A well-run organization, with highly motivated and aligned people, is a powerful form of high art. It includes the performance art of your people delivering services and coordinating activities at scale and it has artifacts, symbols, and physical art that have the potential to leave a profound impression on the people it touches. The art manifests in and through all of the layers of the organization’s culture.
The motivation of the people you surround yourself with is the wellspring of creativity in your life.
There is a complex relationship between motivation, psychological safety, the structure you impose, and the innovation that results. It is not as simple as you might think. The guru on the subject, author Amy Edmonson, Ph.D., coined the term ‘psychological safety’ and has spent the bulk of her career as a professor and researcher at Harvard University studying teams, teaming, and the dynamics of this phenomenon.
The greatest of leaders shift the thinking and behaviors of those they lead in ways that cause more caring and more influence through competence. They transform the thinking of those they serve by shifting the language of the group from “I” to “We” thinking at scale. Their work transforms their followers into leaders, through language, by empowering them to each scale both caring and influence in their work. The most successful leaders craft language, create tools, and follow through with actions that allow their leadership to resonate for generations. Natural leaders have an uncanny ability to inspire others into action to create sustainable, long-lasting positive results. They do it by purposefully scaling both the capacity for influence and the capacity for caring in those they lead.
Great leaders profoundly scale the capacity for caring and the capacity for influence of the people they lead.
Pathways to Growth for Mature Organizations and Startups
Of course, large enterprises can innovate, but it is harder for them than for startups. Many do not know where to begin. They look back and recall how, as a startup, they discovered the product-market fit that made them successful. And now, in full growth mode, they attack innovation with the mindset of growth they have today – which does not work.
Commitment is rare. Building a culture of commitment in your organization accelerates trust.
People often avoid making small interpersonal commitments because they are risky. According to Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning and prolific academic, we value loss about twice as much as we value gains, thus it follows that we are more likely to avoid a negative experience resulting from a missed promise than to take the unnecessary risk of making a commitment. However, when you make commitments and keep them, even small promises, it builds trust faster. Being purposeful about the promises and commitments you make to your customers, your colleagues, and your friends can transform your business and even your life. Building commitment into your culture and empowering your people to make measured and valuable commitments can have a big impact on how you earn trust. Companies often make contractual guarantees and issue warranties because they know how important commitments are, but the small promises that are made every day, through normal interactions can be just as important in helping your people and your firm earn trust from your customers. Lots of small, valuable interpersonal commitments add up, over time, and can be even more valuable to the people you serve than those big corporate commitments that we tout in our marketing materials. This small tactic also has the ability to transform your internal culture by boosting internal trust between colleagues. As long as the intent to keep them is certain.
Product builders chasing the elusive product-market fit move through two key stages in pursuit of long-term product success. The work they do on the path to product-market fit is a lot different than it is after they’ve achieved it. And the difference in the approaches they take to this work is critical.
There’s more to creating effective documentation than merely gathering information. As a consumer of documentation, you know this to be true. Because you’ve been there. We all have.
At first enthused by the seeming treasure trove of information assembled to guide your learning and project progress, your excitement is quickly dashed as your search for the proverbial needle in a haystack drags on. What first appeared as the holy grail of actionable knowledge becomes a fruitless quest for that one elusive piece of information you need to move forward on a task. Sheepishly, you turn to a more experienced colleague and ask for a lifeline.
OWASP Accepts Tool For Re-use, Acknowledges as ‘Best Practice’
When a team of ITX developers recently created – and contributed – a new integration to the Open Web Application Security Project’s (OWASP) threat modeling tool (Threat Dragon), they were simply living the company’s culture. Continuous innovation, thriving together, and giving back to the community are pillars of the ITX value system.
The integration automatically pushes open, non-mitigated security threats created in Threat Dragon directly into our Jira backlog. ITX contributed the integration back to OWASP because we know there are a lot of dev teams in our community using Jira to manage their product backlog – especially if they’re doing it in an Agile mindset.
OWASP has accepted the contribution, even acknowledging ITX as a “Company Collaborator” and posting the integration as a best practice on its website.
To those in the digital product space, the term “Discovery Phase” will likely wash over us like many of the other oft-touted buzz words of our industry. But a healthy discovery process allows us to understand product-market fit and identify key user needs. What’s keeping us from incorporating this valuable learning into our products? We believe it’s either ignorance, intuition, or inertia that stands in the way of successful discovery.
If you’re concerned about security now that your team is working remotely, you’ve been doing it wrong.
Even as the economy slowly reopens, the global coronavirus pandemic is forcing many businesses to ask employees to continuing to work from home. While system security is always a top priority, a number of clients have only recently shared their security concerns now that their folks are working remotely.
