- A well-defined strategic plan helps us reduce anxiety, but it can make us less responsive to unforeseen events.
- To build a product, we need to remain open and responsive to the unpredictable. Taoism is a philosophy that gives us clues as to how to do this.
- Our principles of culture seek to place the company in creative flow, embracing error and uncertainty in the search for constant innovation.
When we founded Uncover in 2020, one of my main focuses was the definition of a clear and objective strategy for the company. That is: a succession of well-defined steps that, if executed with excellence, would lead us to the promised land.
Behind this claim lies the natural desire to reduce the sense of uncertainty of those who venture into new paths. Good strategic planning would help us keep as many variables under control, increasing the predictability of our young venture.
Sad deception.
Building Product
From the beginning, we positioned ourselves as a company based on technology and product scalability, which took us months operating as a research and development laboratory. We bring together some of the best data scientists, designers, and software engineers in the market, interacting in a constant effort of discovery and innovation.
Our common goal: to build a data platform that finally delivers to decision makers historic promises of Data driven marketing, creating the gold standard in ROI analysis, investment optimization, and forecasting.
However, at every step we were faced with a new technical challenge that was not foreseen in our very well outlined strategic planning. Scarcity of data to train the models, archaic sources, absence of standards... we soon realized that our initial effort to reduce uncertainty would be totally in vain in the face of the relentless forces of randomness.
But more than that: to achieve our product ambitions, we would need to sustain a virtuous circuit of discovery and innovation for many months, placing the team in a productive harmony that could embrace the uncertain instead of uselessly trying to get rid of it.
In an effort to control the destiny of our business as much as possible, the well-planned strategic planning soon became an obstacle to creativity, paralyzing us in the face of unpredictable events instead of embracing their unavoidability.
Flow State
Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophical tradition that became popular in the 21st century because it addressed the state of flow (or Flow as it is better known). It is the state of maximum engagement of the human mind, in which all the energy of attention is put into doing something, without any internal or external distractions hindering it. It's an especially common state for high-performance athletes and artists, who need to get rid of all distractions to achieve excellence.
In the Taoist approach, the key to achieving the state of flow is to transform the relationship with the unpredictable. Instead of dispersing energy trying to control the uncontrollable, we must preserve a way of working that is responsive to change and guided by common objectives.
At Uncover, faced with the challenges that were presented in the construction of the product, we began to challenge ourselves: could we put the company in a kind of flow? It would be necessary to adopt a culture capable of accepting the unpredictable without resistance, preserving our creative energy to solve problems.
Culture vs. Strategy
While the strategy seeks to minimize the unpredictable, the construction of culture attempts to produce principles that inform individual and collective action before it. To bring the company closer to a state of flow, we adopt, consciously and unconsciously, learning focused on preserving creativity in the face of problems. Here are some of them:
Reduce mechanisms that punish errors: individual performance evaluation systems must measure the ability to handle errors autonomously, and not punish their commission.
Empower executors to solve problems independently: if we assume a culture of error, each one must have autonomy and the power to act without responding to a higher hierarchical level.
Show early, and always show: we shouldn't wait for things to be perfect to share them, because they never will be. We need constant feedback.
Microcultures: it is important and desirable for small groups to create their own identities, even if this produces cultural heterogeneity in the company. This increases the sense of responsibility and accomplishment in the face of projects.
There, and back again
Our journey at Uncover is still early on. We're, with luck, coming out of the diapers. The application of these principles certainly helped us to realize our product ambitions in this initial phase: we have, so far, zero churn of customers and employees in the company, which possibly signals some success.
Even so, it is impossible to know if they will be sufficient for future stages, in which we expect accelerated growth and expansion of complexity.
Knowing how to respond to the unpredictable will possibly be our greatest strength in this process.