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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.

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Igniters and “slow-cookers”

I am starting this without a title, maybe in the end it doesn’t even become a post.

Just like this, I started today without a title, as I was not very excited about it. But I have discovered a great risk for my life e for my future.

“There is one thing that never changes, and that’s the change itself. “

Some important philosopher

Maybe that quotation is another thing that never changes.

For all of my life I have been the one who embraced change, and made sense of it. That is a fact, as much as I am not the one that pushes the change. Most of the times I do not cause it, as I have got in my life people who do it, and I can tell you, they do it very well!

They are good igniters, and that is the very best term for them, as they start fires, but they aren’t good to keep it burning, it is not of their nature. After some time, I found out I am this slow-cook kind of person, I just keep it burning.

I accepted this situation, and made it profitable to those around me. It set them free to have their crazy ideas and to change as much as they want. They have their back covered.

That was never a secret, and I was talking to some friends about it, when I realized this: what if they stop trying to change, and they settle down? Who is going fuel me with something different and amazing to solve?

That would be a life changer, not to have anybody to keep changing my life.

The danger I saw was that I was trying to stop my igniters to do their part, by not giving them space for that.

If you understand the importance of changes, and see them as positive, always remember to have around these 2 kinds of people, the igniters and the “slow-cookers”. It does not apply only for business, but for personal life also.

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One step at a time, a dozen a day…

The best way to change, is by beginning it small.

Today it is easy to come to this conclusion, but it was not always like this. Actually I had to fail miserably to understand that.

I am going to put myself as a third person from now on, because I am not that guy anymore.

I am very proud of that guy! He accomplished many good things with such an ease that maybe I wouldn’t.

He was a young architecture student who had to produce a poster for a big company. A world map showing where they were making business.

He knew what to do, even at that young age he have already had produced several good things!

As he was adventurous, he made a plan! He was going to the next level using another tool that seemed to be the best at that time!

But he didn’t know how much effort he would have to put into doing both, making the job and learning the new tool.

His plans at that time were limited to the tools he would use, and the visual he would get, not planning as I see today.

Today I see that that was his biggest mistake, he tried to do it all, at once, without seeing the risks of changing.

I am also grateful for that fail today, as I keep using it to make my transformation decisions.

After that I still see as big and far as before, but now I do it one step at a time, a dozen a day.

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It’s nice to see you here!

If you got to this site, it’s probably because we got in touch!

If that’s not your case, I’m even happier that you came here! It means I might have something that you need!

In all cases, right now you will be able to know me a little better through my social accounts, I’m leaving here my LinkedIn, that, so far, is the one I have been updating the most!

Enjoy your day!

Luiz Alberto Crema
Thriving Through Transformation

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Je suis content que vous êtes ici!

Si vous êtes ici, c’est presque certain parce que nous déjà nous avons retrouvé !

Se ce n’est pas le cas, je suis le plus content que vous êtes arrivé ! Ça signifie que je pourrai vous aider avec quelques chôse que vous avez envie !

En tous les cas, maintenant vous pouvez me connaître meilleur dans mes réseaux sociaux . Je partage ici mon LinkedIn que c’est lequelle que j’actualise le plus!

Profitez votre jour!

Luiz Alberto Crema
S’épanouir Grâce à la Transformation