Finding purpose
During a visit to NASA space centre in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a caretaker carrying a broom. When asked what he was doing, his response was “Well Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon”.
Organisations that stand out from the crowd, like NASA, do so not just because they are good at what they do, or how they do it, it’s because they have a strong sense of why they exist. This sense of purpose extends beyond the boardroom to every single employee and externally with customers and users. Take Apple for example. Arguably there are better and cheaper products on the market, yet I can’t remember ever seeing people queue for these like they do when Tim Cook announces the release of a new-fangled device.
I wanted to test what would happen if I created a sense of purpose in a personal task and used what I learned from the experience with teams I work with at Defra & the Environment Agency. This article is a story about that journey, and like all good stories, this one starts in a pub — the Slip Inn, York to be precise.
“Dan, we are thinking about doing this coast to coast bike ride, fancy it?”. To cut a long story short, I learned during the evening that this was a 150-mile bike ride with over 10,000 ft of climbing, oh and by the way its time capped at 17 hours. After a few beers and a bit of persuasion, I agreed to do it and to prove this isn’t a convenient story for this article, here’s a picture of us at the finish line.
Reflecting on what we had just achieved, I was keen to understand what drove us to complete the ride. I landed on the golden circle model by Simon Sinek, which is broken into three parts, what, how and most importantly for this article why.
Wind the clock forward a few months and we’d made time to carry on riding, but the reason to continue riding wasn’t as strong. There was no why! Can you guess what’s happened?
I’ve learned that having a sense of purpose is as important off the bike as it is on it and I’ve seen the benefits too. One of the success criteria which the Flood Information Service use as their yardstick is user satisfaction. As you can in the below graph, they’re doing a pretty good job!
The team that maintains the Flood Information Service know their “why”:
We will deliver a world-leading flood warning and information service that will save lives and protect livelihoods; by providing accurate and relevant information to users who need it, when they need it, in ways they want it — so they can take the right action.
It’s been brilliant to see how the team have embraced their purpose and change the way they work to support it. Here’s what I have observed.
The team visualise metrics that support their purpose because they understand you get what you measure
Using real-time feedback loops, the team visualise customer satisfaction (on a 70 inch TV!) and use this intelligence to assess how well the service is performing.
The team put the user at the centre of everything they do, even when that sometimes means enabling others to provide services to the public
The flood team has recognised not everyone knows where to find flood information on GOV.UK and may not think to seek advice should they find themselves at risk. For that reason, they have invested heavily in providing partners like Google and mobile phone operators with data feeds, so flood risk can be pushed into everyday digital services.
The team check-in with themselves and talk about issues often
When the team spots negative feedback on the service, they don’t wait until the next sprint planning session or retro. They work together, with the Product Manager to implement a fix as soon as possible. This has been enabled by using real-time retrospectives.
Not everything on the journey to finding purpose went smoothly. Here are a few lessons I think the team learned along the way;
Support the team and challenge change if it doesn’t support the purpose
When the security team requested a change to the service which would make it harder for users to get flood information, the team didn’t challenge it and as a result satisfaction and conversion rates dropped. In retrospect, the team should have been supported more to reach a compromise with security that didn’t impact users.
Give the team space to learn about its purpose
The best way the flood team did this was to get in front of users and learn what it’s like to live with flooding.
Talk about your purpose with stakeholders outside the team
Doing this helped the flood team engage with partners that helped extend the reach of their warnings to users that don’t know about flooding or where to look for help.
If you are interested to learn more about what the flood team are doing, you can follow us on Twitter @flooddigitalea
