Month: March 2020

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The summer is gone…

The summer is gone, the crops are under snow and we are stuck at home, no way to get out after a major blizzard.

There are many stories about preparing to the bad times while we are in the good ones.

Personally, I heard fewer stories of those who, during bad times, in spite of getting desperate, or even hibernating, and waiting for the good times to come again, spent that time preparing to speed up the come back.

Independently if there is a crisis or not, record every good idea you have, even if you don’t have time to put it in place due to all the daily activities, these would be our “standby bank”.

We know that everything will change even if we are part of the cause, or the consequence. When we are part of the cause, and we are driving change, the main effort is to face the inertia of the “status quo”.

What if this force gets into standby, and we are part of the consequence of a change?

This is the time for us to pick every idea we had in our “standby bank”, or even in those changes we were suffering to put in place in the good times, and use them as a contingency plan.

Then, the effect of our changes will become stronger, and when the blizzard is gone, and the sun is shining, we will feel like we are up to speed quicker, but in the the end, we didn’t even stop.

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Too much effort for such a small reward

How my daughter came to the conclusion she didn’t want to play a game?

For some weeks, my 11 years old daughter, fan of Harry Potter, asked me to let her install Wizards Unite, the “game that all her friends play”.

She was asking me that because I put parental control on her phone, and I use that to be able to negotiate with her what she can, or cannot do with it.

It was the end of winter vacations, and she came with a strategy to convince me to install the game. She would have it installed for one day, just to understand how the game is, and probably share the experience with her friends.

I approved her strategy, and added some conditions to, perhaps, let her keep the game installed after that.

The first condition was her to produce a report explaining her experience, in a very specific format: two letter sized pages, typed on the computer, font size 12, single space and straight margins.

The second condition was me to read it and be able to understand the game and evaluate if she could keep the game installed.

The third condition was that she should deliver me this report the next day, until noon.

She started to study about writing and text production, she is reading books and articles about that. My intention with the challenge I proposed was to help her train those skills based on something she legitimately desired.

As we came to an agreement, I let her install and play the game. Of course, the game is very well produced, and designed to have all her attention, starting with simple, yet challenging missions. In less than 30 minutes she was already asking to go to the park nearby, to hunt monsters and earn extra points.

I went there with her right after, and actually helped her playing, asking how to control, and helping her to perform some enchantments and potions. After we came back home, I realized she was still with her phone, but not playing the game anymore, she was talking to her friend while watching a video.

At this moment I started asking her about her report, as in the beginning she was with a notebook taking notes about the game.

Without further ado, she has gone to her computer and started typing her impressions. The first paragraph was enough, because her friend was back from her vacations trip and invited her to play. She got very happy with that, as she didn’t see her friend for 3 weeks now. In the end of that night, I turned off her computer with that first paragraph still there.

After that, watching TV, I asked her again about the report, and the answer surprised me. In her words, she explained that the game was good, and she enjoyed playing it, but she knew that my wife and I would not let her play all the time, and also we wouldn’t let her go out to play it in the streets alone – and yes, she was right about it – therefore all the effort of making a two pager would not worth it. It was too much for such a small reward.

I still don’t have a specific outcome for what happened. She never asked to install it again. I understand that her conclusion, and the maturity it took to make it, made me very proud of her, but I confess I was waiting for a different end to this story.

I hoped that the game would be good enough to keep her motivated and accomplish her task, even with the fact that her friend calling her to play in the mean time and the restrictions we could make after that, but it was not.

Her goal was to finish the report at noon about her experience. Right now, 11:58AM, I have just finished this “report”.

P.S.: I wrote this on Jan 4th, and after more than 2 months, she never mentioned about the game again, what confirms my conclusion at that time.

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A short stride, a long path.

I was talking to my friend a moment ago, and he was afraid of the outcomes of the last pandemics.

At this moment, I realized that these global events, with huge impact everywhere were not my priority right now.

It doesn’t mean I don’t care, actually I do, because it is changing most of what is going to happen to me in the shorter term.

In the last two years, I opted to make a greater change in my personal life, without even knowing about the outcomes of it in the longer term.

Big changes doesn’t mean quick changes, it takes some time and a lot of preparation to digest so many new things. So, in spite of looking of every change on the long term, and freezing due to the incapacity of solving all of them because there are events that does not depend on you, I opted to look at the smaller goals in the next step.

The way I define the next step is that action I can take alone, without depending on others.

My family and I depend on so many factors that whichever decision or move we make right now towards our goal is just another lucky guess. The current situation doesn’t change that, it is just another factor to be aware of.

We need to finish the current step to look ahead with some perspective. There are several paths to take, and we are studying them from far, just like the options that are given to us by Google Maps when we need to go a different city to visit, and we need to define if we want to go by bus, car or train, if we want to go by the toll route, or we are fine getting some traffic, or even if it worths going.

The long path ahead will require many adjustments in our directions. Being able to look to the sides, and see the surroundings is mandatory in this case, and for that we are walking with a short stride.

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Change, before you have to.

Today I was introduced to an old quotation that summarizes most of my decisions, I mean, the ones I made consciently.

“Change, before you have to.”

Jack Welch

Sometimes you have to accept some external and uncontrollable risks on your life, because you wouldn’t be able to avoid, transfer or mitigate them. But this doesn’t mean you won’t have to have a contingency plan ready.

My contingency plan to changes I cannot control is creating my own changes, learning something new, getting out of a comfort zone, trying and learning new things and being creative!

The fact that we build a new status actually drives us towards the opportunities around that, and those old risks lose importance, as we moved away from the previous status.

Change to have a new perspective and see the external and uncontrollable changes the size they really are.

Then you will be able to stop only seeing them as threatening risks, and open yourself to turn them into valuable opportunities that now you can capture, and thrive through transformation.

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“Ah-ha!” moment

Today I was presented to an unconventional way to report about my learnings on an event. I was supposed to describe my “Ah-ha!” moments and why I had them.

This approach is about your discoveries, your “Eureka” moments, and seemed to be very well received by all the participants of the event. It made me rethink about my capacity of making every opportunity an “Ah-ha!” moment.

It is interesting because you can add more color to some facts that should seem secondary at a first glance, such as the behaviors and small attitudes you saw.

Sometimes we are so involved into our experience, that we don’t feel able to learn from others and see through their perspective. We forget that every opportunity may take a round “Ah-ha!” from our mouth!

We may already know what is being exposed to us. We know that so much that we already forgot how we started it, the difficulties we have gone through to make it as natural as it is right now.

But when we force ourselves to look at that experiences with a discovery perspective, and we remember all the effort we had. The “Ah-ha!” is stronger, because we learn again, and now with some background.

Now I am very glad to have learned and applied this new approach.

Looking forward to my next “Ah-ha!”

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Something new happened! Old news…

I am happy to announce that I have a blog! It is brand new, just three months old!

When I wrote that first paragraph, I saw the word “old” there, and it made me think about the process of starting it an how it is deeply related to transformation.

This blog is not old, nor it is new anymore, as there are some posts before this one.

When new ideas come, we make tryouts, prototypes, we discuss it, create expectations alone or in small groups. That’s what I did here, and all this effort is not seen as change yet, as nothing is different from before.

We understand all of this as “change” after it is announced and involve more people because then it becomes tangible, there is a pressure to have it solved, at this point, it doesn’t matter if the change will take place or not, it has to become the new status quo or to be terminated.

That’s how changes happen, they are never brand new. They are always there, under the surface, growing quietly as whispers. We can sense them, but they are not clear yet.

They need to become a change when they already have momentum, a starting force that provides inertia to be resilient against all the opposing forces that will try to stop them.

In Project Management we use the kick-off meeting, where a lot of effort has taken place and its time to announce to all the team and the stakeholders it is an actual project.

In my case, I am creating a posting routine, maintaining it for some months before announcing it, so here it goes…

I started my brand new, three months old, blog!

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This change is so simple! Why does it take so long?

When we start thinking about transformation and changes, there are two good quotations to keep in mind:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

Leon C. Megginson

Nature does not make jumps

Charles Darwin

The first one is intimately related to the second, even though people tend to prefer one over another, depending on their role in the change process.

Those who are promoting change, generally refer to the first phrase, the survival of the fittest, as a mantra to justify their actions and to add speed to the change.

They are right, but when we talk about speed, then we need to respect the second quotation and their defenders. There are no leaps when we talk about nature.

Technological leaps are happening in front of our eyes, and we’re caught amazed by that. Common people like us have access to an incredible number of tools which we can’t fathom the idea of where they are from, or even how they work.

Then the second quotation remembers us that we are still natural beings, and we need to be aware that for us to absorb something new takes time.

A new paradigm, a new information, a new environment, all of those take time to understand, to desire, to know, to perform and to sustain it.

The excitement around the novelties has its extreme opposite right beside it: the fear of not being able to handle it.

That may be the reason newer generations* are not afraid of being disruptive, as for them, everything is new, one way or another. They are faster to adhere and sustain changes.

Environments such as communities, companies and teams are generally a mix of generations. When they are pushed into changes, it is important to understand their generation balance to determine their level of resiliency.

Understanding the level of resiliency of this groups will lead to the correct planning of each change, and the overall transformation of an environment.

That, added to the pressure for the change, will determine the speed of change, independently of how simple it seems to be.

*Generation here is not restricted to physiological age. It expands to the time this person is exposed to a paradigm or a process.

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We have a problem!

After setting up a WhatsApp group with my neighbors, I found out that we were not as secure as we thought. Too many things were going on around us that we simply ignored, because we couldn’t know what was beyond our sight.

We got scared, even without having any real trouble happening directly with us. That fear was our motivation to gather around and solve the problem!

It was amazing! We created a strong relationship with our neighbors and solved our problem with a simple and effective solution. End of story!

No, it was not the end of the story, we “created” a new problem that became harder to solve.

We put in place monthly meetings to discuss the performance of the solution, shared the minutes of the meetings with everyone, created surveys to collect their opinion, and several other good initiatives risen. We had energy and enthusiasm to bring new ideas and make them happen!

But, with the solution of the greater problem – security – people started to feel comfortable. There was nothing else compelling them to be part of the meetings, or even to collaborate with their opinions in the WhatsApp group. It is easy to understand. Why to use your energy to solve a problem that doesn’t exist anymore?

What we discovered then was that our solution would be as good as the commitment of the neighbors to keep it. For when people got relaxed, we experienced some smaller security problems. Nothing to fear yet, but they were there.

We also known that we needed a minimal number of neighbors to sustain our solution, and if they were not concerned anymore, we wouldn’t be able to sustain the solution at its best.

This problem we created was not as big as the first one, but took much more effort to solve exactly because of the difficulty to prioritize it throughout the community. The monthly meetings were getting empty, and people didn’t care to answer our surveys.

After some time struggling, our best strategy to overcoming it was by accepting that we would only have full meetings and surveys answered if there was a real need for that, and we focused on specific meetings, with a tangible purpose, even though it sometimes was with a smaller audience.

The engagement risen with that, because we were adding value every time we met, and those who attend smaller meetings with their problem solved are prone to interact with bigger events.

Today I use that experiences lessons learned in the transformation project I’m involved. When the primary motivator for a project or a process is already gone for good, don’t be afraid to change your paradigms, remodel your ways, find new goals to keep moving forward.

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Open Data equals Governmental Data?

Today I attended to an interesting event around open data. My expectations were around seeing how governments share their data, who is able to use it and at what extend.

My expectations were not wrong, but there was a plot twist in the end!

Overall, there is a pressure from the population to get good, reliable and current information.

We are not only talking about data analysts, scientists or these kind of people anymore, it is about the couples getting married and need to find a registered religious official (and yes, this is the most downloaded data from Ontario’s data service).

Now that the process of gathering data and providing open data is almost settled, the governmental open data sources are taking the next step by making all those raw data become something digestible, with charts, maps and even storytelling, directly from their source.

The challenges are big, and they worth it, as this is one of the ways to avoid governments to take unilateral decisions, and also promote individuals or companies to work with this data, and in this case, it doesn’t really matter if they are willing to have direct profit out of this.

If I stop my text here, it all makes sense, as we are talking about governments that do it all based on laws*.

Then there was this presentation of a vehicle tracking company, that has more than 3 million sensors installed, and they have a humongous set of information sitting idle there at their servers. They had this big idea, why not turning it a by-product** and open this to the great public, for free? It is not a new idea, and surely Google is the first, but not only, company that already does that successfully.

Why did I consider it as a plot twist? Because I was not expecting it and because they found a way to create value for their company through open data. That intangible asset was passive and now became active, growing their visibility to new and diverse markets that they wouldn’t be able to reach with their core business.

*The fact that it is something that governments must do, doesn’t decrease the value of the teams that perform it. It was amazing to see the excitement of the presenters around their work and around the new challenges they had ahead!

**All concerns regarding to privacy were answered during the presentation and can be explained by the company.

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Everything is working so well. Let’s change it!

I have developed an efficient process and an Excel tool to support it two years ago. The team is happy with it, and have been using it and showing results! Success!

Now they are calling me again to change it. Why?

If you have already used Excel, you will feel like me. In a nutshell, you are able to create whatever you want, ready in the speed of a cheetah, and available to everybody through a cloud server with versioning control.

Then changing may not be a feasible option, as everything is fine. If you think like this, you are right, no need to change, at all.

Two years ago, there was no structured process, it was an endeavor which the results were unknown, and Excel excels in that case.

Now, the process has settled, and it requires continuous improvement – side note, it was built to a CI team – and scalability, decentralization, accessibility and agility are the new requirements for this process.

Now the tool became the bottleneck of this process, and that’s change is required. Added to that, the company evolved their digital solutions, and have some pretty good tools broadly available now , why not use them?

Instead of choosing the tool blindly, and deploying it, we are taking a step back, and understanding the tools available and comparing them against the business requirements, putting weights to them.

We are aware that the perception of value for each requirement changes, and at this moment, the weights for the requirements are enabled to change, as the tests are run.

Again, everything is working so well, why change, and have all this work around it?

My current answer to this is because it is important to have structured decision, even if the decision is not to change.