Mud brothers
Good, better, best solutions
In retail, people often talk about a product and its position in the market as either ‘good’, ‘better’ or ‘best’.
Heinz position their baked beans as the best. HP might decide not to invest the considerable resources it would require to challenge Heinz’s positioning and instead position their baked beans as ‘better’. The supermarket own brand baked beans would be positioned as ‘good’. (Supermarkets also very successfully introduced a ‘basic’ level to this hierarchy and I can remember as a student being able to buy a tin of baked beans for 9p).
This hierarchy of perceived value can be applied to building solutions to a problem. There could be a good solution, a better solution, and the best solution. The higher up the hierarchy the solution is the more costly, complex, time-consuming it’s likely to be, but it delivers more value than the lower solutions.
Knowing what a ‘good’, ‘better’ and ‘best’ solution looks like helps with plotting the future of the solutions. A good solution might be enough for now but a better solution will be required within a year.
Good, better, best… but never perfect
Baked beans can be good, or better than good, or the best, but never perfect. Are perfect baked beans an impossibility?
Solutions can be good, or better than good, or the best, but never perfect. Can the perfect solution exist?
From a Zen point-of-view, ‘perfect’ is a fixed, dead state, unable to grow, evolve, or improve, so the solution may be perfect right now but as life and the world moves on it becomes out of date and no longer perfect.
So the perfect solution would need to evolve into different solutions to meet different needs at different times. It’s complexity increases as it evolves, and that complexity comes with a cost that makes the perfect solution unviable.
Maybe ‘good’ is good enough.
Transparency because…
…stuff gets lost in hand over.
…sharing work creates faster feedback.
…communicating openly builds trust.
…responsibility and accountability are everyone’s responsibility.
…planning is easier when done in context.
…opportunities for convergence are essential.
…generalists learn together.
…course corrections happen faster.
…team culture should be nailed to the wall.
…decision making involves everyone.
…knowledge is power, and everyone should have the power.
Charities have to choose unsolvable problems
The biggest risk to a charity is solving the problem they set out to solve. If they solved it there would no longer be any reason to exist. So the aim for a charity is not to solve its chosen problem but just to make progress towards a solution. This is why charities have to choose unsolvable problems.
Certainty and uncertainty in value and duration
John Cutler tweeted about how he approaches forecasting with a team, and shared a Google Doc explaining the method.
One the second page was this:
This is important. It made me realise that initiatives can / should be considered / assesses / prioritised / forecasted on how certain or uncertain the value they will deliver is, and how certain or uncertain the duration is. Initiatives of unknown duration and unknown value are high risk compared to those of known value and known duration.
So, we need to have a reliable method for forecasting cycle time (not estimating effort time) to arrive at a known duration, and for establishing value (including cost of delay) as a known quantity.
Making these method of prioritisation explicit, reliable and robust is vital for across the organisation (not just within the digital department or within the scrum team) in order to be part of the mind shift towards delivering value continuously.
Prioritising parking spaces
In an office with more people than parking spaces, we needed a fair way of choosing who should get one.
There are various ways we could have done but the best solution was priority based on length of service, so the longer you’ve worked at the office the higher up the list you go.
There are two reasons this is such a good solution:
- Length of service is a fact, and choosing who gets a parking space based on fact rather than opinion has clarity and transparency, and is easy to understand. And it turns parking into a benefit of long service.
- It means the older team members who are more in need of a parking space get one without getting into uncomfortable discussions about health, medical conditions, or who is most in need.
Even everyday things like allocating parking spaces require a method of prioritisation.
Finding the right way to prioritise is vital. Using facts is great. Making it clear and easy to understand for the people involved is important. Gaining additional benefits as a result of the method is a good thing to achieve too.
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time, is the old answer.
But what if it’s an elephant today and a buffalo tomorrow? What if it looks like an elephant to one person and a dog to another? What if the elephant doesn’t want to be eaten? What if one person wants to eat the elephant and another doesn’t?
Then, you have to all agree it’s an elephant, and that everyone wants to eat it, and who’s going to eat which bit, and when to eat it, and how long it’s going to take to chew eat bite.
Suddenly, eating an elephant doesn’t seem so simple.
Building skills for building chatbots
Our events team wanted to build a Chatbot as part of the fundraising raising events acquisition journey.
They used the bot society simulator to design the flows and had intended to pay an agency to build the bot. Instead, I spent a couple of hours with one of the team to teach her the basics of building a Chatbot. She picked it up really quickly and built most of the bot in the first day.
Things I learned:
Digital transformation requires giving people the opportunities and space to develop new digital skills. This is more productive and efficient in the long run as it reduces reliance on external (and often costly) resources.
About using bot simulators specifically, beware of falling into the trap of thinking of the Chatbot as a visual interface like a webpage. Chatbots are conversational interfaces and need to be designed more as a two-way interaction then the kind of one-way passive interactions we usually have with screens.
Building something like a Chatbot yourself means you have a greater understanding of how it works, which will be a big help in iterating and improving the bot, puts the organisation in greater control of this and future Chatbots, and gives the team member another skill to go on their CV.