meish dot org: life, unfolding

For the past year or so, I’ve been the consumer experience lead for Social Media initiatives and projects within my company, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do is to influence and change not just what we do, but the way that we do it – because, as Fun Boy Three (and Bananarama) once said, that’s what gets results.

I strongly believe that the way we behave, think, act has an enormous impact on what we do, and changing that can be the first step towards revolutionising what a company does. Even just resolving to think in a new way about a situation can be enormously effective, and not just in the field of innovation and social media.

My experience has shown that committing to behaving in a particular way – or committing to base decisions on a particular mindset – is a great first step for a company which may not be as flexible and entrepreneurial as it might have once been, and it makes it easier to actually get things done.

With this in mind, at the beginning of last summer, I devised a set of operating assumptions for the social media team, inspired in part by some of the Getting Real approach, which we then iterated within the team to create a common charter. Since then, we’ve been sharing our approach with colleagues internally, and the operating principles which we try to embed into everything we do.

It certainly seems to have helped people understand not just what we were doing but why we were making certain decisions, and what is driving a particular course of action, which may otherwise seem puzzling within the context of traditional ways of working within the organisation.

I thought it might be interesting to share them here:

1. There are no sacred cows: If there is a different, better way of doing something, we should do it. Challenge what doesn’t work and change it.
2. Simple, effective and quick always trumps comprehensive, complex and late.
3. Think small scale: Less features, less people involved, less time, less money. Vary the scope, not the timeframe. Start small, then scale.
4. Think big picture: Work from the top down: what is the vision? Then what details will help to get us there?
5. Embrace and be inspired by constraints: Creativity happens when we are solving problems.
6. Everything is a work in progress: We iterate by default.
7. Everything starts with the user: We conceive and design and develop with users in mind – solving users’ problems, helping users to be amazing. Then we get out of their way.
8. We focus effort on making things real: Prototypes and alphas are better than hypotheticals and mockups. We’d rather spend time doing things than writing or talking about doing things: PRDs should follow prototypes, not precede them.
9. Learn from users: We watch the user experience unfolding in real time. Look for patterns in real data, be flexible and open to change tack, listen to users.
10. We make decisions quickly and then move on: We are empowered. We make lots of little decisions, and are prepared to kill things if they’re not working.
11. We think like a network: Think about platforms and services rather than one-off solutions. Make it easy to integrate everything, to weave features, products and services across experiences. What we do should be easily found and felt.
12. We celebrate success and learn from failure: It’s ok to get things wrong, as long as we realise quickly and learn from the experience.

Incidentally, there’s nothing company confidential in the points above – it’s just an effective way of working which I’ve been developing with my team…but you’ll have to wait and see what we’re achieving by working this way ;)