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A downhill slope (find others)

If you’re in a book group, social pressure is going to get you to read that book. The act of joining the book group is the hard part. Once you’re in the book group, the books are going to get read, because now you’re playing a game. It’s a game you’re enrolled in, it’s one you want to move forward.

…

The easiest way to start creating this game dynamic is to form a group. To find others, to find others and challenge those others to play the game with you. Because we all know that solitaire might be a little fun, but solitaire isn’t the kind of game we dream of when we dream of games.

We do better when we do it together.

Seth Godin – Akimbo – The Wedding Industrial Complex

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Make it happen. Find others. Say the words.

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Build, measure, learn

This post is a leap from Rule 2 of bootstrapping the non-profit: Do it Now.

This is such a key idea, and so interesting and relevant to Do it Now, that I thought I’d do something about it like, write now.

The idea is that when you’re developing a new business or organisation, there is so much that you don’t know that planning has less value – it will inevitably change when you know more.

Because of this, your focus needs to be on trying things out, working with what you do know – and your best guesses – and testing them out in the real world.

So we get the lean startup cycle:

The Lean Cycle
From Open Classrooms: The Learn Startup (this is supposed to be an embed but it isn’t working for me!)

The relationship between this and Do it Now is that the fastest way make progress – even if it’s only progress in knowing what not to do – is to go through this cycle quickly. One of the best ways of increasing your cycle speed is to take action – now!

Counter-intuitively, the more uncertain a situation it is, the more useful this approach – and cycle speed – can be:

When a project can be approached with a high degree of certainty, the best activity is to plan. As we have high confidence that the plan is likely to succeed, the best strategy is to execute what we know will work well. The focus can therefore be on executing the plan and monitoring progress.


When a project carries a high degree of uncertainty, the best activity is to learn. As any plan would make too many assumptions that would be hard to justify. The best strategy is to increase the speed at which we learn until we have discovered which plan would work the best. The focus must be on learning and discovery and checking any assumptions that we have.

Open Classrooms: The Learn Startup
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Bootstrapping the non-profit organisation Rule 2: Do it Now

This is the second in a series applying Seth Godin’s rules of bootstrapping (see also here) to building a non-profit organisation.

Rule 2: Do it Now


Do it now. Not later, not next week, NOW. It’s better than later.

In the non-profit world:

Still do it now

Not much to add on this one. A bias to action is critical, and all things being equal, now is far better than later.

This blog is a great illustration – a month and a half ago I committed to shipping a blog post every day for 100 days. I would set the bar low if I had to, as long as I got something done. Every day.  I’m at 60 posts as I write this, and it dawned on me that it would have taken me an entire year to get this far if I’d committed do a post a week.

In Lean Startup terms, doing it now is a key way of increasing your cycle speed. They might be small steps, but you get something done, you can review it, you can do it better next time as you build-measure-learn. See the next post for more on this.

I guess a caveat for the non-profit world is that you need to tread carefully if we’re dealing with vulnerable people.

But do it now doesn’t mean ‘be a bull in a China shop’ – it just means being commited to taking action, to doing the next thing now.

If you know what you need to do next, then it’s easy – do that, or at least do the smallest next part of that that you can.

If you don’t have clarity about what to do next, the next thing to do is to find out. Do some research. Find the name of three papers. Get hold of them. Make notes on one. Email the person who wrote it to thank them. Each one is a tiny push of the boat (or flywheel, if you’re a Jim Collins fan), giving you a little bit more momentum and making it easier tomorrow.

Rule 2 says “I will not go to bed tonight until I have done X.”

Rule 2 of bootstrapping the non-profit

Do it now.

Thanks, Seth.

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The meat is on the street

John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard movement of churches, wasn’t renowned as a systematic religious teacher.

Apparently people would ask him “John, when are you going to teach us the deep and crucial stuff – where’s the meat?”

And he’d answer: “The meat is on the street.”

That is, “Go out into the world. You will learn the deep truths of faith by doing it.”

Books, podcasts, blogs are very useful in learning to make positive change in the world. Ideas are wonderful tools.

But we learn our most important lessons by doing – by taking action.

The meat is on the street.

Go!

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On Assignment

Kevin Kelly went to Asia in the early 1970s having never held a pair of chopsticks.

He took a change of clothes and 500 rolls of film in his backpack, because he was, as he puts it, “on assignment” to photograph daily life and traditional culture wherever he went. He stayed for most of the decade.

He was 19 years old and going to visit a friend in Taiwan. He had some experience as a photographer but hadn’t really held much in the way of chopsticks, professionally speaking. But he was on assignment. From himself. Aged 19.

I am going to make a badge and wear it every day:

Driverless Crocodile: On Assignment.

KK was interviewed on Ralph Potts’ Deviate podcast.

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Three Things

“You get work, however you get work.

“But people keep working in a freelance world, and more and more of today’s world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it’s good, and if they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.’

Neil Gaiman

I love this. Numbers two and three are relatively simple.

Now for the hard bit:

  • Go away, think again about your values. Did you forget kindness the first time round? or fun?).
  • Reconsider your vision in the light of experience. It’s always an MVP.
  • Then define “good work”. Your best work.
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Made to Stick: Simplicity

Following Zinsser On Writing, here’s a snippet on simplicity from Made to Stick.

The first chapter is about reducing your message to it’s absolute core.

As with Zinsser, clarity of intent is key for the Heath brothers: it’s not enough that the message is simple, it must be profoundly important.

They use the military practice of sharing “commander’s intent” as an analogy to help us cut to the core of our messages.

In the military, commanders at each level of the chain of command summarise their intent or purpose in a couple of sentences at the top of a each of orders. This is done so that when (not if) circumstances change and the details of best-laid plans become irrelevant or wrong, troops can still make decisions and take action to achieve their commander’s overall purpose.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. No sales plan survives contact with the customer. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.


They suggest finding the Commander’s Intent for your message by adapting these prompts:

“If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must …”

And

“The single most important thing that we must do tomorrow is …”

They continue:

Find the core of the idea. Weed out superflous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important, but just aren’t the most important idea. The army’s commander’s intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have five north stars.
…
It’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.

There’s plenty more in the chapter that I’ll share another time, but this is the main thing.

Easy question:
What superfluous and tangential activities are slowing you down?

Harder:
What good, productive activities can you set aside in order to achieve your main goal?
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Setting the bar low

If a job is too big, if standards are too high, it will never get done. It might never even get started.

Setting the bar low, on the other hand, is a great way to get started. A drop in the bucket, a brick in the wall at a time – sooner or later you’re talking about something concrete.

A blog entirely made up of perfect posts? Impossible.

A single, excellent blog post? Time consuming and very rare.

100 posts of variable quality? That’s easy enough. It’s enough volume to cover over the posts you feel shy about, and enough opportunities that a few will clear that nice low bar with ease.

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Being prolific

How many ideas have you lost out of pure inertia?

I don’t just mean all the ideas you’ve had that you never did anything about – you lost those too, but many of them probably weren’t that good anyway. 

Doing something with an idea is often the fastest way to check if it’s important. You might do a bit of research and write down what you do, or seek out the right person for a conversation, or see if you can make something happen. If it turns out not to be important, or if it isn’t for you, that’s fine – you’ve cleared the decks for a new idea which might be a keeper. A stagnant pool of vague ideas costs you new ideas.

But the ideas you really lose, the good ones, are the ones you find down the rabbit hole once you’ve taken action on an idea and confirmed that there’s something to it. Things get more specific on contact with reality (or the customer!), and vague ideas begin to take concrete form, and new vistas of questions and actions open up.

This is what I mean by being prolific: making fast, small, low-cost decisions; taking action; trying things out. I don’t mean mindlessly, throwing proverbial mud on the wall. And of course there’s an equal and opposite principle of focusing and going deep. But you only go deep by diving in.

So if you think you’ve got good idea – why not take it for a test drive?

Why not now?