A house with four rooms

A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me of a model for great products that I have used for a while, but not actually seen written anywhere.

My hopes are that this model illustrates the tensions between having a great value prop, feature cohesiveness and product character.

This is the story of a remote house in Italy that had four rooms.

The first room was an empty room. Nothing to it but white walls. It was a somewhat big room, with lots of light, no apparent problems.

The second room was a room with 3 pieces of very high end furniture. It had this ultra elegant chair right in the middle of the room. Next to the chair was a state-of-the-art mirror, one of those that you can actually speak to and check the weather. Next to the mirror, a lamp – you guessed it, no ordinary lamp either, this one was bathed in gold. The room itself was poorly lit, as the only source of light was the after mentioned lamp.

The third room was a room in where all furniture seemed to come from IKEA. Picture a hotel room, and you pretty much got it. It had a comfortable looking king-size bed, was overall well lit and was well round in every aspect possible.

The fourth room is your childhood room. It has your bed in it, all those posters you had glued to the wall, your term papers shuffled around in a corner, corny pictures of you with weird hair and your wardrobe with all those weird clothes you used to wear (you know the ones i’m talking about!).

Room #1 – Minimum viable product and foundational assets

Using a minimum viable product can sometimes feel like walking in room #1. The world is filled with possibility with what you could do with that room. The challenge with room #1 is that the open-ended nature of the room lends itself to different interpretations of value for different people. Maybe John is thinking the room would do a great studio, but Mary is thinking it would make an amazing walk-in closet.

The key lesson of this room is:

No matter what you do, you’ll disappoint someone.

The key point is to make a room that matches a need a good enough number of people have.

The corollary:

Leverage the structure you’re building on

Room one is also a great opportunity to assess the foundations you’ll be building upon. This is a room with plenty of light, plenty of space and good electrical structure. This means what you can do with the room can choose to leverage those assets. But if the room had neither of these, the chances of building something great are decreased.

These foundations represent the structure you’ll be building your product on. Examples of structure include your existing user base, intellectual property, “real estate” in users computers/phones, marketing dollars, sales structure, and so on. Do you have a good user base you can test your ideas on, or good real estate in your users phones, computers or servers, or even do you have a good slot of time you can re-use/use in their daily schedules. What about intellectual property as a foundational asset, is there something unique about what you’ve been doing/acquiring that you can re-purpose. Great foundational assets smooth the way to great value propositions. Not having these is not a blocker, but the road to success is much steeper.

Room #2 – have a unique value proposition

Let’s start with an idea: great products excel at doing one thing very well.

Using a product that doesn’t, can feel like walking into the second room. Even though some aspects of it are very well put together, somehow the whole of it does not serve any function.

The key lesson of the second room is:

If there is no unique value proposition, it doesn’t matter how good the individual components are

And the corollary:

Given a unique value proposition there is a level of tolerance for missing features

Take from this tolerance budget if you’re just starting your application, but be aware of not going into overdraft. “How much to take” you only know by learning which you get by shipping. Assuming the tolerance budget is zero, likely will result in not-shipping-soon-or-often-enough syndrome. Are you hearing “we can’t ship without that feature!” when it’s time to ship? Understand that “Cutting is shipping” (S. Sinofsky) and as long as you’re not cutting in your unique value proposition, and your tolerance budget isn’t zero you’ll likely be ok.

So… you add a bed to this room. It’s now a bedroom.

The thing is it’s really really hard to differentiate. Maybe you add a bed, but so what, any other room in the world has a bed. Given that the bed quality is the same, what is unique about this room that makes people stay here and sleep? Are you providing a faster, better or cheaper bed? In itself this is not a new idea, but this next thought might very well be: The answer again is not in the quality of the individual components, but in their arrangement to support the unique value proposition (eg maybe the mirror is a very cool one, but there’s a different aspect to this room if you put this mirror lying around in a corner, or if you put it on the ceiling right on top of the bed).

One last thing about room number 2: If a room is for sleeping, poor light doesn’t matter. But take away the lamp and people won’t even consider sleeping there. You need a lamp, but having a good-looking lamp is not what makes or breaks the room. This relates to those features of a product that are basic user needs. Sometimes this is security, auditability, reporting, etc. Take them away and that’s all users can think about. These features need to be executed well, but mostly at supporting the value proposition of the product, ie they don’t need to be great at doing everything (eg do you really need a captcha for an in-house business app?)

Some business use those (“basic user needs”) as their unique value proposition, which is great. It’s also true that they are reproducible given enough man days (ie they are not “new” problems). If you are in a business that sells these as your unique asset, good for you – but look at the timeframe those are a relevant asset and ask yourself what will you do to stay relevant at the end of it.

A great focus on having a unique value proposition is key for great products.

So, the executive bullet point summary for room #2 is:

• Have a unique value proposition (UVP) and excel at doing that first
• Once you have your UVP, and you get access to a missing-feature tolerance budget that is different from zero
• Focus on the U of your UVP
• For all the other components of the app, make sure they become supporting components of the UVP
• Some features work just like oxygen. Given that it exists, people don’t even think about it, take it for granted and move on. But if it doesn’t exist, that’s all they can think about. Oh… and it’s hard to find people that would pay more for “better” oxygen.

Room #3, #4 – What stories are you facilitating for your users

This brings us to room number 3, and there is no way you can talk about this room without comparing it to room number 4.

Room 3 is an interesting one because it indeed serves a purpose. It has a bed that’s quite comfortable, it’s well-lit and has all the amenities you could expect. The challenge with room number three is that it lacks soul, it lacks character. For the purposes of our discussion, character is “the stories you’ve shared with it or because of it”.

Compare room three with room four: even though the furniture in your childhood’s room might not have been state of the art, or that it might have been a tad smaller than you’d like, room number four is FULL of stories and my bet is that just thinking about it causes a smile in your face.

That very same reaction is what I believe great products should strive for. Doing so mostly has to do with two things: 1) great product design 2) do no evil.

There are plenty of things you can do with product design to facilitate character. Start with the flow of actions, think how can you get out-of-the-way, try to set a more friendly tone in your messaging, and many many more.

But more than facilitating character by using any of these “tactics”, make sure to build your product so that it creates opportunities for users to share a story with. Here’s an example: do you have a transport app? build a feature that helps users get home on new years, specially tailored for that day.

On the other hand, resisting the temptation to “do evil” can be quite substantial, especially in a business that’s growing. But every time it happens, it takes a huge chunk away from the “love capital” you’ve worked so hard to collect.

Good product design helps here too: e.g. are you sending your users too much e-mail, too many push notifications? Convert those into helpful scenarios (eg easyjet spams their users quite often, but they missed the opportunity to actually alert me when i flew into london with them and the gatwick express was not working).

So they key lesson of room #4:

Great products cause that same smile on your face you get from thinking about room #4 and you get that from creating opportunities to share a story that would not exist without your product

—

And here you have it, the 4 room model for building great products.

So, what would the world lose if your product didn’t exist? What is the last story you remember your product helped any of your users create? Did it put a smile on their faces?

20 SOLUTION FOCUSED QUESTIONS [1/2]

(this is part 1 of 2)

Solution based therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses more ion what can be done with solutions rather than what is the origin of the problem.

It’s a great tool set for communication and influence and most of the techniques apply for organisational change as well as they apply for individual change.

These are questions that I use every day at work and that I see other people use as well.

Here are twenty solution focused questions / techniques:

1. The desired situation question. These are questions that help clarify what the desired outcome of a situation is. Questions like “what does the desired situation look like?” , “would you like instead of the problem?” , “what does success look like?”
2. The what’s better question. Refocuses back on what the progress has been so far. It often has a motivating effect. Useful guidelines are to keep the question simple (“so, what’s better since the last time we met?”) and to repeat it often until the receiver “runs out” of good things to say

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top (part 5 of 5)

(this is the last [fifth] part of a five part series)

As I mentioned before, i’ll follow-up the habits with some commentary on how I see these in my daily life.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top

16. Not listening: the most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues. 

Not listening, or it’s close cousin “interrupting someone mid-sentence” is one those habits that you’ll spend a lifetime correcting if you don’t have awareness you’re doing it wrong and the tools to do it better.

Personally, I struggle more with not-interrupting as I tend to jump-in mid conversation if something didn’t quite sound right or if I (think) I know what the other person is going to say.

On the other hand, making sure other people feel listened-to is one of those things I know helps build great rapport from the start and sets relationships on a high note from the get-go.

Here’s what I think helps:

– First, get back to the “now” by scanning your body for sensations from your head to your toes (i usually wiggle my toes as a result). You know those Simpson’s cartoons in where the boss is speaking and all Homer can hear is “blah blah blah”. Scanning your body tunes the moment back to the present and helps turn that voice from “blah blah blah” to something useful.

– Second, paraphrase. Use your own words (or better yet use their own) to recap what you’ve heard. “Can I paraphrase to make sure I understood you right? I heard you say X and then Y. Is that right?”

– Finally, apologise. If you find yourself interrupting, make sure you apologise and are the one aware of your own fault, before someone points it out to you. This does not help with the problem per say, but the first step being awareness, from that moment on you’ve committed publicly not to do it again.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top (part 4 of 5)

(this is the fourth part of a five part series)

As I mentioned before, i’ll follow-up the habits with some commentary on how I see these in my daily life.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top

11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: the most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success. 

Claiming credit we don’t deserve is, if anything, severely annoying. This day and age, it’s almost delusional to think that anything worth accomplishing is accomplished alone. You know that, and believe me, other people know that as well.

Yet, what is also true is that people love faces and stories. Steve Jobs didn’t sat down to design the iPhone yet people see him as the man that brought it to the world. This attribution phenomena is a common one, and you should expect it (or even take it as an opportunity) when communicating to other people about the amazing job your team did.

Standing up and saying “my team did all the work, not me” is humble, but pointless. Does this mean that you should go in front of the camera’s and say that it’s all your invention and everybody should feel so lucky that you’re even talking to them about it? – definitely not. Bear with me while I explain further.

You see, when you say “my team did all the work, not me” the only thing people hear about that message is “not me”. That you didn’t do it and you’re just a spoke person for some huge expensive structure of people, processes and tools that somehow managed to [luck maybe?] deliver results. As one of my mentors told me, as good as this structure is, they still need someone to coordinate, provide direction and leadership, and that’s you. Leadership is either implicit or explicit. By taking ownership, directing and delivering results, you promote accountability for delivering the results. It means you can take ownership to improve things and to do so at the risk of failure. If anything goes wrong, everybody knows who’s to blame. Think football managers (they’re not the ones kicking the ball in the field you know?). The opposite is a team in where somebody is involved but not committed to be in charge. In this sort of team, you don’t do anything perceived as risky, and when things go wrong, usually fingers start pointing.

You’re only a “genius with a thousand helpers” if you start trying (and failing) to answer all questions, from UX to product features passing by operations and architecture.

Be the face that is accountable for the success or failure of what you’re doing – be the face that your stakeholders attribute to the structure of people, processes and tools that deliver success and take your core team with you to do so reliably, wherever you go. Just don’t stand in front of everybody pretending you had no help.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top (part 3 of 5)

(this is the third part of a five part series)

As I mentioned before, i’ll follow-up the habits with some commentary on how I see these in my daily life.

PS: Apologies for taking too long to post these. I’m back to weekly updates now.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top

6. Telling the world how smart we are: the need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.

This one has gotten me in trouble. When coupled with “adding too much value” this sixth habit empowers me with an abundant source of annoyance to give other people 🙂

The gist of it here is that announcing how smart you are turns them off.

Getting rid of this habit is simple: 1) before opening your mouth ask yourself: Is anything I’m about to say worth it? 2) Conclude that it isn’t; 3) Say “Thank you!”

Simple but not easy. I have been in too many situations myself (giving/receiving feedback, job interviews, meeting new friends) in where I’ve managed to close my mouth concluding that what I am about to say adds no value, only ends up passing the message that I think somebody is wasting my time (even if I don’t even mean that at all), and that I’m better off saying “Thank you” and not prolonging the conversation.

One of the situations that I was able to manage this was after announcing a lessons learned workshop in a team meeting, only to be approached later by a colleague who was a bit surprised by the announcement. In simple terms, he felt like he should’ve been the owner of this activity and I ended up not involving him. I resisted the urge to start showing how he wrong and how smart I was that I managed to take initiative when all he had done was talk about it for the past two weeks. Instead, what I did was listened to his feedback, took three seconds of silence to acknowledge it in, and said “Thank you”.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top (part 2 of 5)

(this is the second part of a five part series)

As I mentioned before, i’ll follow-up the habits with some commentary on how I see these in my daily life.

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top

1. Winning too much: the need to win at all costs and in all situations – when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally besides the point.

This one I find mostly when there are differences of opinion between parties. Say you’re in a call, somebody says we ought do A, somebody else says doing B is so much better. Sometimes people are even agreeing but doing it so violently that it has to stem out of a need to win (in this case when it doesn’t matter). The best way to resolve these is with a common higher up purpose. We often come back to “what’s best for customers?”. Another common higher up purpose can be built by having a product plan in where you specified priorities and a framework for making decisions in advance.

What’s key for me is that sometimes it’s just ok to say “lets do B”, and move on. Energy, willpower and focus are finite resources and we are doing a disservice to the company if we debate every single detail instead of focusing on adding value to the end result. Sometimes nobody knows the answer, so A is as good as B. Discussing it to eternity is not the point, not trying to have your word as the final say however, is (specially when you end up  more time discussing than doing).

The 20 habits that prevent you from getting to the top (part 1 of 5)

I was recently reviewing one of my favourite books, Marshall Goldsmith “What got you here won’t get you there”. This is a gold book that’s very well written and offers insight on every page.

WHAT GOT YOU HERE

The big gist of this insight packed book is that we all have habits that we’ve built that brought us to where we are today. Those habits however are now setting us back if we are to reach the next level. Yet, as creatures of habit, we fall superstitious that the behaviour we had is correlated to the success we’ve attained, and that’s… simply holding us back.

Marshall lists twenty habits that are preventing us from getting to the top. I see these everyday and am guilty of some of them. Awareness of these is important, but so is doing something different in at least one of them. As Marshall puts it “your wife isn’t going to believe you when you get home and tell her you’ve been to this enlightening talk and are going to change twenty things in your life starting today… Yeah right!”, so focus on one at the time.

What I thought would be most useful than just copy pasting from the book, was to share some stories on how I see these playing out everyday. I’ll break this post down in 5 parts (this post + one for each five habits).

As a disclaimer: names are omitted and these opinions are my own, not my employers.

Talk Review – Tony Robbins on Financial Security

You can find my notes on this video by Tony Robbins [TR] on the topic of “Financial Freedom”.

Overall, I thought this talk was insightful and delivered with power and connection in true TR style!

ON BEING WEALTHY VS BEING FINANCIALLY FREE

• Wealthy != Financially Free
• Being wealthy is about your psychology – wealthy is about how grateful you feel for what you have.
• Start from a wealthy state
• Start from a place of abundance and not scarcity

THE MONK, THE KING AND THE MAGIC LAMP

Tony Robbins tells the following story: A poor monk had a magic lamp that rumour had it always gave double what everybody asked of it. A king, previously known for conquering kingdom after kingdom, called for the monk to appear in his presence. When the monk finally did, visually humbled by being in the presence of such great king, the king asked him about the lamp. The monk mentioned it was a gift from his family for generations, and that for that reason only, that would be the only thing the monk would not give up for the king. The king was enraged, and after the monk left, had him killed. The king got the lamp, closed the palace and asked his first wish of the lamp. “1000” gold coins – the lamp responded “why have 1000 if you can have 2000” – the king thought “YES! you’re right, 2000 gold coins!” – the lamp responded “why have 2000 if you can have 4000”. The king finally died of starvation.

Two things are important here (and I love these kind of stories!):

• When you reach your dream, you’re likely going to replace it with another     .
• Be wealthy in the influence you give others and with what you have

FINANCIAL FREEDOM

• Financial freedom is about building your own money making machine.
• Everybody’s a trader, currently you’re already are, you trade your time for money. Now you’ll trade your money for money.
• If you can build something that is working for you (day & night) making you money then you’ve built a money making machine.
• Individually define financial freedom for yourself, but one example that resonated is when that machine makes me enough money to cover for your cost of living, the cost of your mortgages, some money for fun, some pocket money.

THREE STEPS FOR FINANCIAL FREEDOM

1. Spend less than you earn
2. Invest what you save
3. What you get out of your investment, reinvest

I like how simple this model is. There’s a lot of people not doing #1, and I’m currently still not doing #2 very well (let alone #3!).

MONTHLY MINIMUM FOR INVESTMENT

Take a minimum to invest and keep it the same over a year. Have it go out of your account into your portfolio the minute you get payed.

INVESTMENT BUCKETS – ASSET ALLOCATION

• Security bucket: 2-6 months of home & living costs; house mortgage; saving
• Growth bucket: where you invest either by: 1) buy and hold; 2) momentum investing
• Dream bucket: in where you place money for whatever dream you might have

Most people start with putting money on the dream bucket and forgetting that what they end up buying (a car, a house) likely only goes down in value over time (further, it’s unlikely that “you’re going to sell out the house and eat it”). Next, most people put money on the growth bucket because that’s where the most potential is, but TR equated this to winning at the casino in Vegas (“that’s how they get you”) – once you feel like you’ve won, you end up forgetting how easy it is to loose it in a snap [TR mentioned a story about one guy being in debt -100K at 62 years old].

In the order of security, growth and dream.

Unspoken toxic truces

The following is a real story.

(edited excerpt from “The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life/business” by Charles Duhigg)

LONDON UNDERGROUND
Philip Brickell, a forty-three-year-old employee of the London Underground, was inside the cavernous main hall of the King’s Cross subway station on a November evening in 1987 when a commuter stopped him as he was collecting tickets and said there was a burning tissue at the bottom of a nearby escalator.

More than a quarter million passengers passed through King’s Cross every day on six different train lines. During evening rush hour, the station’s ticketing hall was a sea of people hurrying beneath a ceiling repainted so many times that no one could recall its original hue.

The burning tissue, the passenger said, was at the bottom of one of the station’s longest escalators, servicing the Piccadilly line. Brickell immediately left his position, rode the escalator down to the platform, found the smoldering wad of tissue, and, with a rolled-up magazine, beat out the fire. Then he returned to his post.

Brickell didn’t investigate further. He didn’t try to figure out why the tissue was burning or if it might have flown off of a larger fire somewhere else within the station. He didn’t mention the incident to another employee or call the fire department. A separate department handled fire safety, and Brickell, in keeping with the strict divisions that ruled the Underground, knew better than to step on anyone’s toes. Besides, even if he had investigated the possibility of a fire, he wouldn’t have known what to do with any information he learned. The tightly prescribed chain of command at the Underground prohibited him from contacting another department without a superior’s direct authorization. And the Underground’s routines—handed down from employee to employee—told him that he should never, under any circumstances, refer out loud to anything inside a station as a “fire,” lest commuters become panicked. It wasn’t how things were done.

The Underground was governed by a sort of theoretical rule book that no one had ever seen or read—and that didn’t, in fact, exist except in the unwritten rules that shaped every employee’s life. For decades, the Underground had been run by the “Four Barons”—the chiefs of civil, signal, electrical, and mechanical engineering—and within each of their departments, there were bosses and subbosses who all jealously guarded their authority. The trains ran on time because all nineteen thousand Underground employees cooperated in a delicate system that passed passengers and trains among dozens—sometimes hundreds—of hands all day long. But that cooperation depended upon a balance of power between each of the four departments and all their lieutenants that, itself, relied upon thousands of habits that employees adhered to. These habits created a truce among the Four Barons and their deputies. And from that truce arose policies that told Brickell: Looking for fires isn’t your job. Don’t overstep your bounds.

So Brickell didn’t say anything about the burning tissue. In other circumstances, it might have been an unimportant detail. In this case, the tissue was a stray warning—a bit of fuel that had escaped from a larger, hidden blaze—that would show how perilous even perfectly balanced truces can become if they aren’t designed just right.

Fifteen minutes after Brickell returned to his booth, another passenger noticed a wisp of smoke as he rode up the Piccadilly escalator; he mentioned it to an Underground employee. The King’s Cross safety inspector, Christopher Hayes, was eventually roused to investigate. A third passenger, seeing smoke and a glow from underneath the escalator’s stairs, hit an emergency stop button and began shouting at passengers to exit the escalator. A policeman saw a slight smoky haze inside the escalator’s long tunnel, and, halfway down, flames beginning to dart above the steps.

Yet the safety inspector, Hayes, didn’t call the London Fire Brigade. He hadn’t seen any smoke himself, and another of the Underground’s unwritten rules was that the fire department should never be contacted unless absolutely necessary. The policeman who had noticed the haze, however, figured he should contact headquarters. His radio didn’t work underground, so he walked up a long staircase into the outdoors and called his superiors, who eventually passed word to the fire department. At 7:36 p.m.—twenty-two minutes after Brickell was alerted to the flaming tissue—the fire brigade received a call: “Small fire at King’s Cross.”

Commuters were pushing past the policeman as he stood outside, speaking on his radio. They were rushing into the station, down into the tunnels, focused on getting home for dinner.

Within minutes, many of them would be dead.

SMALL FIRE AT KINGS CROSS
Hayes, the safety inspector, went into a passageway that led to the Piccadilly escalator’s machine room. When he reached the machine room, he was nearly overcome by heat. The fire was already too big to fight. He ran back to the main hall. There was a line of people standing at the ticket machines and hundreds of people milling about the room, walking to platforms or leaving the station. Hayes found a policeman.

At 7:42 P.M.—almost a half hour after the burning tissue—the first fireman arrived at King’s Cross. As he entered the ticketing hall he saw dense black smoke starting to snake along the ceiling. The escalator’s rubber handrails had begun to burn. As the acrid smell of burning rubber spread, commuters in the ticketing hall began to recognize that something was wrong. They moved toward the exits as firemen waded through the crowd, fighting against the tide.

Below, the fire was spreading. The entire escalator was now aflame, producing a superheated gas that rose to the top of the shaft enclosing the escalator, where it was trapped against the tunnel’s ceiling, which was covered with about twenty layers of old paint. A few years earlier, the Underground’s director of operations had suggested that all this paint might pose a fire hazard. Perhaps, he said, the old layers should be removed before a new one is applied? Painting protocols were not in his purview, however.

As the superheated gases pooled along the ceiling of the escalator shaft, all those old layers of paint began absorbing the warmth. As each new train arrived, it pushed a fresh gust of oxygen into the station, feeding the fire like a bellows.

At 7:43 P.M., a train arrived and a salesman named Mark Silver exited. He knew immediately that something was wrong. The air was hazy, the platform packed with people. Smoke wafted around where he was standing, curling around the train cars as they sat on the tracks. He turned to reenter the train, but the doors had closed. He hammered on the windows, but there was an unofficial policy to avoid tardiness: Once the doors were sealed, they did not open again. Up and down the platform, Silver and other passengers screamed at the driver to open the doors. The signal light changed to green, and the train pulled away. One woman jumped on the tracks, running after the train as it moved into the tunnel. “Let me in!” she screamed.

Silver walked down the platform, to where a policeman was directing everyone away from the Piccadilly escalator and to another stairway. There were crowds of panicked people waiting to get upstairs. They could all smell the smoke, and everyone was packed together. It felt hot—either from the fire or the crush of people, Silver wasn’t sure. He finally got to the bottom of an escalator that had been turned off. As he climbed toward the ticketing hall, he could feel his legs burning from heat coming through a fifteen-foot wall separating him from the Piccadilly shaft. “I looked up and saw the walls and ceiling sizzling,” he later said.

BOOOM
At 7:45 P.M., an arriving train forced a large gust of air into the station. As the oxygen fed the fire, the blaze in the Piccadilly escalator roared. The superheated gases along the ceiling of the shaft, fueled by fire below and sizzling paint above, reached a combustion temperature, known as a “flashover point.” At that moment, everything inside the shaft—the paint, the wooden escalator stairs, and any other available fuel—ignited in a fiery blast. The force of the sudden incineration acted the explosion of gunpowder at the base of a rifle barrel. It began pushing the fire upward through the long shaft, absorbing more heat and velocity as the blaze expanded until it shot out of the tunnel and into the ticketing hall in a wall of flames that set metal, tile, and flesh on fire. The temperature inside the hall shot up 150 degrees in half a second. A policeman riding one of the side escalators later told investigators that he saw “a jet of flame that shot up and then collected into a kind of ball.” There were nearly fifty people inside the hall at the time.

Shortly after the explosion, dozens of fire trucks arrived. But because the fire department’s rules instructed them to connect their hoses to street-level hydrants, rather than those installed by the Underground inside the station, and because none of the subway employees had blueprints showing the station’s layout—all the plans were in an office that was locked, and none of the ticketing agents or the station manager had keys—it took hours to extinguish the flames.

When the blaze was finally put out at 1:46 A.M.—six hours after the burning tissue was noticed—the toll stood at thirty-one dead and dozens injured.

“Why did they send me straight into the fire?” a twenty-year-old music teacher asked the next day from a hospital bed. “I could see them burning. I could hear them screaming. Why didn’t someone take charge?”

UNSPOKEN TOXIC TRUCES
To answer those questions, consider a few of the truces the London Underground relied upon to function:

• Ticketing clerks were warned that their jurisdiction was strictly limited to selling tickets, so if they saw a burning tissue, they didn’t warn anyone for fear of overstepping their bounds.
• Station employees weren’t trained how to use the sprinkler system or extinguishers, because that equipment was overseen by a different division.
• The station’s safety inspector never saw a letter from the London Fire Brigade warning about fire risks because it was sent to the operations director, and information like that wasn’t shared across divisions.
• Employees were instructed only to contact the fire brigade as a last resort, so as not to panic commuters unnecessarily.
• The fire brigade insisted on using its own street-level hydrants, ignoring pipes in the ticketing hall that could have delivered water, because they had been ordered not to use equipment installed by other agencies.

In some ways, each of these informal rules, on its own, makes a certain amount of sense. For instance, the habits that kept ticketing clerks focused on selling tickets instead of doing anything else—including keeping an eye out for warning signs of fire—existed because, years earlier, the Underground had problems with understaffed kiosks. Clerks kept leaving their posts to pick up trash or point tourists toward their trains, and as a result, long lines would form. So clerks were ordered to stay in their booths, sell tickets, and not worry about anything else. It worked. Lines disappeared. If clerks saw something amiss outside their kiosks—beyond their scope of responsibility—they minded their own business.

And the fire brigade’s habit of insisting on their own equipment? That was a result of an incident, a decade earlier, when a fire had raged in another station as firemen wasted precious minutes trying to hook up their hoses to unfamiliar pipes. Afterward, everyone decided it was best to stick with what they knew.

None of these routines, in other words, were arbitrary. Each was designed for a reason. The Underground was so vast and complicated that it could operate smoothly only if truces smoothed over potential obstacles. Unlike at Rhode Island Hospital, each truce created a genuine balance of power. No department had the upper hand.

Yet thirty-one people died.

The London Underground’s routines and truces all seemed logical until a fire erupted. At which point, an awful truth emerged: No one person, department, or baron had ultimate responsibility for passengers’ safety.

Sometimes, one priority—or one department or one person or one goal—needs to overshadow everything else, though it might be unpopular or threaten the balance of power that keeps trains running on time. Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace.

There’s a paradox in this observation, of course. How can an organization implement habits that balance authority and, at the same time, choose a person or goal that rises above everyone else? How do nurses and doctors share authority while still making it clear who is in charge? How does a subway system avoid becoming bogged down in turf battles while making sure safety is still a priority, even if that means lines of authority must be redrawn?

The answer:

Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. NASA administrators, for instance, tried for years to improve the agency’s safety habits, but those efforts were unsuccessful until the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, the organization was able to overhaul how it enforced quality standards. Airline pilots, too, spent years trying to convince plane manufacturers and air traffic controllers to redesign how cockpits were laid out and traffic controllers communicated. Then, a runway error on the Spanish island of Tenerife in 1977 killed 583 people and, within five years, cockpit design, runway procedures, and air traffic controller communication routines were overhauled.

In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

That’s exactly what occurred after the King’s Cross station fire. Five days after the blaze, the British secretary of state appointed a special investigator, Desmond Fennell, to study the incident. Fennell began by interviewing the Underground’s leadership, and quickly discovered that everyone had known—for years—that fire safety was a serious problem, and yet nothing had changed. Some administrators had proposed new hierarchies that would have clarified responsibility for fire prevention. Others had proposed giving station managers more power so that they could bridge departmental divides. None of those reforms had been implemented.

When Fennell began suggesting changes of his own, he saw the same kinds of roadblocks—department chiefs refusing to take responsibility or undercutting him with whispered threats to their subordinates—start to emerge. So he decided to turn his inquiry into a media circus.

The response was instantaneous and overwhelming. Commuters picketed the Underground’s offices. The organization’s leadership was fired. A slew of new laws were passed and the culture of the Underground was overhauled. Today, every station has a manager whose primary responsibility is passenger safety, and every employee has an obligation to communicate at the smallest hint of risk. All the trains still run on time. But the Underground’s habits and truces have adjusted just enough to make it clear who has ultimate responsibility for fire prevention, and everyone is empowered to act, regardless of whose toes they might step on.

CONCLUSION

The same kinds of shifts are possible at any company where institutional habits—through thoughtlessness or neglect—have created toxic truces.

A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis—or create the perception of crisis—and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.

How do you chunk your work?

Say you have two hundred shirts to fold and put in drawers:

Do you:

• start by separating them over the type of shirt, color, size, and follow that by putting them away in their respective drawers.
• Or, in alternative, you pick up the first shirt, proceed to put it away, and then come back and repeat, one by one, for the remainder of all shirts.

The first approach is more organised, more effective. After all, you first start by organising the “work items” completely with the end in mind. The second one in comparison looks like you’re spending most of your time walking around between the pile of clothes and the drawers, wasting resources such as time and energy to accomplish the same end goal.

Here’s the catch: going one by one allows you to pause the work you have to do at any time, while always showing demonstrable progress towards your target. The first one IS more effective and more organised, but it’s also less progress centered. In other words, given 10 minutes of folding, using the second approach you’d have done much more packing than using the first approach. Maybe the same is true for 20 minutes of work. 30?

So, when chunking work, it’s worth asking yourself: If an interruption causes me to go do something else for 2 hours and then come back:

1. would I be able to pick up where I left?
2. would I have demonstrable progress towards my target?
3. how many interruptions need to happen for it to be worth going one by one?

(tip: for longer time-spans, progress centered is almost always worth it, one glaring example: cleaning your inbox)

Hope this helps!