First Software to Break Through the Hierarchies
A personal, inside-out view for each of us to engage our fellow human-beings for better learning, business or other purpose — on our terms
We’re excited and very proud to release a major new software capability — the My Hi-flier home. It’s a personal business/ learning/ activity home that breaks the usual hierarchies we are always faced with. Instead of software that makes us fit in somehow, makes us smaller than we are, dominates who we can be and what we can achieve, we provide a true inside-out view for each of us to start our day based on our own priorities. It immediately becomes an important anchor for the shifty, agile and virtual world we live in.
We believe it’s a major milestone for software in general, as it seems to be the first time our purposes and activities come together in one view, and they are sorted for us dynamically by our level of involvement. We don’t belong to organizations, they belong to us, and we choose to go deeper and decide our time based on our own priorities and availability. Instinctively we always disliked the top-down regimes that we were told were necessary but we could see limiting our effectiveness every day. With a bottom-up, personal view, on our own terms, now we can begin to let our human ingenuity take off. Here is a first overview, the My Hi-flier home shown for someone with a consulting focus:
We see Mary pursuing five different purposes with always the top three shown with detail to immediately jump in to. The left panel is like a book binder with her own profile and stats on how much she is doing across everything. Then we see the organizations or purposes dynamically sorted so that the one with the most active Missions always shows to the left. So as the eye reads she starts from the most important organization to the less important ones, in this case her Consultant Co. gig has twice as many active Missions as the Startup.ai where she is an advisor, and her assignments from an extra program at the Ivy College are currently mostly completed. One view, all options to make her own good decisions now.
Why traditional software is so degrading for us
It’s the age-old problem with most software that it is built for corporations that decide to use it. So adoption and implementation start from a top-down proposition — ‘it’ knows best, you the human being are a small wheel in the machine:
- You don’t know the whole picture
- You don’t know what goals you are actually working on, and how you are affecting others
- There is little or no immediate feedback on how you are doing
- The intelligence is in the machine, not you
- The interface reduces everyone to the same, smallest common denominator, which is usually pretty dumb
- If you have strengths or preferences, special initiative and ambition, here is usually where they have to succumb
This did not change with software-as-a-service, which only changed how software was delivered to you. It remained a monolithic block of code, a black box, completely apart from your everyday world and experience. And usually quite ugly too.
It used to be companies issued not only all the software to you, but also the computer and the cellphone. In the last years we have seen the ‘consumerization of enterprise’, with simple and colorful interfaces that have made messaging and content storage much more pleasant. While this is all progress, none of the existing software lets you start from your perspective across purposes and activities. They may have the option of letting you move from one organization to the next, but there is no sorting or other logic that gives you the overall view and head start.
Bottom-up is human is effective
Here now is the exact opposite. When designing the My Hi-flier home, we started with the explicit knowledge that in today’s world the organizations are more fleeting while our view of the world — and our software — stays stable over time. While clients, classes or interests change, each day we are balancing our time and commitments across everything we do in a similar way, needing to make countless decisions, fast, on what to focus on next. We can use some real help!
We use ‘organizations’ as a lose term for spaces, activity areas, opportunities, purposes. Inclusive — as desired — of any and all areas you are active in, e.g. a company you work for as an employee, your own business, your volunteering, your learning, your hobbies, your family. No need to choose any more, Hi-flier is completely web-based, built to provide the high-level overview and power of work plans (we call them Missions) above communication feeds and storage. You add the organizations or get invited to them, you delete them once their purpose is over.
In the same vein, there are no defined teams. Because it’s not real to expect static teams except for clearly defined long-term goals, which is just about never the case today. Most often we are not considering trade-offs and dependencies within a team and a few tasks, but across teams, functions and organizations. We’ve gone through a period of upleveling, which is actually a good thing as it gets us out of tasks or items that are ready to be automated anyway. It’s not that team-based project management software has no place, but we’ve been yearning for help in the agile world we live in today, where we are very rarely just engaged on one goal, and where much of our human intelligence and experience is needed to orchestrate and continuously align all resources on a higher level.
And with virtual and physical worlds merging or continuing to shift from one to the other, the need to be inclusive and centered around each of us personally has only increased the need. Much of what we have been able to intuit from simply observing colleagues is now lost. The dynamic of interaction and innovation is lost — and top-down software become killer applications in a very negative sense. Also on a very practical level without seeing each other and coordinating directly: It’s not actually possible to find priorities and deadlines and expectations out of an email let alone messaging feed — so now how are we expected to coordinate across everything we have going on?
The True Measure — Active Missions
As we’ve said, organizations come and go. The true measure is how many active Missions or plans are being enacted or transacted in each — and how many we can personally pursue! So with the My Hi-flier home, we get exactly the personal view to align our energy and effort on a high level. And on that level we can decide if we can take on more or are overburdened. On that level too we see one organization becoming more important or active, another less so. Our software is as dynamic as our lives, and helps us to be proactive about where we want to go.
This also explains why our pricing is based on active Missions, because the active Missions directly correspond to the value that you are getting, in how much you are using Hi-flier, in how much you are able to improve your view of and engagement in priorities. As each active Mission drives toward completion, you keep track of the completed Missions over time as the overall record of your success. We currently include basic metrics per organization to keep track, over time we will add more insights that will give an even more rounded personal success profile.
A Closer Look at the New Hi-flier Home
Here we look at a learning example with two different people participating, and two different perspectives. As before, in each case the personal panel on the left highlights the individual profile, here of the teacher Ted and the student Sally, with metrics showing total active missions and the number of organizations they are part of.
Then the organizations and activities are ranked from left to right by:
- 1) The number of personal active Missions in each
- 2) The total active missions in that organization, which is an indication of the overall size and activity level
For each organization a vertical Mission Control shows upcoming actions, new comments per Mission, and Missions you’ve been added.
We see that Ted teaches an Engineering Class that Sally is a part of, but otherwise we see them diverging, with Ted also teaching an extra-curricular Robotics class as well as a Philosophy introduction, whereas Sally has picked up on Hi-flier to help make her soccer team excel. From these overviews they can then directly go to Missions shown, e.g. here Assignments, or they can click on the organization logo for more details on who else is a member, and to start additional Missions.
Thanks to Our Customers
From all of us at Hi-flier, thank you for all the great inputs and feedback on our prototypes to get us here! We’re not just building a product, we’re building a movement to turbocharge our personal success based on our individual strengths. This is the second big part of the our human intelligence technology. We couldn’t do it without you. We’ve been on this from design through to delivery for the last six months, and there was much customer input and research ahead of that. We got it done and are now able to get it to everyone. Things keep getting more and more exciting!
For the agile world we live in. For the new virtual-first world we live in. We want to give power to the people done with the status quo, who excel with their own human ingenuity and empathy. With the My Hi-flier home, we believe we now have the complete environment.
Check out the new personal home and all other improvements at success.hi-flier.com. If you haven’t already, sign up for Hi-flier on our website, www.hi-flier.com.
Keep hi-flying!
Hi-flier Product Team
