Agile & Entrepreneurial - Designing better by Doing better.
The Pumping Heart:
A living opportunity. Your product might be a 'product', it might be a startup, it might be personal or group growth. Here's the pattern: Your outfit needs to develop stuff in close contact with real users to ensure that its doing the right stuff right. Faster is better. It wants to develop the most important stuff first. It needs to get a minimally useful version of your product in use, and getting feedback, ASAP. It swarms the product development as much as possible, people do things together and at the same time, learning together, and shortening the development time. Collaborative. The product is developed. Grown in close contact with a user group. Who are evaluating, testing, suggesting, and buying – improving the whole process. Serendipity by design. You get what you need instead of what you want, in the learning doing, and you appreciate that.
An agile development team, in a start-up or otherwise,
takes a basic product vision and does the 'first most important' bits
first. In small fast cycles, say a week long. Best face-to-face in a common team room. It shows the results to
the client at the end of the cycle. The team takes client feedback as
learnings and adjustments, while it does the next week's 'first most
important' stuff. The program develops a spiral learning-by-doing
cycle. Passion thrives where we delight people fast.
A natural pattern
A natural team just gets in
there and does the job. Ants swarm things. In comparison, the average
human “team” isn't, it's just a group. All too often the group works
like a logical factory instead of a
team. Person A hands his finished bit to
person B who does her bit, and hands the results to person C, who
finds problems and ignores them because arguments happen when bits
are handed back. Human teams that focus, preferably in a common team
room, learn about themselves and their workings and mesh. They
form a web of interactions among themselves and their workings. A kind of community. They
can create things faster, better, and cheaper. Often by simply not
doing some things proven unnecessary, linked to learning more
effectively as they go.
Personal success
You have a personal development need, say leadership, public speaking, maintaining buoyant
optimism, or you need to be able to handle crises. Whatever. We look for the
first most important part, and work on it together. We have apt materials
for each of these at hand. We do a
bit, test it against reality, learn, review, and do more. A rich journey. Most
learnings are best repeated many times, learning good habits. It's better, actually faster
and more effective, to skillfully read a book fast some times than to
slowly trundle through it once. We follow that habit and success
forming pattern. It grows patina into community.
All the examples share a success pattern that we can follow.
Design Thinking
It's really an almost accidental Design Thinking while Doing pattern.
I want to engage with a blend of interesting people and situations. I want situations where it's clear that I will help you. Where we enjoy the journey and it's going somewhere. I like helping people, and making things go.
Areas where we might mesh might be:
Many times people have contacted me, verified opportunities, and gone from there.
Where you need to grow new - outside some box, way, or habit, and you see no way now.
You've started and need to be more agile – entrepreneurial to cope with changing reality.
Change and complexity are eating you. You need to ride the waves of change instead of being clobbered by them.
Cultural stuff. Cultural diversity colours the whole picture, or not if you're dominant and oblivious. People think learning 'the language' does the job – nope.
Browse here on the website, especially the Catalogue – Resources. Look at Buoyancy – Optimism, Handling new opportunities – Crisis, Leadership, Teams, and so on.