Only Dead Fish

I'm Writing a Book

I'm not big on New Years resolutions but I thought it a fitting time to put something out there by way of a personal ambition for the coming year. I'm going to write a book.

It has been a long held aspiration of mine to do this but the reality of running my own business for the past five years has meant that it's been very difficult to carve out the necessary time to progress with it. Nonetheless I've been writing about themes that I feel passionately about on this blog for almost a decade, and accumulated over 100 posts on the loosely bracketed subject of 'agile' over that time.  

So I'm taking digital transformation, an area I've done a steadily increasing amount of work in, as my theme. As I've said before, I don't believe in digital strategies. But I do believe in strategies that are fit for purpose for a digitally empowered world. And as I have often said in those 100 posts it is my fundamental belief that digital technologies impact right across the organisation and require a re-evaluation of not just marcomms but also product design and development, business models, service design and delivery, customer and supplier interaction and just as importantly not just strategies but also organisational structures, culture, skills, behaviours, and ways of working.  

I believe that this re-evaluation is not about a transition, with a beginning middle and an end, but instead about equipping the organisation to effectively deal with continuous and accelerating change, and increasing levels of uncertainty. I believe this re-evaluation is not just about adapting for the new networked world, but transforming to be fit for purpose for it.

Yet whilst there is clear and growing demand in the business world for intelligent and concise insight in this area, there is still no ‘bible’ or manifesto for digital transformation. So many business books talk about the need to change. So very few talk about how to do it. So I want to write that book.

This has become an itch I have to scratch. And that, to me, is the best reason to write a book. Austin Kleon said 'Write the book you want to read'. So that's what I'm doing. 

Putting this ambition out in the wild means that this is a public commitment, but it also means that I can use this blog to continue to develop my ideas as I progress with the writing. And I'm delighted to say that I'll be working with Peter Abraham who will be co-authoring the book with me. Peter is one of the smartest digital practitioners I know and a long-time collaborator of mine so I'm really pleased to have the benefit of his enormous expertise and experience on the project. Between us I think we bring a very rounded perspective to what is a hugely important topic.

We'll be talking to publishers of-course (if you are one and are interested in publishing the book then do drop me a line) but in the meantime watch this space for more posts as I explore and expand on our thinking. 

Flexible Technology Stacks

One of the areas that I think companies find hardest to let go of is the concept of locked-down technology stacks. There's no doubt a number of good historical reasons why it was once important to maintain rigid controls over the technologies your staff use, but with the plethora of advanced, secure tools and systems now available, times have changed.

And yet I still encounter teams in companies that are unnecessarily restricted in the technologies they can use and at a time when innovation, prototyping, tesing, collaboration, efficient communication and project management are so critical this becomes a potentially significant problem.

The answer of-course is about balance. To have sufficient controls in place to enable effective technology stack management, remove unecessary compatibility or security issues whilst still empowering teams to do their jobs better, use tools appropriate for the job at hand, and enable healthy levels of autonomy.

It's rarely perfect and there are always challenges but utilising broad lists of approved technologies and tools that then enable choice and flexibility by individuals and teams is a sound approach (and the guiding principles of the GDS technology transformation programme is a good place to start).

So I liked what Robert Rees had to say over on The Guardian's developer blog about the technology stack they use and how instead of being a fixed stack, they allow the teams to choose the technology that solves their problems whilst also having a 'whitelist' of approved tech:

'A lot of organisations standardise technologies to help them move faster. Our whitelist attempts to do this for us. If you believe in autonomy, though, then you have to let teams choose the technology that solves their problems most effectively.'

Like most things it's about balance but it does seem to be one that many companies struggle to move forwards with.

Protecting Against Obsolete Beliefs

'When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world. Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.'

I liked what Paul Graham had to say about protecting yourself from obsolete beliefs (or what I have previously termed toxic assumptions). In order to respond well to a rapidly changing world, he says, we need not only to have an explicit belief in change (to be actively looking for change) but also to be 'aggressively open-minded'. Although I seem to have a stronger belief in the importance of having a point of view on the trajectory of change, he makes some good points about meaningful change typically originating from unforeseen places, being disciplined about not letting your working hypotheses or domain-expertise overly-constrain your view on the future (not becoming 'a prisoner of your own expertise'), and to focus initially on people rather than ideas:

'Surround yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from. If you want to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you can't do better than to be friends with the people whose discoveries will make them so.'

Nicely put.

On Design, Strategy and Planning

Shane Parrish had a great extract from (of all places) The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual describing the relationship between design and planning. Worth repeating in full:

"While both activities seek to formulate ways to bring about preferable futures, they are cognitively different. Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem. In general, planning is problem solving, while design is problem setting. Where planning focuses on generating a plan—a series of executable actions—design focuses on learning about the nature of an unfamiliar problem.

When situations do not conform to established frames of reference — when the hardest part of the problem is figuring out what the problem is—planning alone is inadequate and design becomes essential. In these situations, absent a design process to engage the problem’s essential nature, planners default to doctrinal norms; they develop plans based on the familiar rather than an understanding of the real situation. Design provides a means to conceptualize and hypothesize about the underlying causes and dynamics that explain an unfamiliar problem. Design provides a means to gain understanding of a complex problem and insights towards achieving a workable solution."

Shane goes on to talk about the importance of gathering different perspectives when dealing with complex, multifaceted problems, in order to become not just opinionated but informed, clarifying the issue to the point where logic and intuition can then be applied effectively. If, as Shane suggests, design is an ongoing enquiry that focuses on framing the problem (alongside regular reassessment), and planning focuses on developing courses of action, then rather than being the link between them, strategy is perhaps the continuum across both of these two things. Or in Noah's words, the set of (continually evolving) 'rules' that you build to help drive optimal outcomes in decisions, informed by a start point but also ongoing outcomes.

On the Renaissance of Email Newsletters

The email newsletter seems to be undergoing something of a continuing renaissance. Quite a number of the smartest people I know now do their own update, and the list of insightful newsletters that now arrive my inbox keeps on growing. Since I first wrote about the Rebirth of the Newsletter, there's a number of others that have been added to my recommended list, including: 

Shane Parrish's (aka Farnam Street) weekly update

Alexis Madrigal's excellent '5 Intriguing Things' 

The Undercuurent weekly dispatch

The Storythings weekly newsletter

Anjali Ramachandran's international startup-themed Other Valleys

Strands of Genius from Faris and Rosie

The Almighty weekly Dark Matter

Steven Johnson's innovation focused How We Get to Next

And it would be remiss of me not to mention my own curated weekly newsletter which (unbelievably) I've been doing now for almost five years (you can sign up to that here). And of-course there's Fraggl, which is set up on the premis that combining different forms of curation can surface great and relevant content.

It's notable too how apps and publishers are using email as a key tool for content discovery, and some are creating new context-driven email products. Pocket, for example, do an excellent weekly summary of top articles saved using the app. The daily Medium emails are the main way in which I find Medium posts I want to read (although if I'm honest I find them a tad too much), and no doubt inspired by the excellent Quartz daily email (which acts as a kind of distributed home page), the FT recently launched First FT - key news and thought stimulus delivered to your (mobile friendly) inbox in time to read on your daily commute to work.

And there seems to be real value in it. Witness Thrillist Media who send out over a billion entertainment and product driven emails a year which are the foundation for an e-commerce operation that generates almost $100m in revenue. And interesting startups like TheSkimm, an informally written daily news briefing targeted at young women that has recently passed a million subscribers and raised over $6 million in funding.

The interesting thing about all this is that inspite of how much we all complain about groaning inboxes, email seems to be growing in importance as a content discovery tool (perhaps because we spend so much time in it, and it is such a device-agnostic, action-oriented medium) and ironically has the potential to help us better distinguish signal from noise.