Navigating the new normal
Learning in the midst of the storm
Life is better slower
Life around us in lockdown has reminded me of childhood in the country and wow is it good. Walking outside and hearing the birds and the wind. Cycling and saying hello to strangers and neighbours (from a distance). Shopping weekly. Enjoying sunsets and slower starts. Staying in for the evenings and talking to your family. Having slower weekends because there is no rush to fit everything in. Reading. Exploring the neighbourhood. Gardening. Looking out for people in your immediate community. Thinking locally. The city has become a village and it is a better place for it.
How can we keep that?
What does it look like to design a pattern of work or an organisation that embeds these characteristics? Could walking meetings, or staggered starts or flexi working all become part of that?
I think people have found some good in recent weeks and will want to hold on to that.
Without intentionality, that will disappear rapidly.
Finding joy in simplicity
There is something good in getting rid of noise and stuff. What’s clear is we have built so many meetings, processes, reviews and metrics into our organisations that we have often forgotten our why and our core value propositions.
One of the best tactics I have found for determining what should be in a space is to remove everything and then decide what I want to put back. If you do it the other way around and try to choose what to remove bit by bit it is almost impossible.
So what if you cancelled every meeting? Every org chart was ripped up. Every review was reset to zero. Every budget thrown in the bin. Every process put on hold. And you sat down and said, ok what’s our playbook. What is the why — the problem, the vision, the mission. What’s the how — the values, the product or service, the solution. And then re-design from the ground up the organisation — in the property you use, the technology you use, the people and skills you need, how you’ll use outsourcing, what finances you need, how you’ll reach and engage your customers.
Too far? Will you ever have another opportunity to reset like this? Even if you keep 98% of what you removed, at least you have elected to choose it should be there, rather than being there by default.
Ask yourself “What do I want in the room” rather than “What can I remove from the room”. (p.s these rules can work at home too, just not with everything!)
Making a plan in the midst of uncertainty
It has been notable in the last week of how much of the narrative has been warning of how bad things can get. This is partly a response to unwinding of lockdowns, mass use of public transport and a natural consequence of “we are past the peak” message.
WHO warns Coronavirus may never go away
UK PM declares we may not find a vaccine
I’ve also heard that we don’t have sufficient capacity for manufacturing vaccines (5 billion needed but capacity for 1 billion in total in the world) or testing (only 45 companies working on testing and capacity is an issue, as well as shortages throughout the supply chain). Or that we may have to continue social distancing in the UK throughout all of 2021.
Are we approaching the point of maximum pessimism?
And yet.
The Nasdaq is less than 10% of its pre-pandemic levels. Discussions are on when stimulus packages might be withdrawn. Leaders are talking about when they might open places of work again. Families are discussing holidays and visiting relatives and friends.
We’re in this strange situation where because of the uncertainty, the planning scenarios are gravitating to a “it will all be fine by next summer”, with very little expectation of true normality before then. But the downside if this scenario is wrong is very large indeed. So you end up with an asynchronous scenario with extremes.
From everything I’ve heard, prepare for the “it will be normal” by next summer but have some pretty serious contingency planning in place for a downside case. Imagine a scenario where is no vaccine, there is no immunity when you’ve had it, unemployment remains at 30% of the workforce and Governments are unable to keep printing money to keep the economy afloat. What happens then?
Getting yourself unstuck
I liked Colin Hewitt’s article this week for its honesty, empathy and sage advice to founders. Built on experience and leading to a endurance and hope in the middle of this. Worth your time to read it if you are a founder or work with founders. Especially loved the don’t read your emails until 12pm…..
In this uncertain moment, many people who lead organisations are stuck in knowing how to plan. If we don’t make a plan, the plan will be made for us and we’ll fall into being led rather than leading. Three pieces of advice I have been sharing with entrepreneurs in the last fortnight are:
- Be a painkiller, not a vitamin.
Every time a crisis pops up, this piece of advice starts to circulate around VCs and Entrepreneurs. The core principle is this — your customers are not focused on luxury, beauty, add-ons. Instead they are thinking further down Maslow’s pyramid — survival, community, paying the bills, staying afloat, bringing in cash. You need to meet a current need — and that’s not to sell something that is an add-on or expands their offering, but to resolve a pain point — reducing costs, finding them new customers that pay, lowering financing burdens, removing legal headaches or liabilities.
2. Break it down
I confess to being a fan of The Unit, which aired on CBS 2006–09. I describe it as a cross between the A-Team (i.e. Delta Force) and Desperate Housewives. In terrible stereotypes the US Special Forces men go off to war or missions and the women stay home to have relationship and family challenges. I’ve picked up more than a few leadership tips from that series. In one episode the team is stuck wondering how to capture an ex-Unit arms dealer. The Sergeant Major comes in and asks them to “break it down”.
1) identify the question you are stuck with
2) ask “why” against that question and write down the 1–3 answers you come up with
3) seek to resolve those smaller component questions rather than the macro question you start with. You may still be stuck but repeat the exercise on the remaining unanswered component questions and the problem will shrink.
3. Walt Disney had three rooms
This story I picked it up from Scott Belsky’s book “Making Ideas Happen” and have relied on it many times since. The story goes that Walt Disney had three separate rooms as part of the creative process and three very different conversations happened in each of those rooms
- Room 1 was for brainstorming, where all ideas were ok. Get the post-its out. No stupid ideas. Everything is possible
- Room 2 was for fleshing out the concepts into a developed plan. Get it out of your head and down on paper. Have costings, responsibilities, route to market, roadmaps etc.
- Room 3 was called the Sweatbox and that’s where the plan was interrogated. What’s wrong with this? Who else has done it? How can you prove product/market fit? Who are you going to get to fund it?
We all know which rooms we’re best in and which ones we are weak in. We also all know people for each room. If you put a room one person in room 3 you get endless distractions and tangents. If you put a room 3 person in room 1 the ideas get shot down and critiqued before they are even on the post-it and the energy leaves the room rapidly.
My question to entrepreneurs just now is what room do you need to be in right now and who are the people who need to be in that room with you. (And who needs to leave the room for a moment).
Just Launch
Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator that helped scale Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe amongst others is well known for his mantra of “Just launch”.
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. — Paul Graham
Momentum is key in these times. Keep moving and look for a way forward. Imagine. Design. Prototype. Feedback loops. Analyse. Iterate. Design. New prototype.
Minimum viable products to keep development time down and cash burn low.
In the same way that exercise brings a sense of more energy, happiness and endorphins to your body, momentum in an organisation can create energy, teamwork.
My imagination this week has been thinking through the problems we now have. So if you can’t go on vacation, can we bring vacation to you? You were going to Sweden? Have a gift box with Swedish food, Swedish books, Swedish movies, Swedish gifts and games — all to enjoy at home.
My design and prototyping this week is with the launch of The Weekly Distillation, my free newsletter. (Sign up for this sort of writing and more and be an encouragement to me!). I’m excited to see where this goes.
Thanks for reading.
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