Day One of Blindfeed.com
What does Day One actually mean?
It’s the day when it all starts. It’s the day life is created. It’s the day that an idea sees the light for the first time. Day One also represents a kind of humbleness and eagerness. Day One is a clean slate, a canvas where we can paint anything we want. It also means a tremendous amount of responsibility. Day One isn’t for everyone. Day One is for the few that dare to invent, create, experiment, and dare to fail over and over for a chance to reach Day Two. However, Day Two, as Jeff Bezos put it, is ‘stasis‘, it’s followed by irrelevance. You actually never want to reach Day Two.
Day One is for the disrupters, the innovators, and the crazy ones who dare to bet against the consensus. Day One is where people shape the world. Day Two is where people try to keep the world as it is. Day Two is where currently everyone naturally evolves to. It’s when people and organizations become “The Status Quo”. Sooner or later we all become the status quo. Now, you might be a 20 somewhat year old that thinks the status quo does everything wrong and you can do it better. 50 years from now, another 20 year old will say the same about you.
As the human species, we haven’t really found an algorithm to keep us the hungry, radically open-minded, and radically truthful humans throughout our lifetime. Kids, are a reminder what it’s actually like to be truly open-minded. It’s when a bunch of kids can beat a group of MIT students building a tower with sticks. It’s when they will smile uncontrollably when they smell a flower for the first time. For kids the world is open for play. That is what Day One also means for Blindfeed.com — To always remain hungry, open-minded and to realise that the world is open for play. It’s open to learn from other people, to be amazed by their perspective, to be shown there is a different way, a better way, a more remarkable way.
So how do we keep ourselves from transitioning in Day 2?
First of all, we need to proof we have a reason to exist. We’re not a company that’s been around for a decade. We’re a company that saw its official light a month ago. Today is Day One for us, because we secured our first official funding that enables us to bring our idea to life with cognitive diverse team of people that are eager to make their mark. Blindfeed’s unofficial light went on over a year ago, when we learned incredible lessons about collective decision making, crowd-wisdom, implications of anonymity, how to demystify culture, and how to best see and understand everyone’s perspective. That evolved in the Blindfeed of today to help people understand more about themselves, and each others. To help the best ideas to win.
Winning implies there is a competition, and that might spark an argument that competing with each other is not good for culture in the workplace. While competing against each other internally can easily result to toxic environments, competing with each other is necessary for survival. It’s how the human race evolved to where it is today. It’s how teams in sports are able to win their game. You compete with each other so you can compete against other teams, and companies. It’s the fuel for innovation. That’s why we see winning as a game. And there are two games, finite games and infinite games. Finite games, have rules everyone agrees on, and it’s super clear at the end who won. Like you have with sports. There is a time, a score, a distance, a position, or a weight we can easily measure. When the winner is clear, the game is over.
Infinite games aren’t designed to have a clear winner at the end. We play infinite games to keep playing the game. This is what today, very few of us understand, especially in the workplace. We treat our careers as a game we can win at, we treat our organizations as a game we can win at. And that’s where we’re wrong. The purpose of your career, and your organisation is to keep playing the game. You can’t be the world’s best marketer, engineer, designer, director, company, or even country. Nobody will agree on the winner. So it’s time to let go of the temptation to join this rat-race to become a temporary headline on some poorly written article telling how awesome we are. That to us, is bullshit. It’s fake. It’s a vanity metric. It choosing sugar over protein. It’s choosing dopamine (short-term) over serotonin (long-term).
When we understand the difference between the two games, we can be more open-minded to the perspectives of others. We can breathe more deeply, and we can put own ego’s aside.
So why does Blindfeed exists?
There are two things that stand out for us. Meaningful work, and meaningful relationships. Both of them are rare to find in the 21st century. The majority of internet and (social)media companies don’t really help either. They either create products that add little to no meaning to our lives, or they turn us into the product. The world really doesn’t really need another e-commerce, bike-sharing, or another food delivery startup. Getting our food faster delivered to us by 5 minutes, doesn’t add meaning. Spending 1 hour on instagram everyday doesn’t add meaning. However, learning something new about yourself, and the people you work (and play) with, understanding their perspective… that is the currency of change. That’s the reason why Blindfeed exists. When we discovered that feedback is our most important problem, it became our biggest opportunity.
Why feedback? Isn’t that problem solved already?
- When people receive another freaking survey every week asking them how they feel, and if they would recommend their employer to their friends, that isn’t feedback. That isn’t even engagement. That’s a data point that can help an HR manager/director show their “culture” is measurable. Yet you are lucky if half of the people respond, and if 10% of that half actually shares what they really think.
- When people send some emoji’s to you, hit a like button, or comment “it’s great!“ or “I don’t like this“ — that isn’t the feedback that helps you evolve. It’s superficial. It doesn’t provide any insight. It doesn’t help you be better next time.
- When people leave a 1 or a 5 star review, you might think it tells you something — yet it actually says very little. 5 star can mean it’s as expected (from their perspective), 1 star can mean 1 thing went terribly wrong, but the rest was as expected. It can also mean it was a troll. But what does a 6 star experience look like? A 7 star? An 8, 9, 10, 11 star experience? Nobody knows.
All these kinds of feedback barely scratch the surface. They might help sell more products, get more eye-balls, or give people a lazy data point to show their work matters. However, they add little to no value to the individuals that are part of the collective, and they add nothing to our evolution.
What does feedback mean to us?
Feedback — It starts with the information about our reactions to a product, an idea, or a person’s contribution. It’s the foundational fabric that helps us evolve.
It demands asking for the perspective of people who are likely to disagree with us.
It thrives on radical transparency — to see the world as it is, and the willingness to be uncomfortable with what we do not know. And in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen.
It requires humility to listen to the invisible voices that unravel our blindspots and our talents. It’s having the wisdom to admit we were wrong, and the courage to go with an idea that’s not ours. To recognize there might be a truth in the perspective of someone who thinks different than us.
Blindfeed is the radical idea of discovering our blind spots in an ego-centric world. To see through the eyes of someone else. To change the way we understand ourselves, and each other. To build a world where the best ideas win.
Source: The blindfeed manifesto
Who is Blindfeed for?
Blindfeed is for the curious ones, the open-minded people who want to learn something new. For the hungry ones who want to do better. For the change makers. For the experimenters. For the people who can let go of their ego (every now and then). It’s for the people who want to play the infinite game. Blindfeed is for the people who believe the world is open for play.
What does success look like?
Blindfeed is just in its humble beginnings. It might not work. We might not get it “right“ in the short-term. It might have some rough edges. It might feel uncomfortable sometimes. However, we exist to get it right in the long-term. We believe that when our product becomes good enough, that when we become good enough, it will change the way humanity plays the infinite game. That we can help humanity find meaning to keep playing.
We’re not looking for the ordinary but for the extraordinary. We’re not looking to please everyone, but we’re looking to add meaning to some people, some teams, some organizations in order to create more meaningful work, and more meaningful relationships. So that one day most of humanity dares to solve more complex, important and interesting problems in the world.
Yours truly,
Björn
Founder & CEO of Blindfeed.com
P.S. For the curious ones
If you believe this work matters, and you are an engineer, product designer, data whisperer, or a storyteller. Send me a message [bjorn [at] blindfeed . com] or have a look at Blindfeed.com. We’re always looking to expand our team with individuals that dare to leap into the unknown.
