How can your team turn its problems into competitive advantages?

Dávid Pásztor

The best fighters can't be knocked out with a huge punch. When they get a big one, they gain energy from that and start fighting harder. An earthquake can't destroy a city. People will build better and bigger houses in the place of the collapsed ones. A virus can't kill a species. Many will die, and just a few resistant will survive. But the race itself will be stronger than ever before.

Nassim Taleb described an interesting phenomenon in his book Antifragile. He found that there are things that gain from disorder. And unlike robust or resilient things, these are not just adopting or handling problems, but actually, get better from stress.

We consult companies building digital products every day. Staying alive in a changing business environment, and solving the shitload of problems a company faces day by day needs the same approach. Imagine how your business would look, if you can turn all those problems into competitive advantages.

When you start your business you are the antifragile element yourself. You find the problems and you make sure they get solved. If you recognize that your customer support sucks, you just start building the best support you can imagine.

But as the team grows you will arrive at a point where you can't handle everything. You need a system to make sure all the problems will be solved. And not just solved, but turned into a winning advantage. Fortunately, the Studio Model has an answer for that, and it's called the how-we-work meeting. I will explain how it works. :)

The how-we-work meeting is a one-hour long weekly meeting that empowers everybody in your team to speak up about the problems and tensions they see, or the opportunities you might miss. It's a forum where anybody can suggest a topic, and the team can discuss them in small groups. The groups can make any decisions about the topic on the spot, and no one has the right to force them to change it later. Basically, it's a structured way of encouraging bottom-up change.

A few things you will need to implement this in your team:

An online list of topics accessible to everyone. And a few tricks to get people to write up their ideas.
Voting for the topics of the given week. You can't discuss everything at once, so choose the most popular ones.
One hour with the whole team every week. Yes, I know, it sucks. We hate meetings too. But this one worth it. You will discuss the most popular topics in small groups. Everyone can decide which group they join. You have to encourage them to solve problems for the long term and find solutions that actually will convert the problem to a competitive advantage. After 40 minutes the teams sum up the results to each other.

The how-we-work meeting can help to solve small operational issues and serious tensions too. It can help your team to get better in certain professional things, and it can also help to solve organizational problems.