"Here's to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
Think Different

Consequences of Corporate Culture

This morning I was overthinking corporate culture and storytelling in the shower, as you do, when it hit me. I was trying to figure out why companies should care about their culture. I knew it was important; companies with healthy cultures usually had a great vibe in the company and people were generally happier, but what was the impact on the bottom line?
My Eureka moment was realising that culture defines what the default option is in each and every decision made in your company.

The culture in your company defines what the default option is for tiny decisions such as “What shall I wear to the office today?” and “Am I allowed to help this customer?” to “Should we present this to the board at all?”
Every non-default decision requires a mix of effort, energy and guts that I call Leadership. Which means that most decisions are made by default, even if you have great leaders. So I will wear whatever is acceptable at work. I will stick to procedure when helping customers. And I probably do not make that particular presentation to the board.

So the trick to get people making correct decisions is to make sure that the default option is the correct one. Some people say it is impossible to change culture. I disagree and think it is merely extremely hard and takes a lot of time and dedication. The secret ingredient is to have values and communicate how a decision is framed by those values. Which of course means living by your values as well :)

So this is where Storytelling becomes an important Leadership tool. By not only living our values, but communicating about them with Value Stories we can slowly shift corporate culture into making the correct decision the default decision.

Our Business Environment: From Connect Four to Chess to Poker

Until not too long ago, the second half of the 1800s, all business was like playing Connect Four.
The playing field was known, strategies were simple and if you could see a couple of moves ahead you would do well. This was the realm of bakers, farmers, tailors and fishermen.

Then came along the Industrial Revolution and the game changed. Over the course of 1 or 2 generations the game changed from Connect Four to Chess. It was a completely different game.
Mom & pop shops all over the world went out of business because they could no longer compete with cheap mass-produced goods out of the big factories. Planning and predictability became the name of the new game. Resource utilisation, economies of scale, supply chain management and budgets became important tools for senior management to move us pawns across a huge chess board.

But the good news is the game is changing again. Information asymmetry is gone. Fuelled by the internet in general and social media in particular consumers know more than ever, possibly more than you do. The world around us is being commoditised as Joe Pine explains nicely in his TED Talk about the The Experience Economy. And to add insult to injury cause and effect are becomes more and more fuzzy.
The world is rapidly changing to playing Texas Hold’em Poker. No amount of willing or trying will make a game of poker predictable.
The trick of the game is to learn. In an individual game you need to learn what cards your opponents have; over the course of multiple games you need to learn what playing style your opponents have and their tells.

What kind of company are you working for? Are they trying to know and predict everything? Do they have ‘The Plan’? They are still playing chess then. There is a reason serious chess players play with a clock. Given unlimited time they would never make a move.
One of the biggest hands in poker was for $5,897,501, the difference between 1st and 2nd place in the 2006 World Series of Poker. You can see it here.
Even for this hand there was no clock. It would have been pointless anyway.
Poker players know they won’t know everything, not the cards of your opponent and the cards that still need to be drawn. What they do is figure out what the possible scenarios are and try to learn as much as possible, usually by investing (betting) money.
So? Does your company have THE plan? Or does it have a few scenarios and is it betting small while trying to learn? Which one do you think is more more likely to win at poker?

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Stoos Connect! A week later..

The dust is finally starting to settle on Stoos Connect. What a day it was. 20+ lightning talks, 75 local participants, 24 remote viewing locations between San Francisco and Melbourne and another 100 or so remote viewers. Everything about it blew my mind.
I am looking to do a retrospective about the day in a week. So here are my observations and hope you will add yours.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Interest

Interest was and is extremely high. We probably had between 400-600 participants and a line-up of big names. There is a lot of work to be done before we get to the tipping point, but I see Stoos making the first decent inroads into the early adopters.

Technical difficulties

We had quite a few technical difficulties. Most notably the videos in the presentation by Jaap Peters. The video by Daniel Pink later ran fine, so one of the lessons would be to not play videos from within Powerpoint.
Slides from the remote locations were also problematic. So I would probably just ban them next time.
It was hard to connect to the central location. Skype refused to let me make a Stoos Connect account for some reason and I had to use my personal one.
There were some quality issues with remote presenters. Overall it was good enough.

The video problem was the most annoying by far. We need to test this better next time.

Organisational Issues

Some speakers spoke too long. Need to be more strict on it, but also make it more visible for them. Because of all the other issues I forgot to install my iPad with a countdown clock.
Wanting to keep costs down I did not include dinner with the price of the ticket. This costs us quite a bit of time as everyone had to pay individually.

Network expands

The ambition of the Stoos Network is slowly moving towards a movement of movements. How do we connect all of the different movements, ideas, organisations etc to facilitate that tipping point. During the preparation I kept getting suggestions for other people and movements. And even after the fact. As I type this I get a Twitter message pointing me towards what looks like another awesome group.

Not connecting outside enough

Because of these issues we did not connect to other satellites as much as I would have liked. We did get to see a few satellites, but I wanted to involve them more. Need to schedule more time for that.
We also did not use the backchannels like Twitter enough. Really should figure out how to include that more.

Self-organisation works!

I am extremely happy with the way the organisation was run. I was the one with the original idea, but especially Sander took upon himself a lot of work. Sander took care of the website, the eventbrite page and the video part. Especially the last part was done way better than anything I could have dreamt up. I would have had a camera record it. They came up with a 3 camera setup, video mixer, audio, presentation laptops, skype laptops, live streaming laptop. The livestream was way better because of them. And once we get the videos edited I am sure the results will be stunning.
But also being open to people suggesting speakers. Some of the highest rated speakers were speakers that were invited not by me, but others.

Slack saved my live

We build in a LOT of slack. We planned to be at the venue way too early. So my train breaking down, the forgotten cable or the audio problems weren’t the end of the world. In the schedule I had planned a maximum of 45-50 minutes for every hour. And 30 minute breaks instead of 15. It was still not enough, but we did managed.

Speaker quality varied greatly

Almost every agreed that some speakers were much better than others. What most people disagree on is which speakers were good and which ones bad. Take Vlatka for example: A few people thought it was not all that inspiring, many more found it great to have a scientific background to what they felt was right. Some people thought Niels was just bashing management, others found him thought-provoking. In a remote satellite 3 managers got into a heated debate what it meant for their company. So that is mission accomplished.

Conclusion

It was an awesome event. Certainly for the first time. When I started on this journey 6 months ago I was not sure how it was going to pan out. I remember finding a venue that was nice, but not too expensive, so I would not lose a lot of money if it failed.
I remember having booked Jurgen Appelo and Niels Pflaeging and thinking I at least had some names on the list people recognised.
Turned out even more people know Steve Denning, Daniel Pink and Roger Martin.
All in all I think it was an amazing event. Feedback has been great so far. The technical problems sucked and we need to learn for next events, but we do need to remember we did something not many people have done before: Having a truly global conference where both audience and speakers were not in the room. I still feel humbled, proud and excited when I think about the day.
I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions in the comments.

PS: My awesome co-organiser Sander Huijsen now has some free time and is looking for a new challenge. If you or anyone else you know needs a Java/C/Android developer and/or Scrum Master/Agile Coach, take a look at: http://imagile.nl. He gets things done.

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My ultimate KPI: My funeral

This morning I was told one of the students in a storytelling course I ran passed away. She died of a heart attack while on holiday.
Now I did not know her very well, I only trained her for a few hours, but it still got to me. She was nice and outgoing with a bubbly personality. Someone you take an instant liking to. And more importantly she was about my age. Somewhere in her thirties probably.

>> continue reading…

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Review of Drive Workshop

The Drive Workshop is a workshop that is based on and developed in cooperation with Daniel Pink, the author of the book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The tagline of the workshop is “Using autonomy, mastery and purpose to transform your organization and yourself” and that is exactly what I love about the workshop. Instead of rehashing the concepts of the book, the purpose of the workshop is to create an action plan on how to use the concepts in the book to, surprise surprise, transform your organization and yourself.

>> continue reading…

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The Blue Zone: Where change and leadership happens

In april 2008 I got one of my worst assignments of my entire career. Or so I thought at the time. I did not find out until way after the fact it was the best. But I digress. My assignment was to help a client fix a bug in a small, not too important application. Not a dream job by any stretch of the imagination, but made worse, much worse, when I finally had the code installed. To call it badly written code would be a grave insult to badly written code everywhere. I spend 2 weeks trying to wrap my head around the code and in the end changed 2 lines to fix it.
And then the client was so happy they wanted me to stay to fix some more things. And of course my employer agreed.
So I was stuck in the worst possible job for another 2 months. This is where I discovered the Blue Zone.

>> continue reading…

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