This is Day Thirteen in the 30 Days of Reinvention Video Series [#30DaysReinvention].
Become more mindful of unnecessary frictions.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Hey it’s Rand,
The more fuel you have the greater ability you have to break through inertial constraints, the greater ability you have to overcome roadblocks that can hold you back.
Let’s run through a few question and answer sets to illustrate how this works. You can answer for yourself or for your business.
Do you embrace failure?
Are you A – Failure is never considered a viable option, and I do not encourage a culture of questioning.
Are you B – My culture encourages orthogonal thinking, taking risks, and failure is expected, but this is more talk than walk.
Are you C -My culture encourages orthogonal, out of the box thinking, taking risks, and failure is expected, but this practice is sandboxed to limited groups within my team.
Or finally, are you D – My culture encourages orthogonal thinking, taking risks and failure in all parts of my team.
Here’s another one:
Are your decisions data-driven?
Are you A – I don’t use any machine learning or deep-learning algorithms to make decisions.
Are you B – I use some reporting systems to collate and analyse some data, but decisions don’t hinge on this.
Are you C – Actionable decision-making is driven by the analysis of complex learning algorithms.
Or are you D – I have integrated complex learning algorithms into my activities.
Are you starting to get it yet?
Let’s try another one.
Do you have a mission or meta-purpose?
Are you A – My mission is purely profit-oriented, and based on generating superior products and services.
Are you B – My mission is profit-oriented, and based on generating superior products and services, and also includes a set of core organisational values.
Are you C – My mission is to make a difference for my entire ecosystem of people, be they part of my team, partners or suppliers.
Or are you D – My meta-purpose is to make a difference for the entire planet.
Examples of such a meta-purpose are:
- Increasing world empathy
- Organising the world’s information.
How do you rate on this scale?
What is your mission?
What is your meta-purpose?
Let me change tack with another question:
How asset intensive are you?
Are you A – Except for a small number of peripherals, such as printers, all of the assets I use are owned by me.
Are you B – I make use of a limited number of on-demand services, such as cloud computing.
Are you C – On-demand assets and services are used in a number of my activities, such as leasing office space.
Or are you D – On-demand assets and services are used in many of my activities, including mission-critical activities.
Where are you on this spectrum?
Would you consider A to be higher friction than D?
Hopefully you are starting to see a pattern here as I’ve purposefully arranged the answers so that they range from high to low friction: A is higher friction than B; B is higher friction than C; and C is higher friction than D.
Apply this thinking to all of your activities and become more mindful of how many unnecessary frictions there are that can be removed.