Innovating and operating through growth
by Andy
Here’s how I think about helping a team develop:
It’s not about telling people which fork in the road to take, it’s about revealing the fork and letting them decide which is the right path for them.
by Andy
In the world of probabilities there is a concept of 1 minus, as in 1 minus the probability of something happening is the probability that something will not happen. For example, if there is a 34% chance your initiative will work, there is a 1 minus 34% – or 66% chance – something will not work. I get it, math is hard.
But this concept is useful beyond probabilities.
It helps reveal the contrary perspective in other problems too, like company culture. This dawned on me while reading What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz reminds us that when we’re building a culture we can choose concepts that sound positive, but we need to also think about how those traits may be weaponized.
For example, if you say your culture is ‘Flexible,’ that sounds really good – like you’re a lean adaptive group. But at some point, asking people to be flexible all the time is pretty much the same as saying “do what I say and don’t complain about it.”
Sounds pretty rigid to me.
This is further complicated because company cultures have all kinds of traits they’re trying to embody. As the concepts layer on top of each other, it gets trickier and trickier to tease out the underlying implications.
Of course, the goal isn’t perfection, its awareness. We can’t be perfect so if we’re aware that there are layers and nuance to how we live a culture, that’s a great start. Not to having a perfect company culture, but working toward one that doesn’t reward the 1 minus of it’s attributes.
by Andy
A common method for heating a cold car is cranking the dial on the temperature to full red, and blasting the fan on its highest setting.
But if your destination dictates you drive for more than a few minutes the car soon becomes uncomfortably warm, and then you need to adjust to an extreme in the opposite direction. You end up taking 1 step forward and 1 step back until you land somewhere in the middle.
Work can feel the same way; an extreme amount of effort at the beginning of a big project can lead to having to compensate by back pedaling in the other direction.
Try keeping things regulated. Put the temperature dial close to the middle, and keep the fan at a medium speed. Acknowledge that your work will take more than a few minutes and accept that your project may be slightly slower to warm up, but ultimately you’ll have to make fewer major adjustments and stay more comfortable.