Just Thoughts #10: An organisational analogy
In this week's publication, I talk about organizational analogies, building trust, and running offsite.
The content in this article is “handwritten” - and only co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking. I was downgraded to only free version help as I’m out of funds.
The content is free to read; if you want to support my writing work, you may buy my poetry collection on Gumroad here.
Reading these thoughts you are either inspired or you are not. The first rule of reading these thoughts is asking yourself: Why should I think this way?
The highlight of the week: Ice-swimming to counter the pressure. Ok, ok, our housewarming party was nice as well, and the offsite with the deidei team.
“Write like nobody’s reading” - That’s a Note I liked on substack this week, but now I can’t find it. Am I missing the feature or where does one look up one’s activity, or follow the activity of other writers? Default feature on most social platforms. Now all I can check is activity related to my page/profile.
I’m reflecting on my writing and publishing style. Firstly, I’m happy I got at least two phone calls, mainly because my content provoked a strong negative reaction. A reference to people’s behavior in the audience of events, which made them feel unsafe and because I used provocative jokes. I listed, apologized, and revised. Even if I intended to spark a reaction.
Regardlessly, I’m happy to say others reached out to say I should keep writing. Digressing into a discussion about forming a new political party, as in my last piece I suggested the FSC should be put down (half serious, to make a point) and instead create an initiative to go “Full political”. However, everyone in the startup scene knows you never go “Full political”. Reminding me of the scene from the unique comedic masterpiece that is Tropical Thunder: “Everyone knows you never go full retard”. That movie has so much to unpack from a DEI perspective I won’t go down that rabbit hole.
Secondly, I will deprecate my habit of publishing in a private LinkedIn group. That doesn’t yield impact and doesn’t provide enough value towards activity. The idea behind this was to provide additional thoughts for avid readers. However, as it hasn’t sparked discussion and feels like a one-sided broadcast (not what groups on any platform are meant for) I might as well see what sort of traction the habit could form on Substack notes.
It serves as a commitment to post something every day. Also, functions as a fail-safe for constructing additional content during a week when I don’t have enough time to write at the end of the week. Furthermore, posting on LinkedIn, especially during a weekend feels like the wrong habit. I still like numbering the thoughts. The habit of numbering them gives them an index, and it also puts more weight on the fact it’s just one thought, not multiple ones during one day. May collate to a nice collection someday.
Thirdly, I’ll be going paid again after this which means I will have to define target audiences and structure free versus paid content. I think all headline content will be paid. I’ve also promised interviews and live content, that is something I’ll start working on.
keeps hyping the success content creators have with podcast features. Let’s see where to start.This first section will always reflect on my content, containing the feedback from the last writing, what I’ve learned from it, and revisions I’m making to my writing and publishing style. I will be directly referencing previous work, likely underpaid content. It will also contain reflections on any tools I’ve used to improve efficiency or structure work.
This week I’ll discuss deidei’s offsite I facilitated and put together. Referencing the work I use as inspiration. Shedding some light on how to operationalize the “Heart Beat Hustle” discussed in
#2. I also have an analogy to describe different roles in an organization I’ll share.Didn’t have new content to discuss this week. However, this past year, I realized someone added an “A+” to the LGBTQ community and I had no clue what it stood for I picked up the book “ACE Voices: What it Means to be asexual, aromantic, Demi, or Grey-ace.” Haven’t finished reading it yet, but the glossary of the meanings could be in the very beginning.
One of the reactions from last week's post was how Finland can only compete by being the least racist when it comes to attracting foreign talent. This sparked some discussions within my network with a few friends sharing their experiences with dealing with visa application processes.
Headlines this week:
The Jungle: An analogy for organizational roles.
What is trust?
Deidei offsite.
Re-charging.
The Jungle: An analogy for organizational roles
If you’re in the densely growing jungle with your team or your organization you won’t go anywhere if someone isn’t there chopping away the greenery. Without that work, nobody is going anywhere as it’s so dense. Furthermore, it pays off to have someone or some people staying back to ensure there is new equipment available, people are resting as they should and supplies are in order. Finally, there should be someone above the treeline who can look around and scream “This is the wrong jungle!”. Referring to the fact, you may be in completely the wrong market.
In a self-organized context these “roles” are mainly points in time when the team jointly does these exercises together. Everyone can understand that nobody goes anywhere if everyone is up at the treeline looking around. Same for staying back and managing supplies. In contrast, if everyone is constantly down at the front chopping away everyone will burn out quickly.
Instead, you can create moments in time when everyone goes up above the treetops to look around and discuss what they see. This equals your offsite. Furthermore, the “support” of managing equipment, supplies, and rotations equals your team routines in between offsites; Your 1-1’s, team weeklies, monthly retros, and other alignment meetings. Arguably, it could also include hackathons where you create new tools or ways of working for future work to be done needed by the team. The rest is essentially doing the work that moves the team forward.
With time and in between these routines, you may leave one person up above the tree tops the person who hopefully people trust the most in “reading the jungle”. Seeing if there are sudden changes like a storm heading their way. The team may also leave the best cook running the “supply” area to make sure the food is always on point. Finally, during the offsite, you may leave “on the ground” to ensure one can react to sudden operational needs, like keeping customer support running while the offsite is ongoing.
I used to use this analogy when onboarding 200+ individuals to Smartly.io during my three years in the company managing the onboarding of new employees. Today I use it to describe the operational structures of companies. I feel bad about talking about chopping down jungles, I would need some help finding a better analogy. Do you have any suggestions:
I’d also like to express my gratitude yet again to Otto Hilska & Kristo Ovaska for teaching me the value of analogies, and Anssi Rusi for showing me how to operational them. I’m working through Otto and Rebecca Murphey’s book Build Elements of an Effective Software Organization. What I’m most surprised by is that they have OKRs described in them, as I remember a time when Otto wasn’t very fond of them.
What is trust?
I found myself wanting to discuss the notion of trust the past week. Mainly, because of the bias exercise mentioned in the previous post Just Thought’s #9 includes you having to list people you “trust”. Furthermore, the analogy described in the previous chapter mentions “trusting the person at the tree tops”. Without a point of reference, you may get lost in the semantics of the nature of trust.
Searching for answers I decided to ping my friend Juho Nenonen on LinkedIn. I and Juho used to play basketball back in the day, and back then I got inspired by his ability to do cap tricks. Boys have become men and alongside making a professional career out of basketball he’s focused on becoming an expert in psychological safety within organizations, and teams.
Roni Ström, the COO of Reactor, jumped into the discussion dropping the trusted advisors’ trust equation. We happen to be related by marriage, and as cousins sometimes take the time to discuss business over family meals or otherwise.
Juho references a dissertation by Mirjami Ikonen and the way he likes to define trust:
I've always used the definition that I learned in the dissertation of a friend on the dynamics of trust: "The willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another".
I usually further tease apart two elements of trust:
Competence trust: I trust that you know what you are doing
Emotional trust: I believe that you have my best interest at heart.
That sounds like the two vectors in the analogy I like is Simon Sineks story bout the Navy Seals. Nonetheless, this whole discussion makes me feel we need a different analogy;
An analogy that is not from a military context
Somehow integrate the fact your biases play a part in who you trust.
The fact Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens refers to how religion is one of humanity’s greatest social inventions.
One should always be weary of translating military and sports analogies into an organizational context. Why? The art of war is built on the premise that there always is an enemy, when in business that may not exist in the same way, especially in infinite settings (discussed in Just Thoughts #9). The same goes for sports. Not saying, that competition is not a healthy thing in business, just pointing out it is inherently gender, nationally, and ability-biased. In the Olympics, you compete by nationality. Additionally, you rarely see men and women mixed at top levels of sports, nor those with different abilities and disabilities (the Paralympics are separate from the Olympics).
In business, these lines do not need to be drawn as such. In business, you also do not usually, have “the rules of the game” fixed with a “finite” amount of parameters. In sports, there is usually a fixed-size court or track etc. In business, your market is constantly evolving, even if the law defines some things the way a rule book does. However, corporate law is way more extensive than the rule book of any sports game.
I, however, made the obnoxious statement in Just Thoughts #2 that I’ve been trying to imagine an analogy and an operating model that makes the art of business as automatic as breathing for a team. This takes us to the next chapter.
P.s. When will you start writing on Substack Juho? ;)
Deidei Offsite
I’ve been working as Interim Operations for Deidei for the past couple of months. Last week concluded the hands-on work on internal operations. Moving to focus on external sales and fundraising efforts, the partners and the team to assume ownership of the operating model going forward.
The work included revisiting the already-made strategic content. Vision, Mission, and Strategy. The team had also already chosen to use notion as their internal wiki. The work before the offsite was also working on describing the beat (as referenced in Just Thoughts #2), as well as what topics are discussed and when. The idea of “retros” was also entirely new to the team. A practice most software developer teams are familiar with, even if running an effective retro is an art in itself. To me, it always starts with how safe people feel to express themselves in such spaces, but I won’t go into the art of creating safe spaces in this blog post.
Nonetheless, working through the content of the operational template (a template I hope to be able to share soon with you together with my former colleague and the world’s leading Notion Expert Taina Perenniemi), the deidei team thought the word “hustle” is not as inclusive as it could be so suggested to call it “Motion” instead. Inspired by a referenced quote by the one who likes to reference me as her “right-hand man” during her time at Slush, Marianne Vikkula, in her interview with Jyri & Timo.
What followed was then (recapping);
Heart: Your values, policies, and principles
Beat: Your rituals, your meetings, and associated metrics.
Motion: Your Activities and Your Outcomes
Motion is Potion
Motion is potion, and I’ll add that without the right potion there will be no motion. Hence, rinse, execute, learn, and repeat. I won’t go into the details of how to construct it from scratch as that comes with the template and the examples.
I mainly brought this up as the offsite fits of how this fits in the context of the framework. The offsite is part of the beat. The beat at deidei is defined in tertiles, as opposed to quarters, mainly because deidei wants to operate with eight weeks of holidays a year. This means there would be an offsite three times a year.
The team is currently 10 people, and with both budget and time constraints I decided to book the student union’s Sports Cottage I’m still an active alumni of; Teknologföreningen. The cottage can be booked by externals at a fairly decent price (check info and prices here), but the best part is it’s only 30 minutes driving from Helsinki and in the middle of the woods, in the national park area of Noux.
The offsite was two days and one night. Each program number during the offsite was tied to one of the values deidei has. The goal was to get everyone to participate in working through the different parts of Heart Beat Motion of deidei and being able to create a starting point for their coaching, as well as their personal growth. Generally, it also focuses on a point in time when the team looks around the jungle, as described in the analogy in the first headline.
The first exercise was simply to ease the team into the space and have a discussion about the meaning of purpose. What does purpose mean to them and where is it derived from? Using ikigai as the premise for the discussion as presented in Just Thoughts #2. The team discussed at some point how Westerners sometimes have the bias of thinking anyone in the “East” is inherently more spiritual, or that coming to the West you’re somehow “saved”. A very flawed bias. I had to remark that I had chosen ikigai based on this flawed bias, but I’ve chosen to stick with it because of Tacha Eurich’s work on self-awareness. In it, she remarks that “Why?” is not a good question to ask yourself when it comes to introspection, “What?” is better. The ikigai questions consist of “what” questions, which follow Tacha’s research about building self-awareness.
Additionally, following the research made by the people behind Blue Zones having purpose increases longevity, and as I’ve previously written here on substack we will outlive most organizations in this world so the only sensible thing to do is own your professional growth.
With the grounding discussion of what purpose means to us personally in the form of discussions of three, we went to the next exercise, facilitated and suggested by Fon. As a DEI consultancy team has extremely high standards for psychological safety, the following exercise was held in the form of a circle exercise about the value “dei in our DNA value”.
Goal:
To respectfully reach a shared understanding of the meaning of this value
To build a sense of community
Roles: Circle Host (Fon), Circle keeper (a person who interrupts proceedings if needed, e.g., if tensions have risen), Note taker (a person who notes down themes that arise during the discussion and reports them back to the group at the end). Circle Host is mandatory, the rest are optional. Instructions (to be delivered by host):
Pass the talking piece around the room.
Be mindful of how long you take to speak. Make sure everyone gets a turn.
Make sure you represent only your views, e.g., by using statements such as "I think...", and "I feel..."
Listen attentively without interrupting or commenting on the person holding the talking piece. Brief clarifying questions are allowed if you don't understand something.
It is always ok to simply pass the talking piece forward, or take a moment of silence instead of talking.
Withhold immediate reactions to what people have said, and for now, only answer the question posed at the start of the turn.
Round 1: Checking in
Round 2: Describing own thoughts/feelings about the topic
Round 3: Reflecting on what other people said about the topic
Round 4: What would you need moving forward, so that we live by this value?
This exercise can be done in about an hour
If you want to read more about the exercise you can visit the circle way. The setting brought a well of emotions, and after we were done I had to jump into the icy lake to balance my energy through a serotonin kick caused by cold water.
The evening we cooked together and shared personal stories of where we are from, what we’ve encountered in life, and a random Matti Nykänen quote as there was a Matti Nykänen game at the cottage.
The next day was more operationally focused and was divided in two, the collective goals, and in the afternoon reflecting on personal contributions to the collective goals. After the sauna, morning icy dip, and a hefty breakfast the team started working on the operational document. The premise is everything can be scrapped and rebuilt, one doesn’t need to keep anything. Following the 1-2-4-all model, the team first read through what was reflecting what to add/change/remove and ended up with a commented document with all desired revisions. Each team of two started with a specific section to ensure every section got worked on to some extent.
In the afternoon it was about personal goals and aspirations. Creating the crude foundation for how they individually contribute to the vision, and collectively help each other do so. Starting with writing reflections on personal ikigai, then finding stories from deidei that give people pride and joy (purpose) and refining these stories. This process followed a story described by Fredric Laloux in his book Re-inventing Organizations, where factory workers were brought together to share their stories of what makes them proud to work for the given company.
The final exercise was about defining personal learning goals and using the feedforward method to learn to get suggestions on how to work on them going forward. Here is the more structured outline;
Work Place design:
Method: 1-2-4-All
Topic: It takes a village
Goal: Collaborative iteration of Ops model.
In pairs of two pick a part to work on from the ops model.
The description (analogy)
The Heart
The Beat
The Motion
Write in thoughts in “buckets of” DROP/ADD/CHANGE
Purpose Exercise:
Method: Self-reflection & Feedforward
Topic: Impact & Result Driven
Exercise: 1
Goal: create a foundation for personal coaching
Pick something you’ve done in your work at deidei that resonates with what you think your ikigai is. Something you’ve done that makes you feel pride & joy
Write down the story.
Reduce it to 5 sentences
We run a “Pitching circle” (everyone pitches their story and asks for feedback on it, how presented, what’s good, and what could be improved)
Exercise 2
Goal: Create a Foundation for your personal goal-setting
Based on your ikigai and company long-term goals (end of 2024 and beyond) write up personal learning goals.
Write down 3-5
“Feedforward” x 3, one round for each learning goal
Summarize learning goals with ikigai reflection.
The flow of exercises followed Patrick Lencione’s pyramid of effective teams. First, you work on the trust (the bottom of the pyramid), then you create a safe space to let potential conflicts arise. Then you commit to a team to the collective, by using the 1-2-4-all model from Liberating structures. Moving over being able to hold each other accountable by forming a written foundation for personal learning goals, and finally discussing how individual aspirations can come between the individual and team goals.
If I could’ve made things differently I would’ve collated the financial data, customer feedback data, and people engagement data as a pre-read to the team. However, everyone knew more or less the status queue going into the offsite, and the team was executing customer work or doing sales every available minute as it was so overloading them with reading material didn’t feel warranted.
Additionally, we worked without a projector, even if one was available. Hence, all I had to work with was my voice and everyone’s attention on the one document which was the operating model. Schedule and exercises were also accommodated to current circumstances some could’ve used more time. Pretty content with the outcome nonetheless and the team felt so as well.
Re-charging
The week ended with me and my partner having a well-overdue housewarming party themed with flowers. We contemplated whether it’s worth the effort when you don’t have time to talk to everyone at big parties, as opposed to more intimate dinners, but having a party now and then makes it an opportune time to have different parts of your network to connect. We thought it was worth all the effort and we enjoyed ourselves, and believe our friends did so too.
The evening ended with some Singa-powered karaoke at camping arranged by long-time friend Adry. It’s not easy making something of your own in a country away from home, and I’m very happy for my friend. The place combines many things and is quite suitable for company parties, even if the specific evening is packed with students.
Until next week! Remember to subscribe for more thoughts to make sure you don’t miss a fresh dose of Just Thoughts every Monday (EEST)
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