Tag: innovation

Categories
Blog Post

Setting Up Basecamp – What I’ve learned – January 2018

Take a second

When we take on an important project, we need to take a second to think about:

  • What are the stakes involved
  • How do we measure success
  • The difference between positive and negative conflict, and how we handle it
  • What are the incentives
  • Who do we need
  • Why we are doing this

And if even if we can’t a definitive answer (actually, it may be better not to), we have to get a general sense of what they are.

Why?

Projects are messy and humans are complicated. Messy in the sense that when we are pushed to the edge of our competence, things get “weird,” stuff breaks, and nothing goes to plan. Complicated in the sense that we are illogical, emotional, and environment changes everything.

That is a good thing, because that is where innovation lives. With a good base camp, we get processes to catch the errors and reframe them into the usable.

So take a second and think it through.

Categories
Blog Post

It’s About Trust

Everything Else is CYA

Being “detailed oriented” or “proficient in Microsoft Office” are protective mechanisms designed to explain, not solve.

If you want to work on a project that holds up the things as they are, this works. Fail, and those skills in word that highlight those footnotes may save you.

That is safety. It is also covering your ass.

Work that expands the boundaries of what we call safe, or innovation, will fail. If your project tries to change the way “we do things”  it is a matter of if, not when about failure. You’ll need to internalize that failure isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.  With that said, if you don’t trust the person failing, then no amount of pivot tables will change that.

If you want to push the envelope with your team, trust, more than anything else, is required.

Spend time understanding the methods of building trust, instead of skills, and increase the velocity of innovation in your circle.

Categories
Blog Post

Foster Innovation – Make the “Next Action” Specific

Specificity. Action.

At the beginning of someone’s career, when they hear “I’ll get to that” they get excited. To that person’s mind, it has reached an action plan, and something is going to happen. Eventually, they realize that the idea fell apart, and it didn’t mean that at all.

They drop the naivety and in the worse cases, their creativity.

So when that person comes to you and hears “I’ll get to that,” they just listen to a “long no.” Anyone else in that room that understands that they also take a note.

Innovation dies. Status quo takes hold.

Instead of relying on the easy answer, take a breath and do one of two things:

  • Make a promise to make a concrete action
  • Say “no” with a reason coming in the moment with an invitation to talk in depth afterward

It’s hard to do this at the moment, however, if you want your team to innovate over inertia, it’s what is required.

Categories
Blog Post

Innovation is Failure

No success is free

If you are innovating, you are going to fail – period.

Anyone promising innovation without pain is selling fools gold.

Amazon is the biggest, via the market cap, company in the world.  They have the concept of “Day One,” meaning they are always trying things.

Sure, this meant the Amazon Fire, Destinations, and Amazon Wallet. All disasters.

It also meant AWS and Amazon Prime.  If they didn’t find themselves willing to go through the pain of innovation, then they would still just sell books.

In the spirit of that, ask yourself two things:

 

Categories
Blog Post

Life As Usual Video Blog #13 – Trust

Every week I do a video blog (or VLOG).

This week I talked about trust.

When I started this,  I was very scared of putting myself on video, so I got the courage and put myself in the arena, killing a lot of bad self talk.This gives me the chance to work on my communication skills, start a new medium, and experiment!

Once a week, after I have thought about them, I will give them a day here on the blog.

These aren’t just promotion posts (although they are, please watch and share :-) ) I want to take the time to break them down and try to clarify what I want to communicate and the tactical things I learned through doing.

If you enjoyed the video, and if you want to get on the ride, please,subscribe to my YouTube channel, and join my Facebook page where I post them every Sunday night.

What I Wanted To Communicate About Trust

Trust is a fragile cycle, but worth all the padding in the world because it colors all of our decisions. It’s quite simple – if we are in a place where we can’t trust or aren’t trusted, we can’t work our absolute best.

  • Trust allows for dialogue – If we go into a situation where there is trust, we get a chance to talk and be honest.
  • Fragile cycle – Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Breaking trust damages the relationship.
  • Dialog creates innovation – The best innovation happens when everyone is trusted to do their job, and they are honest. This in turn creates more trust.

What I Learned Doing This Video

  • Prewriting the intro makes it sound a lot better.
  • Talking slower made it sound better
  • Now I have to move the camera closer (thanks Yuriy B.)
Categories
Blog Post

An Interesting ‘i’ Word That Make You Do The Work

Go for it – the inspiration zone.

How many times have you sat down to begin something and you just felt that magic strike?

You got in rhythm, and all of a sudden, the rest of the world stops. You are in the zone, you accomplished flow, and everything is right with the world.

The inspiration zone, where things click. Not only do they click, they click and feel wonderful.

This all wonderful. When it happens, I think everyone feels like a magician. Everyone wants to work in this state, and people think it’s the only way to work, but there is one big problem with it.

If you wait for it, it never happens.

That’s the wrong ‘i’ word

Never is too strong of a word, but it fits. People who wait for inspiration never start a lot of things. The things they do start rarely get finished. They get stuck, waiting for a magical muse to come by and sprinkle the fairy dust that get them started.

We all know someone who wants to get into work, but has to wait on the mood to strike. As if the world must wait for their genius, and that doesn’t happen unless it happens on their time.

Alright, now wipe that smug look off your face since you probably thought of Jerry. Jerry may do it a lot, but if you did some soul-searching, you would realize that you do it a lot yourself. If you don’t you already know the ‘i’ word I am alluding to, and you use it often.

I applaud you(try to help Jerry when you can though)

The right one is intuition

Intuition is scary.

What makes it scary is that there are no books that you point to. There is no degree that lets you or anyone else get themselves off the hook. Intuition forces you to listen to that little person inside and decide. Most of those decisions fall into the realm of “this might work” .

The great thing is following this ‘i’ word is that it is the fastest way to another one that is now one of the biggest reasons something big fails or succeed.

Innovation.

 

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started