In a new context start to experiment as soon as possible. The joy will follow.
I changed my job three months ago and continued experimenting in a new environment. The new work had a splendid start when thinking about experiments since there was a New Work -program just launched at VTT, Technical research center of Finland. The program has five streams: culture, leadership, learning, digital solutions, and wellbeing.
I’m excited about this, since I feel passionate about the culture of experiments, lean and agile ways of working and general joy in life. New Work is encouraging to develop just the right things in the company.
With the company perspective in mind, I thought I could share some insights from my own experiments. Since experiments can grow too big quite fast, I try to focus on small experiments in everyday life.
I had a few meetings with brilliant new colleagues about data handling. Inspiring examples of traffic, real estate, and energy data that are collected for research purposes. The challenge was how data management should evolve when collecting new data sources for commercial opportunities with customer companies.
In the last meeting before the holidays, we had only 30 minutes. I thought we need to work simultaneously if we want to get anywhere.
I made a simple Miro kanban board with five swimlanes (Commercial data space/Research data space/Funding/Legan and technology/Other) and and four stages (Backlog/In-process/Done/Feedback-loop).
I send invitations to the kanban (miro.com) with very short introductions on how to use it.
Seven experts from different areas joined the meeting and even though I don’t think anyone had used Miro before, it worked like magic. In 30 minutes we were able to produce over 50 relevant post-its and a clear path where to continue.
Miro was quick and intuitive to use for a variety of people, from a layer to a developer. It’s inviting all to participate. Kanban also helped us to remember topics after relaxing holidays and we were able to form action points quickly.
Kanban will probably change in the future, but I felt the first version already helped us to have an inspiring start for joint efforts.
I’m planning on using Miro also for Bright Future -workshop soon. I’m doing customization of Dave Gray’s The Culture Map and I’ve only used it in live workshops. I would be happy to hear if you have some tips, please contact me here or in Instagram, Twitter or LinkedInn.
Photo by Riikka Rissanen
Small experiments and inspiration 