Category Archives: Innovation

What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding

Lessons from a Leaked Document

What We Can Learn From MrBeast's Onboarding

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the often murky world of corporate communication, a leaked MrBeast document has emerged as a beacon of clarity. Far from being your typical vague, jargon-filled memo, this onboarding document is a crystal-clear recipe for success that’s as refreshing as it is rare.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. MrBeast’s empire isn’t without its share of controversy. Reports of toxic work environments, unsafe conditions for contestants, and allegations of rigged games cast a shadow over his content creation machine and his leadership capabilities. These are serious issues that merit investigation and discussion. As a result, this post isn’t an endorsement of MrBeast as a leader, it’s an endorsement of an onboarding document that he wrote.

The Secret Sauce: Clarity Meets Innovation

What sets this document apart is its razor-sharp clarity and relentless focus on creativity. Unlike the vague platitudes that plague many corporate communications, job descriptions, and performance matrixes, this document clearly outlines expectations, success metrics, and the strategies and tactics to fuel continuous innovation.

This clarity is transformative for people and organizations. When team members understand both the guardrails and the goals, they channel their creative energy into groundbreaking ideas rather than second-guessing their approach and worrying about repercussions.

Expectations: Always Be Learning

The first principle is a clear directive: always be learning. In MrBeast’s world, this isn’t just about personal growth—it’s about staying ahead in a rapidly changing digital landscape. This commitment to continuous learning fuels innovation by ensuring the team is constantly exploring new technologies, trends, and creative techniques.

While some see the definition of A, B, and C-players as evidence of a toxic workplace, the fact is that it’s the reality in most workplaces. It’s the absence of clarity, usually disguised by claims of family-like cultures that value diversity, that makes workplaces toxic.

Metrics: The Start of a Feedback Loop

The focus on specific success metrics like Click-Through Rate and Average View Duration isn’t just about measurement—it’s about creating a feedback loop for innovation. Clear benchmarks developed over time allow teams to quickly assess the impact of new ideas and iterate accordingly. It also removes the temptation and ability to “move the goalposts” to create the appearance of success.

Strategy: Structure Meets Creativity

After describing what success looks like for employees and how they’ll be measured, the document outlines a structured content formula akin to an innovation strategy. It provides a clear framework of priorities, goals, and boundaries while encouraging creative experimentation within those boundaries.

Starting with a step-by-step guide to making videos with a “wow” factor, the document also emphasizes the criticality of focusing on “critical components” and managing dependencies and

Far from the usual corporate claims that direction and “how to’s” constrain creativity and disempower employees, this approach creates a safety net that allows employees to be successful while still pushing the envelope of what’s possible in content creation.

How to Become Your Version of (a non-controversial) Mr. Beast

You don’t have to be a content creator, social media savant, or company founder to follow MrBeast’s lead. You have to do something much more difficult – communicate clearly and consistently.

Clearly define what success looks like (and doesn’t) for your employees and projects.
Establish frameworks that encourage bold ideas while maintaining focus.
Define objective success metrics and consistently measure, track, and use them.

This leaked MrBeast document offers more than just a glimpse into a YouTube empire; it’s a masterclass in leadership in the era of hybrid workplaces, geographically dispersed teams, and emerging cultures and norms.

The document’s approach shows that innovation doesn’t have to be chaotic. By providing clear expectations and frameworks, leaders can create an environment where creativity thrives, and groundbreaking ideas can be rapidly developed and implemented.

When viewed in the bigger context of the MrBeast organization, however, the document is also a reminder that no matter how clear you think your communication is, you must be vigilant for those who claim that bad behavior is just a “misunderstanding.” Leaders know that no amount of views, clicks, or revenue is worth sacrificing the well-being of their teams.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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We Are Starving Our Innovation Economy

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We Are Starving Our Innovation Economy

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The Cold War was fundamentally different from any conflict in history. It was, to be sure, less over land, blood and treasure than it was about ideas. Communist countries believed that their ideology would prevail. They were wrong. The Berlin Wall fell and capitalism, it seemed, was triumphant.

Today, however, capitalism is in real trouble. Besides the threat of a rising China, the system seems to be crumbling from within. Income inequality in developed countries is at 50-year highs. In the US, the bastion of capitalism, markets have weakened by almost every imaginable metric. This wasn’t what we imagined winning would look like.

Yet we can’t blame capitalism. The truth is that its earliest thinkers warned about the potential for excesses that lead to market failure. The fact is that we did this to ourselves. We believed that we could blindly leave our fates to market and technological forces. We were wrong. Prosperity doesn’t happen by itself. We need to invest in an innovation economy.

Capitalism’s (Seemingly) Fatal Contradiction

Anyone who’s taken an “Economics 101” course knows about Adam Smith and his invisible hand. Essentially, the forces of self-interest, by their very nature, work to identify the optimal price that attracts just enough supply of a particular good or service to satisfy demand. This magical equilibrium point creates prosperity through an optimal use of resources.

However, some argued that the story wasn’t necessarily a happy one. After all, equilibrium implies a lack of economic profit and certainly businesses would want to do better than that. They would seek to gain a competitive advantage and, in doing so, create surplus value, which would then be appropriated to accumulate power to rig the system further in their favor.

Indeed, Adam Smith himself was aware of this danger. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” he wrote. In fact, the preservation of free markets was a major concern that ran throughout his work.

Yet as the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, with innovation the contradiction dissipates. As long as we have creative destruction, market equilibriums are constantly shifting and don’t require capitalists to employ extractive, anti-competitive practices in order to earn excellent profits.

Two Paths To Profit

Anyone who manages a business must pursue at least one of two paths to profit. The first is to innovate. By identifying and solving problems in a competitive marketplace, firms can find new ways to create, deliver and capture value. Everybody wins.

Google’s search engine improved our lives in countless ways. Amazon and Walmart have dramatically improved distribution of goods throughout the economy, making it possible for us to pay less and get more. Pfizer and Moderna invested in an unproven technology that uses mRNA to deliver life-saving molecules and saved us from a deadly pandemic.

Still, the truth is that the business reality is not, “innovate or die,” but rather “innovate or find ways to reduce competition.” There are some positive ways to tilt the playing field, such as building a strong brand or specializing in some niche market. However, other strategies are not so innocent. They seek to profit by imposing costs on the rest of us

The first, called rent seeking, involves businesses increasing profits through getting litigation passed in their favor, as when car dealerships in New Jersey sued against Tesla’s direct sales model. The second, regulatory capture, seeks to co-opt agencies that are supposed to govern industry, resulting in favorable implementation and enforcement of the legal code.

Why “Pro-Business” Often Means Anti-Market

Corporations lobby federal, state and local governments to advance their interests and there’s nothing wrong with that. Elected officials should be responsive to their constituents’ concerns. That is, after all, how democracy is supposed to work. However, very often business interests try to maintain that they are arguing for the public good rather than their own.

Consider the issue of a minimum wage. Businesses argue that government regulation of wages is an imposition on the free market and that, given the magical forces of the invisible hand, letting the market set the price for wages would produce optimal outcomes. Artificially increasing wages, on the other hand, would unduly raise prices on the public and reduce profits needed to invest in competitiveness.

This line of argument is nothing new, of course. In fact, Adam Smith addressed it in The Wealth of Nations nearly 250 years ago:

Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

At the same time corporations have themselves been undermining the free market for wages through the abuse of non-compete agreements. Incredibly, 38% of American workers have signed some form of non-compete agreement. Of course, most of these are illegal and wouldn’t hold up in court, but serve to intimidate employees, especially low-wage workers.

That’s just for starters. Everywhere you look, free markets are under attack. Occupational licensing, often the result of lobbying by trade associations, has increased five-fold since the 1950s. Antitrust regulation has become virtually nonexistent, while competition has been reduced in the vast majority of American industries.

Perhaps not surprisingly, while all this lobbying has been going on, recent decades have seen business investment and innovation decline, and productivity growth falter while new business formation has fallen by 50%. Corporate profits, on the other hand, are at record highs.

Getting Back On Track

At the end of World War II, America made important investments to create the world’s greatest innovation economy. The GI Bill made what is perhaps the biggest investment ever in human capital, sending millions to college and creating a new middle class. Investments in institutions such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would create scientific capital that would fuel US industry.

Unfortunately, we abandoned that very successful playbook. Over the past 20 years, college tuition in the US has roughly doubled in the last 20 years. Perhaps not surprisingly, we’ve fallen to ninth among OECD countries for post-secondary education. The ones who do graduate are often forced into essentially decades of indentured servitude in the form of student loans.

At the same time, government investment in research as a percentage of GDP has been declining for decades, limiting our ability to produce the kinds of breakthrough discoveries that lead to exciting new industries. What passes for innovation these days displaces workers, but does not lead to significant productivity gains. Legislation designed to rectify the situation and increase our competitiveness stalled in the Senate.

So after 250 years, capitalism remains pretty much as Adam Smith first conceived, powerful yet fragile, always at risk of being undermined and corrupted by the same basic animal spirits that it depends on to set prices efficiently. He never wrote, nor is there any indication he ever intended, that markets should be left to their own devices. In fact, he and others warned us that markets need to be actively promoted and protected.

We are free to choose. We need to choose more wisely.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Microsoft CoPilot

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Why Small Innovations Matter Now More Than Ever

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Searching for Silver Linings

Why Small Innovations Matter Now More Than Ever

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Do you feel like you’re drowning in a sea of bad news? You’re not alone. We’re standing in the eye of a storm of war, political division, and endless layoffs. In times like these, why bother with innovation when we’re using all our energy to survive and make sense of things?

I’ve asked myself this question with increasing frequency over the past months. After hours of searching, querying, and reading to understand why you, me, or any other individual should bother with innovation, I can tell you two things:

There’s no logical, data-backed reason why any individual should bother innovating (there are many logical, data-backed reasons why companies should innovate)
Innovation is the only life raft that’s ever carried us from merely surviving to thriving.

If that seems like a big, overwhelming, and exhausting expectation to place on innovators, you’re right. But it doesn’t have to be because innovation is also small things that make you smile, spark your curiosity, and prompt you to ask, “How might we…?”

Here are three small innovations that broke through the dark clouds of the news cycle, made me smile, and started a domino effect of questions and wonder.

LEGO Braille Bricks: Building a More Inclusive World

You know them, and you love them (unless you’ve stepped on one), and somehow, they got even better. In 2023, LEGO released Braille Bricks to the public.

By modifying the studs (those bumps on the top of the brick) to correspond with the braille alphabet, numbers, and symbols and complementing the toy with a website offering a range of activities, educator resources, and community support, LEGO built a bridge between sighted and visually impaired worlds, one tiny brick at a time.

How might a small change build empathy and connect people?

The Open Book: Fulfilling a Dream by Working on Vacation

Have you ever dreamed of going on vacation so that you could work an hourly job without pay? Would you believe there is a two-year waitlist of people willing to pay for such an experience?

Welcome to The Open Book, a second-hand bookstore in Wigtown, Scotland, that offers “bibliophiles, avid readers, kindred book lovers, and adventure seekers” the opportunity to live out their dreams of running the bookstore by day and living above it in a tiny apartment by night. The bookstore is owned and operated by a local nonprofit, and all proceeds, about $10,000 per year, go to supporting the Wigtown Book Festival.

How might you turn your passion into an experience others would pay for?

The Human Library: Checking Out Books That Talk Back

If used books aren’t your thing, consider going to The Human Library. This innovative concept started in Copenhagen in 2000 and has spread to over 80 countries, offering a unique twist on traditional libraries. Readers “borrow” individuals from all walks of life – from refugees to rockstars refugees, from people with disabilities to those with unusual occupations – to hear their stories, ask difficult questions, and engage in open dialogue.

How might you create opportunities for dialogue and challenge your preconceptions?

Small Things Make a Big Difference

In a world that often feels dark, these small innovations are helpful reminders that if you are curious, creative, and just a bit brave, you can spark joy, wonder, and change.

How will you innovate, no matter how small, to brighten your corner of the world?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing?

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Everyone Clear Now on What ChatGPT is Doing?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Almost a year and a half ago I read Stephen Wolfram’s very approachable introduction to ChatGPT, What is ChatGPT Doing . . . And Why Does It Work?, and I encourage you to do the same. It has sparked a number of thoughts that I want to share in this post.

First, if I have understood Wolfram correctly, what ChatGPT does can be summarized as follows:

Ingest an enormous corpus of text from every available digitized source.
While so doing, assign to each unique word a unique identifier, a number that will serve as a token to represent that word.
Within the confines of each text, record the location of every token relative to every other token.
Using just these two elements—token and location—determine for every word in the entire corpus the probability of it being adjacent to, or in the vicinity of, every other word.
Feed these probabilities into a neural network to cluster words and build a map of relationships.
Leveraging this map, given any string of words as a prompt, use the neural network to predict the next word (just like AutoCorrect).
Based on feedback from so doing, adjust the internal parameters of the neural network to improve its performance.
As performance improves, extend the reach of prediction from the next word to the next phrase, then to the next clause, the next sentence, the next paragraph, and so on, improving performance at each stage by using feedback to further adjust its internal parameters.
Based on all of the above, generate text responses to user questions and prompts that reviewers agree are appropriate and useful.

OK, I concede this is a radical oversimplification, but for the purposes of this post, I do not think I am misrepresenting what is going on, specifically when it comes to making what I think is the most important point to register when it comes to understanding ChatGPT. That point is a simple one. ChatGPT has no idea what it is talking about.

Indeed, ChatGPT has no ideas of any kind — no knowledge or expertise — because it has no semantic information. It is all math. Math has been used to strip words of their meaning, and that meaning is not restored until a reader or user engages with the output to do so, using their own brain, not ChatGPT’s. ChatGPT is operating entirely on form and not a whit on content. By processing the entirety of its corpus, it can generate the most probable sequence of words that correlates with the input prompt it had been fed. Additionally, it can modify that sequence based on subsequent interactions with an end user. As human beings participating in that interaction, we process these interactions as a natural language conversation with an intelligent agent, but that is not what is happening at all. ChatGPT is using our prompts to initiate a mathematical exercise using tokens and locations as its sole variables.

OK, so what? I mean, if it works, isn’t that all that matters? Not really. Here are some key concerns.

First, and most importantly, ChatGPT cannot be expected to be self-governing when it comes to content. It has no knowledge of content. So, whatever guardrails one has in mind would have to be put in place either before the data gets into ChatGPT or afterward to intercept its answers prior to passing them along to users. The latter approach, however, would defeat the whole purpose of using it in the first place by undermining one of ChatGPT’s most attractive attributes—namely, its extraordinary scalability. So, if guardrails are required, they need to be put in place at the input end of the funnel, not the output end. That is, by restricting the datasets to trustworthy sources, one can ensure that the output will be trustworthy, or at least not malicious. Fortunately, this is a practical solution for a reasonably large set of use cases. To be fair, reducing the size of the input dataset diminishes the number of examples ChatGPT can draw upon, so its output is likely to be a little less polished from a rhetorical point of view. Still, for many use cases, this is a small price to pay.

Second, we need to stop thinking of ChatGPT as artificial intelligence. It creates the illusion of intelligence, but it has no semantic component. It is all form and no content. It is a like a spider that can spin an amazing web, but it has no knowledge of what it is doing. As a consequence, while its artifacts have authority, based on their roots in authoritative texts in the data corpus validated by an extraordinary amount of cross-checking computing, the engine itself has none. ChatGPT is a vehicle for transmitting the wisdom of crowds, but it has no wisdom itself.

Third, we need to fully appreciate why interacting with ChatGPT is so seductive. To do so, understand that because it constructs its replies based solely on formal properties, it is selecting for rhetoric, not logic. It is delivering the optimal rhetorical answer to your prompt, not the most expert one. It is the one that is the most popular, not the one that is the most profound. In short, it has a great bedside manner, and that is why we feel so comfortable engaging with it.

Now, given all of the above, it is clear that for any form of user support services, ChatGPT is nothing less than a godsend, especially where people need help learning how to do something. It is the most patient of teachers, and it is incredibly well-informed. As such, it can revolutionize technical support, patient care, claims processing, social services, language learning, and a host of other disciplines where users are engaging with a technical corpus of information or a system of regulated procedures. In all such domains, enterprises should pursue its deployment as fast as possible.

Conversely, wherever ambiguity is paramount, wherever judgment is required, or wherever moral values are at stake, one must not expect ChatGPT to be the final arbiter. That is simply not what it is designed to do. It can be an input, but it cannot be trusted to be the final output.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Creating More Digital Value for Customers

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Creating more value for customers is how highly successful digital companies like Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple got to where they are today.

Creating More Digital Value for Customers

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

So how do you improve your customer value? Think of customer value as an equation — how much do you give me in exchange for how much I give you? There’s the “cost” side of the equation for the customer, and there’s the “benefits” side. Great customer value engineering innovates on both sides of that equation.

Cost

An important part of the “cost” is the money the consumer spends, but it is also measured in time, convenience and level of effort. If the customer has to work harder to extract the value from your offering, this is a perceived increase in cost.

Let’s take the example of Netflix. They have always been aggressive about providing access to large volumes of content for an accessible monthly charge. Their current lowest price is $6.99 per month, less than the cost of a single movie ticket. Netflix also works hard to use personalization to lower the effort it takes to find and play content on any device.

Here are four key ways to reduce the “cost” side of your value proposition. Consider which of these might apply to your offering.

1. Charge less. This is the most obvious step. The danger is that competing on price alone can be a dangerous game and take both you and your competitors into a place where it can be difficult to make money or run a sustainable business. However, we see many of the most successful companies in the digital space not necessarily “discounting” their offer but finding ways to re-engineer their entire cost model via innovative approaches that leverage this new digital world in order to offer more for less. For example, Amazon is able to undercut the prices of many brick and mortar retailers because they don’t have the cost of retail stores and because of the large scale of their operation. Google is able to offer email for free because they have devised a way to make money via advertising rather than charging for the service.

2. Change your payment model. Blockbuster rented videos on a “per video” basis. Netflix’s first innovation was not streaming or House of Cards but rather the subscription model for video “rental.” Similarly, Amazon created a major innovation with Amazon Prime when they offered subscription 2-day shipping services. But subscription is not the only way to change the game. Disaggregation is another. Apple changed the music industry by focusing on selling individual tracks of music rather than entire albums. They then applied this same approach to episodic TV episodes which were previously only available to be purchased in “full season” DVD sets.

3. Reduce the customer’s effort. Uber takes the effort out of getting around. They extremely simplified the process of ordering a car service, paying, talking to the driver about where you are headed and managing your expense records. These may be small things, but they add up. Just like we are willing to pay more for milk at 7-11 to avoid the grocery store if your offering is less effort for the user it reduces the overall “cost.”

4. Reduce unexpected costs. Look for opportunities to save a user money that they would be paying to someone else. If a user can drive less or avoid shipping costs, you have saved them money, and they may not mind giving you a little more. An old-school example, AAA sells roadside assistance but included with this subscription are discounts to most hotels and some other travel-related services. These discounts cost AAA nothing and add value to the membership.

Benefits

Now that we’ve removed some of the “cost,” how can we augment the benefits? Here are five techniques to increase the benefits side of the equation.

1. Offer more stuff. HBO recently partnered with Sesame Workshop to add over 20 seasons of Sesame Street to their on-demand offering. Dropbox continues to increase the storage they will give you for your $9.99 monthly subscription. Consider cost-effective ways to simply give the user more of what they are coming to you for.

2. Add features. Google office massively increased the value of their “PowerPoint” competitor by enabling cloud-based real-time collaboration. Consider how to expand the features your product offers to add value.

3. Increase shareability. The more people that can utilize a single purchase, the more value it has. Apple created their family plan so that apps purchased from their App store can be used by anyone in the family. Amazon created a way to “lend” a Kindle book to a friend.

4. Increase durability or longevity. Extending the realistic lifespan of your product extends the value. For example demonstrating the “future-proofing” you have included in your solution so that it will be forward-compatible with the “next generation” of technology adds value to your offer.

5. Add flexibility. If customers can use your product in different ways, apply it to more “needs” in their life, this increases the value. You may have subscribed to Dropbox to share files with clients, but Dropbox has added and promotes features also to make it a great place to sync and store your personal photos and act as a “backup” in case of hard drive failure. Apple constantly markets the diverse ways their products can be used. iPhones are also cameras, calculators, GPS devices, musical instruments, word processors, currency converters and presentation tools. Every additional way your iPhone can be used potentially replaces another product you would have to buy and adds value.

Which of these opportunities to enhance the value equation for your customer best fit your business? For those that don’t seem to “fit,” try a thought experiment for each and consider if it did fit, how would you apply it? You might discover a breakthrough that would transform your whole value proposition.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Howard Tiersky, FROM

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Don’t Listen to the ‘We Can’t Do That’ Lie

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These Are the Truths

Don't Listen to the 'We Can't Do That' Lie

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

How many times have you proposed a new idea and been told, “We can’t do that?” Probably quite a few. My favorite memory of being told, “We can’t do that,” happened many years ago while working with a client in the publishing industry:

Client: We can’t do that.

Me: Why?

Client: Because we already tried it, and it didn’t work.

Me: When did you try it?

Client: 1972

Me: Well, things certainly haven’t changed since 1972, so you’re right, we definitely shouldn’t try again.

I can only assume they appreciated my sarcasm as much as the idea because we eventually did try the idea, and, 30+ years later, it did work. But the client never would have enjoyed that success if my team and I had not seen through “we can’t do that” and helped them admit (confess) what they really meant.

Quick acknowledgment

Yes, sometimes “We can’t do that” is true. Laws and regulations define what can and can’t be done. But they are rarely as binary as people make them out to be. In those gray areas, the lie of “we can’t do that” obscures the truth of won’t, not able to, and don’t care.

“I won’t do it.”

When you hear “can’t,” it usually means “won’t.” Sometimes, the “won’t” is for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes tonight because I have an urgent deadline, and if I don’t deliver, my job is at risk.” Sometimes, the “won’t” isn’t for a good reason – “I won’t do the dishes because I don’t want to.” When that’s the case, “won’t” becomes “can’t” in the hope that the person making the request backs off and finds another solution.

For my client, “We can’t do that” actually meant, “I won’t do that because it failed before and, even though that was thirty years ago, I’m afraid it will fail again, and I will be embarrassed, and it may impact my reputation and job security.”

You can’t work with “can’t.” You can work with “won’t.” When someone “won’t” do something, it’s because there’s a barrier, real or perceived. By understanding the barrier, you can work together to understand, remove, or find a way around it.

“I’m not able to do it.”

“Can’t” may also come with unspoken caveats. We can’t do that because we’ve never done it before and are scared. We can’t do that because it is outside the scope of our work. We can’t do that because we don’t know how.

Like “won’t,” you can work with “not able to” to understand the gap between where you are now and where you want to go. If it’s because you’re scared of doing something new, you can have conversations to get smarter about the topic or run small experiments to get real-world learnings. If you’re not able to do something because it’s not within your scope of work, you can expand your scope or work with people who have it in their scope. If you don’t know how, you can talk to people, take classes, and watch videos to learn how.

“I don’t care.”

As brave as it is devastating, “we can’t do that” can mean “I don’t care enough to do that.”

Executives rarely admit to not caring, but you see it in their actions. When they say that innovation and growth are important but don’t fund them or pull resources at the first sign of a wobble in the business, they don’t care. If they did care, they would try to find a way to keep investing and supporting the things they say are priorities.

Exploring options, trying, making an effort—that’s the difference between “I won’t do it” and “I don’t care.” “I won’t do that” is overcome through logic and action because the executive is intellectually and practically open to options. “I don’t care” requires someone to change their priorities, beliefs, and self-perception, changes that require major personal, societal, or economic events.

Now it’s your turn to tell the truth

Are you willing to ask the questions to find them?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Humanizing Agility

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Humanizing Agility

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?

I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.

As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.

I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.

This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?

Making sense of agility

Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.

Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.

Humanizing agility differently

Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.

It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.

Like innovation, agility is contextual.

Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:

Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.

That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.

Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements

1. Emotional energy

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.

2. Change agility

Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.

It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.

Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.

Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.

3.Cognitive agility

Cognitive agility is the extent to which people can adapt and shift their perspectives and thought processes when doing so leads to more positive outcomes.

Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.

Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving.

4.Innovation agility

Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.

To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.

5.Organizational and leadership agility

Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.

Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.

Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility

Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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Sometimes to Innovate You Must Do the Following

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Sometimes to Innovate You Must Do the Following

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

What it takes to do new work:

Confidence to get it wrong and confidence to do it early and often.

Purposeful misuse of worst practices in a way that makes them the right practices.

Tolerance for not knowing what to do next and tolerance for those uncomfortable with that.

Certainty that they’ll ask for a hard completion date and certainty you won’t hit it.

Knowledge that the context is different and knowledge that everyone still wants to behave like it’s not.

Disdain for best practices.

Discomfort with success because it creates discomfort when it’s time for new work.

Certainty you’ll miss the mark and certainty you’ll laugh about it next week.

Trust in others’ bias to do what worked last time and trust that it’s a recipe for disaster.

Belief that successful business models have half-lives and belief that no one else does.

Trust that others will think nothing will come of the work and trust that they’re likely right.

Image credit: Unsplash

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False Choice – Founder versus Manager

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False Choice - Founder versus Manager

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, was so inspired by a speech by Airbnb cofounder and CEO that he wrote an essay about well-intentioned advice that, to scale a business, founders must shift modes and become managers.

It went viral.

In the essay, he argued that:

In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.

With curiosity and an open mind, I read on.

I finished with a deep sigh and an eye roll.

This is why.

Manager Mode: The realm of liars and professional fakers

On the off chance that you thought Graham’s essay would be a balanced and reflective examination of management styles in different corporate contexts, his description of Manager Mode should relieve you of that thought:

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Later, he writes about how founders are gaslit into adopting Manager Mode from every angle, including by “VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.”

Founder Mode: A meritocracy of lifelong learners

For Graham, Founder Mode boils down to two things:

Sweating the details
Engaging with employees throughout the organization beyond just direct reports. He cites Steve Jobs’ practice of holding “an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart.”

To his credit, Graham acknowledges that getting involved in the details is micromanaging, “which is bad,” and that delegation is required because “founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20.” A week later, he acknowledged that female founders “don’t have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can.”

Yet he persists in believing that Founder, not Manager, Mode is critical to success,

“Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.”

Leader Mode: Manager Mode + Founder Mode

The essay is interesting, but I have real issues with two of his key points:

Professional managers are disconnected from the people and businesses they manage, and as a result, their practices and behaviors are inconsistent with startup success.
Founders should ignore conventional wisdom and micromanage to their heart’s content.

Most “professional managers” I’ve met are deeply connected to the people they manage, committed to the businesses they operate, and act with integrity and authenticity. They are a far cry from the “professional fakers” and “skillful liars” Graham describes.

Most founders I’ve met should not be allowed near the details once they have a team in place. Their meddling, need for control, and soul-crushing FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) lead to chaos, burnout, and failure.

The truth is, it’s contextual. The leaders I know switch between Founder and Manager mode based on the context. They work with the passion of founders, trust with the confidence of managers, and are smart and humble enough to accept feedback when they go too far in one direction or the other.

Being both manager and founder isn’t just the essence of being a leader. It’s the essence of being a successful corporate innovator. You are a founder, investing in, advocating for, and sweating the details of ambiguous and risky work. And you are a manager navigating the economic, operational, and political minefields that govern the core business and fund your paycheck and your team.

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Innovation is Combination

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Silicon Valley’s Innovator’s Dilemma – The Atom, the Bit and the Gene

Innovation is Combination

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Over the past several decades, innovation has become largely synonymous with digital technology. When the topic of innovation comes up, somebody points to a company like Apple, Google or Meta rather than, say, a car company, a hotel or a restaurant. Management gurus wax poetically about the “Silicon Valley way.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that other industries haven’t been innovative. In fact, there are no shortage of excellent examples of innovation in cars, hotels, restaurants and many other things. Still, the fact remains that for most of recent memory digital technology has moved further and faster than anything else.

This has been largely due to Moore’s Law, our ability to consistently double the number of transistors we’re able to cram onto a silicon wafer. Now, however, Moore’s Law is ending and we’re entering a new era of innovation. Our future will not be written in ones and zeros, but will be determined by our ability to use information to shape the physical world.

The Atom

The concept of the atom has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. Yet it didn’t take on any real significance until the early 20th century. In fact, the paper Albert Einstein used for his dissertation helped to establish the existence of atoms through a statistical analysis of Brownian motion.

Yet it was the other papers from Einstein’s miracle year of 1905 that transformed the atom from an abstract concept to a transformative force, maybe even the most transformative force in the 20th century. His theory of mass-energy equivalence would usher in the atomic age, while his work on black-body radiation would give rise to quantum mechanics and ideas so radical that even he would refuse to accept them.

Ironically, despite Einstein’s reluctance, quantum theory would lead to the development of the transistor and the rise of computers. These, in turn, would usher in the digital economy, which provided an alternative to the physical economy of goods and services based on things made from atoms and molecules.

Still, the vast majority of what we buy is made up of what we live in, ride in, eat and wear. In fact, information and communication technologies only make up about 6% of GDP in advanced countries, which is what makes the recent revolution in materials science is so exciting. We’re beginning to exponentially improve the efficiency of how we design the materials that make up everything from solar panels to building materials.

The Bit

While the concept of the atom evolved slowly over millennia, the bit is one of the rare instances in which an idea seems to have arisen in the mind of a single person with little or no real precursor. Introduced by Claude Shannon in a paper in 1948—incidentally, the same year the transistor was invented—the bit has shaped how we see and interact with the world ever since.

The basic idea was that information isn’t a function of content, but the absence of ambiguity, which can be broken down to a single unit – a choice between two alternatives. Much like how a coin toss which lacks information while in the air, but takes on a level of certainty when it lands, information arises when ambiguity disappears.

He called this unit, a “binary digit” or a “bit” and much like the pound, quart, meter or liter, it has become such a basic unit of measurement that it’s hard to imagine our modern world without it. Shannon’s work would soon combine with Alan Turing’s concept of a universal computer to create the digital computer.

Now the digital revolution is ending and we will soon be entering a heterogeneous computing environment that will include things like quantum, neuromorphic and biological computing. Still, Claude Shannon’s simple idea will remain central to how we understand how information interacts with the world it describes.

The Gene

The concept of the gene was first discovered by an obscure Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel, but in one of those strange peculiarities of history, his work went almost totally unnoticed until the turn of the century. Even then, no one really knew what a gene was or how they functioned. The term was, for the most part, just an abstract concept.

That changed abruptly when James Watson and Francis Crick published their article in the scientific journal Nature. In a single stroke, the pair were able to show that genes were, in fact, made up of a molecule called DNA and that they operated through a surprisingly simple code made up of A,T,C and G.

Things really began to kick into high gear when the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. Since then the cost to sequence a genome has been falling faster than the rate of Moore’s Law, which has unleashed a flurry of innovation. Jennifer Doudna’s discovery of CRISPR in 2012 revolutionized our ability to edit genes. More recently, mRNA technology has helped develop COVID-19 vaccines in record time.

Today, we have entered a new era of synthetic biology in which we can manipulate the genetic code of A,T,C and G almost as easily as we can the bits in the machines that Turing imagined all those years ago. Researchers are also exploring how we can use genes to create advanced materials and maybe even create better computers.

Innovation Is Combination

The similarity of the atom, the bit and the gene as elemental concepts is hard to miss and they’ve allowed us to understand our universe in a visceral, substantial way. Still, they arose in vastly different domains and have been largely applied to separate and distinct fields. In the future, however, we can expect vastly greater convergence between the three.

We’ve already seen glimpses of this. For example, as a graduate student Charlie Bennett was a teaching assistant for James Watson. Yet in between his sessions instructing undergraduates in Watson’s work on genes, he took an elective course on the theory of computing in which he learned about the work of Shannon and Turing. That led him to go work for IBM and become a pioneer in quantum computing.

In much the same way, scientists are applying powerful computers to develop new materials and design genetic sequences. Some of these new materials will be used to create more powerful computers. In the future, we can expect the concepts of the atom, the bit and the gene to combine and recombine in exciting ways that we can only begin to imagine today.

The truth is that innovation is combination and has, in truth, always been. The past few decades, in which one technology so thoroughly dominated that it was able to function largely in isolation to other fields, was an anomaly. What we are beginning to see now is, in large part, a reversion to the mean, where the most exciting work will be interdisciplinary.

This is Silicon Valley’s innovator’s dilemma. Nerdy young geeks will no longer be able to prosper coding blithely away in blissful isolation. It is no longer sufficient to work in bits alone. Increasingly we need to combine those bits with atoms and genes to create significant value. If you want to get a glimpse of the future, that’s where to look.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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