A new decade, now what?
New year's resolutions, failure, and hacking human behavior.
Now what indeed…
Are we meant to be doing something different? Probably, everyone else is! Panic sets in, complete and utter FOMO. New year, new we sort of thing. Even if you’re old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, 2020 is still a significant change and it’s a bit of a daunting one. A whole new decade is here and a hell of a lot has happened since the last, so this time it has to be bigger and better than ever, right!?
For those in business, this is probably all sounding a little too familiar. That common feeling of stressing over the all-important strategy, setting targets and the direction of travel for the business in 2020. We’re sure at this time of year you can see many parallels between new year's resolutions and most strategic plans… however we have some bad news (sorry), the failure rate for New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, and most give up by February. If you’re thinking that’s where the similarities between strategy and new year’s resolutions stop then you’re in for a shock.
It was estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution. There are many explanations for this abysmal failure rate, but a 10-year longitudinal study on executive leadership concluded that 50%-60% of executives fail within the first 18 months of being promoted or hired.
- Harvard Business Review.
It’s quite clear then that there is a problem in both traditions, approach, and our expectations. How does it go so wrong? Everyone always approaches the new year with such excitement and positive energy, really believing they can make a difference.
Some of the time it’s as simple as not knowing how to get started. This, unfortunately, can often mean the end before even beginning. In most cases though, the focus is directed at internal issues. People concentrate on reconciling budgets and managing performance. They pay less attention to external strategic opportunities such as market shifts, customer needs, and advancements in technology.
Time management is another big factor. One study reported that 70% of leaders spend on average one day a month reviewing strategy, and 85% of leadership teams spend less than an hour per month discussing strategy.
To be honest, this is all looking a little bleak, so why bother with any of this at all? Well, there is actually something in setting your goals at the start of the year. It’s called the Fresh Start Effect and was identified by Dai, Milkman & Riis in The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks That Motivate Aspirational Behaviour.
You are more likely to achieve goals set at the start of a new time period. Researchers have found that we tend to motivate ourselves into good habits by using a new week, month, year or national holiday marker to put past behaviour behind us and focus on being better.
The desire to be a better human is not more evident than the January Gym rush, the exercise kick to shed yourself of the old you and upgrade to the new and improved. Using gym attendance data, researchers found that, amongst university students, the likelihood of attending the gym increases at the beginning of a new week, month, semester, as well as soon after term breaks. It also increases after birthdays — as a little gift to yourself.
Hacking for success
Let's use some methodologies from the world of product and see how we can apply them to better understand and improve our own behaviours.
Shorter timeframes and smaller wins; The Snowball Effect
It shouldn’t be about all or nothing. Break down large goals into achievable milestones. More frequent wins along the journey. You can even make it better by calling it a win when you follow your system. The system-versus-goal model was popularized by Scott Adams.
Scott Adams — How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01J4WYQQI/
Experimentation & Adaptation
The idea of continuous improvement and learning. People talk about fail fast and that failure is good, well, it’s not. Failure is still failure unless you structure it in a way to learn from it. Treating an idea as an experiment primes the process with a need to understand what happened. It doesn’t need to be complex but at least have an understanding of what you believe the expected outcomes should be, run the experiment, compare, learn then repeat.
Morgan Brown & Sean Ellis — Hacking Growth
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01J4WYQQI/
Purpose & Values First
Less focus on KPI’s and a drive to achieve better fulfillment, doing work that you and your customers truly believe in. Don’t get me wrong measuring data to validate process can be useful, but, without a fundamental understanding of why you should be posting on Instagram at least once a day is just a vanity metric.
Paul Jarvis — The Company of One
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241380227
Naivety Towards Risk
Strategy fails commonly because of the lack of understanding or even consideration of the negative effects on your business. We often paint the rosy picture which only ever gives you one side of the story, its fabrication is one you want to hear, not the one you really need.
Richard Rumelt — Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
https://www.amazon.co.uk//dp/1781256179/
Collaborative Delivery
Strategy is not the job of the leader, its everyone's responsibility. It is dangerous to have one individual dictate the future to everyone. Ultimately this also contributes to the lack of ownership throughout the team.
Lorna Davis — Collaborative Leadership
https://www.ted.com/talks/lorna_davis_a_guide_to_collaborative_leadership?language=en
How we’re approaching the new decade
Here’s a quick behind the curtain look at how we applied these principles into our own strategy.
The Road to Delivery Design
Context —
Taking stock on the current market
Our business landscape is an ever-changing domain. It is subject to rapid and extremely aggressive shifts in what is right ethically, for growth, and for profitability. This influx is driven hard by the insights obtained via personal data, technology breakthroughs and always-on customer touchpoints. The challenge faced by companies today is how can they adapt at pace while keeping the corporate machine running?
Customer Needs —
Understanding where we can really help
After another year of working with our customers daily at close proximity, we distilled their most common frustrations and where they sought our guidance most often. It boiled down to two main directions of travel, put simply;
Bring it to life or Show us how. This is something we‘ll continue to evaluate based on our customer feedback.
- I need to build a product. It’s unclear how to start and I’m not sure who can help. I need great design, robust code and something that my customers will love.
- My team is not delivering the results I need. The process is holding us back and no one seems to know how to go faster.
Our Risks —
Combatting naivety towards risk
We took an honest look at what would destroy us in the future. If we didn’t address these factors in a way that rang true to our beliefs we’d be the sole contributor to putting our business in a vulnerable state.
- The continued rise of the in-house agency.
- The commoditisation of websites and apps.
Our Mission —
Defining our purpose and values first
To continuously redefine how a go-to product team works.
For leaders and innovators of large organisations who want to activate their people, untangle process and bring ideas to life. Etch is the product team that drives behavior change, positive business outcomes and delivers radical impact.
Guiding Principles
- From prediction and planning to experimentation and adaptation
- From delivering projects to networks of teams sharing expertise
- From job descriptions to talent and mastery
- From dictation to supportive leadership and distributed authority
- From KPI’s focussed to Purpose and values first
- From just offering our thing to offering the right thing
- From the traditional pitch and pony show to diagnosis and relationships
Our Measures —
Experimentation and Adaptation. Shorter timeframes and smaller wins.
We will continue to question ourselves on performance by aligning what we do to our guiding principles. We visit these measures every 90 days breaking down the year into shorter more obtainable wins. This allows us to correct our course before being too far out.
Our People —
Collaborative Delivery
We approached this as a team and its output is from years of working side by side with each other in the thick of it. To deliver successfully and steer the ship we have identified leaders from across all our specialisms who will be responsible for driving the work we do, keeping it true to our guiding principles. Each leader will be embedded within the teams for regular pulse checks.
All together –
We now have a long term vision for the business with frequent short term wins. Our services are tailored to what our customers really need and driven by a passionate team of experts. It’s a great journey to be on and we’re super excited about what’s ahead.
And what about New Year’s resolutions?
Well here’s A great little tip for you and one that I’m personally using right now during dry January. Dry January if you don’t know is going through the full month of January while not consuming alcohol. Sounds easy but after a boozy Christmas and new year, it’s definitely a challenge… especially for us Brits 😂
I’ve started using the hack of micro wins. Gifting myself with cold hard cash every day I don’t Drink. Each day I pay myself five pounds (roughly the price of an English Pint of beer), celebrate sobriety, feel good, and in the end, I can guilt-free treat myself (or probably my wife) to something nice with the money I saved.
Thanks for reading! ✌️❤️
Author Jamie Heuze
Head of Product at Etch
Jamie honed his craft of product design by working closely with and nurturing some of the most interesting startups in today’s tech scene.
Over the last 10 years of his career, he has donned many a cap in all areas of design, from creating effective branding and packaging for some of the world leaders in the gaming industry to redefining user experiences and digital products for desktop and mobile apps.
So far he’s had the pleasure of working with the likes of BBC, Ubisoft, HBO, Disney, Pearson, Warner Brothers, Universal, and Sega.
