Build an Intelligent Platform
Intelligence is awareness plus functionality, or that’s the way I think about it.
Intelligence is not IQ, let’s get that out of the way. When I took the IQ test in fourth grade, we were told never to disclose our IQ. What a silly thing to say to children, because it felt like a permanent stamp on our ability. How many times have I qualified or disqualified myself because of the value of that number? How many times have I sat through a tough lesson and decided I must not have the talent for that subject? (Answer: too many times.) There were also times I felt superior to people because my IQ is higher than theirs.
Intelligence isn’t only innate to me. Sure, I have natural talents and limitations, but working from an awareness + functionality point of view, I can do a lot of things to develop intelligence. I can Google an answer or talk to a friend. I can pay attention when I’m alert and do serious work at those times. I can embrace standards or build databases. I can increase the intelligence of the system outside my limitations.
I get my work done on my platform. It’s things like my emails and Slack channels, reports, and dashboards. It’s also things like my websites and blogs, product offers and customer engagement. Don’t forget all those meetings. An intelligent platform offers awareness and functionality where I work.
And now, a cautionary tale. Once I worked on a dashboard system that was unstable. The license we had for the system was insufficient, and the data import was unreliable. We decided to use a different system. I spoke with all of the affected people and set expectations. One department head decided he would purchase his own system and control half of the company’s data instead. Everyone was frustrated with this outcome.
The department head was frustrated because his job relied on numbers he couldn’t quickly get. He optimized for himself and left other people out of the loop. He also protected and withheld a lot of the sales and marketing information from the rest of the organization. He wanted to be the big star.
This solution reduced our awareness because we didn’t have information and couldn’t agree about the information we had. It also cut our functionality. What can we do with only part of the data? Who should we be talking to?
After we vented, we started making incremental improvements to recombine our company data. Different people contributed different solutions until every department was aware of the information they needed and had the tools to work with that data and perform better.
We’re not usually against one another; we’re for ourselves. We know what we can contribute, and we know what works in our domain. Finding a platform where we can participate intelligently makes it easier to work together instead of only for ourselves.
Our platforms are more than our dashboards and pipelines. In data work, we often think of the models and systems we build as the platform. In software work, it’s our applications. In product work, it’s the product offer and marketing. These are all platforms for interacting and improving things. The important thing is we notice where we meet.
We look for ways to add awareness and functionality to reach our goals. There are always things we can do to improve.
Look for high risk, high impact problems and make low-risk, incremental improvements.
Where do things go typically wrong? When is the outcome less sure? Which meetings are the worst meetings? What questions never get answered? What bit of knowledge is getting lost in Slack or email? What customer is discounting or discontinuing their engagement with your company?
Find an area that is high risk and add intelligence to it. Where can I add awareness? Why is this happening? Who needs to know about this? Can I bring more people into the conversation? Can I simplify this, so it’s easier to handle? The more intelligence you pump into these high-risk areas, the better.
Otherwise, the problems erupt into something out of control. Soon the company is hiring a consultant to do something you didn’t or wouldn’t handle.
This works folks. A friend of mine is building a way to start conversations around data. He shares a single data visualization with his company with Slack and gets people talking about it. Do they have questions? How are they using this information? Is it coming up in policy decisions? When we share information, everyone is empowered.
Someone else I know changed the way they share information from meetings. He embraced transparency in his organization as much as possible so that people couldn’t push an agenda because nobody knew what goes on behind closed doors. Anybody can look up the notes from a meeting.
A project manager opens the conversation around the payoff for her team’s decisions. She talks to people about what they wanted when they took action. She then provides the resources needed. Instead of repeating the same efforts. People go into their work better supported.
A product owner uses priority guides to focus people’s attention on the outcome of the screens and pages they produce. Many organizations around me use brown bag lunches to share what they’re learning in an informal setting. A smart manager asks for pushback when she dictates the solution she wants rather than the outcome. Smart people everywhere are finding ways to increase awareness and functionality in their work.
It’s the small things we do that make the big differences. All of us can find something we can improve this week. I’m looking forward to my week and the things I can do better. Look at the intelligence of the system, the awareness people have and what they can do with it. Look at the places where we come together. What can we do to make more-intelligent platforms?
