Public Secrets of Mount Change

Change is hard!

To change something does always mean, to risk something - to loose something. In exchange we always have the chance and hope to win something. Ideally, we loose something bad and win something good. But we do almost never know...

What we know is, that it is deeply human trying to adhere to the current state.We call that e.g.

• Loss aversion
• Risk aversion
• Ambigutiy aversion
• ...

So: Change is hard!

Does this mean that you should never change? No! But if you think you have to face a big change initiative, you should be able to really answer two questions for yourself:

1. Is there a desire, necessity or urgency perceptible that will make the effort of climbing Mount Change seem smaller than bearing the consequences of standing still?
2. Do you have a clear vision, mission or goal that will ensure that people roll down Mount Change together and in the right direction?

Only if you have clear and simply understandable answers to these two questions, you should start your efforts. For that you will not forever start and never reach the top of Mount Change. Nor will you roll down the hill and fall of some cliff because some people took the wrong direction.

Don't misunderstand me. You are not done with answering these two questions. But it is an important point to start. And you are ready to take up your hiking stick, then. Good reads on the change topic are:

• "The Corporate Culture Survival Guide" by Edgar H. Schein
  This book exposes the rich set of experiences of Edgar Schein, who is one of the first, most famous and influencial organizational psychologists.
• "How to Change the World" by Jurgen Appelo
  This book stresses out a view on organizational change that is based on systems- and complexity theory. It is not a complete collection of steps for a succesful transformation, but a brilliant guide to getting the right attitude towards organizational change.

Lean Startup Experiment - Day 3

Day 3 of our experiment is over. It was a day full of work and (from our point of view) huge progress on the project. We improved the layout massively and included some hints on the page about our intentions. We got the large image view working and took care of some legal aspects. You are now able to register yourself as a prospect customer by clicking on the login button and sending an email. We solved several infrastructural problems including deploying our app to the Amazon cloud (EC2).
If you would have asked us this morning, if we would be able to accomplish this - nobody of us would have said "yes" probably :-) It was a great day and we learned a great deal of things about all the new frameworks and technology we never used before!

Sven working hard to keep the backlog up-to-date. We are working to fast :-)

We are very proud of our layout. Especially because there are no designers in our team. If you like our design, too - or hate it: Please tell us! We need feedback! Fastly! (You may use the comments section, for example)

The current UI prototype contains some description on what we want to achieve. We love it :-)

Key learnings of Day 3

• Working with lower outside temperatures is MUUUCH better!!!
• JavaScript is shit
• JavaScript is cool
• We did not get any customer feedback today - which we regret. We will have to improve on that massively tomorrow!
• On the other side - we got a lot of things done, which was really great fun!
• IT guys cannot live without becoming sarcastic - even if successful ;-)
• We think the purpose of our project is not clear enough for visitors on the first view. We will have to improve massively on that!
• We are not able to acquire enough prospect customers by doing marketing over Facebook, Google+ and Twitter only. We will have to try out other marketing mechanisms.

Our main goal in the next two days is to come so far as to be able to go outside and sell our idea to passers-by. Functionality of the site should be so far, that those people will immediately see a value for themselves in using our project. Ambitious goal! Let's see...

Lean Startup Experiment - Day 2

The second day of our lean startup experiment is over now. What did we accomplish? What did we learn?

What did we accomplish? 

The first thing we did this morning was to reprioritize our product backlog. We then managed to sketch some (seventeen!) paper prototypes and chose the one we liked best in fifteen minutes. Afterwards we kicked the complete technology stack we wanted to use yesterday and set up a new one. But still we managed to get a first UI prototype online this evening. You can find it here: http://thatsmykid.de/

First UI live prototype of ThatsMyKid

Key learnings:

• The prioritization of a product backlog in a lean startup project is stable for at most half a day...
• Do not start lean startup experiments if it is 35 degrees celsius outside - can be quite demotivating :-(
• The open working environment at Coworking Space Nuremberg is really cool and enjoyable.
• The new technology stack (Meteor, JQuery, JavaScript) is really good for rapid prototyping.
• Having an hourly status (review) meeting before commiting code helped us a lot to stay focused and avoid trouble.
• Technology is waste (it takes a LOT of time - even if you are not an expert with it)
• Driving three different technological approaches to our first prototype was a good idea, since we learned very fastly, which one would fit our project.
• No design is the best design (at least almost none :-)
• If you have your first UI prototype this is REALLY motivating!

This day started out very frustrating but had an amazing turning point when we first saw our UI prototype in the first review working. The deeper we dive into technology and minimal feature set, the more obvious it becomes, how massively complex a simple application must be. We are optimistic to learn a lot during the next three days and are glad that we love our design so much.

Lean Startup Experiment - Day 1

At this moment the first day of our lean startup experiment is at an end. What did we accomplish today? Essentially, we "proved" our hypothesis, that there might be some interest in an application as we imagine it. Additionally we got some valuable feedback for our app based on the paper prototype we constructed in the morning.

Paper prototype of ThatsMyKid

Sven showing our valuable feedback vom passers-by

Key learnings for today:

• The paper prototype massively helped us to show people, what our idea of the app is. The feedback for our prototype was very helpful and good. Having something to present and touch is an invaluable advantage!
• Feedback from potential future customers can be very motivating. Get feedback from customers as fast as possible!
• Establishing a backlog - even for a product you have a relatively clear vision of - is hard. It is hard work to focus on the key features of your product!
• The last step today was setting up the infrastructure to build a first prototype, which was very time consuming. We didn't expect it to be that hard. Even if many Google services (which our technology stack depends heavily upon) are really easy and convenient to use.

Preliminary ThatsMyKid logo

A lot is done. But there is still more to do...

We are now keen to see, what we will be able to deliver after the second day of our little lean startup experiment. Stay in touch!

Build Flexible Organizations!

It is said, that one of the huge challanges of our time is the great volatility of end customer markets. To face this fact, many companies debate, how to cope with this new market reality. Not surprisingly there are thousands of solutions out there, eagerly sold by consultancy companies:

• You need a flexible and highly adaptive IT ecosystem (see SOA)
• You need to be flexible in handling your requirements (see, Agile, Scrum)
• You need flexibility in your high level planning processes (see Beyond Budgeting, Beta-Codex)
• You need flexibility everywhere. Google for "flexible it solutions" and you will find more than 60.000.000 hits...

But having implemented this "solutions", lots of companies find themselves in situations where they are not really satisfied with the flexibility they gained. Why?

It is just not sufficient, to demand all your processes, tools and people to be flexible. After all it is not your processes, tools or people reacting to the market - it is your entire organization as a system, reacting.

Thus, if you want to stay competitive your first priority should probably be to design or redesign your organization in a way that the resulting system is capable to cope with change as a whole. In other words - you should try to build an organization that avoids organizational dept. 

One of the major challanges of our time might therefore be, to build a sustainable organization where management, leadership and structure are much more situational and much less permanent.

Value People over Techniques

Many people ask themselves: "What makes a successful organization?". And since there is so much question  and therefore much money to earn there are tons of consultancies and "simple technical" solutions to this question. So far, I did not see any of those solutions succeed. Even my personal favourite "Agile" is definitely not a solution in terms of "do it and you'll succeed". Why is that?
I think it's pretty easy: It's because the problems we have to cope with in todays environments are mostly "social" problems and only rarely technical problems. But people love to approach all kinds of problems with technical solutions, because it is the easiest and considered to be most "scientific and exact" way. It is for sure the most convenient way, since you must not bother with complex and not linearly answerable questiones.
This said, I personally believe that to align your environment to a more successful direction, you will have to focus on the more complex "social" questions first and at least become aware of these crucial factors and derive "technical" solutions later as one aspect of the way to go. Concretely this means, to focus on:

• Corporate culture before defining corporate strategies
• Values of your employees before implementing rules and guidlines
• Satisfying your customer before maximizing your profit
• Maintain the ability to change and adapt before maximizing the efficiency to produce.

Hereby I mean that everything mentioned above is absolutely important, but one should focus on the "social" items on the left first and derive adequate "technical" solutions on the right then.
Easy? Not at all. To me this evokes many serious and hard questions immediately:

• How do I know, what corporate culture I have? And how can I describe this appropriately? How can I measure this? How can I present advancements? (and many more...)
• How can I know what the values of my employees are? And how can I influence these? Is this possible at all?
• How do I meassure the satisfaction of my customer? It is sure not as simple as just implementing some simple tool (NPS, etc....).
• What is the right amount of ability to change? And what is the threshold where I must lay more value in efficiency?
• and tons of more questions ...

But after all: If you would agree, that in principle the four sentences stated above are right, the immediate consequence must be to focus on these questions first and think about the "technical" aspects later (which is, what for example the Stoos Network seems to do).