but it helps to tell yourself “Here’s an offer.  Could it help or hinder?” before you decide.  The answer isn’t always obvious.

Everything’s an offer
December 15, 2020

Everything’s an offer

Yesterday I started reading ‘DO/IMPROVISE’ by Robert Poynton.   It starts with another of those lovely diagrams that you only have to see to be changed by:

 

It’s the bit in the middle that’s powerful.  ‘EAO’ stands for ‘Everything’s An Offer’.

An improv term, an ‘offer’ is what a fellow actor or audience member gives you to build on as you improvise a scene or story together.   It doesn’t matter what it is, or how random it is, your job is to take it and use it to build your next offer, so that everyone can keep the scene going to a satisfactory conclusion for all.  None of you know what that conclusion is until you find it.

The only part of the process you control is your own ability to spot offers, see their potential and react in a way that increases that potential for someone else.

After what 2020’s thrown at us, that might just be the attitude to cultivate for 2021.

 

Taken as read
December 14, 2020

Taken as read

Clearing out my inbox today, I found an email I’d missed from Dale Carnegie with this headline:

“Research reveals importance of honest leaders to UK workforce  – Read the full report!”

What else needs to be asked that we used to take as read?

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.