Stopping
The only thing more difficult than starting something new in an organization is stopping something old.
Russell Ackoff
Capacity for unpredictability
My question is how organizations can lead us not toward some predictable goal, but toward a greater and greater capacity to handle unpredictability, and with it, a greater capacity to love and care about other people?
Margaret Wheatley
Choppy constraints
Different types of constraints create a choppy flow of value for organisations.
The digital-first organisation
If digital transformation is about changing old organisation to be more fit for the internet era, then digital-first is about designing an organisation from scratch for the the digital age.
Some of the principle for that might include:
- Never finished – everything, the systems and tools orgs use, the products and services they deliver, the culture and structure of the org, all of it is never finished. It all requires ongoing investment of time, money, effort and expertise to keep pace with the environment the organisation operates within.
- Information flows
Modern product practice
Modern product practice organises for the fast flow of value. That means continuous everything:
- Research
- Experiments
- Value proposition
- Discovery
- Market analysis
- Ideation
- Design
- Validation
- Development
- Measurement
- Insight
- Delivery
- Business models
- Adoption
- Roadmapping
Work In Regression
Like Work In Progress, but rather than work that is being done, it’s work that is being undone, it’s work that suffer entropy.
Orchestras and Jazz bands
The metaphor of the team as an orchestra with someone in the role of conductor is only one way of imagining how teams are organised. It suggests perfect synchronisation under the control of a pivotal person.
I prefer an improv jazz metaphor for how teams work. Everyone is equal in their contribution, and appreciated for the uniqueness they bring. As someone joins they add to and changing the music, but when they leave the music carries on.
| Orchestra | Jazz band |
|---|---|
| Synchronised | Flexible |
| Dependent on one person (conductor) | Inter-dependent contributors (all equal) |
| Predictable | Adaptable |
| Easy to spot disruptive variation | Impossible to predict effects of changes |
Weeknotes 361
This week I did:
Personas
I think successful product work requires three (or maybe four) fundamental things. 1) Who is it for? – which is what personas help with, 2) What are they trying to achieve? – expressed as goals, user needs, etc., and 3) How are we going to help them achieve it? – figured out in user journey maps, solution design diagrams, process maps, etc. These three things express the work at it’s simplest. The fourth thing is a roadmap for creating the things that are going to help the people achieve their goals, which is helpful for alignment and communication but not really fundamental like the other three.
So, this week I did a bit of work on how we create personas, in this case for people who donate to our charity without any specific prompting such as from fundraising campaign. The first step is figuring out the criteria, which at the moment are: Age, Frequency of donation, Amount of donation, Relationship with the charity, and Closeness to cause. I wanted the options for each criteria to be mece so there are between three and six options for each, giving us 2,160 different personas. Of course, we won’t be using all of them. We’ll focus on identifying the most likely combinations and then designing for them.
Digital charity chat
Twitter is good for one thing, at least; setting up video calls with people with similar interests. We chatted about how technology can become charity’s third means of change, and that there aren’t any good examples of this yet. About how digital enables charities to offer variety that meets people’s specific needs rather than do things only one way, but that it takes a different mindset to accomplish. How regulation might be preventing charities from innovating with technology. And the digital needs more generalists. And lots more.
I read:
The product is the variable
This post from Jeff Gothelf has some great insight into the shift the modern digital world is creating. It used to be that the products, teams, organisations, etc., were fixed, stable things and the outcomes they tried to achieve were flexible. So, an organisation might launch a new product with the goal of getting 20% market share, but if they only got 2% then the product was considered a failure. The modern way is that products, teams, organisations, etc., are variable, flexible, changeable as they try to achieve known, fixed outcomes. In this way, the product that only achieved 2% market share is iterated upon until it achieves the goal.
Positive Patterns for Online Shopping
Citizens Advice are currently conducting public research to understand more about consumers’ experience of a number of design patterns that influence how we behave when buying things online.
What’s particularly interesting is that it’s built on squarespace with an airtable form. Even for a large national charity with existing website infrastructure and developers, it’s quicker and easier to use nocode tools for something like this.
A Guide to Email Accessibility Best Practices for Nonprofits
Handy guide to making emails accessible, because they should be.
I thought about:
Orchestra vs. Jazz band
Still thinking about the difference between teams that organise like an orchestra and those that work together like a jazz band. No right or wrong, just what works in different circumstances.
| Orchestra | Jazz band |
|---|---|
| Synchronised | Flexible |
| Dependent on one person (conductor) | Inter-dependent contributors (all equal) |
| Predictable | Adaptable |
| Easy to spot disruptive variation | Impossible to predict effects of changes |
Dodging spaghetti
When someone throws spaghetti at the wall, duck. This is my new mantra for not getting involved in things that look like they don’t know what they are trying to achieve. I used to think the right thing to do was to get involved and try to guide the work towards knowing why it was being done, but at the moment at least, it seems better to stay away.
Work In Regression
There’s lots of thinking about work in progress and how to manage it. It’s important and essential for efficiency and effectiveness. But it doesn’t recognise how work is also undone. In the old physical world, work stays done. When a car is built, it stays built. Knowledge work doesn’t follow the same rules. It suffers entropy, it erodes if not maintained. I wonder how we can be more aware of work in regression, maybe even track it.