Faster, Better, Happier: Building Great Stuff Together

“We're in trouble and you need to help us.” That’s the overarching directive that brings me and the team at Ethical Ventures in to companies around the world, and across industries, where we work on improving teamwork, strategy, and organization structure. Sometimes the problem is contained in a bottom or top line metric, but often it’s simply a feeling that things aren’t quite right and could be better.

Whatever the initial insight, event, or tension that unlocks the realization that something has to change, my work almost always focuses on a combination of doing more with less (faster), improving quality of products and services (better), and creating the kind of place where people want to work and where they are more engaged (happier). Faster. Better. Happier.

Faster: When we say we want organizations to move more quickly, we really mean that we feel like we aren't making enough or doing enough with the resources we have. We want to make more in the same amount of time with the same number of (or even fewer) people hours.

Better: This can refer to maintaining a high standard of service or product quality. It can also refer to improvement – either incremental or disruptive – of these same services and/or products. While disruptive innovation is often the stated goal – and those that succeed can upend entire industries – it’s a red herring in many organizations that should be more focused on consistent delivery of existing products and services over the invention of new ones.

Happier: This is where culture lives. Often my clients are having a hard time retaining or attracting, good people; or leaders feel overwhelmed and have an impending sense of dread. Often it's the leadership team itself and how they relate to each other that's the real problem. Leaders are especially prone to poor collaboration due to the silos inherent in their work – not to mention the strong personalities of people that often find their way on to these teams.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences

I started my career in newspaper design and had the good (or bad) fortune to be presiding over the design and production of the San Francisco Examiner right as Craigslist came on the scene. That meant a sudden drop in our classified ad revenue (the source of a full 50% of our operating budget). Now as a consultant, I'm frequently hired to help adapt to this sort of disruption for industries as varied as media, banking, healthcare and even activism.

The obsession with moving faster and making better products is easy to understand. They have direct economic impact and clearly fit under the umbrella of improvements that make sense for businesses to go after. Management consultants have been making promises of faster and better for years and the tools that get us there are well described in business school literature.

This work of system improvement however, is holistic and changes in one variable inevitably have consequences – both intended and unintended / positive and negative – that need to be anticipated.

Peter Drucker famously noted that, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is partially true but the reality is complex. Happier, more engaged, people tend to do better work and people who are doing good work tend to feel better about what they are doing. Ideally we create a positive feedback loop between the two.

Efficiency (faster), quality (better), and culture (happier) are symbiotic and mutually interdependent. You can’t get one without the other – at least not for long – and improving any individual aspect becomes easier when the other two are healthy.

In this series I’ll present you with processes and tools that improve each of these organizational facets, while also introducing you to the underlying principles that make them work. My goal is to help you apply the right mindset to the problems you face so you can intervene in your systems in valuable ways.

Attempts to move faster, build better and create a more engaged culture often have a “groundhog day” quality in the organizations I work with. There’s a feeling of hopelessness in my clients and an awareness that they’ve tried to change in the past only to end up in the same (or only marginally better) place. This is often because (to paraphrase Albert Einstein) they are trying to fix things from the same mindset that created the problem in the first place.

My work will help you think in a new way about the challenges and therefore make changes that actually create change.