Embracing the 'Try, Trying, Tried' Maker Mindset 🥰

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” - Dale Carnegie. 🙈 Problem - Modern work frameworks - With concepts like Lean, Agile, task, working on, Complete, velocity, momentum, sprint. Yikes. That doesn't sound like much fun. 😅 What's wrong with this? it's so negative! look at this: - Task = chore 😥 - Working on = Grinding 🥵 - Complete = Nothing ever really gets complete 100% 😓 - Sprint = Rush jobs only lead to more problems 😰 - Velocity = If you gamify work velocity, it will lead to "cobra effects" 🐍 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive - Agile / Lean - Invented by factory managers at Toyota. It's fine for conveyor belt work. Things that are operational and predictable. But, it should never have been applied to higher-level work like innovation. Innovation is the complete opposite of assembly line work. 🤦 Why has this become the standard? ☎️ Hello, it's the 19th-century assembly-line manager calling, can I have my playbook back, please? 🦸 Solution - Alright, let's fix this. This is not a framework; it's not a fixed playbook. It's more of a mindset that will naturally become part of the culture. It doesn't need to be written down or turned into a manifesto. The people will be its champions. Best of all, it fits right into kanban-style boards in your favorite collaboration app. Instead of the usual kanban columns: "Task," "Working on," or "Complete," I introduce (drumroll) 🥁... "Try, trying, tried" 💥 🧗 Try - It's much easier to try something. Say there are 200 issues in your tracker. People should be allowed to work on what fits their energy level right now. Sometimes you're on a streak and can take down immensely challenging tasks. Other times you're a bit zapped and you need just to get back into the stride and do some low-rpm refactoring/maintenance tasks. 🧑‍💻 Trying - There are times when you may need to stop due to a blocker or if the task turns out to be more complex than expected. That's okay. The important thing is that you made an effort. You shouldn't feel like you didn't succeed. Some things may not be meant to work out, and trying to force them could make matters worse in the grand scheme of things. It might even be better to start over and try again with your intimate knowledge of your first attempt. Your brain will remember many things from the first try and move much faster the second time. 👌 🎋 Tried - most things will never be 100% complete. Striving for complete perfection can make things rigid and difficult to change later on. Sometimes it's better to aim for 70% completion and then wait for other parts to come together. Once the complete picture is more clear, you can work on the remaining 30%. We often feel the need for things to be 100% complete, but it's better to remain flexible and adaptable, like bamboo. 💪 Initiative - Is like a cycle or sprint if you may. An estimate will be set on time but it's not fixed. Things happen, or some investment is worth a little more time. This, in turn, encourages a sustainable 'can-do attitude'. Work should be fun; you should wake up wanting to do it every day like it's Christmas morning and you're 6 years old again. 🗿 Milestone is pretty positive. It's a north star of sorts. Something to reach for but not "set in stone" per se. (No pun intended 😸) To be honest, all these work process words that we have gotten use to just need a positive spin on them. It's all how your mindset point-of-view is configured. Retro-spect 👉 discoveries. Performance review 👉 Mentoring, Epic 👉 Journey ...and so on. Now these things don't sound so confining anymore. That was easy. Just re-label them. In the past, performance reviews usually meant this: 🥵. But if you think of it as a mentoring session. Now you look forward to it, and you're not in defensive mode anymore, and you're suddenly way more open to input and learning. easy win! 💪 ⛵️ Having a more forgiving and less stringent work mindset makes it easier to adapt to the unpredictable nature of life and work. Both are usually volatile and require adaptability. So let's get back to doing what we do best: working on interesting problems with interesting people, and leaving all the "frameworks" nonsense in the rearview mirror. How hard can it be? This kind of "attempt mindset", it's like. Innovation is something you continuously chip away at, there is no map, there is no blueprint. You just have to throw attempt after attempt after attempt at it, and over time. If you have the right product sense. It will start to form the "right" infrastructure. Because that's all innovation is. Infrastructure. A collection of attempts that formed the DNA of the final result. But if your strategy for achieving this is all about a "master plan", built with conformity and strict rules. Then the ultimate version of what you are trying to achieve will probably not manifest it self. It's like Nature. Millions of attempts over millions of years. And here we are. Humanity. A collection of attempts, most of them failures and dead ends. "Failing forward" vs "Succeding forward" - A concrete example: 1. Succeding forward: Spend 4 hours solving something surface-level and simple that looks like progress, but in reality is just lipstick on a pig. easy to measure. If you do 20 of these. It looks like immense progress. High velocity. The system rewards this behaviour. 2. Failing forward: Spend 8 hours trying to solve something unflashy that has fundamental importance. But most likely is a dead end or won't be resolved. But if it works, the value is exponential to the whole. Each attempt also makes the next stab at the problem more likley to succed. If you do 4 of these. Maybe one works out. But "the system" penalizes this. Low velocity. Not productive enough. hard to measure failed attempts. Looks weak performance on the surface. Case in point. We get the cobra effect. Because one is easy to measure and as such is incentivized "succeding forward" gets favored. But basically "under the hood" builds up a house of cards, that will crumble eventually and lead to stale progress. The other modus operandi leads to strong foundations. Speed increases, because foundations are strong. Innovation is not a linear journey, it's more like a rollercoaster. - This mindset results in exponential innovation: 🚫🚫🚫✅🚫🚫✅🚫🚫🚫🚫🚫✅🚫 = 🚀 - This mindset looks "good" but leads to linear results: ✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅ = 🤷‍♂️ Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” 💡 I'm eager to learn from other makers and hustlers here on PH. Based on your experience and journey so far, what are some work methods that you have enjoyed and found effective in the past? Share your insights 🙏👇