Mindset over Method
How I’ve Learned to Reject the Tyranny of Process.
I was a participant in some of the earliest StartupWeekends, and I’ve been to eight of them in the US and Europe, over a span of more than a decade. I won a couple, I co-organized a couple. I love it. My daughter even ran a StartupWeekend team when she was just 10 years old.
In the early ones, we were all just simply fired up. The slogan was “No Talk, All Action”, there was very little “process” at all, and we accomplished a ton in two days.
Then Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup” book came out, and I got to read about the kind of crazy things we did at StartupWeekend (and in real startups), explained as a process, a method, with academic language and definitions.
After that, the StartupWeekends I attended started with a 2-hour presentation on the business model canvas, on the lean process, etc. And the event changed from a place where engineers and designers built businesses, to a place where marketing grads built pitch powerpoints.
I saw the same thing in my Innovation Consulting engagements. Teams who had learned about innovation in school, “doing” the innovation process, but not actually building anything.
Methodology, process, best practices… these are ways that we take what a winning mindset has invented, and ossify it. But it turns out, without the mindset, the gestures are empty, sterile, void of meaning and outcomes. Worse, once we have a process written down, we stop coming up with better ways.
So today, in my UX and product work at CustomerOS, I actively reject method and process, and work instead to inspire teams, so they will be burning to achieve great things. And then, they do, in whichever way they please.
Process is mistrust. It’s an attempt to control people. But people are smart and resourceful. They don’t need to be controlled, they just need to be inspired, and trusted.
