Leveraging mental models to evaluate systems and process failures in a startup.
It's less intimidating than it reads.
Day two, trying this daily journaling thing again. Warning: if I get consistent at this, your inbox will be filled with my random thoughts and ideas from daily journaling. I wouldn’t want anything to do with it. Take a few minutes to unsubscribe.
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I was able to leverage a small handful of mental-models to evaluate a recent opportunity for strategic problem solving we’re working through. Yay! You’re dying to look under the hood. I’ll take you there.
Looking at the business and the remote team, we’ve been getting tons of stuff done. It’s inspiring. Honestly, for such a small team to accomplish so much, so quickly and make so much impact… I’m proud. As we continue to knock stuff of our collective list, the backlog of features, to-do’s, experiments, exercises, activities and so-on has expanded by orders of magnitude.
Upon deeper thought it became clear to me that we were running into an availability bias (or availability heuristic) situation, where we were working on the most recent thing that could be recalled. If we entered 100 new to-dos or ideas over the course of the week for example, when the productivity from Monday was done, we were looking at the new, supposedly more important items, from Friday (because of availability bias, we were assigning more value to the newer tasks). You may think this can be resolved by a sprint framework (and you might be right), but another perspective is that when you’re in a bootstrapped startup, priorities crop up and generalists get pulled in every direction. Fun. Moving on, there’s also a survivorship bias situation at play, as whatever's hit the backlog, remains in the backlog and whatever’s survived/new… gets worked on. I’m painting broad strokes here of course. We don’t just blindly throw things in the backlog, but we have relied a bit much on intuition over a system or process of structured analysis. This over-reliance on intuition vs a short pause for deep thought (think fast vs slow thinking) has been a company character flaw that we are working on correcting. When one pauses to asses the impact, priority and commitment associated with a task, that person not only creates a good habit but accomplishes a valuable exercise to the benefit of herself and the organization.
So what’s the solution? Well there are a lot of potential solutions to this, my favorite thus far, and the one we are primarily fiddling with, is scoring… and team-buy-in is a must. We tried scoring once before and it failed because we didn't have sufficient buy in. I, personally, am primarily responsible for its initial failure as my heavy bias towards action detracted from thoughtful, data driven decision making and it ultimately created more work for everyone. We’ve re-approached it with a buy-in first strategy and are scoring using a quasi-fibonacci sequence of 0, 1, 3, 5, 7 (there are two 1s and an 8 instead of a 7 in a Fibonacci sequence and I ought to find out how the heck we landed at this set of numbers, but I am more thoughtful on battles I choose these days); with 0 being the highest value and 7 being the lowest. This sequence helps avoid the inherently lazy thinking we find to be associated with the traditional 1-10 or 1-5 score. We’re scoring Impact, Priority, and Commitment (time to complete) and then using a fairly simple mathematical formula to come up with a score in our Notion boards. After scoring, we’re checking if there is an associated OKR with each item, the existence (or lack thereof) of an associated OKR is another critical factor in our scoring model. The benefits to me are obvious, with the icing on the carrot cake (the objective winner in a cake quality competition) being another move towards a culture of data-driven decision making and a second-order outcome of perhaps being able to eventually score human productivity with KPIs and dashboards.
P.S. What do you do when you have tons of ideas and you humbly think they’re all brilliant? (1) Score them; (2) ask people what their ideas are to solve similar problems without sharing your idea; (3) ask people to poke holes in your idea; (4) pick one (he who chases two rabbits, catches neither); (5) remember, awesome ideas are almost meaningless. I designed a concept for mobile wallets and digital payments when I was 10 or 11 years old. I couldn’t execute (for what I think are obvious reasons). Brilliant ideas don’t make for outliers… focus and execution do.
P.P.S. I think it would be easy to make this post much longer, but I’m leaning towards succinct > novella. Please let me know what you prefer.
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