Hufflepuff Design (English Version)
Culture eats strategy for lunch
Organizational Design
The key is in understanding the organizational structure as your product; your collaborators, as your users. After this, everything begins to fall into place with a bit of research. Your first version won’t be the best, but with feedback from your users and analyzing the data from your results, step by step you’ll have a more satisfied and efficient team.
Is the user, stupid.
You stop there for a sec right? I hope you understand where the comma is and it becomes clear what I meant. There’s nothing more important than the user, every KPI, any performance metric, efficiency, o quality standard derives from your users, the members of your design team. And the key is to build trust, in abundance.
Trust
On a rational level there’s quite some debate between trust and control in an organization, on startups companies — specially on startups — in general there’s a tendency towards trust. Nevertheless something happens when the organization grows: we see the need to establish controls. The control it’s a sign of distrust and without realizing we give votes of no confidence every time we implement a new control on our team.
The achievement of goals and objectives happen in an organic way on our team. Time has taken me to this maximes about the human nature and work in general.
People is systematically kind, trustworthy, self-motivated, smart.
Money it’s not the only reason people work.
We aren’t infallible. We make mistakes, sometimes on purpose.
We are more than a job. We aren’t interchangeable, we’re unique.
There’s no performance without happiness. To be happy, I need motivation. To be motivated, I need responsability. To be responsable we need to understand why and to whom we are working, and be free to decide how.
Wholeness
A lot of old traditions, most fo what the budhism is after, is to find a higher purpose in life. A big chunk of the methodologies that our team has — performance reviews, 1 on 1s, meetings, team values — are designed with the goal of creating enough safe space to remove your professional mask, and reveal our true self as it is, venture in finding wholeness both individually and collectivelly.
For the system to work, it has been absolutely necessary to proctect the recruitment process. Only designers willing to lower their ego in favor of a common goal, where collaboration is the backbone of the design process.
Advice Process
There’s concepts, moments, milestones that set a before and after, for me as a team lead, it was the introduction of the Advice Process. Paraphrasing a Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations and Dennis Bakke. Generally we assume that decisions can only be taken in two ways: hierarchical authority — someone makes the final decision; where many end up frustrated, but at least we get to progress — or through concensus — everybody gets a say, but sometimes it tends to be painfully slow — . The Advice Process transcends this opposition beautifully : the agony of putting all the decisions through consensus is avoided, and yet everybody with a stake has been given a voice; people have the freedom to seize opportunities and make decisions and yet must take into account other people’s voices. The process is the key for our team. It’s so critic that it’s the only forced obligation to our team.
The Advice Process in practice creates community, humility, learning, and better decisions.
It draws people, whose advice is sought into the question at hand. They learn about the issue. The sharing of information reinforces the feeling of community. The person whose advice is sought feels honored and needed.
Second, asking for advice is an act of humility, which is one of the most important characteristics of a fun workplace. The act alone says, “I need you“. The decision maker and the adviser are pushed into a closer relationship. This makes it nearly impossible for the decision-maker to ignore the advice.
Third, making decisions is on-the-job education. Advice comes from people who have an understanding of the situation and care about the outcome. No other form of education or training can match this real-time experience.
Fourth, chances of reaching the best decision are greater than under conventional top-down approaches. The decision maker has the advantage of being closer to the issue and has to live with responsibility for the consequences of the decision. Advice provides diverse input, uncovering important issues and new perspectives.
Advice is simply advice. No colleague, whatever their importance, can tell a decision-maker what to decide. I can ask though questions, voice my opinion, but it’s the job of the designers to integrate conflicting perspectives into one decision.
No it’s not consensus
We often imagine decisions can be made in only two ways: either by the person with authority (someone calls the shots; some people might be frustrated; but at least things get done), or by unanimous agreement (everyone gets a say, but it can be frustratingly slow).
It is a misunderstanding that self-management decisions are made by getting everyone to agree, or even involving everyone in the decision. The advice seeker must take all relevant advice into consideration, but can still make the decision.
Consensus may sound appealing, but it’s not always most effective to give everybody veto power. In the advice process, power and responsibility rest with the decision-maker. Ergo, there is no power to block.
Ownership of the issue stays clearly with one person: the decision maker. Convinced she made the best possible decision, she can see things through with enthusiasm, and she can accept responsibility for any mistakes.
The advice process, then, transcends both top-down and consensus-based decision making.
Living organism
About day to day methodologies I’m not elaborating much, just like any product design, it is in constant evolution. Our Design Doc had been changing since we stumble with new needs. Same with our team dynamics, we no longer hold 1 on 1s, at least not in a schedule form. Our performance review also differs from our first one. The same happened with our user research process, and I’m sure that we are going to keep finding changes. We work like a living organism, and we adapt as we find new needs and opportunities.
I think it’s ideal to end with a fragment of the exit performance review of Ana San Gil, former member of our team.
I was quite nervous on my first week, I came from a very production-based workflow and felt some type of guilt for not producing and just reading a book. I slowly understood the way-of-work and began trusting it. The book was a great introduction to how the team was going to work, and the constant meetings with the group made the settlement feel natural. Fast enough I felt comfortable with the team and began giving more feedback and ideas without feeling fear of rejection or fear of generating resentment/anger, usual in other types of organizations. I got to enjoy the calmness of working with empowerment and collaboration, making the workflow much smoother. Every time I felt stuck with an idea, I would ask for suggestions and different points of view. Also by doing this, I was able to notice the types of problems that I was better at solving and began moving towards those. I was not only allowed, but encouraged to assume those projects which were more related to service design, including user flows, case scenarios, planning, questioning and anticipating. I was also asked to give suggestions and observations on other projects, making my opinion feel valuable as well. It gave me great satisfaction not only to work on the projects at hand, but also on the structure and system that made the team work and feel good as a whole.
Thanks ladies for being part of this experiment.
