Issue 27 - Manifesto for a Disappearing Boss
How to become a Disappearing Boss
1.Plan To Disappear
Because it is certain that one day you will.
Focus on the future life of your business as you would focus on the future life of a child – with the aim of making it independent.
If your business was a child, you would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves you, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.
Not only will you build a business worth selling, you’ll have you more choices about who you might sell it to (see 24.)
2.Never Think Pin Factory
The factory model breaks down the making of a pin into a series of tiny, standardised steps. So that instead of making a whole pin, a worker executes a single step, passes the pin on to the next worker in the chain and repeats.
Great for pins, but soul-destroying for humans.
And counterproductive for processes that require the application of empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair. Processes that involve human beings or other complex systems.
In other words businesses like yours.
Even if you make pins.
3.Think Orchestra Instead
For anything bigger than a one-man band, music is a complex, collaborative, creative endeavour, just like running a business.
In an orchestra, processes are split horizontally rather than vertically. Each instrument has its own end-to-end score, containing only the notes it plays and the cues its player needs.
That makes the musician’s life easier, because they know exactly what they have to play when, while at the same time knowing exactly how their individual performance contributes to the whole experience, in real time.
A musical score is a high-level, end-to-end process framework, expressed in a shared language, that allows repeated playings to be consistent, while still allowing scope for interpretation and the emergent.
This shared language can be idiosyncratic, consisting of prompts and reminders rather than instruction. A score more or less sketchy, improvised around a premise or a set of rules. It can leave room not just for interpretation, but for exploration and experimentation.
It’s possible to build the same thing for a business. I call it a Customer Experience Score.
4.Focus On The Customer
Structure your business around what you do, for the people you serve:
Your clients.
Not the Boss.
Not by function.
No hierarchy.
No managers.
No reporting up or down.
No overhead.
No departments.
No fiefdoms.
No silos.
No handovers.
No falling between the cracks.
5.Write Your Unique Music Into A Customer Experience Score
Even if you’re in the same business as others, the way you behave, the way you deliver – your music – is unique to you. That’s what your customers and clients are really paying for.
So if you want your music to be played consistently, to elicit a consistent response in your audience, to have longevity, write it down.
The key thing about a musical score is that it describes what the audience should hear. It tells musicians which notes to play in which order and at what speed. It gives hints about the mood it’s intended to create.
What it does not describe is how to produce those notes. It assumes the player knows how to play their instrument.
It doesn’t even dictate what instrument is used. As long as the right notes are produced, in the right order and at the right speed to induce the required mood, they can be produced on anything – from a crumhorn, to an electric guitar, to a computer – and the audience will recognise your music.
6.Keep Your Promise Tight
Create absolute clarity on who the business serves and what the business promises to do for them.
Nail down the values and behaviours that drive ‘the way we do things round here’, setting expectations for behaviour for everyone in and around the business.
One of the characteristics of a self-organising system is that “as it changes, it does so by referring to itself; whatever future form it takes will be consistent with its already established identity. When the environment demands a new response, there is a reference point for change.”
For your business that reference point is your Promise of Value.
The more clearly and explicitly that is spelt out, and built into the way a business works, the more resilient your business will be – not because it won’t change, but because changes will always be adopted in a way that is consistent with that Promise.
7.Keep Your Score Loose
Set a floor: “the least we will do’.
No ceiling.
Provide clear direction on what needs to be done when, both to make the right Promises to the right people, and to deliver on those Promises – without specifying in excruciating detail how to do those things.
Set out the usual run of events, without enumerating every possible scenario.
Let the technical expertise reside in the individual, the musician.
Be as jazz as you like. Turn the floor into a springboard.
Let your people exercise their professional judgement to handle exceptions, based on their own knowledge and experience, plus the values and behaviours expected of them.
Do however, build a reference library of techniques or ‘how-to’s that new or infrequent players may find useful.
8.Make Every Part Meaningful
Each Part starts and ends at the boundaries of the organisation – it runs from end-to-end, following the lifecycle of a prospect through to client and beyond.
This way the person playing that part stays focused on the customer.
Very satisfying for both parties.
9.Make Every Note Count
If it doesn’t contribute to making and keeping your Promise, or improving how you do that, don’t do it.
10.Assume Competence
Mozart didn’t tell his musicians where to put their fingers. He knew they knew how to play their instruments, that’s why he recruited them, or trained them.
11.Recruit For Attitude, Train For Aptitude.
Your music is always unique to you. No other orchestra is quite like yours.
So stop looking for people who already know what you know.
Instead, recruit people who really want to deliver your Promise.
Let them learn how to play your music when they join. Let them work out where in your Orchestra they can contribute best.
Just make sure they’ve had plenty of practice before they perform in public.
12.Make Sure Everyone Can Play More Than One Part
With a shared notation, a complete Score, and several players for each Part, you can be flexible in how you assign resources.
Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.
13.Automate Drudgery
The goal of automation is to “take the best of what people can do and make it even better by leveraging what machines can do.”
Simple processes can always be automated, and complicated processes are amenable to mechanisation and automation.
All living things (like human beings) are complex systems. Which means that any process involving them is necessarily complex. A different thing altogether.
That means it makes sense to automate the simple and the complicated wherever you can, to free up your human capacity to deal with other humans.
These complex processes can’t and shouldn’t be mechanised or automated.
It is possible though, to inject some consistency, repeatability and therefore scalability into them, by adopting the analogy of a creative collaboration (orchestra) rather than a production line (pin factory).
14.Think Carefully About What You Call Drudgery
On board the schooner Gallant, sailing cargo across the Atlantic, the latest navigational and forecasting technology keeps them on course and unsurprised by the weather, but hauling ropes is done old-school, by hand, by the crew.
“You can get motorised winches, that would do all this at the touch of a button, but doing it by hand and voice is great exercise, fantastic team-building and very good for morale. Why would you want to get rid of that?”
Automation isn’t the end game.
It’s the means to a completely new game, that creates space for the very best of what it means to be human – curiosity, connection, community, and care for the planet.
15.Leave Room For Ma.
Ma.
The gaps between things.
The pauses between notes.
The white space on a page.
The places where we can come alive for each other.
Leave room in your Score for Ma.
It's where the magic happens.
16.Free People To Be Human.
Most modern businesses involve interactions of some kind – with other employees, customers, and suppliers.
These interactions require emotional labour – listening; empathising; being present to the other person, as well as intellectual labour – pattern-matching; imagining potential scenarios; reviewing possible solutions etc..
Without a Score, interactions become harder than they need to be, because each occurrence is treated as unique, where in fact they fall into common patterns, with unique features.
Use your Score to capture what has to happen in the common patterns.
Give your people a framework to work from that doesn’t take much thinking about.
Give them a box to think outside of.
This frees up intellectual and emotional energy to be spent on the unique and personal aspects of regular interactions, and on the exceptions that either prove the rule, or highlight the start of a new pattern.
Motivated people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur. They can spark off the constraint to ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities.
They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the process.
With their heads cleared of the routine, your people can use their hearts to exceed your promises.
17.Beware Black Boxes
Imagine what would have happened if Mozart had simply taught his musicians their parts by rote, tightly coupling the ‘what must happen’ with the ‘how we make it happen at this moment’.
He would have created a black box, that could make music only for as long as the specific players he taught could remember it, or the instruments they used were available.
A black box limited by the number of people Mozart could physically teach; that would be impossible to interrogate, update or re-interpret; that would quickly become obsolete.
Even worse, if the ‘black box’ is a person, it can get run over by a bus, headhunted to a competitor, or simply decide to leave.
Keep ‘what must happen’ separate from ‘how we make it happen at the moment’.
Given the ‘what’, future generations will be able to work out the best ‘how’ for now by themselves.
18.Share Everything
In a self-organising system in a rapidly changing environment, you don’t know what information will be useful, or where, or when or how.
Why on earth would you want to hide any of it from anyone?
19.Embrace Variation
No Score can be pre-designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality.
A completely process-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.
Keep your business open to small variations (what Holacracy calls ‘tensions’), – especially to small, persistent variations that are driven by the people you serve – your stakeholders.
Give your people full autonomy to respond to variation. You know they will do so in line with the Promise of Value at the core of the business, so no harm will be done.
What starts as a small variation may well turn into a new opportunity, a new product or service, a new way of doing things, that makes the business stronger and more stable over time.
Make sure your people can spot that and adjust the Score or the instrumentation accordingly.
Freedom and order is what will help you thrive.
20.Make Admin A Side-effect
Everything that goes on inside the system must be a side-effect of making and keeping your Promise.
That means all the resources needed to play a Part must be available as and when they are needed.
And feedback must be as immediate as it can be, going straight to whoever is best placed to act on it.
21.Practice Together Often
People will continually find better ways to do things and new things to do. And as long as they are congruent with the Promise, that’s exactly what you want.
At the same time this is a kind of entropy – a gradual divergence from the original Score for the ‘way we do things round here’ that eventually leads to a completely different piece being played – and an irrelevant Score that helps nobody.
Ditching the Score altogether doesn’t resolve this issue – it just makes entropy invisible.
On the other hand, updating it can end up as one of those jobs nobody has time or inclination to do.
One answer is regular Group Practice, where everyone gets together and plays out improvements they want to share – backed up by evidence that these will enhance the overall performance.
A ‘scribe’ takes notes and incorporates agreed improvements into the existing Score – perhaps based on a vote, or even as alternative options.
Group practice reminds everyone that they are custodians of a Promise, collaborating to produce an experience that embodies that Promise for their audience – an experience built on the efforts of those who’ve gone before, enhanced by those they work with, and most importantly, to be carried on by those who come after.
22.Cut Some Slack
For at least the last 190 years, we’ve known that overburdening people, equipment and systems leads to mistakes, wasted effort and sometimes, tragedy.
We know that people, systems and even equipment need rest. Time out to repair, recharge and recalibrate.
But.
When times are hard, or you think nobody will notice, it’s tempting to overload systems, processes and people.
Resist that temptation.
Slack is what keeps you resilient, creative and adaptable.
Slack is what will keep you ahead of the game.
23.Only Add Productive Capacity
If you want more impact, add more Players, or replicate your Orchestra.
That way you’ll add 100% productive capacity, no overhead.
24.Make Everyone An Owner
It's the surest way to ensure they’ll behave like one.
A final point:
25. Don't Disappear Alone
It's hard to Disappear from the business you started - although not as hard as you might think. After all, for a long time, you aren't 'gone', you've just blended yourself in. The disappearance is gradual, so everyone has time to get used to it. Including you.
It's probably better to say it's hard to get started on Disappearing.
Why?
Because it's a step into the unknown. What if it doesn't work? What if this is the wrong choice? What if there is something better out there?
To which in all honesty, my answers have to be: 'It might not work for you. It might be the wrong choice for you. There might well be something better out there for you.'
But if you know you want to change your relationship with your business, there's only one way to find out what the right solution for you is.
And that's to take a step into the unknown.
My job is to make taking that step as easy and as comfortable as possible. To show you as quickly as possible that what we do together will give you what you need. To make sure that even if you decide to stop, you still feel you've gained something worthwhile.
I can tell you till I'm blue in the face that it has worked for most of the people who tried it. In some cases spectacularly. Nobody lost by it.
But me telling you, or even me showing you, isn't going to be as convincing as you having a go for yourself.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Thanks as always for being there.
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