Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 86 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

October 19, 2020

Which, What and How

You’d think that Keeping your Promise is easy to do. That’s true when everything is going to plan, but when times are hard, or the unexpected happens, it may not be so easy. It may even be impossible.

It’s at these times that questions can help you hold yourself to account for what you do and the way you do it:

Which parts of my Promise of Value are sacrosanct?

If you have more than one set of stakeholders (and it seems to me you’ll always have at least 5 – customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, your community), then you can also ask:

What’s the unbreakable promise you make to these people? (In this podcast, Brian Chesky talks to Eric Ries about making 2 or 3 unbreakable promises to each set of stakeholders)

When you know the answers to these questions, you can ask further, practically useful ones:

Which part(s) of my Promise does this activity demonstrate and uphold?
Which part(s) of my Promise does this activity contradict or undermine? If it does, how can I bring it into line? Could I do something different? Could I do it differently?

If everyone in your business is in the habit of asking these questions in the good times, you’ll be well able to do the right things, the right way, when things are bad.

October 15, 2020

Where, When, What, and How

We think often about the motivation of the people we wish to serve: ‘They must be ambitious to grow‘, ‘They must be seeking change‘, ‘They must be hungry’.

But according to B J Fogg, behaviour designer and author of ‘Tiny Habits‘ there are at least two more factors we need to consider.

The first is ability. Motivation means nothing without the ability to act on it, so when packaging up your Promise of Value for sale, it helps to think about what formats will work best for different clients’ abilities to act on their motivation.

These kinds of question might help:

Where is each potential client in their journey?
When is it a good time for them, to discover me?
What can I offer that is the best thing for them, where they are right now?
What could make it not work?
How can I make sure it works?
How can I make it easier for them to enrol with me?

The Promise is the same, but the format may make all the difference to whether someone buys.

October 14, 2020

Who and what and why?

A few good questions to ask of yourself and the people you wish to serve:

You	Your ideal client
Who are you?	Who are they?
What skills do you have?	What skills are they missing?
What do you enjoy doing?	What do they need doing?
What dent are you trying to make?	What dent are they trying to make?
What transformation are you uniquely able to deliver?	What transformation are they seeking?
Why do you want to do that?	Why do they want to do that?

Knowing that everyone really wants

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know their place in this community, and have others know it too.

will help you ask and answer these questions far more productively.

October 13, 2020

Making maps

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. .. it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.” Donald Rumsfeld

Part of any consultant’s job is to formalise the known knowns and the known unknowns. To map out the worldview a business owner is working within so that they can share it with their teams, giving them routes to follow.

In doing that, we achieve something even more important – we surface the unknown unknowns – the areas of the map that have up to now been blank, or worse, have become the abode of monsters signalling ‘Don’t go there‘. And by turning the ‘unknown unknown’ into a ‘known unknown’, we break through to new territories for the business to explore and expand into.

For me, the brilliant thing is that all it takes to achieve all this is questions. So this week I’m going to share some of the best mapmaker questions I know, organised around my map of a business:

I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

October 12, 2020

Other eyes

I don’t subscribe to a huge number of blogs. I don’t have time to read them all.

The ones I do subscribe to:

Reinforce my worldviews, but put things in a different way, that helps me see nuances I’ve missed. That’s one way worldviews change.
Tell me things I didn’t know before, and can’t un-know now. That’s another way worldviews change.

It just so happens that today’s converge neatly:

Coffee and Junk

Seth’s Blog

The Phone Lady

Actually if it comes to it, that’s why I read anything – fiction, non-fiction, ads on buses, the sides of cornflake packets. It’s also why I like to have conversations (occasionally heated) with people I don’t agree with on everything.

We learn from seeing through other eyes.

That’s also how we really connect.

October 9, 2020

What if it works?

What happens if it works?

Every improvement we make to our business doesn’t just change the business. It changes us too. And that is a truly scary thought. What if we don’t like our future selves? What if other people don’t like them either?

We forget of course, that our self has changed with every improvement we’ve ever made, and yet we are the same person we’ve always been.

Composing your Customer Experience Score won’t make you a different person. It will simply enable more of the real you to come out.

And by bringing your whole self to bear on composing it, you’ll do the same for everyone that plays it, and everyone that experiences it.

October 8, 2020

I’d lose control

The only way to scale a business that is built around you is to embed the ‘you’ into the way the business works, so that everything about it reminds your prospects and clients of you, even when you are not in the room.

That means enabling and empowering other people to do what you do, as well as or better than you do it. That isn’t losing control, it’s just putting the control in a different place – into the fabric of the business, instead of one or more people’s heads.

Perhaps what’s really behind the worry of ‘losing control’ is the fear of becoming less important to the business. After all, if it can get on perfectly well without you, where does that leave you, the founder, the originator of the vision? The irony is of course, that the more you dig your actual self into the business, the less able it will be to survive without you. All too often, an amazing little business fizzles out with the life of its founder. To my mind, it’s almost criminal to let that happen.

Done well, composing your Customer Experience Score puts you right where you belong – embedded into the heart and soul of the business, without actually having to be present day to day. It’s not just your prospects and clients that will be reminded of you every time they interact with your business, your people will be reminded too. Even those who haven’t joined yet.

Dale Carnegie has been dead a long while, but the business he founded carries on as world-wide empire, with his vision and philosophy firmly ensconced at its heart.

Isn’t that something worth giving up hands-on control for?

October 7, 2020

No one else is doing it

Of course ‘Nobody else is doing it‘, is really an observation about risk, not isolation. Most of us don’t like to go first, for fear of looking stupid. Unlike my beloved, who, faced with a marquee-full of Cornish pasties and cream teas at the grand opening of the Eden Project, boldly stepped forwards with the words “My mum would expect it of me” – and broke the ice for everyone else, hesitating hungrily on the periphery.

So the real answer to ‘Nobody else is doing it‘ is ‘What’s the worst that can happen?‘. The best that can happen is that you get results that the waiting others couldn’t dream of, and you get them first.

If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get what everyone else gets, maybe less. Provided the downside isn’t too damaging, it’s worth taking the leap. Then the very best that can happen is that you break the ice for the others, and everyone benefits from your lead.

October 6, 2020

I have really good people

Of course, you’ve surrounded yourself with really good people.

How are they actually spending their efforts? Delighting clients, or dreaming up new, better ways to deliver on your Promise of Value?

Or are they re-inventing the wheel? Teaching new recruits the ropes? Trying to remember what they did the last time that rare, but surprisingly regular occurrence cropped up? Finding ways to get around the software system that actually makes their job harder? Looking for another job?

Every member of an orchestra knows how to play their instrument. They don’t need to be told where to put their fingers. But they do appreciate having a score to follow. A score means they don’t have to think too hard about 80% of the job, freeing up energy and imagination to deal with the 20% that makes all the difference to performance. That 20% is what keeps clients happy, loyal, willing to pay extra and eager to tell their friends about you.

But the real power of a score is that it enables your team to bring their whole selves to bear – time after time, performance after performance.

And that’s what keeps your team engaged, aligned and proactively taking responsibility.

Really good people can be even better with a score.