My co-founders and I have been drafting notes and letters to our team since the beginning. Written 3-4 times a year, they are our humble equivalent of a shareholder letter. Today, in the spirit of openness and a growing community that cares about Undercurrent’s future, I’ve decided to start making them public.
We began counting trimesters (rather than quarters) near the end of our first year in business, more than seven years ago. It was our experience that, “90 days isn’t enough time to make meaningful change, and 180 days is too long to go without reflection.” Today, we’ve been marking our progress in 120 day increments for over 19 trimesters. I remember thinking, surely we’ll be zipping around SoHo on hoverboards long before our 20th trimester rolls around. And yet here we are. Plenty of world changing stuff going on. Less hovering than initially expected.
At this moment, Undercurrent feels (and depending on how you measure it, actually is) busier than it’s ever been. More than a few weeks this year have been over capacity, which means nights and weekends get sacrificed to the cause. When this happens, I feel compelled to reiterate why we’re doing this, instead of something else.
Our purpose is to make every organization in the world more responsive.
That’s an insurmountable challenge — and we know it — that’s why it’s worth doing. In the parlance of our friends at Google, that’s a 10x challenge (more like 1000x in our case).
A responsive company is a place where everyone feels empowered to make things happen at the edge. A place where employees, customers, and the broader community are inspired. A place that can change quickly when the world does. A place where risk is respected, but also encouraged. A place that learns — and gets smarter every day.
The good news is: this is an idea whose time has come. Many many smart people are talking about the idea of responsive, adaptive, lean, and agile businesses. Even better news: many of our clients agree. As you know, visionary minds at GE, American Express, Sonic, PepsiCo, and dozens of other organizations are giving us the chance to pilot new ways of working.
The bad news is: this stuff is hard. It’s slow (maybe too slow). It’s so easy to get lost on a project with a small team in the far corners of an empire that holds more than 50,000+ hearts and minds. Especially when the bureaucracy starts to creep in, and quarterly earnings and bad muscle memory start to eat your momentum.
But, my advice to you is simple. Stick with it. This is a muscle building game, for them and for you. You’re getting yet another chance to try to change a culture while the plane is in mid-flight. No matter what the challenge, this will make you better at the art and science of transformation. And for your client, this experiment (likely one of many) is the early seedling of a much faster and more expansive shift. This experiment needs to work. It must work. Because if it doesn’t, the change we all need may never come.
Two books have recently influenced my perspective on our purpose: The Second Machine Age, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, and Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. Both are highly recommended.
Recently our Core Circle (for those of you outside Undercurrent that’s equivalent to a management team, see Holacracy for more info) met to establish our strategies for the next 120 days. In this context, a strategy is a statement like, “apples even over oranges,” where both are good and one must be prioritized over the other. Here are the four strategies that we are taking into the summer, with a short description of how we’re thinking about them.
Listening even over Talking. We work in an industry that promotes people who project a magnetic and persuasive presence. The downside of that is that we seldom listen as much as we speak. Yet, we recognize there is great value in asking the right questions and simply listening, internally and externally. We have much to learn. As our very own Lucy Chung recently said, “you have two ears and only one mouth, use them proportionally.”
Cooperation ever over Debate. Another byproduct of the consulting profession is that we learn to see the cracks, the unintended consequences, the stone unturned. As such, we can be challenging collaborators — especially to each other. In service of momentum and culture, we’ve asked the team to consider cooperating and playing along as a new default mode, rather than pointing out problems. Let’s not let perfect ruin good… better to ship something that works, than nothing at all.
Focus even over More. This is one of my greatest weaknesses, and it’s one of the reasons we’re in the business we’re in. We want to do it all. We want to see it all. We want to try it all. All at the same time, if possible. This means that we savor the challenge of leaping into a new industry or problem. But it also means that we seldom, if ever, say no. No to a client. No to a coworker. No to ourselves. But we must. If we are going to achieve our goals this year, we need to choose what matters and crush it. Look at your goals, roles, accountabilities, and calendar events, and see if you can cut them in half. Be aggressive. Go too far with focus and see what happens. It’ll be good for you (and us).
Being Responsive even over Other Ways Of Working. The best part about our recent research into what makes organizations (and other complex adaptive systems) more responsive is that it challenges us in our own practices. We have historically been secretive rather than open, yet transparency is a common value in responsive companies. From here on out, wherever possible, we resolve to drink our own Kool-Aid (hence this public letter). That means that we’ll be grappling with the same challenges as everyone else, and becoming a living lab for responsive ideals.
I’m extremely pleased with the way our service offering has evolved. It’s not all the way there yet, but it is markedly improved. Starting from the premise that we need to be better, faster, and more economical than our more established consulting brethren, we redesigned our services over the last trimester to focus on just two things: auditing an organization’s responsiveness, and working to enhance it in one month intervals. Standardized monthly pricing and a single team structure (one team of three experts) has been remarkably successful across a diverse range of projects and industries. The days of sprawling consulting teams embedded and on perma-billing are numbered. What’s more, this clarity of method means that clients no longer have to wonder, “How might Undercurrent approach this?” The Undercurrent way is becoming clearer.
Finally, I want to mention one more thing. As we have discussed in recent weeks, we are putting renewed emphasis on Undercurrent’s cognitive diversity. We know that the world’s most challenging problems only fold to teams of ultimate diversity and the willingness to work together and learn. So, we must put more energy and resources toward increasing the diversity of our team. While we’ve historically sought out diversity of expertise and experience, we need to do even more to increase gender and cultural diversity here. We will prioritize strategies and tactics like our fellowship program, support of groups like Ada’s List, and efforts to deepen relationships with the women in our tech community. This is fundamental to our future success. Our ability to realize our collective potential depends on our ability to create a company — and an industry — in which women and other underrepresented perspectives thrive and lead.
In Back to the Future, Doc Brown says, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” But that’s not entirely true. Where we’re going, everything is a road. Everything is a connection. We have always been, and will always be, part of a network. I look forward to strengthening that network with you over the next 120 days.
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