Lesson of the week: Consider the options as they emerge, don’t blindly follow a plan. This takes discipline.
Ukraine, Malaysia and now Argentina!
To the untrained eye it might seem that I’m trashing around undecided about location. It only seems that way.
It occurs to me that my venture is entirely in my control – sweet – ! I get to decide when , whom, what and why (at least until there are other opinions to consider – even then, it is my cash on the edge of the loo). So – as I press ahead with building contacts in Malaysia – identify candidates for the roles in KL, other options (from friends, colleagues and well meaning mates) keep coming in, and I must spend a small amount of time and energy to consider their implications for the next move. It is a learning and I *should* inspect it and adapt if appropriate.
My plans right now are all virtual – I haven’t spent a dime (beyond registering a few domains). I feel tremendous power with that situation – I can ‘spring’ into any direction.
The core of the venture is actually transferable to any location – I didn’t quite appreciate this until multiple locations choices came up – and so I have now continued along the path of making the actual implementation (what happens when I choose a location) as location independent as possible.
Something else I learnt (or was reinforced) was that I really know what I want in my team. Diversity is extremely important to me. For some it is a problem because it can be hard work – but for my medium term vision it is critical. Innovation stems from the sweet spot between our differences and the main bubbles of diversity (gender and ethnicity) which encompass such richness of experiences are easy differences to build into teams (others require much more thought). Knowing what to do when you have these differences is also rather important (if you don’t know – don’t try building diverse teams, it could be the worst thing you could do!).
By comparing Malaysia with the Ukraine and Argentina for example – it became really clear that whilst I might get more technically capable people and more readily in both Ukraine and Argentina – I’m told it would be really tough to get a good ethnic mix. This is almost guaranteed in Malaysia.
To be honest, I had not thought about how important diversity would be until I realised I might not get it , and in the level I required.
With less than a week to go before the Malaysia trip, I really need to drill a little deeper into my stories. At the times when I struggle to write things down – I find it better to reward my brain by filming an interview with myself on my mac and record the story telling that way. Try it sometime.
User stories can be told and recorded on audio , video or both. I would argue that the written form is perhaps the least communication rich format of the three. Why more teams don’t use it is beyond me. Sure you need to be able to index the various bits of the story (CCC), but once you establish a template (which I strongly suggest you do) then that challenge is easily overcome. You could even have some software to index what you say so that you can auto-tag your stories. Oral tradition reborn. More on this later.
BTW – as my stories become done – I will release the video/audio onto the wwxlabs.com website.
That is it.