Friday, October 18, 2019

Mindset for lean start-up success



The Lean start-up achieves success through experimentation and Experimentation involves following a set of processes. With an output focused mindset, the processes seem cumbersome, over the top and a waste of time. When you think you already know what will lead to your desired outcome, experimentation seems wasteful. Just going through the motions of running an experiment won’t aid your learning and will just slow you down; so the experimentation is wasteful thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is something that we need to flip on its head for the Lean Start-up to have a chance of success. It is with a “Learning will lead to Outcomes” mindset that the value of those processes becomes clear.





We can start by promoting belief in the idea that experimentation leads to learning, which leads to outcomes and outcomes are more valuable than outputs. As people increase their belief in experimentation they tend to practice experimentation more rigorously and more frequently. This tends them towards perfect practice, which leads to their experiments generating more knowledge. As they gather more knowledge from their experiments they gain clarity around which outputs are more likely to lead to outcomes. With that clarity they can focus in on a smaller set of outputs with a good chance of producing a positive outcome. The effort saved can either be put towards working on other outputs with a good chance of success or entirely different endeavours. Either way those that apply experimentation appropriately, learn more and importantly deliver improved outcomes.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Feedback Dojo

Doing the basics brilliantly is a foundation from which organisations can achieve greatness. Doing the basics brilliantly comes from lots of little, almost insignificant things, done really well, done really well each and every day. We are talking about behaviour, the ingrained behaviour of all of our staff. Some of this behaviour can be established through sharing a vision, holding shared values, establishing a sense of purpose, clear frameworks & process along with understanding how they contribute to the organisation. Yet there is still a large amount of behaviour that can only be refined in a nuanced, ongoing, day by day, bit by bit approach, by those close to the people in question. Feedback enables us to bridge that gap and steer our people towards doing the basics brilliantly.
To achieve positive changes in behaviour feedback needs to come from a foundation of trust, delivered at the right time, in a private space. It is also crucial that it is delivered in a neutral way with a focus on behaviour instead of opinion. With many aspects of this skill required for it to be applied successful, lots of people struggle to provide effective feedback.
The Feedback Dojo is proven to quickly develop the ability of participants to deliver effective feedback. That feedback leads to positive changes in behaviour in their peers, colleagues and direct reports.