Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 83 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

November 27, 2020

Consistency

Good Services principle number 9: A good service is consistent.

I like this principle particularly, because consistent doesn’t mean uniform.

Your services are obviously going to be different if they take place over different channels or formats, or if you have different levels of offering. A one-to-one consultancy isn’t going to be the same as a do-it-yourself option, but your service should live up to your Promise of Value across channels, across time, across customer types and across all individual customer journeys. There should be no gaps – something that takes extra care if your organisational structure is non-orthogonal to your processes.

The great thing about consistency is that it allows for the kind of variation that uniformity would stifle. The kind of variation that allows you people to over-deliver on your Promise and delight individual clients – even when things go wrong. As you design the services that enable your business to deliver though others, remember to empower that ability to vary in your team. Not only will it make for more delight and flexibility, it will be the means by which you discover new needs and desires in your client base.

‘Consistency’ is the perfect word here because it describes how your service should feel.

That’s what keeps it human.

November 26, 2020

Streamlining

‘Streamlining’ was very fashionable back in the 1930s and 40s. Originally pure engineering, the purpose was to reduce drag over fast moving vehicles such as trains, planes and automobiles.

However, the look quickly got taken up as a badge of modernity, often accentuated with totally unnecessary, usually shiny protuberances, that looked the part, but actually increased friction. Eventually, ‘streamlining’ got applied to all sorts of things that were never going to move, never mind create drag – record players, light fittings, buildings.

The point is to remember who it’s for. That’s where Good Services principle no. 8 comes in: “A good service requires as few steps as possible to complete.” For the user. If you deliver through other people, they are effectively the user.

What does “as few steps as possible” really mean? For me, this:

Each step is a meaningful move in the right direction from the perspective of the client. This often means that steps are bigger than you’re used to thinking of. If I want to hire a car, filling a form in isn’t meaningful to me, but choosing a car from those you have available is.
Each step is completely self-contained. There is no possibility of ‘limbo’ (or purgatory). A step is complete or its not. That way, everyone knows exactly where you are in the overall process.
You couldn’t add another step to the process without muddying it.
You couldn’t remove any step from the process without breaking it.

Streamlining a process into as few steps as possible isn’t necessarily about speed either. The process itself may take a long time. Individual steps may take a long time, or there may be long gaps between them:

The service, or process, should be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and possible to deliver with minimal interaction from you, or anyone else in your business.

Of course, achieving this might mean re-organising your business. But it will be worth it.

November 24, 2020

Tell me what’s happening

I’ve been ordering a lot online lately. Not primarily because of Covid, but because we’re kitting out the extension. I’ve had no problems at all, everyone has been well set up for online sales, and everything has worked exactly as I expected.

Until this last week.

Last Monday, I ordered some coir matting. Ordering was more or less straightforward (once I’d understood the pricing), and I received confirmation by email, setting my expectation for when I might hear more about how my order was progressing. So far, so good.

A few days later, I haven’t heard anything. I call the number in the email. It rings and rings. “It’s late, maybe they’ve left for the day. I’ll try again tomorrow.” The next day I call again. It rings and rings, until finally, the call is cut off. I try again. Again, no answer. “It’s Saturday, maybe lockdown has meant they can’t be there as usual. I’ll try again on Monday.”

On Monday, I call again. Again, no answer. Twice. Three times. I send an email. No reply – not even an automated response.

Now I’m beginning to mildly panic. “What if they aren’t a real business? Should I cancel the order? How will I get my money back? Should I be ringing my credit card company?”

I look them up on Companies House and Endole. All seems OK. “But what if they’ve gone bust? Or can’t fulfill orders because of lockdown?”

I try the head office number on the website. A young lady answers. “I’ll have to give you another number, we don’t handle online sales.” It is of course, the number I’ve been calling. I explain the situation – including my fears. She laughs, “Of course we’re real! But we’re not as big a company as we look online. We’ve been really busy and it’s been a struggle to keep up. I’ll get a message over to the warehouse and get them to call you.”

Sure enough, an email arrives shortly afterwards – “Your order’s on the lorry, and should be with you tomorrow. Let us know if it hasn’t arrived by Wednesday.”

And sure enough, it arrived this morning. Phew!

There are a couple of simple things even a small business can do to prevent this kind of misunderstanding, even if you’re taken by surprise by a surge in demand:

First, immediately, have a message on the warehouse phone that lets people know they have come through to the right place.

Include in your message that if there is no answer it’s because you’re busy. Genuinely busy. Explain why. If you can’t have more than 5 people in at a time, let people know. If you’re short-staffed, let people know, and let them know what you’re doing about it. People are very understanding if you are honest with them.

Second, as soon as you possibly can, make sure the phone gets answered by a real person.

Transfer the warehouse phone to the shop, or use a pay as you go phone answering service. Even if they can’t track the order, they can at least take a message, answer frequently asked questions, and reassure your clients that the business is real, and their money is in safe hands. Messages can be dealt with asynchronously, perhaps at the end of the day when the warehouse has more time.

These two simple, cheap and relatively easy actions will also reduce the number of incoming calls (e.g. my 7 calls would go down to 1), removing the incentive for harried warehouse people to ignore the phone.

The ultimate aim is of course, to make the communication of what’s happening with my order a side-effect of the fulfillment, but don’t wait until that’s in place – if you don’t tell me, your remote client, the real story, I’ll make up my own, and it might be wild.

Online, communicating what’s happening to an order is as important is actually fulfilling it.

November 23, 2020

Constructive interference

We don’t know what we don’t know. Neither do we know what our clients and colleagues don’t know. And we often take for granted the things we do know.

So, a useful thing to do every day might be to ask:

“What do I take for granted that I know, that the people I serve don’t or may not know?

How could I best share that?

It’s a ripple in a pond, but who knows where it might end up?

November 20, 2020

Spontaneity

My friend Harry Morrison is an actor. He’s recently started writing short, packed posts on what it’s really like to work in theatre, and guess what? It’s hard work.

I particularly liked this from today’s post:

“Even the best stand-ups have notebooks packed with all their best ‘spontaneous’ off-the-cuff quips. Their skill is in waiting for the perfect time to use them.”

There are 2 things here that a relevant for designing effective business processes:

If you haven’t rehearsed the likely scenarios, you’ll never spot that ‘perfect time’.
The biggest impact comes from realising that the unlikely scenario you’re currently in is actually ‘the perfect time’.

Process, preparation, and practice (aka ‘doing the work’, aka discipline) is what makes spontaneous creativity possible.

November 19, 2020

What’s on the inside doesn’t matter

Good Services principle no. 7: “A good service is agnostic to organisational structures”.

In other words, the way you organise your company’s resources to deliver on your Promise of Value should essentially, be invisible and irrelevant to your customers and clients.

What if you took it further, so that your team and your clients saw the same service, one from the inside, one from the outside? What if you then made those services the basis for your organisational structure?

That would make life easier for everyone, wouldn’t it?