By Randal Adcock

It was a long hibernating winter!

Leaves and grass are turning green. Unemployment is apparently low. We may vacillate between hope and doubt. Is the economy recovering? Are our political leaders making the right choices? If bad things like a pandemic can happen, what else? Or, maybe the odds of life will now turn in our favour?

Meanwhile, Wayfinders is continuing to pursue the construction of a new cloud platform. Its been a very long time coming but we have made progress on a number of fronts and we’re building capacity. It will include a number of functions to support our Members in business.

We have not been doing Cafes for a while. A combination of pandemic fatigue and Zoom fatigue dropped participation. However, the opportunity exists to revitalize and resume.

Most people have been hoping for a “New Normal” that is better than the “Old Normal”, but normal nevertheless. Even prior to the pandemic, people were siting a lack of meaningfulness in their work. We do our best work when there is sufficient balance of certainty and challenge in our environments. With familiarity we can work more automatically and spontaneously. We can be agile and adaptable. This is something we can all create for ourselves.

Sometimes we feel overwhelmed, defeated and powerless. We need to test that theory. Is life really that intimidating? In rehab psychology they talk about “baby steps“. In the business world of design thinking we start small with a MVP (minimal viable product). People, like all living things, are essentially decision makers. Every decision you will ever make is a ROI (return on investment) decision. That is, we want more value coming out of our activities than we put in. In other words, we are value-generating decision makers.

We don’t want to make a big investment up front when there are many unknowns. Its too easy to make mistakes and the payoffs are tentative at best. The value we create is for ourselves and others. In order to make an investment wisely, we set out on a learning path. That path takes the shave of an S- curve, commonly called a ‘learning curve‘.

At the beginning of the learning curve, you know very little about the subject, maybe a new product or service to explore. So it comes to your attention, you become Aware of this subject and develop a Desire to learn more. You are curious, so you pursue further Knowledge, which leads to some testing of applied skill or Ability. When you repeat that ability with practice in different situations, you Reinforce the learning and it gets stronger. “Practise makes perfect“. The learning path spells ‘ADKAR‘. Remember it! Thank you Wendy Lickacz for teaching me about ADKAR!

You can’t generate value all by yourself. As a social animal, the process used will always be more or less collaborative, and the value you create is meant to be shared. We have always had a sharing and collaborative economy. But, two questions – 1) for collaboration, what talents and resources are you missing that can be found in other people? and 2) for outcomes, what do other people value? Answers – 1) know your strengths and challenges, and 2) Ask them!

To improve collaboration industrial psychologists have developed a lot of tools for measuring talents, traits, skills, interests and dispositions so they can be matched to job descriptions. We now live in an age in which we can use artificial intelligence to match people with others based on complementary talents and traits and shared values. Wayfinders is exploring ways to incorporate this into our platform. This will leverage your talents and passions to improve your value-generation potential.

“Ask your customers what they want” – Its easy for me to repeat these words. For many if us, reaching out to ask questions is a lot harder in practice. Only a portion of the population is natural at this and we don’t get much education or training for it in our K-12 system. For another thing, people are suffering from choice fatigue. For yet another factor, if you are an innovator, chances are, people will not be familiar with what you are offering, so it will take some extra convincing to even get their attention.

Put our best ideas together and you get a customer-oriented MVP learning curve for collaborative value-generation. Oh! Mouthful! In other words, get on a learning curve to get better at collaboration and talking to your customers — so you learn how to be a better value generator. How do you feel along this learning path? A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. When your excitement about new-found knowledge is not matched by competence, it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Stick with it to see the full rewards.

But wait… there is more. As a value-generator you know that ‘knowledge is power’. Power for what? Knowledge reduces uncertainty and overcomes the risks associated with uncertainty. If you are able to build a business model that is a good match among your natural talents and those of your partners, and then match that model to produce the things other people value, then you will create a level of management competence and certainty around you.

Recent studies in the psychology of happiness have found that we need two things to make us happy – 1) to be loved, and 2) to be in a productive work flow (generating value). This makes so much sense for both collaboration and sharing. Life is a journey, not a destiny. We don’t stand still. We move, sometimes backward, but mostly forward with intent. Much of the time forward is up hill. But, step-by-step, we can learn to master the art and science, even the spirit, of the journey. It is easier when we support one another on this way-finding journey.