Chapter One

Pivot: how I found my focus.

This is the first chapter of the story “The Happiness Table: on fueling growth by understanding happiness in creative companies.” It’s my Advanced Work-Based Project and my final deliverable for my MA in Digital Media at Hyper Island.

In the introduction I’ve written about the reason why I’m telling this story. This post is particularly related to how I got there. It’s a deeper understanding of the journey. It’s about the realisation of how influential and uncontrollable external factors really are. More importantly, it’s about a term called “pivoting” — which I’ve done three times in nine months. Pivoting has helped me to acknowledge when a situation wasn’t fruitful anymore. It has given me the courage to find my way out and do something (slightly) different.

Blurry May-August: the future of strategy.

During the month of May as a student in Manchester, I decided that I had to start writing as soon as possible. Right before, I was taking a short spring break back in Belgium. I caught up with my friend Thomas Driesen and we talked about the things that were keeping us awake at night. I explained my hunt for meaning to him and he told me:

“You should start writing now. Make it real time so that people will be able to follow your journey. It’s the best way to sell your final product.”

He was right. And it didn’t have to be perfect. Starting early allowed me to slowly explore unknown territories. Starting early also taught me how to write. Gradually, it took less time to craft something acceptable.

It was scary.

Because I actually didn’t know what I was doing. I was just absorbing stuff that was coming my way and transforming it into cohesive stories. I was trying to give meaning to everything I came across and somehow make a link to this beast called “the future of strategy”.

September was all about surviving in London.

I decided to move to London, on a mission to find a cool internship. I wanted something that was about strategy, innovation, products and services. I considered the intersection of these four areas as both my sweet spot and my ultimate goal.

September was one of the toughest months. I experienced a lot of different things in a completely new environment. Some brought me down, others kicked me back up. I summarised and wrote down the most important things here. Reflection is more powerful when you think and write at the same time.

In October, I met this man: Ian Crocombe.

From the first moment, Ian and I were very much aligned. I showed him my work while we were having coffee in Leather Lane. When he finished his cake, he told me he wanted to give me the internship. He also wanted to give me space for my personal project. We agreed that it had to be something beneficial for both POSSIBLE and myself. Now it was only a matter of finding common ground. He asked me to write a research proposal with a hypothesis and an appropriate methodology. He wanted all of this on one A4. Concise, punchy and to the point. That’s exactly how he is.

I was happy that I could finally apply things to a professional environment, because that is for me what the Advanced Work-Based Project should be all about. Being there, researching and making a change for the good.

I was so relieved that I had a professional coach who could steer me in the right direction. I finally had the feeling that I could make something that was not only for myself, but that served a higher purpose.

Ian gave me focus.

I needed to adapt.

Even more, I needed to pivot.

“To find the right business model for your company, you usually have to pivot.

Many start-ups believe in the popular myth that the key to founding a successful company is perseverance and an iron will: a heroic founder has a brilliant idea and fights through lots of setbacks until the idea finally becomes a hit.

But this way of thinking leads most start-ups into the so-called land of the living dead. Like mindless zombies, they just can’t take a hint and will keep working hard to sell a product that the market simply doesn’t want.

To avoid this, you should keep asking yourself how you need to change your product to improve it and help it find its market.

Also, you should periodically ask yourself whether a pivot might be in order — a fundamental change of course.” — Eric Ries, The Lean Startup.

I interpret pivoting as defining a current plan as unachievable, finding a new way to survive with the knowledge you already have and actually making this new way work.

Ian and I agreed on three things:

1. I should make it less broad.
2. I should focus on one thing.
3. and I should do that one thing really well.

Pivot one: lean strategy vs. quality of work.

Taiichi Ohno — founding father of Toyota’s manufacturing process.

I knew that we were both into lean. Ian asked me the other day if I had seen this post by Matthew Daniels from Undercurrent. I had, and I was really feeling it.

I came up with a hypothesis, a rough draft for a data gathering methodology and a roadmap with weekly tasks.

If I apply progressive process methodologies to POSSIBLE’s upcoming briefings, will this make the work better?

I wanted to challenge myself to understand and apply progressive methodologies like Agile, Lean, Google’s design sprint, IDEO’s design thinking methods and other cool stuff to POSSIBLE’s upcoming briefings that are not only related to phases more towards the end of a traditional waterfall process, i.e. design and development. What would it have looked like to do this for research, strategy, propositions, ideation and prototyping? I assumed that if I could come up with and apply an appropriate methodology to a certain briefing, it would make the strategic work more efficient. It was proven before, and I should’ve been able to do it too. (After a while, I realised that this was, what Eric Ries calls, a leap of faith. I had to make this assumption in order to move further, without being absolutely sure that I would nail it.)

Back then, I also challenged myself to find out things that weren’t investigated yet. I was not only interested in improving the efficieny of the process.

I wanted to know whether it would make the work better.

Pivot two: lean strategy vs. quality of people.

Inside Google’s new 1-million-square-foot London office—three years before it’s ready.

This was somewhere in the beginning of October. Ian, Kasia Zaniewska — our Product Strategy Director, Hayley Mills — Junior Strategic Planner and I sat together and we quickly realised that it would’ve been very hard to research the second part of my hypothesis. I was only going to stay at POSSIBLE for three months, which is way too short to measure goals and KPI’s.

That is why we slightly pivoted and changed the hypothesis:

If we apply progressive process methodologies to POSSIBLE’s upcoming briefings, will this increase employee happiness and performance?

Instead of measuring quality of work, we decided to measure quality of people.

You can read more about the primary research methodology over here in Chapter Two: Does lean make you happy?, which I’ve written a while ago. And about the results over here in “Chapter Three: Quality of people.”

I was so happy that I managed to get quantitative and qualitative data. It gave me the feeling that I was on the right track. I finally had my own primary data to play with. And I never thought that I was going to need another pivot, because I firmly believed that I had found my focus.

It was Christmas before I knew.

In December and January, we hibernate.

This was the most energy-consuming period I’ve ever experienced in a work environment. Ironically, it was because there wasn’t a lot of work going on. Agency and client people were taking it slow and a lot of them were on a holiday. It felt like I was slowly lullabied by this sudden and unwanted hibernation.

During this quiet period, I couldn’t spend time on my personal project. I needed another briefing. At that point, I only managed to test my hypothesis on a control group and not on a test group. I needed another briefing to make this research complete.

Right before the end of my internship, things were gradually brought up to speed. I sometimes had too much work, but it felt so good. It gave me energy. I was working again on my biggest baby, a project for Canon. Things were suddenly moving really fast and after finishing my preparatory work, we decided to start with a few design sprints. It was the moment I had been waiting for.

Unfortunately, this was my last week as a strategy intern at POSSIBLE. I felt the urge to stay longer and join the Canon design sprints, but I decided to go back to Belgium. I needed time to reflect, pivot one more time and do the right thing with the data and knowledge that I had gathered.

It was the best thing to do. I couldn’t afford spending more time researching. I had to start with some serious writing.

Training back to Belgium.

I sent an email to Jim Ralley, who is my supervisor for this project, with an update. This is what he replied:

Hey Thomas.

This sounds great. A little concerned that you’re pivoting again. But if you’re confident that you can put it all together before the deadline, then I’m on board.

Is there anything you require from me in terms of specific feedback?

I was a bit concerned too. I had so much data about motivations behind happiness and performance on the work floor, but I couldn’t find a theme that tied all of these references together.

Therefore, I gave myself a couple of days to dig through the data. I applied the following methodology that allowed me to find my third focus:

1. everything was dispersed. There were pictures on my hard drive, video fragments on a USB-stick, books in my unpacked suitcase, books on my Kindle, favorites on Twitter, (un)read articles on Pocket and written words in several notebooks.
2. I went through this labyrinth of possible inspiration. My first job was to filter out the things that actually seemed useful to me.
3. I started referencing already. I knew that I was probably not going to use all of them, but it gave me a good and “clean” feeling. I felt that I was saving time.
4. to get an overview, I started writing each reference on a seperate Post-It note. I put big sheets on a wall and divided these sheets in three parts. I hashtagged each reference (yes, I did that).
5. “reference”, “main insight” and “how to use it in my written piece”.
6. I suddenly began to see patterns. Words like leadership, values, structure, decision making process, failure, group/team and personality kept coming back.
7. all these words influence employee happiness and are part of three bigger wholes, more specifically purpose, process and culture.
8. then I asked myself: how can I craft a story out of all the knowledge that I have about these three areas?
9. I refined my focus question, inspired by Hayley, Greg, the guys from Undercurrent and a few positive psychologists.
10. I came up with the title: “The Happiness Table: on fueling growth by understanding happiness in creative companies.”

The way I’ve written the story from now on is rather dynamic than linear. It’s the mind map that was in my head for a very long time. And I’ve tried to bring it to life.

Please continue with “Chapter Three: Quality of people.” if you want to know more about the first results of my research that unraveled the very first insights.

— Thomas