Chapter Two
Does lean make you happy?
This is the second 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. This post in particular describes the primary research methodology for measuring quality of people.
A very warm welcome.
This post is about the future of strategy, progressive process methodologies, happiness and performance — and my computation neurons who will hopefully help me to craft a story out of these three themes.
One, two, three.
The future of strategy
For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to understand what the future of strategy in digital agencies could look like. I went through theories I came across at school, I talked to people and I came up with some first assumptions.
It is very hard to synthesize all these pieces of information into one decisive direction because they could be perceived as ‘not so much related to each other’, yet very true at the same time.
How strategy will be designed and implemented in the future is rather a choice that companies make than an acceptance and implementation of a ‘one size fits all’ model. Different process methodologies will exist and live next to each other. Some companies have progressive process methodologies that are ingrained in their DNA. Some slightly more traditional companies are adopting these new methodologies. Others are very much resistant to change.
One thing is certain. If executed well, these progressive methodolgies lead to work efficiency. And I am especially interested in what the role of strategy would be inside that world.
How can we make strategy more efficient?
The answer’s just around the corner. But it’s probably a tough nut to crack.
Progressive process methodologies
Since I started doing my internship as a strategist at POSSIBLE, I noticed that I was working in an environment that is willing to question itself and that is adaptive to change. Around the same time, this post called ‘Strategy, in reverse’ was released by Matthew Daniels from Undercurrent.
I was happy that those colleagues whom I considered as ‘cool’ had read it too. This entire article somehow took the form of a call-to-action. It instigated us to try these things as well.
We’ve challenged ourselves 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 look like to do this for research, strategy, propositions, ideation and prototyping? We assumed that if we come up with and apply an appropriate methodology to a certain briefing, it will make the strategic work more efficient. It’s proven before, and we should be able to do it too.
We’ve also challenged ourselves to find out things that haven’t been investigated yet. We are not only interested in improving the efficieny of the work.
We want to know whether this would improve the people who are doing the work. Would this improve their happiness? Would this give them the feeling that they’ve performed better?
To dig deeper, I need a new heading.
Happiness and performance
Here comes the hypothesis:
If we apply progressive process methodologies to POSSIBLE’s upcoming briefings, will this increase employee happiness and performance?
There are two big challenges in this second part of our hypothesis. The first one is how to define happiness and performance, and the second is how to measure them.
1. How to define happiness and performance?
I still remember the first week in Hyper Island, called way week. We had to collaborate on a manifesto that would represent the five most important values for our crew of 43 students. The first part of that exercise was to make a top 5 that everyone agreed upon. These were:
Respect, bravery, freedom, passion and happiness.
The second task, which was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, was to define these values. We were divided into five teams to discuss what they meant for our crew. Subsequently, the (very international) representatives of each team were invited to build the manifesto in only a couple of minutes inside a fishbowl. The 38 other students had to sit silently around the aquarium. I was inside the bowl, and I felt like a politician.
These values are extremely subjective, and it is very hard to find common ground between interpretations that are directed by cultural manifestations.
We did very well on the first four, but then there was happiness.
For some happiness was the journey, for others it was the final result. For some happiness could be found in small things, for others happiness is big, visible and in your face. It was very hard to find common ground because happiness of life is something that relates to the individual and its personality.
At POSSIBLE, we didn’t want to go that road. We looked at what happiness could mean in a professional environment, to narrow it a bit down. Inspired by Daniel Pink’s book Drive, we came up with four questions we thought could bring us the data we are interested in.
2. How to measure happiness and performance?
We are going to make small project teams of preferably four people and ask each member four questions at the end of each day during a couple of weeks (preferably before, during and after the real work). Participants get notified at the end of each day by text messages to make sure we capture all that is needed.
- How satisfied are you with today?
- How valued do you feel by the people you’ve worked with today?
- How good do you think your individual work was today?
- How well do you think the whole team has performed today?
Participants will have to answer these questions by giving a number from 1 to 10. We are going to collect real time data and try to learn. When we see interesting things happening (e.g. a sudden fluctuation of answers to question one), we are going to tap into that by interviewing that particular team member in order to better understand their emotions and behaviors. This will allow us to learn and to be better prepared for future projects.
To make it a tad more playful, I’ve made this LEGO board. Team members have to play with it every day and give a score for questions one, two, three and four by placing the right buttons on the bricks.
At the end of each day, I am going to take a picture of the board. I am going to print them out, hang them on a big wall, compare and analyze.
This is absolutely going to be challenging.
I better get back to work.
Thomas
