Saturday, 9.28pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. – Lao Tzu
This is the second post in my study of John Seddon’s ‘Freedom from command and control’.
Before I go through some of the key ideas that will help you create better service businesses, I need to jot down a few notes about representing knowledge.
As you might have noticed I use drawing as a way to structure my thinking, which then helps me to write a post.
My approach is inspired by several approaches to drawing as a way of thinking, including mind mapping, concept mapping, sketchnoting and thinking maps.
A good introduction to diagramming techniques used in systems thinking can be found here.
I recently came across Paul Fernhout’s website from a talk he gave at Libreplanet 2021 and discovered itIBIS – indented text Issue Based Information Systems – based on the work of Werner Kunz and Horst Rittel in the 1960s.
Essentially, this is a way of visualizing complex information using textual or graphical tools.
It’s similar to what I do with notes, and there are overlapping issues of theoretical interest, that I should probably pull out as I carry on with my PhD.
But the point I want to make is that it’s given me some thoughts about how to think my way into a piece of useful writing.
A document that I go back to a few times is Get Writing by M. Batchelor.
One of the suggestions she makes is to work out your outline in a talk.
An outline, as you know, is a structure of what you’re trying to communicate. And it’s a technique I’ve always hated.
I prefer to work out what I want to say by writing it down and seeing what happens.
But that ends up in rambling works like this post, which your well behaved AI tool will never write.
And that’s ok, because what I’m interested in is getting thoughts into your head, not just heaping up content.
So… one way of writing an outline is to use this idea of indented text as a way to examine what you’re reading and thinking about.
The IBIS technique has three key components – questions, comments and pros/cons.
But we’re not limited to just that – for example in the image above I’m using Colin Eden’s bipolar structure of “rather than”, represented by three dots like this “…”.
So the first line should be read as “learn and improve rather than command and control”.
Okay, one last thing.
We tend to think that we use reasoning to think objectively about our options and make balanced decisions.
It turns out that might not be right.
Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that we use reason to win arguments and that might be a better explanation of what happens in real life.
So, the reason you’re seeing the image above as a mix of text and diagrams is because I’m thinking of experimenting with that as an aid to arguing the points I’m learning about. You can see the points. Maybe the pictures will help. Let’s see, shall we.
The ideas that you need to know to help you create better services come from ideas that were worked out in manufacturing, in particular Toyota.
They figured out that learning about a system and trying to improve it led to better outcomes than trying to boss people around and control them with numbers in spreadsheets.
It was more efficient to only do something when a customer needed you to do it – you started making a car when a customer asked for it, rather than building lots of cars just in case.
We’ve just rewatched the new Karate Kid, so the picture is of the teacher and student connected with bamboo poles. One moves only when the other does. That’s connection.
So how do you build a connection?
Well, by working on the relationship, of course.
You don’t just get there by relying on marketing.
If you spend your time connecting to customer needs then you won’t need as many people pushing paper creating budgets and forecasts and hopes and dreams – you won’t need a management factory.
And if you know what customers need you can create it for them, even if it’s different each time – even if it has variety.
That’s going to shock some people who will argue that only rigid standardization can work.
Ignore them.
The way to create what customers need is to have your team bring their brains to work rather than mindlessly obey your orders.
If your team is engaged, cares about clients and wants to do a good job they will build what is needed.
And your total costs will fall, when viewed from an end to end perspective. It might look like you’re spending too much time with one customer, but what you learn will drive down total costs.
Focusing on customer needs and doing only what needs to be done as effectively as possible means work flows unimpeded through your organisation.
That leads to economies of flow rather than economies of scale.
And these ideas are going to be fundamental as you take the next steps in your business.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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