Hey First name / dear friend,
You probably noticed we didn’t send a newsletter last week. This was not something we intended to do, it was a direct consequence of our systems needing a readjustment.
Here at 3101 (the studio behind Humankind Works), we’re constantly experimenting with new strategies, tactics and systems. And we do it for a very important reason: reimagining work includes testing new ways of doing work.
And as you might imagine, sometimes things don’t work out. And when they don’t, we’d rather be brave and make adjustments because the sooner we do this, the sooner we can move forward.
In this specific case, we needed to simplify.
Despite seeming either too “basic” or “counterintuitive”, simplifying our businesses is one of the most important things a business should do.
Complexity is not a bad thing per se, it is how nature evolves. And in that process of evolution, the unnecessary gets filtered out.
Unnecessary complexity creates noise and friction where there should be clarity and flow.
The reason is that unnecessary complexity is one of the biggest bottlenecks to a company’s progress — it creates entanglement, lack of clarity and it culminates in bureaucracy and overhiring. In other words, it just slows everything down, undermining growth, profitability and the team’s wellbeing. And for us, who are serious about making this world a better place without burning ourselves out, this is even more important. The world needs companies like ours to thrive.
Simplifying should be a recurring practice, especially for tiny businesses.
I learned this practice with my coach, Christine Carrillo. Christine is very intentional, not only with her time and energy, but also with her teams’. I remember the time she told me how every month she would do
company wide resets for a few days to simplify and optimise processes.
These “restructuring” cycles are not a new concept, quite the opposite — in many tech companies, the engineering team has a “code debt” weeks after a couple of sprints.
In our case, we overengineered our systems and we were too ambitious with the projects we set ourselves to do in August and September. Adding insult to injury, we had summer holidays, and some of the team members, including myself, had personal situations that required our undivided attention.
As a CEO, I want to manage in a way that energises my team, not in a way that drains them.
Respecting this principle, we decided to take a step back, reevaluate and make some changes moving forward.
In hopes our learnings can be helpful to you, I’m going to share some of the areas we take into consideration while doing our resets and insights we got from doing them.
1. Choosing the recurrence of resets
In the period we’re now, we don’t have a product or marketing cycle that creates a specific pace in our business. If we did, we’d adapt to it so that resets would complement those cycles. At this moment this is how we integrated our resets in our planning workflow:
- Yearly: we create a high-level strategy and goals for the year
- Quarterly: we get specific on the projects we’ll tackle, always starting with a team retreat and retrospective of the previous quarter. Then with the information we gather, we take some days to optimise our processes and document.
- Monthly: we review and adjust our projects and deliverables.
- Weekly: we define deliverables on a weekly sprints framework, adjusting as we go. We now connected a “learnings” database to our projects database. The goal is for us to add the topics as go when they’re still fresh, so that we’ll discuss in our retros further ahead.
2. Creating a compass that makes decisions easier
The clearer the organisation’s identity and purpose, the easier it will be to make decisions in all areas. And in what regards company resets, they will help you distinguish between what’s important and what’s superfluous.
In the beginning, we tried defining our values, but it was too soon. We had to work together for some time to refine them. As our values evolved, decisions became almost instinctive.
Even if you work by yourself, consider defining the values you like to work by. This is the foundation of your company — the values, vision, mission and goals. Your purpose. It will allow you not to steer away from them so easily.
3. Optimising resets to the business’ needs
The business stage or the growth phase you’re in will influence both the resets’ intervals, and the areas you’ll be optimising.
Humankind Works is in the product definition phase side by side with product market fit — so we concentrate our efforts on those activities.
This said, we’re mindful of keeping a baseline in what comes to people and operations so that we don’t set ourselves for problems further ahead.
4. Leveraging your team’s strengths
It’s critical to pair the right people for the work that needs to be done — this will make work more efficient and the quality standards of what they deliver higher.
As the person who holds the concept of Humankind Works, I need to be deeply involved in product and content. Our goal is to make our company less dependent on me doing/reviewing the work, but in order for that to happen, Humankind Works’ concept has to become a bit more defined. This has been one of those lessons we learned the hard way, maybe I’ll cover this in a future edition.
5. Integrating and optimising ongoing tasks
We like to create new things, but we underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done on an ongoing basis — the recurring tasks that keep the business functioning, and the tasks that we now have to keep doing to maintain new initiatives we created.
At Humankind Works we not only take ongoing tasks into account, but we also target them as one of the areas with biggest potential to simplify, automate, eliminate and outsource.
6. Managing team capacities
Capacity encompasses not only working hours but also our physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities to handle tasks and projects. As knowledge workers, we rely on our brains’ performance.
Life happens, and at any given moment, team members may face capacity limitations due to personal reasons — and we can prepare for them when resetting our workflows.
But the inverse is also true — we can optimise the work we ask our team to do taking into consideration the types of capacities required. Imagine a super automated and efficient company that generates a ton of customer dissatisfaction.
The team handling customer experience will be burned out in no time, intellectually and emotionally. We’ll need to make choices — hopefully aligned with our values.
7. Keeping systems and documentations simple
We love spending time tweaking Notion and Coda docs. In the beginning our systems would take into account all different situations. Nowadays, we just want them to be as simple as possible — if we open a page and feel overwhelmed or confused, something has to get moved or removed.
We prioritise short tutorials and walk-me-through videos — easily findable in our knowledge base.
It took us a while, especially because most of our team is neurodivergent, but we’re getting there!
Before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a heads up that these resets might be challenging if you don’t choose courage.
We sometimes avoid seeing what we need to see, because we don’t want to make hard decisions. But there is a new and incredible you on the other side — we're all in this journey with you and you got this!
See you next week!
P.S.1: We're here for you — how can we help you? Vote in a topic and/or leave a message. 🤗
P.S.2: And before we go, was this newsletter helpful to you?
