To get things done you need a plan. But good plans can be hard to create. If you are striving for clarity, meaning and direction in your career, find the time and space to do this with People Who Do this March.
@simon_kimber just put this beautifully written post up about the difficulties in keeping his dev team motivated when much of what they do is, by definition, repetitive: building on what has gone before. What they’ve built is great but the development schedule is full and there’s no time to do the things they really want to.
Simon’s solution: a leaf out of the Google history book. Fridays you can do what you like.
Last week Curtis and I invited ten interesting people we’ve met over the past few months to join us at Hawthbush Farm for a slightly experimental day coming up with ideas for making work better.
Hawthbush is where I keep my bees and grow vegetables. Toby and Lisa are finally coming out of the treadmill of building and refurbishing and welcomed us to what is now a beautiful place. Most of the accommodation and the function room are finished and feel amazing, so much so that Curtis and Emily have booked to stay for a holiday. The twelve of us sat around an old oak kitchen table in the Granary, ate great food, talked a lot, fended off the occasional curious chicken and a very affectionate cat. By the end of the day I was slightly overwhelmed by the breadth and number of ideas we’d covered. I guess we didn’t actually invent anything physical, but I did leave feeling wiser and curious to try out some of the ideas.
Here are some of the themes that are still resonating with me:
Another day and a half of retained work; becoming embedded within the team; sharing the weekly check in session; learning by osmosis.
Meanwhile the core service mapping project is almost ready for beta launching. The original brief was to design and apply a product development process as part of a strategy to embed innovation. It turned out we had to go back a stage first and understand exactly what it was we did. We mapped it, then we built a comprehensive set of checklists, inspired by “The Checklist Manifesto”. Those checklists are designed to act as a net to ensure nothing critical gets dropped. It acts as a roadmap for junior members of the team and as prompt to ensure we are doing all we can for the client. It does not tell you how to do your job, but it supports you in raising the baseline for all the projects you deliver. The core programme is now embedded in Basecamp and forms a living frame for all future work.
Today I went back and produced a training module for the launch using camptasia, a brilliantly intuitive screen plus video capture tool. Within an hour of downloading it I had a seven minute introduction and how to edited, encoded and uploaded. It will take a lot less time in future.
How does this fit in with productivity and creativity? The structure and clarity we get from mapping and check listing what we do provides a framework that keeps us on top of things when it gets busy. It protects from error and the fear of error. The tool keeps us level headed, effective and less stressed. That frees up head space for creative work.
We also planned four hours of storytelling for business. It’s mind mapped across several sheets of flip chart paper and will stick to the wall a few days while we sleep/sense test it.
I had some good meetings this week:
Chris Gorsuch recently ex of FATdrop now looking at using digital tools to map analogue adventures. He’s starting with foraging, but we discussed urban exploration, geocaching and treasure hunting in all it’s guises. The idea of using technology to create connections with the real world, through walking, by providing information, context, education and education is brilliant. We talked about RFID, possible connections (could be good for Dr Bramwell?). It’s all about creating space for adventures.
Chris also set up #IdeaPub, a fortnightly gathering at the Caxton Arms on Wednesday’s to talk up ideas, for the fun of it. Maybe one day for the doing.
We’ve been having conversations with people we might bring into People Who Do. This is against a back drop of getting to grips with how we grow the business. We are looking at taking one area at a time, starting with Accelerated Productivity and working out how to expand and productise it. We are also grappling with how to bring people in, as associates, employees, partners and how to manage that integration. We’ve planned a day in May to start pulling it together.
I met with a long established training consultancy who use a psycology based approach. They’ve been asked by BSkyB to pitch, but they want a creative solution. It could be a serendipitous opportunity for us to collaborate, we’ll design some creative scenarios for experiential learning and they can map their framework to it. We’ve started to think of concepts involving radio, music, film, museums and even a bakery…
I was introduced to Ray Richards this week. He is among other things a director of Rilkes Room, behaviour change specialists. They pioneered the idea of doing something different. Change doesn’t come from thinking differently, but from doing differently. They design chains of behaviour expanders and disruptors that encourage you to broaden your range of behavioural responses. It’s baby steps. At first the challenges may seem far removed from the thing you want to change, but as you get good at doing things differently, you build a tool kit of behaviours that allow you to change the big stuff. It’s elegantly intuitive and fits with some of the tools we’ve developed. Rilkes Room are looking for some people to learn about and apply the ideas more widely. I’ve put my name down. Rilkesroom.com
Curtis and I also spent an afternoon with Nick Poyner of Best Phone Co, brainstorming how we could integrate our productivity tools with his Comms technology to create a combined consultancy offer that we could both benefit from. We start a trial in May.
For a change Curtis and I managed to spend a decent amount of time together. Most welcome.