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Lean Ops - Building a growth environment in your organisation

Growth gets you out of the comfort zone. Because of that, growth - personal or business, can be painful. It's scientifically proven that people's first instinct is to reject change.

Doctor Carol Dweck coined the term "growth mindset" 30 years ago in a study about students' attitude towards failure. He describes the growth mindset as the underlying beliefs people have about learning and intelligence.

If you want to introduce a growth mindset in your organisation, what you're actually looking for is to design an ecosystem that empowers people with a growth mindset to create their best work. But also their biggest failures.

Characteristics of a Fixed Mindset

Believing that your qualities are “fixed” (unchangeable, carved in stone)

Traits are what you were born with and what you have to live with

Need to prove yourself (over and over)

Experiences are used as confirmation (of intelligence, personality, character)

Hide deficiencies

Look for relationships to build up self esteem

Use what’s tried and true

Blame others, full of excuses

Label themselves (I am… I can’t…)

Failure is a direct reflection of ability

Characteristics of a Growth Mindset

Basic qualities can and should be cultivated

Everyone can change through application and experience

Passion for learning

Don’t need to prove themselves, because time can be used to actually get better

Overcome weaknesses

Look for relationships with people who will challenge and encourage growth

Step outside their comfort zones, take risks

Confront Challenges

Persistence. Sticking with something even when it is not going well

Failure is a learning opportunity

People with a growth mindset at work

#1 Discovery: Analyse the value streams

#2 Decisions to be made: Benchmark them against the business strategy of the company

#3 Jobs to be done: Organise fast paced & skilled teams around jobs to be done and use data to evaluate results and decide on next steps.

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Notes to a Junior Strategist

Keep your modesty. Listen more. Talk less. Be a team player. Don’t make it about yourself. Never stop reading. Read anything. Read everything. Grow your sensibility. You don’t have to always agree. But be respectful. Sit in your customer’s shoes. Rework that value proposition until it’s perfect. Don’t sell stuff just for the sake of it. Try to make the world a better place. Look for potential. Work with unmet needs. Drink more water. Sleep more. Enjoy your work. Love the problem, not the solution. 

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A prescription for creative anxiety

In moderation, anxiety isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can help you to stay alert and focused, spur you to action, and motivate you to solve problems.

Innovation anxiety doesn’t apply only to individuals, but also to organisations.

I listened to an amazing podcast today from Designers on Board with Helsinki’s Chief Design Officer - Anne Stenros. In the first 5 minutes she speaks about the challenges of driving innovation (in one of the most innovative countries in the world still), highlighting the importance of an organisation to have have in its DNA this openness to change.

I think it's the best prescription I could share.

For me, being open to change is not a fancy buzzword, but the a core value of an enterprise designed around a culture of feedback, workspace & product.

A culture of feedback - This is not holacracy (though it can be). But people involved in the process matter, and I’m going to show them that they matter by being upfront & honest while emphatic & constructive.

A culture of workspace - Innovation doesn’t happen working in silos, but in multi-disciplinary teams that can spot and/or ensure the added value of an idea at an organisation level.

A culture of product - We have never lived a time of such insecurity. Social. Technological. Economical. Political. How are we going to make sure that, whatever we are building here, we leave an open window for whatever is coming next? And through which mechanisms are we going to ensure this “connection” with the outside world?

Take it the other way around.

Our brains (thus us as human beings) are wired to reject change. It's called Fear of Change and it's your amygdala.

The amygdala is the part of our limbic system associated with emotion. Consequently, it plays a significant role in regulating our fears. Although fear keeps us vigilant to the occurrence of physical threats, it is also restricting our ability to focus to anything else.

So maybe a new Homo Sapiens has to evolve for this Openness to Change to flourish, because you can't change people.

But maybe you can design organisations around people that have a tendency for embracing change as their main human potential driver.

Fun fact from www.unstuck.com.

Imagine you’re on your way to an important work meeting. In one scenario, you get a flat tire and know for sure you’ll miss the meeting; in the other, you’re caught in stop-and-go traffic and don’t know if you’ll be late. Research suggests something surprising: we experience more stress when we don’t know if something bad is about to happen than when we know for sure it’s coming.

Neuroscientist Marc Lewis told me that stop-and-go traffic is more stressful because, for survival reasons, the brain is evolved to pay a lot of attention to uncertainty. When consequences are unpredictable, dopamine floods a relatively primitive part of the brain that he calls the “action center,” activating a “motor script that’s ready to swing into action,” with your pupils dilating and your attention narrowing. “You’re going to expend the most energy when the outcome is least predictable” and you have the greatest chance of influencing the odds, Lewis said.*

In his study, Dan Gilbert explains how human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.

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Enterprise Design applied at a city level

Inspirational talk from Helsinki’s Chief Design Officer Anne Stenros @Designer on Board: https://soundcloud.com/designeronboard/episode-2-anne-stenros 

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The missing link in mobility

The missing link in mobility is a collaboration platform between the public & the private sector at both a city & country level.

The public & the private sectors are the two powerful forces designing the present & future of mobility in the cities we live in, but they are working against each other.

They each have their own vision, their own terms and solutions and, most of the times, the same problem. The inevitable is there to happen. They will clash and drown in their own ambitions.

The private sector development plays a key role in creating economic growth, employment and improved living conditions. According to the European Commission, the public sector is responsible for 84% of GDP and 90% of jobs in developing countries.

We, the 7.000 mobility startups registered on Crunchbase, are part of this private sector and are trying to drive business growth in the blind. Our business designers are pushing their limits to make forecasts like they have some sort of a magic bowl.

Take this example. Germany is considering to make public transportation free to drive air quality improvements, which is amazing. But what are the implications for an electric shared car business?

Someone needs to put in place a collaboration platform that can bring together the public & private sector. And at a macro level - the EU, blockchain could be a perfect solution to integrate solutions, results and other relevant information.

Each city administration should open its doors and welcome the local innovators & entrepreneurs to find together the best solution through which not only the business can really strive, but also become a sustainable & meaningful solution for the people living in the city inline with the current & future city development plans.

Offering transparency for development plans, having Business Designers working together with City Urban Planners to identify what role the private sector can play & which roles can it supply in the same time, would be a gold mine for humanity.

A startup is just much faster. It can accelerate growth at rates that a public institution could never do. But the public institution still plays an important part because it can grant the startup with access to relevant information for him to design its business.

There are 4 countries in EU that can already start applying this model.

There's a theorised economic development concept that looks at growth potential called the middle income trap. The idea of countries being stuck in a “middle-income trap” is derived from the observation that challenges change as a country develops and unless policies and institutions also change profoundly to adapt to the new challenges, economies grow below potential and incomes per capita stagnate.

Trapped MICs - no

New HICs - maybe

Established HICs - definitely

Trapped MICs that have spent more than the average amount of time in the upper-middle-income range - like Romania and Turkey.

By contrast, the new HICs that took less than 20 years in the upper-middle-income range are Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic.

Established HICs that have maintained a growth rate above 2 percent since entering HIC status are Austria, Belgium, Germany & Finland.

Thank you in advance.

[andreeastrachina]

Why urban anthropology is key for designing meaningful mobility solutions

We use a lot (and sometimes to saturation) the concept of human-centered thinking. After 10 years of Strategy & Journalism in various roles, I can say that it has always been about the people. The best insights. The most powerful tensions. The best stories. They have always been about the people, but somehow we found ourselves mesmerised by all the new & shiny concepts and/or under the daily business pressure to deliver results. 

We somehow lost our balance, and further - the connection with the outside world, outside our small (but posh) offices. It's easy to forget, and it's most of the times the system's fault.

But there's a glitch in the system.

In 2008, when fromAtoB was founded, it was the first start-up that saw an opportunity in designing a seamless travel planning tool that would facilitate railway connections for people. Like never before. At that time, the liberalisation of the railway market in the European Union was just starting to take shape - and would say, unfortunately, that 10 years later it's still in a incipient phase.

Forward to 2018. The European Commission asks local incumbents for cooperation. It declares 2018 as the year of Multimodal in inland transportation- opening call for projects that would accelerate not only the market's liberalisation, but also its digitalisation & service integration - from tickets to bookings.

So what's the glitch, you ask?

I've spent the past months doing an in-depth research on the railway market to understand not only its core dynamics, but also how it fits into the overall inland transportation system.

After analysing 28 countries, I came to the conclusion that mobility (with a focus on inland transportation) is the most direct mirror of a society's welfare. And that everything built outside of it is just a waste of energy.

You can't design the next mobility solution without knowing what country is truly committed to invest in infrastructure (including what type of infrastructure & what new connections it will open/facilitate in both the domestic & intraregional market) and what's the urban planning strategy for suburban & regional transportation for the next 10 years (except if you don't want to be there in 10 years).

You can't design mobility solutions without understanding what moves people from A to B. True story, it's most of the times a subconscious behaviour driven by first-hand motivations - Leisure, VRF etc. But humans have inner dynamics - like an unseen spider network.

You can't force people to ride a bike in a city overpopulated by cars that will continue to grow in 2020 to 2 billion.

You can't force people to pay 15 EUR for an electric shared car when the world is becoming more and more fragmented between the rich and poor. What happened between the 70s & the 90s in Africa and India is, unfortunately, proof of how non-sustainable mobility solutions can marginalise the less fortunate people & communities at a higher speed than their governments.

And what is the future of mobility in countries with 90% people living in urban areas (the so called megacities) We're already experiencing this in Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Sweden.

You look at Denmark or Netherlands and ask yourself "Why can't we have that?". And all answers take you back to the fine study of Urban Anthropology.

Because our history, values and in the end, society, are a unique piece of human evolution, and must be regarded as such.

Do you have a mobility solution? Go for localisation, and not globalisation.

There's not a-business-case-fits-all (at last got a place to use it). You decide to put France on the second place, for example, but let me ask you: why? It could still be first, but would then serve a different value proposition than it does in Germany.

They say Business Designers have an inner sensibility that makes them see through the numbers. A sort of "reading the air" skill (reminding of Erin Mayer and her book The Culture Map).

I say we have one of the amazing jobs in the world, and should be proud to be tomorrow's designers for the global community we live in.

Explore the Uber case study HERE.

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Why Uber won Eastern Europe - an urban anthropology study case

In a previous article I was writing about the importance of using different value propositions when entering a market as an imperative for success.

A great case study about how unique our cultures & societies are is Uber. Applying Urban Anthropology (with a focus on the political & economical dimensions) to understand what happened with Uber in Central & Eastern Europe tells a much bigger & insightful story than Gross Revenues will ever do. You can try:

Here comes the cool part.

Truth is that Uber didn't expect for Eastern Europe to become such a successful market. Nobody thought that. Especially in a country with one of the slowest GPD increases & income per capita in the European Union. The management was taken by surprise, as their officials have said themselves.

Uber didn't study expansion through the lenses of Urban Anthropology nor did they apply a value proposition to the market other than their traditional global approach.

But the people have done it for it.

Uber's growth approach in Europe was a Divide and conquer strategy in countries with ambiguous transport regulations.

Romania was the last Eastern European market Uber entered.

The list represents the Uber market in EE. Green highlights main cities in Hungary, Poland & Romania.

In only 2 years, the Romanian business became much more profitable than Poland (through Poland has x2 the population of Romania and it's the economic engine of Eastern Europe). More than that,Romania is now the 4th largest market for Uber in the entire Europe.

Let me tell you the story through the anthropology perspective.

Romania is facing one of the most challenging urbanisations in Europe. Its cities have not been designed for these amounts of people, nor its streets (and the trend is still on the rise, as 45% of the population still lives in rural areas).

The poor government management of the situation (with bills passed without any feasibility and/or forecast assessments - won't go into more details) has led to:

For the people: sever traffic congestions, air & noise pollution, lack of parking spaces etc.

For the mobility businesses: a fertile playground for corruption & self-made regulations

Indeed, it's a global truth that cars come with a much more higher comfort than a bus will ever provide, but people weren't driving on the streets of Bucharest because they loved their cars. But because they had no other option: the public transport was (and still is) poorly allocated & connected.

The taxi was, until Uber, the only viable option if you didn't want to take the public transport. But the taxi operators are one of the biggest corruption engines in the capital.

Just to give you an example - also in correlation with Uber - end of 2017, Uber paid to the Romanian state x3 times more in taxes than all the taxi companies registered in Bucharest (41.555 EUR versus 13.605 EUR).

Corruption in the taxi system meant not only dynamic fares these companies could apply to customers (e.g. you get in for an amount and you can't get out at the destination if you don't pay triple), but also quality problems - from car to ride conditions.

After 25 years in the Communism, all these people wanted was to be treated right. Respected. Not taken by fools. Have control. Feel empowered.

And this is what propelled Uber. The people driving were people-like-me. Uber was a synonym with Western values. Where people mattered, and did not have their rights abused.

No longer had we to always check if the driver took the not-the-longest-way to home. We had a third party (Waze until 2017, now GoogleMaps) deciding for the route and that gave us a peace-of-mind.

We had more trust in technology than in the people.

After 3 years and another 4 mobility services launched in Romania, the mayor of the capital wants to ban all mobility services provided through mobile apps."If they want a cab, people should call into the call center.", the major said. Why you ask? Because mobile apps allow mobile payments. And mobile payments imply a clear & transparent financial activity. Which is the contrary to how the system works.

Pause. It was late and wanted to get home faster. So I opened my app folder and instinctually opened Uber instead of MyTaxi. There's no actual difference in Germany between the two, so people started asking me why. And it hit me on the way home. Uber is a love brand. I was born and raised in a country where Uber was one of the first brands that showed us (me and the +2 million of people who participated in the street protests last year) how to live in line with a set of standards.

Play. The story could go on looking at how, once you've overcome this growth momentum, you drive growth in countries where the good life is already a reality and most of the means of transportation fight on points of parity.

PS: Taxify is mainly run by regular taxi drivers. And this is why Taxify will always come second.

Article published on LinkedIn

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France ranks first in mobility innovation

Indexing the 314 startups admitted into the first European Startup Prize for Mobility reveals not only France's appetite for user innovation - with more than 130 submissions, but also how does the short-term future of mobility can look like: collaborative, data-driven & accessible.

Although it has been almost impossible to cluster all 130 startups, it’s this exact lack of pattern that reveals some interesting category trends. I don’t think user innovation has ever seen such a huge development, and it's even more interesting to see what this will mean for Europe (and the world) as France will soon grow to be one of the biggest mobilityexporters - e.g. Germany's rail leader Deutsche Ban is already using DigiMobee's services.

The reviewed 130 French startups cover all the mobility areas:

Vehicles: Flight, Sail, Cars/Electric Cars/Autonomous Cars, Bike, Bus, Train, Scouters/Electric Scooters

Areas: Commuting, Parking, Payments, Communication/Connectivity

Applications: Intermodal, Shared, Singular

Products: Service, Software, Support, Alternative

Audience: B2B, B2C

Value propositions: Sustainable, Solar, Integrated

What to know about France

The population growth in France is metropolitan centered. Moreover, it's the second largest population in a functional urban area in the EU after London (the United Kingdom).

At 1 January 2040, the population of France should reach 73 million inhabitants, nearly 71 million of which will live in metropolitan France.

A data analysis at country level done by MIT can give you a visual understanding of this theory already coming to life, here.

In parallel to the growing population in France, we are seeing, since the 2008 financial crisis, greater inequalities across the country. For example, between 2008 and 2011, the standard of living of 10% of the poorest inhabitants fell by 3.5 percentage points whereas the standard of living of the richest 10 per cent increased by 2.5 percentage points.

3 big ideas in focus for the french startup scene:

Mobility as an igniter | more than moving people from A to B, it’s about how they interact on their way from A to B, and how data can be used to drive a more meaningful experience across touch points (departure, commuting, arrival) in the benefit of the current or future commuters.

Public restauration | Or compensating for the lack of public-driven development. User innovation proves once again that affordable & easy to implement solutions exist, and that they are moving at a faster pace than the public sector. And if I have a favourite here, it’s by far the idea of hijacking public transport. Zenbus is a solution for any public transit network, delivering accurate real-time information for passengers and supervisors, directly from the driver’s smartphone.

Diversification of inland transportation with a focus on accessibility | Urban & subregional transportation, alternatives for how to maximize the long hanging fruits such as proximity to water and/or 2 wheels vehicles - scouters (they do have a culture!) and bikes. What I love about the 3rd "trend" is that it encapsulates the very purpose of innovation - making valuable ideas available for the masses.

Article published on Linkedin