What can you envision yourself doing for 20 years?
Many coaches, motivational speakers and advisors go on and on about questions like “where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?”, about the need to think long-term, and about the importance of playing the long game. But twenty years is a long, long time. For most people, it’s half of their entire work life. Very few are willing to commit that much time to a project.
This article aims at two simultaneous targets: on one hand, it aims to serve as a praise for vision, commitment and evolution; on the other hand, it aims to serve as an invitation to explore what can be achieved when we really go full-on into the long term.
The praise
This past month, Manas.Tech turned 20. That’s two whole decades of leveraging all kinds of technology tools to solve problems. And two whole decades of carefully and dutifully laying a foundation and setting up scaffolding to enable people to build whatever they want, however they want.
To mark the 20th anniversary, the entire company flew to a resort in Brazil, to spend 5 days connecting to each other without technologic mediation. Some of us actually met for the first time in person, or met again after some years of almost exclusively working together remotely.
That last sentence sounds simple enough, but there is quite a lot going on there. There is a significant amount of work behind a team’s capability to work remotely while maintaining the quality of what they deliver and the quality of the interactions that foster good collaboration. That is part of what you get when an organization has been operative for two decades.
But not only the passing of time makes this possible: leaders need to invest heavily, consciously and consistently in creating, maintaining and updating the mechanisms that enable efficient collaboration.
Let’s look at some of those.
Communication tools
The single greatest communication tool is making agreements. Different people call it by different names, such as protocols, rules, guidelines or even tips. They all mean the same thing: there needs to be agreement on how we will use each thing, so that everyone knows how to play the game and we get better at playing it over time.
Management tools
Whatever it is that you do, as long as you keep doing it, two things are likely to happen:
- you’re going to get better at it, and
- you will start doing more of it.
To do #2 without letting go of #1, you need to find ways to manage your work. Management done right is a delicate alchemy of methodology and tools. The seal of truly great management is the design of one’s own flavor of methodology and a bespoke set of tools. We have developed many tools that align with our specific needs and wants, and with the particular way in which our organization works.
We have our own tools for billing and finance management, tools to keep track of tasks, projects and responsibilities, tools that help us keep records of important things in a way that doesn’t demand constant up keeping.
Human tools
Organizations are groups of humans who come together to achieve something greater than themselves. Taking care of those humans is the best way to enable them to build things far greater than you can imagine. Human tools involve the creation of safe, transparent and sustainable practices that help people feel they can do their best work, express their views and opinions, and build meaningful relationships with both peers and clients.
The invitation
If you’ve been reading attentively, you surely noticed that these tools are much more than a way of working remotely: they are the basis for working. Period.
These three systemic units (communication, management and human) make up the larger system that is the organization, which will function only as well as these three systems do.
During our retreat in Brazil, the main goal was to relax, celebrate 20 years of doing what we love to do, and connect with the team. And we fulfilled those goals. But we also made time to reflect on how these three systems impact us on the day to day.
And this is also an invitation to you. To look into your organization and systems, to map out what it is you want to achieve and, most importantly, what happiness looks like to you.
For guidance, this is how we approached this, and some of the decisions we’ve made over the years, which got us here.
No-objectives > Guided by principles
Management by objectives only works well if you are positive about what the objectives you want to accomplish are, and ROWE is a great approach if you have those specific objectives and can define corresponding metrics, but when you are optimizing for happiness, there is no such thing as clear objective/goals.
So, why would a company want to optimize for happiness?
Well, for starters, to survive and thrive for more than 20 years. Somehow, people spend most of their time approaching problems in terms of finding solutions, but surprisingly little pondering how happy they would be if they succeed.
Optimizing for happiness, then, sounds laughable for most leaders at first sight. It would seem that happiness and business have nothing to do with each other, and anyone who optimizes for anything other than profits is simply mad. But organizations are made of people, and people stay where they are happy.
What most leaders don’t reflect so much upon is that investing in happiness is a very good way –probably the best– of building long-term revenue. Over time, teams develop mechanics which make them faster, more efficient, and help them build trust.
Aligning incentives to achieve business results creates an environment of fierce competition, an obsession with metrics and information hiding. Optimizing for happiness, on the other hand, shifts focus away from reaching a goal no matter what, towards the motivation behind people’s actions, and makes it quite pointless to compete, measure obsessively. and hide information, by creating an environment where people collaborate, share and are open with each other.
Dropping ancient artifacts
Another key factor in the creation of sustainable organizations is changing mindsets. Some of these are kind of an invisible and unwanted inheritance: we tend to build organizations more or less intuitively and fall into patterns that others have created, without thinking too much about how accurate or appropriate they are, and they are such subtle traits that it can be difficult to point at them when they are causing problems.
So, a dedicated effort to creating awareness about our systems is the first step in the direction of sustainability. Our handbook contains a beautiful quote by Eduardo Galeano that points directly to this:
We are what we do to change who we are
A lot of things at Manas work very differently than anywhere else, and were originated by a consistent effort to make space for introspection. That is how we find, rethink and recreate artifacts and methods that were installed by use, but not conscious choice. Making time to look inwards as an organization, thinking about and discussing how we want Manas to be, is a core pillar of our culture.
Test, measure, iterate
The most important thing about all of that introspection is translating it into experiments. Quickly. We believe in testing things out and seeing what works and how, instead of endlessly discussing what might happen.
Over the years, we’ve had plenty of people reach out to us and ask about our internal systems, how they work and how to implement them. What most of them imagine is that you can implement one thing or another and then sit back and watch the magic happen.
Few imagine what it really goes into spearheading things under complete uncertainty, measuring with less data than one would hope, and correcting course on the run. Experiments on organizational dynamics, especially, involve a systemic ripple effect: anything you modify leads to subsequent modifications that become necessary when a part of the system changes.
What makes systems work, though, is precisely the awareness of how much they will –need to– evolve over time, adapting to the context and to their own evolution. Phil Stutz expresses it hardly and straightforwardly:
Something to think about
When I first came in contact with Manas, it just seemed impossible. I knew of no other organization that worked like this one did.
A bunch of years later, I still know of no other organization that has no hierarchies and no rigid role structures, yet runs a smooth operation. I know of no other organization that decentralizes decisions about salaries, projects, budgets, hiring –and pretty much everything else–, and that has remained profitable for over 20 years. I know of no other organization that spends so much time reflecting upon what they do, how they do it and why, without seeing productivity go down, but the opposite.
When I first came in contact with Manas, it just seemed impossible. The more I think about it, though, the more it makes perfect sense. Also, the more I come to be convinced that the company has survived and thrived for more than two decades, not in spite of, but thanks to a stubborn will to challenge things that are presented as a given.
As Daniel H. Pink says
“asking ‘why’ can lead to understanding; asking ‘why not’ can lead to breakthroughs.”
Here’s to twenty more years of challenging the world around us. And to you doing the same with the world around you.
