How to deal with ambiguity
In this week’s blogpost, Adam reflects on ambiguity and how he and his team deals with it.
Mary Hannah looked up at me at the end of the day on Monday, excitement and fear in her eyes, and asked, “What just happened?” Honestly, I often ask a similar question at the end of the week — something along the lines of, “Did we accomplish anything?”
From what I’ve seen, this is a pretty typical feeling that most entrepreneurs go through. We were constantly warned about this while we were earning our graduate certificate in Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurism at the Austin Center for Design. Every professor said, “I am preparing you for ambiguity. Get used to it.” Of course, context matters. We were good students and listened. Within the safe boundaries set up by school, we practiced wading through the fog.
But now that we’ve emerged into the “real world”, are juggling KeyUp and the side hustle jobs we’ve taken on to make sure KeyUp survives, and are navigating through a brand new world to us, it’s really hard to know what we’ve done and how to know what to do next.
Monday was exceptional, though. We had to manage three interns, several high stakes meetings, a surprise interview with the Austin Monitor, and the completion of a last minute application for a money-making project for KeyUp. It’s a good thing we had practiced using different protocols at school including sprints and planning our activities using a kanban board. Though it seems like this feeling of what-did-I-just-do-and-was-it-at-all-helpful will only intensify as we continue to build KeyUp LLC, we are finding that what we learned in school is definitely helping.
Here are some of the most important lessons we are transferring to our experience with KeyUp, how we do them, and why they help.
Kanban board:
A kanban board is a way to visualize our work and workflow. To create a kanban board, all members of your team write down all the tasks you need to get done. The tasks should be small enough to be accomplished in a few hours. When we learned how to use this tool at the Austin Center for Design, we used index cards. Then, prioritize each task and come up with a way to talk about how big the task is. To do this, we used the fibonacci sequence. This means we would label each task with a 1, 2, 3, 5, 8… (A ‘1’ would be for a task that is super small, whereas an 8 might take a few days.)
Then, we place the tasks that need to get done immediately under the heading To Be Done. Then, each team member selects a task they are responsible for and places under the Doing header.
And then, get to work! Every task that isn’t an immediate priority is placed in the backlog.
Since starting the Impact Hub Accelerator, we haven’t had access to wall space, we have gone digital. We use Asana to perform a similar function.
Morning stand-ups:
Every time Mary Hannah and I plan the day we return to our Kanban board. We discuss our priorities for the day, figure out who will do what, and always ask, “Why is this important to do now?” We often pick up with tasks we didn’t finish the day before, but sometimes we have new information that makes us shift the tasks and add in new activities to be accomplished.
Evening stand-ups:
While there should be relief that we just put in a hard day’s work at the end of the day, I’ve found the end of the day to be the most anxious. What did I do? Why did I do it? Did I move us forward at all? The greatest resource KeyUp has to waste right now is time. I can think back to many evening stand-ups in which I reflected on the day and thought, “Wow, I think I wasted a lot of time on _____. I mean, I learned something. But did that really help?”
Our evening stand-ups are for asking ourselves helpful reflection questions. This is helpful for me. I am able to connect my work to a larger goal. It also helps Mary Hannah and I to stay on the same page, figure out what we need to change for the next day, and do one of the most satisfying aspects of the kanban board: move all of the tasks from Doing to Done.
So, like most days, Mary Hannah and I had a talk on Monday. It was a crazy day. But what a relief to reflect on a busy day. We got to move a whole bunch of tasks to the Done header, and talk about what today meant for KeyUp. It was a hopeful reflection that what we did helped move our venture forward.
But, as we have been told over and over again, it’s ambiguous. You never really know. But at least, we have some strategies to help us try.
