At work we decided to watch a very interesting webcast of a conversation with Eric Ries and Rally Software’s Founder Ryan Martens and CTO Zach Nies. Eric Ries is the author of Lean Start-up, currently holding the 9th spot on the New York Times best-selling business book list; Rally specializes in software to help with Agile Development, kind of a Basecamp for Agile – if you’re a PM and know what I mean by “Basecamp.” For those who don’t, these are online tools for managing projects, tracking deadlines and to-do lists, etc.
I had just been talking with someone in the morning about the need to change mindset within companies to really find a way to “Work Different.” There’s a challenge with teams in getting folks to understand it is safe not to be told what to do at every step of the way. What went unsaid in this conversation was brought out in the Lean/Agile webcast. It all comes back to not feeling like you might lose your job if you take a risk.
The same idea about mindset came up in this webcast conversation as it relates to the entrepreneurial propensity towards taking risks. The interesting dimension they discussed is what we, in the PM world, call “risk management.” Meaning, when you’re facing the chance that all could fail and you want to say “I’m scared that [x condition] will cause [y result],” you say instead “There’s a risk of [y result] and here are the ways we can mitigate that.” Risk management might not lead to innovation. This is because the very hypothesis behind risk management is that you can and should head off failure. With that approach, no wonder folks are scared to take a chance and try things. Seems obvious, right, they don’t want to take the risk. It comes back to a willingness to learn and to see past failures in Corporate America.
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Work Different 