Joy at Menlo: A Client Developer's Perspective

We Should be Afraid of Fear!
Why fear needs to leave the workplace

We recently came across a short but important video from Love In Action, a podcast hosted by Marcel Schwantes. In the episode, “Why Fear-Based Workplaces Need to Disappear,” Schwantes explores the damaging effect fear can have on workplace culture. At Menlo, we talk a lot about the importance of a joyful culture and joyful leadership. Fear is the opposite of that joy, and this video captures exactly why fear-based leadership hurts both people and organizations.

Schwantes discusses how fear stifles creativity and discourages employees from taking initiative, thinking creatively, or challenging ideas they believe could be improved. This creates workplaces where people stay quiet instead of contributing their best thinking. He argues that organizations perform better when they create human-centered environments where people at every level feel comfortable speaking up and sharing ideas. This is especially important because the people doing the work often have the clearest understanding of the day-to-day challenges and opportunities that leaders may not always see.

At Menlo, we completely agree, and reinforce these ideas through our flat organizational structure, as well as our values of “run the experiment” and “make mistakes sooner.” We want our team to feel empowered to try new things without fear of failure. We also know that mistakes are inevitable, so we want focus on catching them early, and looking at them as a learning experience. Taking away the fear and blame allows people to feel comfortable to speak up sooner, and establish processes to ensure we learn from our mistakes. 

Keep reading for the next article, where we take a more in-depth look at how to create a "safe-to-fail" culture where experimentation is possible!

Watch the full video here!

We Shouldn't be Afraid to Fail!
How to create a safe-to-fail culture

At Menlo, we talk a lot about running experiments. One of the most important parts of this is taking the fear out of trying something new. Any organization can say they encourage their employees to run experiments, but if people are afraid of failure, they're never really going to be able to innovate or experiment. This month we wanted to highlight an article by Melisa Buie about how to create a safe-to-fail culture.

If you can look at failure as a learning experience instead of a negative, it takes the blame away from the individual, and helps to ensure that an issue doesn't happen twice. In this article, Buie highlights the four pillars needed to create a safe-to-fail culture, including leadership, culture, processes, and individual mindset. 

One interesting point that Buie brings up is the emotional side of failure. Even when leadership actively encourages experimentation, people can still carry a personal fear of failing that holds them back. Leaders play an important role here by being open about their own mistakes, modeling vulnerability, and reinforcing that setbacks are opportunities to learn rather than reasons for punishment. Combined with practices like structured retrospectives, short feedback loops, and regularly asking “What should we do differently next time?”, organizations can create an environment where people feel safe to innovate, experiment, and continuously improve!
 

Read the full article here!

The Network: Power of Culture

Podcast Host: Corey Mohn

Recommended by: Sarah Neam, Marketing Consultant

I wanted to recommend another podcast that our CEO, Rich Sheridan, was recently a guest on, called The Network. The Network podcast is hosted by Corey Mohn, and is centered around the CAPS model. CAPS (Center for Advanced Professional Studies) is an education model that focuses on profession based learning for high school students. CAPS has five core values of profession-based learning, professional skills development, self-discovery and exploration, entrepreneurial mindset, and responsiveness. 

I thought this was a really interesting episode that combined Rich's business philosophies with his thoughts on education. Rich and Corey discussed their ideas on bringing joy back to education, focusing on embodying the creativity, invention and excitement that we used to feel in kindergarten. Rich also dove into some fun stories from his own time in high school (including how he had so much fun coding that he stayed in the computer lab until midnight!).

Regardless of whether you're involved in the education world, this is a fun podcast to check out, and it's great to hear about the meaningful work that the CAPS program is doing to improve education!
 

Listen to the podcast here!

This month, we wanted to highlight a simple experiment with an important meaning. As you may know, we work in weekly iterations with most of our clients, hoping to have as tight of a feedback loop as possible. At the end of each iteration, we meet with our clients to prioritize the next week's work, broken down into story cards. Once the story card work has been planned, we visualize it on one of our Work Authorization Boards (WAB). The WAB shows all of the planned work for the week, split up by which pair is doing it, and organized by the day it should be complete based on the estimates.

We have a few clients who prefer to work in bi-weekly iterations, meaning we meet with them every other week and prioritize two weeks of work at a time. Due to the size of the boards (and the height of our project managers), two weeks worth of work didn't fit well onto one board. As a solution, one of our Project Managers decided to cut the day of the week cards in half, and fold all of the story cards so that we could fit two weeks in the space of one. While this was a simple solution, it's also a great example of why we don't box ourselves in to one way of working! 

While we do have a standard layout to many of our physical artifacts, we also iterate on them when necessary. We see all of our processes as ongoing experiments, and never feel bad switching something up when it no longer makes sense!

What are some examples when you ran an experiment on a “standardized” process that no longer worked? Email us!