Only Dead Fish

Agile Culture at Pinterest

So Learnfest, which I spoke at on Wednesday, has been quite an experience. A very difference conference with a very positive vibe run by enlightened people. The theme was Agility, under the banner of the 'Brave New Workplace', and one of the talks there that I took a lot from came from Joel Constable, who does people development at Pinterest.

Joel defined agility at Pinterest as: AGILITY = VELOCITY x FLEXIBILITY. Which I rather liked. He then showed us a framework that Pinterest use to bring this to life at an organisational and individual level which I've reproduced below (please note this, and the write up, are based on my sketchy notes of the session so my apologies to Joel if I'm doing his talk a disservice):

Taking the top left quadrant first (organisational velocity), Joel talked about the importance of the word 'focus', and how they had brought this to life through a quarterly planning cycle, regular 'mission control' meetings between the product owners (who update on progress) and the leadership (whose job it is to remove blockers to progress), company-wide progress meetings (re-iterating the vision, updating against quarterly goals at every one), and short sprint cycles focused on a single stretch goal. Small, full-stack, multidisciplinary product teams (sound familiar?) with clear decision-making structures help speed of delivery. And they work hard to maintain an envrironment that makes it safe to take risks. Sharing of 'highlights, low-lights, no lights' (stuff that worked well, stuff that could have worked better, stuff that didn't work at all), regular open Q & As with the CEO, and a mantra of 'progress not perfection' (which staff often use as a rationale for moving forwards in tricky circumstances) bring this to life in powerful ways.

WIth organisational flexibilty (top right), Pinterest have strong shared values which are built into performance reviews, enlivened through workshops, and highly visible in the physical work space. They even have 'cultural interviewers' - people who have been trained to interview for new staff who share the same values as the company. These shared values are supported by some key principles (which are defined by key subject areas and are there to define how they do stuff e.g. how they build product) which are identified in project proposals. These in turn are supported by some strategic anchors, which are more temporary and tied to specific goals, but are the filters through which they make decisions.

Individual velocity (bottom left) is all about ownership - they work to create a mindset that builds accountability through expectation - it's not only about what's on your job description. And engagement - through a focus on autonomy, mastery and purpose (sound familiar?).

They also work hard to enable individual flexibility (bottom right) by creating a tight feedback loop and emphasising the importance of reflection. This latter point I found really interesting. With all the focus on 'learning by doing' and 'execution', Pinterest make a point of creating enough space for thinking and reflection. There are 3 key steps in this process for them: 'Go' (testing, data gathering); 'Reflection' (they use external coaches to faciliate this); and 'Adapt' (translating learnings into action).

It was a fascinating talk, and good validation for a lot of the thinking I've been banging on about for a good while now. My thanks to Joel for the inspiration.

Spotify Engineering Culture

Spotify Engineering Culture - part 1 from Spotify Training & Development on Vimeo.

I'm giving a talk at Learnfest today which has already proved to be a refreshingly different and fascinating conference (more on that later). Tamas Mihalovits, the Global Training Manager at Spotify (who ran one of the sessions here) told me about this video on Spotify's Engineering Culture. It's a more in depth look at the scaling agile approach that I talked about here and really worth watching. Lots of great stuff in here including the importance of not getting too tied up in process ("Rules are a good start, then break them when needed"), the squads, chapters and tribes approach to agile structures (really like the 'aligned autonomy' idea), and the approach to work environment. Much that is applicable outside of engineering teams too. Thanks to Tamas.

Itch, Pitch or Ditch

I do a fair amount of client workshops and one of the things which I always think is critical in extending out the value of a team spending time together thinking about what they do, how they could do stuff better and generating ideas is having as tangible a link as possible to achieving actionable change, doing things differently or actioning new priorities. It's pretty common at the end of workshops to run a 'what are we going to do next?' session but there may be many differently-shaped ideas that have come out (some small, quick wins, others that need much more work or further exploration), and focusing on what different stuff we're going to do without thinking about how we're going to make room for doing it can lead to resistance or unrealistic expectations about what's possible.

So I quite like getting delegates to affinity map against 'itch', 'pitch' or 'ditch'. 'Itch' are the ideas that you just have to put into action straight-away, the immediate priority, the quick wins, or the really critical changes that are an itch you have to scratch. 'Pitch' are the kind of ideas that are likely to be longer-term, perhaps dealing with significant issues or change and so require more work and planning, or a business-case to be made. 'Ditch' gets the attendees to think what they are going to stop doing in order to make room for the new. This is useful in forcing people to think about the stuff that may be taking up time but be of relatively low value. Time which they might re-allocate immediately toward higher value work or experimentation (to determine what that higher value work might be). The next step here is usually to identify who's going to do that and how you make progress and change visible, but it's important to recognise that ideas have different shapes and so are likely to need different approaches.

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

Here are my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl:

• "Each year, Mary Meeker unveils her fascinating Internet Trends presentation. And each year, her insights are inestimable and eagerly awaited. But each year, I have a problem with her slides. As a presentation designer, I find them rough and busy. To the point it makes them hard to understand. So this year, here’s my humble attempt at redesigning them!" Well done that man
• Mixby. An app that uses beacons to unlock content and museums and events. Rather cool.
• A wonderful, wide-ranging interview with (Ogilvy Vice-Chairman) Rory Sutherland on branding, behavioural economics and much else besides
• What causes the smell of new and old books? Now you know.

And of-course you can sign up to Fraggl here.

Post Of The Month - May 2014 - The Winner

Delighted to say that the winner of this month's Post of the Month vote is Phil Adams, with his excellent piece on the many voices of planning. So well done to Phil. His post is entered into the hall of fame. Thanks as always to everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - May 2014 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations for this months vote. So our shortlist is:

The Case Against Sharing by Susie Cagle

The Many Voices of Planning by Phil Adams

How We Slowed Down the Connection Between Consumers and Creatives from Richard Huntingdon

Deep Learning Business Models from Beau Cronin

Everyone is Doing Strategy Right Now by Leisa Reichelt

Advertisers and Their Agencies: Time for a New Commercial Detente from Rob Norman

The Art of Anticipation by Robin Sloan

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - May 2014 - Nominations

It's time to open up nominations for Post of the Month so if there are any posts that you've read and particularly liked and that were posted in May, please do nominate them either direct or by leaving a comment below. As always, I have a short starting list below but please add to these and I'll put the shortlist up for a vote when there's a good selection. So my starting three are:

The Case Against Sharing by Susie Cagle

The Many Voices of Planning by Phil Adams

How We Slowed Down the Connection Between Consumers and Creatives from Richard Huntingdon

And you can nominate your own favourites below.

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

Here are my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl:

• An exceptional and very moving talk from writer Andrew Solomon (above) on how the worst moments in our lives make us who we are
• An antidote to the hype around the so-called 'sharing economy': The case against sharing
• “It turns out the Internet, like every other technology, doesn’t trend toward good or bad. It is just a convenience machine for what people want. Television was going to make us all better people, smarter and better educated, but people ended up sitting back and watching sitcoms. We want to create something that rewards other things that have more lasting value.” Evan Williams, quoted in this good article on the rise of Medium
• An interesting description from Brilliant Noise of a network and influence mapping process
• Just in time for the world cup, The Economist takes a look at the economics of Panini football stickers

And of-course you can sign up to Fraggl here.

The Quantified Employee

It seems that the practice of organisations using data and insights from personal tracking apps they have given to their employees (or encouraged them to sign up for) is in danger of becoming a thing. Yesterday I came across the FitBit corporate solutions page which offers 'flexible, scalable solutions to fit your budget and improve the health of your employees'.

Buffer, a good exemplar I think of a company with 'digitally-native' values (if I can call them that) give all of their employees a Jawbone UP wristband that they can use to track activity, nutrition, sleep patterns and more. Co-founder Leo Widrich says:

"One of our key values at Buffer is to work smarter, not harder. Together with an immense focus on personal improvement, giving everyone a chance to improve their sleep patterns seemed like a no-brainer. A few weeks in, this has already had an incredible effect. Browsing through everyone’s sleep patterns and discussing how to get more deep sleep over our virtual water coolers has an amazing effect on productivity."

Buffer are not the only ones. To be honest I'm not sure whether to be impressed or terrified by this one. Whilst the goal of improving employee health and productivity might be a laudable one, it does strike me that this only really works in organisational cultures that are characterised by high levels of trust and transparency, and that's by no means every company. So is it empowering or just rather intrusive and a little scary? 

Photo Credit: nolifebeforecoffee via Compfight cc

The Ascendancy of Soft Skills in Marketing

I recently completed a fairly big piece of research work for the smart folk at Econsultancy that was focused on understanding how the shape and scope of marketing skills is shifting in response to the impact of digital technologies. It was a pretty engrossing project, the output of which is a report I authored on the Skills of the Modern Marketer (you will need to be an Econsultancy member to access the full report but as around 250,000 people are I figure there's a good chance you already will be). I also penned a post over on the Econsultancy blog about it, and there's a useful infographic which has been produced to summarise some of the main findings.

There's some good data in the report around the growth of vertical areas of expertise, but when I was conducting interviews with senior marketers as part of the research process something quite fascinating began to emerge early on and was then echoed in every interview I did - the growing influence and significance in modern marketing of particular 'soft' skills. Most notable in these were the ability to embrace change and uncertainty, to spot opportunities and adapt strategies quickly, curiousity, passion, and self-motivated learning, an open and collaborative approach, and the ability to make connections between disparate ideas. Interestingly, the skill mentioned most of all was the ability to articulate digital concepts well to non-digital specialists in the company, a strong signal I think that digital really cannot sit in a silo. Whilst functional skills remain important, and whilst these kinds of softer skills may be considered to have long been relevant, my sense from all those that I spoke to was that the latter are increasingly seen as not just important but crucial contributors to marketing competency in a digital world. Fascinating.