Only Dead Fish

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

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

• More slow-mo brilliance from Adam Magyar, this time in Alexanderplatz. Love this project.

• A provocative take on the evolution of twitter from conversation to broadcast
• A good post from Greg Satell on the impact of ‘mass personalisation’
• A summary of some significant tech trends in the Accenture Technology Vision 2014
• A sensible take on defining Content Marketing from Noah Brier
• And an interesting piece on the newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site

Don't forget you can try Fraggl out by signing up here. 

Scaling Agile At Spotify

One of my favourite examples of an approach to scaling agile structures is detailed in this paper by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson talking about Spotify's model of Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds (in fact the guys at Undercurrent, whom I talk to below, link to it from their site). Spotify has scaled more rapidly than most businesses but this structure is specifically designed to maintain an admirable level of agility across 30 teams and 3 cities. 

The basic unit of development at Spotify is the 'Squad', a small, nimble, multi-discplinary, automous self-organising team that is designed to feel like a mini-startup. Squads are co-located and focus on specific areas of the product or service, incorporating all the tools and skills they need to take an idea from design to test to release and production. Much like Amazon's Two-Pizza teams, Squads are clearly focused on a specific task and KPI.

Squads are grouped together into related product areas called 'Tribes'. Tribes are like the incubator for the squad mini-startups and designed to be no larger than 100 people. Specific processes help minimise the potential of dependencies to slow things down. 

 

'Chapters' and 'Guilds' link Squads horizontally together, enabling some economies of scale without sacrificing autonomy, and acting like the glue that binds the company together. Chapters group together people with similar functional expertise and meet regularly to share learnings. The chapter lead is the line manager for chapter members and has more traditional man-management responsibilities, but is also a member of a Squad themselves so stays in touch with reality.

 

'Guilds' are looser, more organic and wide-reaching communities of interest that can stretch across the whole company (rather than just a Tribe like a Chapter does). They enable knowledge and tool sharing across a wider group.

 

As the paper describes it, it's like a matrix organisation but one that is weighted toward delivery. Rather than people being grouped into vertical silos defined by function, the vertical dimension is defined by those multi-disciplinary, self-organising, co-located Squads, and the horizontal dimension is all about sharing knowledge, learning and tools.

 

The danger of looser structures focused around small, nimble teams is the potential complexities created by dependenies, co-ordination issues, a possible lack of focus on developing vertical functional expertise, and the difficulty in effectively sharing learning horizontally across the organisation. What I really like about this is that it specifically finds ways to avoid those potential pitfalls and makes for a far more flexible structure and one that can be more adaptive at scale.

Holacracy at Undercurrent

I was fascinated to see a Tweet from Clay Parker Jones talking about how they had implemented Holacracy at Undercurrent. Holacracy intrigues me since it is such a disruptive idea that plays well to many of the things I bang on about here, and the guys at Undercurrent have been publishing some smart thinking around organisational structures and culture of late, some of which echoes a few themes I've talked about before. And as as I've also said, organisational culture, structures and processes is the stuff that makes for real change. So I really wanted to know more and asked Clay (whom I've followed and known via his blog and Twitter for a number of years) to answer some questions about their experience of it. He kindly agreed:

NP: Why did Undercurrent adopt Holacracy?

CPJ: We began thinking about Holacracy in about May of last year. We read about Obvious Corp. (builders of Medium) implementing it and were mostly curious from an academic point of view; as our work became more about creating cultures than creating strategies, we thought it'd be an interesting reference point or tool to have in our kit. We were all impressed by the comprehensiveness of the documentation – the constitution in particular – and scheduled a taster session with HolacracyOne, the company that manages the evolution of the practice.

After the session we weren't certain what to do. The practice tracked with ideals that we knew to be right, but it felt dogmatic and unnecessarily complicated, as if we were aiming to distribute authority by creating a ton of bureaucracy. It aligned with our existing way of operating, so it'd be easy to implement, but the learning curve for the operational details was steep. And it would fix some of our ongoing issues (some voices dominating decision-making, setting guidelines for who's actually in charge of what), but it felt like it would also stifle some and turn off others.

In the end, it was so close to the way that we actually run things that we decided to give it a go. The upside was so obvious after a couple weeks of practice that we kept with it. It's good shit.

Short answer: we were curious about it, we tried it out, and we couldn't help but adopt it after trying it.

NP: How does is it work in the agency? Tell us more about how you apply the key principles (distributed power, circle structure, removing tensions, governance and so on).

CPJ: A few key things to sort out: roles are basically "jobs" that get done, and where I used to have one "Job Title", now I also have about 15 different roles that I play; circles are basically like departments, and are developed mostly by differentiating work and "domains" that circles control autocratically; you start with zero "structure" and build only the amount of organization required to do the work of the company.

The best way to get a sense of how this works is to know how we're running it. We have eight circles in the company:

• Board – filled by Founding Partners, each of whom bring different contexts to the job of setting Undercurrent's Purpose
• Core – the central "managing" circle of Undercurrent, filled by Lead Links to the various sub-circles that focus on the work of Undercurrent, and a handful of other roles (i.e. finance) that do work that impacts all the circles inside of Core (the next six in this list)
• Offering – in charge of coming up with new ideas that will put us out of business, and refining our standard offering (consulting work)
• Client – in charge of delivering the standard offering
• Growth – in charge of selling the standard offering
• Reputation – in charge of making Undercurrent famous
• Culture – in charge of ensuring that we have an amazing, well-supplied group of people that can achieve our purpose
• LA – in charge of everything that happens in LA, as we get that office set up

Each of those circles is wholly in charge of a particular domain, and is filled with roles that are constantly changing, evolving to fit our actual practice, the actual experience of being at Undercurrent. This evolution is driven by tensions, which are defined as something that stands in the way of our organization achieving its purpose. In monthly Governance Meetings we propose new Roles, Accountabilities, and/or Policies that take a safe-to-try step toward eliminating whatever tensions are being sensed by anybody in the company.

Sense a tension? Show up to governance, propose a change to how we do business, and get that change integrated into how we move forward. Meeting structures are set up in a way that prevents anyone from shooting down anybody else's idea – your only option, if you have an issue with a recommended change, is to help create a version of the proposal that is safe for the group to try. And if it doesn't work…fine, we'll fix it in a month.

Aside from that, all the work proceeds as normal, but with better, clearer structure. Weekly status meetings for each circle run according to a Tactical Meeting agenda, with clear rules of engagement. They're the best status meetings anyone has ever seen – we have clients and friends join, from time-to-time, to observe.

NP: So what have been the biggest challenges, or things you've learned from adopting it?

CPJ: It's super weird at first: the language takes a while to pick up; there are lots of rules; when you're making important decisions, there's no room for discussion, which seems scary; even for a cult-like organization like Undercurrent, it feels like it's on the edge of too much dogma. And while it's great for introverts – the meetings are designed to make it easy for everyone to voice their opinion in a safe space and at a safe pace – it's tough at first for extroverts that process things by talking.

For us, the transition was relatively easy. We're a small company, with a pretty rigorous approach to talent density. We are fairly flat, very transparent, and power has been implicitly distributed for some time. We don't report into another, larger organization. If you don't have those ingredients, I can see it being a bit more difficult.

The biggest learning for me so far is that our meetings and decision-making process (both of which I thought were good!) were such shit before. We were so slow. We were driven by perfection. We sat around and talked instead of taking action. Those things die quickly after implementing Holacracy. We still have a long way to go with the system. I don't think we're even hearing some of the tensions that live at the edges of our organization, and our muscle-memory from our pre-Holacracy org is strong. But we're getting there.

NP: And what's been the biggest or most surprising upside in the new approach?

CMJ: Biggest upside: more smart people being involved in more important decisions, but without the typical cost of management-by-consensus.

NP: Should more agencies adopt Holacracy?

I can't speak specifically to agencies, as it's been a while since I've worked with the dynamic between creative, accounts, and planning. I can certainly see it having a powerfully positive impact, at the cost of destabilizing traditional boundaries; our coach from HolacracyOne said this to us as we were training: "Holacracy shines a bright light on inefficiency." That said, it's well-suited to professional service firms and software dev companies, and as a consultancy the work naturally divides up. 

Fascinating. My thanks again to Clay for answering my questions.

Defining Stock and Flow Content

Noah Brier has a good take on the development of the stock and flow model for content. It's a good metaphor, and one that I've used a lot over the past couple of years. Originated by technologist Robin Sloan, who first took the economic concept and applied it to content in this way:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Noah makes the point that whilst stock and flow is still a useful way to think about how to create marketing content, the distinction between the two is becoming more blurry. I think he's right. But for me it's also always been potentially quite ill-defined beyond Robin's original explication, and I've seen it used in different contexts to describe different types of content. So exactly what is stock, and what is flow?

Building on that original interpretation, here's my definition:

• Stock content is more likely to be orginal, durable content that retains or builds value over time and keeps people coming back. So it is often (but not always) 'destination' content in that it is housed on owned media assets. It may be entertaining, informative or just useful (like a guide, or directory). It may be one-off, or episodic content that you can follow or even subscribe to. A simple example might be an article written by a brand or a publisher that still ranks high on high volume search terms and so continues to bring in a regular stream of users to the brand or publisher site over an extended period of time. Or it might be something more complex such as content on a community hub or useful functionality on a site. The user context for stock context is more likely to be seeking information, entertainment or inspiration, exploring or engaging. Designing for stock content means creating assets whose fundamental characteristic is that their value is not restricted to a short period of time. 
• Flow content is more likely to defined by a short spike of audience attention and a user context more identified with browsing, grazing, updating, sharing, and interacting. Flow content lives in the stream, is fast, snackable, highly spreadable and shareable, social and mobile friendly. It is often (but not always) 'distributed' content, which is out there in the fabric of the web. Designing for flow content means designing for portability and shareability.

Can a piece of content be both? A single initiative can certainly incorporate both and I think it's possible for something to start out flow and end up stock. But the real point here is of-course that a good content calendar should incorporate a balance of both types, and that they should work together to build value over time.

Photo Credit: Simon Greig (xrrr) via Compfight cc

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

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

• The Google Music Timeline "shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates)". Cool. 

• The power of data. Amazon knows you so well it wants to ship your next package before you order it. It's called 'anticipatory shipping'
• A big step on from the traditional corporate ideas scheme - an interesting piece on how IBM have set up their own internal Kickstarter
• This is something that intuitively makes sense (and something I've heard Adam talking about before now) - a University of Texas study shows that web comments are more civil when journalists interact
• A fascinating list from Ray Kurzweil of how the world will change over the next 30 years

For a daily dose of good links like these you can sign up to Fraggl here.

Building The New

Patricia MacDonald has an excellent rumination building on posts in the first few weeks of this year from Mel Exon, Andy Whitlock, Toby Barnes (and Alexis Madrigal's piece on The Year the Stream Crested) that thematically all talked about the need to take a step back from the never ending streams of content that seem to continuously wash over us. I have a couple of immediate thoughts to add.

When I wrote about that Madrigal piece I wrote about appreciating the desire for a sense of closure, edges, and structure. If I'm honest, what worries me about the whole Content Marketing thing is that there will be too much focus on content in the context of simplistic, one dimensional marketing goals and not enough, as Ian Fitzpatrick rightly says, on content as something that can facilitate great customer experiences.

There's a lot of crap out there. There will be a lot more crap out there. In fact I don't think we can even appreciate now just how much more crap there will be out there. But there will also be brilliance. And perhaps it is (as Clay Shirky said long ago), less about information overload and more about filter failure (hello Fraggl). We all needs rocks to stand on in the stream. We just have to create bigger and better ones.

So has the revolution really paused, as Pats suggests? It certainly feels like we've moved into a different phase. And yes, one where the real hard work begins. For me, that means a focus on the things that rarely get talked about yet will drive the real change. Stuff like organisational design, resourcing, processes, behaviours and culture. 

To bastardise that Socrates quote in the post below, it feels like we've been fighting the old for a long time. And now it really is time to build the new.

No Dead Ends

The concept of 'no dead ends' relates to the idea that wherever a user is on your site or your app there is always a next step, or somewhere else appealing or interesting for users to go that they don't have to work hard to find. Links, images and other content that are contextually relevant to the specific user, or the reason the user is on that page (or at least the subject matter) presented in attractive, compelling ways.

In a publisher context this is about the recirculation of readers since in a world where a significant proportion of your traffic is coming in via deep linked article pages and every page is potentially your homepage, it's all about turning visitors into readers, and readers into repeat readers (Reuters had an interesting experiment in this context which ultimately failed in execution but was quite a radical design solution to this objective).

The execution of this kind of contextual relevance is often pretty clunky. But the interesting thing about the quality of that execution is of-course that it's all dependent on data and how much you know about that user or the context of why they are reading that page. One of the reasons that a 'single customer view' (and notably the log-in) is suddenly so important is that the level of data that a company has about me and my behaviours and preferences is transformational in the understanding of context and therefore the application of relevance.

This is just one of the reasons I think that as much as retailers could learn from publishers about how to do great content, publishers could learn from retailers about data, consumer journeys and targeting.

Photo Credit: Scott Ableman via Compfight cc

Micro-Multinational Companies

“If the late 20th Century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micro multinational: small companies that operate globally”

Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist, quoted at the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh.

And just one of a number reasons (from this Wired post on the subject) why the networked world is transformative in this context - resourcing:

"Micro-multinationals turn inside out an organizational fad of the 1990s: the incubator. But whereas incubated startups divest some business functions to their investors, micro-multinationals purchase these functions from subcontractors. Incubators allow startups to concentrate on what economists call a "comparative advantage" - the thing that any economic entity does best and most cheaply. Alas, incubated startups were also at the mercy of their patrons' whims. Micro-multinationals, by contrast, control their own fortunes."

What Makes a 'Super Successful' Company?

I really liked this list from Sam Altman (Co-founder of Loopt) on what makes 'super successful' companies. Go read the whole thing but here's a precis of the list: 

• They are obsessed with the quality of the product/experience. 
• They are obsessed with talent.
• They can explain the vision for the company in a few clear words.
• They generate revenue very early on in their lives
• They are tough and calm
• They keep expenses low
• They make something a small number of users really love
• They grow organically
• They are focused on growth
• They balance a focus on growth with strategic thinking about the future
• They do things that don't scale
• They have a whatever-it-takes attitude
• They prioritize well
• The founders are nice
• They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup
• They get stuff done
• They move fast.

Lots to like in the detail behind each of these points but I particularly liked:

"Successful startups nearly always start with an initial core of super happy users that become very dependent on their product, and then expand from there."

I think it's easy to be too obsessed with scale too early on with a new product or service. I'm learning a lot from doing Fraggl. We have a number of ideas around scalability that are all very exciting, but for now we're focused on getting the service as good as it can possibly be for our core, growing group of initial users. And that feels like the right thing to do.

HT Swissmiss for the link. Photo Credit: Arya Ziai via Compfight cc

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

My favourite links from the week, curated by Fraggl:

• An uncommonly straightforward, believable set of tech trends from Frog Design

• A good, smart piece from Ben Hammersley on wearable technology as 'the third wave in computing'
• A useful summary from Shane Parrish of Clay Christensen's Innovator's DNA: 'The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators'
• The story of how Scott Griffith turned Zipcar into a $100m dollar business: a 'seven-point strategy for turning a great idea into a thriving company.'

And you can sign up to Fraggl here.