Let's jump right in!

Step 1: Crafting Your Monochrome Masterpiece

First things first, you'll want your logo in a sharp black and white version. If you've got an SVG file of your logo, that's a great beginning. Your goal here is to transform it into a striking monochrome image. I used Adobe XD for this task – it's user-friendly and pretty intuitive. Simply change the fill colour to #000000 for pure black. Once you're satisfied, export your logo as a PNG for the following step. Adobe XD is free and a fantastic tool for this creative journey, you can download it here.

Step 2: The Fusion – Bringing AI into Your Creative Process

Now, get ready for a bit of magic – the fusion of your logo with a dash of AI imagination, thanks to quick-qr.art. This step transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. You'll be combining your crisp monochrome logo with a creative prompt that infuses your design with life.

Start by dipping your toes into the free version, allowing you to play around with up to 25 images. Once you’re bitten by the creative bug – and trust me, it's quite the experience – you can upgrade for a small fee of €9 to explore up to 1,000 images.

Let's delve into the details. Head over to the 'upload' section to introduce your logo or any image – it could be anything that inspires you, even a portrait. Hit the 'inspire' button for prompts that are succinct yet impactful.

The key element here is the 'weight' setting. This will dictate how much your logo stands out in the final design. It's all about finding the right balance: too low, like at 0.8, and your logo gently blends in; too high, around 1.3, and it might dominate the scene. Aiming for a middle ground, about 1.0, usually works wonders.

For those with a subscription, try setting your image count to 4. It’s an efficient way to quickly pinpoint the design that resonates best with you.

Continuing our journey through the settings, remember that the path to the perfect image often involves a bit of trial and error. Embrace this process of experimentation – it’s your key to unlocking a world of visual wonders.

On my own adventure, I explored a range of eclectic prompts, from the edgy charm of "cyberpunk" to the serene beauty of "Amsterdam bridges". My explorations didn't stop there; I delved into the contrasting worlds of "steampunk gold and blue machinery" and drifted through "stunning sci-fi space landscapes".

But here’s a little insider tip that might just be your secret weapon: mentioning famous artists or art styles can ignite a surge of creativity. Imagine using a prompt like "award-winning pop art by Tom Wesselmann". Such references can gently nudge the AI towards a specific artistic flair, bestowing your T-shirts with a touch of classic artistry.

The most important thing is to let your imagination take the lead. There’s an entire cosmos of imagery out there, just waiting for you to discover and harness it.

Step 3: Scaling New Heights – Upscaling Your Chosen Images

Now, you've hit the jackpot with a collection of images that have completely captivated you. The next step? Download these visual treasures. But you'll notice they are only 768 pixels – a tad short of the high resolution we want for our eye-catching T-shirts.

But don't worry, AI has got our backs again with its image upscaling tools. A simple search for 'image upscaler' will open up a world of these digital wonders, with many offering a complimentary trial just right for our project. My personal favourite was Pixelcut, but don't hesitate to explore others – I tried five different tools and was consistently wowed by the quality they all offered.

Using these tools is a breeze. Just upload your image, select 'upscale 4x', and there you have it: a 3072-pixel work of art. With this enhanced resolution, your T-shirt will vividly showcase your brand’s essence with crystal-clear detail.

Step 4: Beyond the Square – Crafting a Unique Visual Identity

It's now time to transform your image from ordinary to extraordinary. While a square is classic, why not step into the exciting territory of rounded corners or a more dynamic shape?

For this creative step, I find Powerpoint to be a surprisingly effective tool. It’s very capable for such graphic tasks, offering a simpler alternative to more complex software like Photoshop. Let me walk you through it:

First, open a new Powerpoint presentation and set your 'page size' to something spacious, like 60x60 cm.

Then, bring your upscaled image onto this generous canvas. Powerpoint might initially shrink it to about 40% of its size, but don’t worry. Just adjust the format settings to bring it back to its full 100% size and watch your visual concept take shape.

Next up:

It's time to unleash your creativity with Powerpoint's 'Crop to Shape' function. This stage is all about adding your personal touch to the image. A gently rounded edge here, a creatively asymmetrical crop there, and voilà – you've crafted a design that’s intriguing and uniquely yours.

This step is more than just cropping; it’s about sculpting a T-shirt design that truly reflects some distinctiveness. These subtle yet impactful touches that make all the difference.

Once you're delighted with the shape of your image, simply right-click and choose 'Save as Picture'.

Step 5: The Final Craft – Bringing Your Digital Creation to Life

We've reached the grand finale: transforming our digital masterpiece into a tangible fashion statement. For this pivotal step, I turned to Printful for their prompt delivery (usually within a week), fair pricing, and impressive quality.

Printful presents a range of canvases for your design, from clothing to accessories. However, in the spirit of classic elegance and simplicity, I chose the humble T-shirt, specifically the 'Bella + Canvas 3001' – a model known for its variety of colours and comfortable feel.

Here’s the process to make it real:

• Start by uploading your creatively shaped image file. Then, a quick click on 'Apply' seamlessly integrates your design with the chosen T-shirt.

• Adjust the size of your image next. While Printful’s default is 12 inches, I found that scaling down to 8 or 9 inches often hits the sweet spot – though your own design sensibilities should be your guide.

Continuing:

• With your image perfectly placed, it’s now time to select the colour of your T-shirt. This is where you can really have fun – experiment with different shades until you find the one that truly stands out.

Wrapping It Up: Your Journey to Wearable Art

And there you have it – our journey from concept to creation. Just a few hours of creative experimentation combined with a bit of AI magic have brought us here. It's incredible how these tools have evolved to become so user-friendly, making design more accessible than ever.

For less than €20 each, you can wear something that's not only unique but also a vibrant expression of your creativity. These T-shirts are more than just clothing; they're conversation pieces, personal statements, reflections of your individuality.

So, why not give it a try? Embrace your inner artist, play with these AI tools, and create something unmistakably yours.

Update - The Shirts Have Arrived

The shirts have arrived, and they are nothing short of spectacular! The designs have truly come to life.

A little tip: Consider ordering just one shirt initially to check the fit and feel. Make sure it’s exactly what you envisioned before ordering more.

As the AI world continually evolves, I've discovered another exciting platform, Freeflo.ai, for my next wave of design inspirations!

The best illustration of Seychelle’s potential comes from a book written in 1997 called The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (Amazon) This book, more than any other, guides my understanding of our evolving world.

By the end of this post, I aim to ignite a spark within you. To believe in the potential of this small nation and to appreciate the fresh relevance of ideas from an ancient and often overlooked book.

Let’s start by introducing what Seychelles has going for it now, as a tourist destination.

Seychelles: A Paradise Nestled in Tranquility and Prosperity

Seychelles shines bright on the tourism map, a hidden gem nestled 1,500 km away from Africa. Every picture sprinkled throughout this post captures its breath-taking beauty, a vibrant testament to my personal journey. Its unique blend of distance and wealth gives it an exotic appeal; it's a prosperous oasis proudly recognized as Africa's sole "high income country" by the World Bank.

Seychelles wraps you in a comforting cocoon of safety and cleanliness, its streets echoing with the pride of the Seychellois who cherish their island home. English and French fill the air, spoken by the hospitable locals who take great care in preserving their cultural heritage. With a workforce deeply rooted in service and finance, they've perfected the art of creating an inviting service culture.

In 2018, this alluring destination welcomed around 405K tourists, an impressive figure that quadruples its local population. As a point of reference, consider Thailand's tourist influx of 40M against a population of 70M – Seychelles may be the smaller contender, but it sure packs a punch in the tourism sector!

However, during my visit, I felt a sense of 'what could be' — Seychelles as something far greater than a scenic vacation spot. Let's unravel this idea, largely influenced by the visionary thoughts of 'The Sovereign Individual,' and chart the journey Seychelles could embark upon.

Beneath the Postcard: The Other Side of Seychelles

Despite its high-income status, Seychelles reveals a different narrative when you're in its midst. The homes, humble and unpretentious, stand in stark contrast to the opulent tourist accommodations that come with a hefty price tag outstripping most European destinations. The island's roads, although well-maintained, can't escape the inevitable snarl of traffic jams we found ourselves in more than once. And while the food tickles the palate, the steep prices leave a bitter aftertaste.

At the heart of these challenges, I suspect, lie two intertwined realities. Seychelles' geographical position as an isolated island cluster makes shipping a costly endeavour. Amplifying this hurdle is its limited size, which deprives it of the benefits of economies of scale. As a result, businesses dependent on large-scale imports or exports find it challenging to carve out a viable niche in Seychelles.

Now, let’s look at how the world might change in the coming years and how Seychelles might move beyond just beautiful beaches. It all starts with an emerging global citizen called a ‘Sovereign Individual’

Worldly Wealth: The Rise of Sovereign Individuals

Sovereign Individuals today are typically high net worth individuals, always on the lookout for strategies to prevent their hard-earned wealth from being eroded by excessive taxes. These are people for whom boundaries are blurred – they are the quintessential global citizens. Their life and work have spanned across continents, and they have built a diverse network of friends from every corner of the globe.

These individuals are usually well-educated and successful in their respective fields. They are often fluent in English and other languages, a testament to their diverse life experiences and global orientations. This cosmopolitan demographic has transcended local identities and become part of a larger, interconnected world community.

Skyrocketing Seychelles: 15x Prosperity in 15 Years

Meandering around the vibrant, lush landscapes of Seychelles, a conviction started to brew within me: "Seychelles has the potential to be truly wealthy." The gears of my mind began turning, sketching out the blueprint to this prosperity.

My theory? Seychelles can harness the potent forces outlined in 'The Sovereign Individual.' With a committed government and a driven population capitalising on these trends, Seychelles could grasp the reins of an unprecedented prosperity, catapulting it into the league of world-leading economies.

Envision a Seychelles that's 15 times wealthier. It may seem audacious, but it's far from impossible. It’s as easy as 5x3. I could easily imagine the population growing fivefold (from 100,000 to 500,000) while individual prosperity triples. The result? An economic renaissance that catapults Seychelles' GDP into the stratosphere.

Sure, Seychelles today is a quaint archipelago, but don't let its size fool you. There's a wealth of land waiting to be conscientiously developed, with potential to sustainably support perhaps tenfold more inhabitants—up to a million—all while preserving its natural splendour.

Yet, our goal isn't just to multiply the population but also to amplify wealth. Picture each Seychellois resident, on average, tripling their income in just 15 years — from $37,000 to a robust $100,000. Think it's a pipe dream? Consider Estonia, which grew its per capita GDP nearly eightfold over the past two decades. It's a bold aim, but within reach.

But the cards aren't merely in Seychelles' favour — they're practically stacked. With a Corruption Perception Index ranking just shy of the USA (27th worldwide), Seychelles presents an appealing, trustworthy landscape to foreign investors.

And that’s not all. Small is in.

The Advantage of Small: How Size is Seychelles' New Strength

Now, let's take a leap into a new world order, described by the Sovereign Individual. In this world, small isn't synonymous with insignificant, but mighty. In this realm, small nations are harnessing their agility and innovative spirit to rise above their size, challenging the towering might of the old giants.

Seychelles, despite its vibrant beauty, is diminutive in geographical scale and population. Historically, this was a significant challenge. However, the tide is turning in favour of petite powerhouses like Seychelles. The necessity for physical protection from larger nations is gradually diminishing.

Mammoth nations, engulfed by their colossal state apparatus, are finding it increasingly difficult to manoeuvre. Likewise, gargantuan corporations are experiencing similar challenges.

The implication? Seychelles should find itself less burdened by implicit and explicit taxes to larger governments for their physical protection, having diminished its earlier disadvantages.

Propelling Prosperity: Where Seychelles Should Place Its Bets

In order to maximise Seychelles' potential and leverage the power of its small size, we need to identify key investment areas. Here's where Seychelles should consider putting its chips to fuel the economic leap.

Investment Focus 1: Developing as a European Remote Work Paradise

The strategic significance of Seychelles being in the European timezone (GMT+4) cannot be overstated. It harmonizes with the rhythm of the working day for over 500 million Europeans. This makes remote working from this small, enchanting archipelago remarkably simple. With daily flights from Paris already in place, this connection could easily expand, accommodating 5-15 additional daily flights without straining the capacity of the airport.

Aligning more closely with Europe, particularly Northern Europe and the UK, provides another layer of appeal. The optimal weather in Seychelles coincides with the less pleasant seasons (Spring & Autumn) of Northern and Western Europe. This synchrony is perfect, especially when the Mediterranean is still just a touch too cool. Seychelles emerges as an attractive remote work destination, where one can enjoy the sunshine while colleagues back home are bundling up against the chill.

Investment Focus 2: Empowering Seychellois through Remote Work Opportunities with European Firms

A vast opportunity lies before the Seychellois people: the potential to work remotely for established European firms. Embracing this opportunity would pave the way for higher wages—possibly two to three times their current levels. Furthermore, this path provides an immersive platform to gain invaluable skills and insights from seasoned professionals versed in Western working culture.

The Seychellois are uniquely positioned for this, courtesy of their fluency in English and French. This linguistic competence opens doors to potential work within economies of at least 250 million people across the UK and North and Western Europe. Thus, remote working can serve as a thriving nexus between the Seychellois workforce and Europe's booming industries.

Investment Focus 3: Championing the Crypto Frontier

Sovereign Individuals are poised to be ardent users of cryptocurrencies. Many have built and sustained their fortunes through the intelligent utilization of crypto. Yet, it's a realm that remains relatively untapped and inadequately regulated by most nations.

Seychelles, however, with its small yet corruption-resistant economy and financial astuteness, is perfectly positioned to pioneer in this domain. By fully embracing cryptocurrency, Seychelles has the opportunity to elevate itself into the vanguard of nations adeptly navigating the dynamic waves of the digital economy.

Investment Focus 4: Creating an inviting home for Sovereign Individuals

To truly elevate its standing on the global stage, Seychelles must aspire to become a cherished home for Sovereign Individuals. The island should prioritize a number of key factors that this discerning group typically values.

Firstly, a regime of stable and predictable low taxes is an enticing incentive, providing a solid financial landscape that respects their hard-earned wealth.

Secondly, facilitating a streamlined process for gaining citizenship and establishing tax residency can further attract global citizens looking for a welcoming base.

The allure of a good life is undeniable. Sovereign Individuals value world-class living standards. Frequent and convenient flight connectivity, reliable high-speed internet, an abundance of gourmet food, appealing architecture, and well-maintained infrastructure encompassing everything from roads to hospitals all come into play.

Finally, the backbone of this promising vision is a trustworthy government. Seychelles must pledge to invest in high-quality governance that will safeguard the interests of its residents and guarantee a peaceful, prosperous, and transparent future.

Small in Number, Big in Impact: The Sovereign Individual

While Sovereign Individuals may not be numerous today, their influence and potential to effect change are remarkably high, especially for a petite nation like Seychelles. Their presence and financial capabilities could make a monumental difference in the nation's socioeconomic fabric.

The small size of Seychelles is an asset, not a limitation. Its lack of bureaucratic corruption enables it to be highly agile, making it capable of implementing necessary changes at a rapid pace. Such nimbleness is advantageous when trying to attract and serve Sovereign Individuals who value efficient, transparent, and agile governance.

No nation has explicitly established itself as a sanctuary for Sovereign Individuals. This represents a fertile ground for Seychelles to assert its place, harnessing its distinct qualities to serve this sophisticated cohort. An unwavering commitment towards this goal could propel Seychelles to the forefront, earmarking it as a global trailblazer.

Sovereign Individuals are not just potential residents; they are potential investors too. With the necessary financial resources at their disposal, they could significantly contribute to making Seychelles a destination tailored to their needs. However, to attract such investment, it is imperative for the Seychellois government and people to make catering to Sovereign Individuals a national priority and communicate this vision clearly to potential stakeholders.

Charting a Bright Future for Seychelles

My journey to Seychelles was an experience steeped in profound gratitude. The archipelago, with its breathtaking beauty, stands unrivaled. The warmth and friendliness of the people lend an undeniable charm to these stunning islands.

As I indulged in the touristic pleasures Seychelles offered, I couldn't help but perceive the untapped potential teeming beneath its surface. It beckoned to me as an opportunity for Seychelles to transition from a picturesque tourist destination into one of the world's most captivating nations.

The blueprint for this transformation is sketched out in the visionary insights of the book 'The Sovereign Individual.' It paints a promising picture of a prosperous future, waiting for Seychelles to seize and manifest.

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Footnote 1: I enlisted the assistance of ChatGPT to refine my writing for the first time on this blog post. For the curious minds, you can compare the evolution of this piece from its initial form to the finished article. Click here to view my original draft, and here to see the original prompt that I started with.

Footnote 2: if you’re from Seychelles and are interested to discuss further, reach to to me at mcclelland (dot) jeff (at) gmail (dot) com.

I started doing this practice 18 months ago after my colleague, Kairi, introduced this idea of “the five balls of life,” credited to Brian Dyson and summarised on this blog post

Before I started this practice, I’d occasionally look back at my week or my month and wonder, “where did all my time go?” I’d be left with this dreadful, sinking feeling that I've spent my 730 hours on something… but hardly any of my time was spent on what was most important to me.

My default is to work too much and that harms every other area of my life. I’m too busy to eat healthy or hit the gym. I’m too exhausted to carve out quality time with my wife and kids, I have too many urgent tasks to start chipping away at big audacious goals.

But I know life can be short. My mom sadly passed away at the age of 47, which isn’t so far off my age today. I’m keenly aware that every day, week, and month I get is a gift. I’d better make the most of it.

Thanks to this tiny practice – literally an hour or less a month – I’ve easily doubled how much progress I make towards things that I really care about. I live a better life because of it.

What do personal commitments look like?

I’ve found it’s useful to group my personal commitments into a handful of categories. I’ve landed on six. Anywhere from 3 to 8 will be fine. Create categories that are logical to you and name them however you like. Just be sure to cover your whole life, not just work.

Next I’ll share my six as well as a few real examples of personal commitments I’ve made over the last few months in each so you get a sense for what I usually include.

1 | Health - A key focus for me because if I don’t consciously focus on this I find I’m too busy to take care of my health. Examples:

• Continue going swimming 2x bouldering 1x + run 1x per week

• Fill the house with healthy snacks for me

• I feel strong, especially in my core and arms, at the end of the month

2 | Financial / Security – Here I put commitments related to improving my financial wellbeing. I bundle security here because my main anxiety around finances is to just make sure me and my family are safe financially. Examples:

• Update investment plan after re-reading Russell Napier articles (note: resulted in this)

• Move crypto into hardware wallets

• Switch over to [password manager] for myself and [wife]

3 | [wife] / Kids – I also find it extremely helpful to consciously plan for and commit to spending quality time with my wife and kids. Examples:

• Take the week between Christmas and new years properly off from Salv

• Go on one weekend away (Tartu or a spa)

• Make many silly photo mashups with kids and draw on clouds (note: like @adailycloud)

• Read books with [daughter] for at least a couple of hours

4 | Soul / Life worth living – Here I put all of the meaningful, fulfilling and fun stuff that’s particular to me. Things that give me back way more energy than they take…if I take time for them. Examples:

• Go winter swimming for the first time

• 2x video calls with [my friend who lives in Austria]

• Try out 5x new recipes

• Publish blog post on job search advice sketched out for [brother in law]

5 | Admin – Things that I’ll just feel way better if I get them done. Sometimes tedious, often procrastinated. I feel a tremendous weight off my shoulders when I get them done.

• Get car's tires changed with no stress in October

• Wash and vacuum car

• Buy a new winter coat (note: I hate shopping so this is a burdensome task. You may love it, and wouldn’t need to add it to your list)

6 | Work – I make a separate, far more detailed plan each month for my actual work, but here I try to jot down a few things about how I want to feel about my work at the end of the month.

• Feel good about our team offsite going in and after

• Spend enough time with [certain colleagues] on budget prep ahead of board meeting

• [newbie in my team] feels comfortable and is productive

Keep in mind

I usually aim for 3-6 commitments in each category. For example, this month I have 27 commitments across my six categories. That’s seems like quite a few commitments, but here’s why I have so many:

• I want to force myself to be creative on the many different ways I can make progress this month. It’s challenging to think of 5+ ways I will try to improve my health this month. But health is important to me so it’s worth me taking a few minutes each month to think how I might improve it.

• I want to give myself several opportunities to be successful. Also, sometimes I drop commitments mid-month because they no longer make sense.

• I want to be ambitious - I want to have enough commitments that I’m quite sure I won’t be able to accomplish all of them. Typically, I make decent progress on about 60-70% of them, which is the right amount for me.

If I’m stuck on what to write in a particular category, these prompts help:

• “When thinking about my [health], I’m going to feel phenomenal about myself if, by the end of the month, I’ve…”

• “When thinking about my [health], I’m going to be so disappointed in myself, if by the end of the month, I haven’t…”

One last thing: the order of the categories doesn’t matter. If it’s a category at all, it’s important to you. Some categories will need more focus this month and less the next.

How to set personal commitments

1 | SET

To set your personal commitments, you just need some kind of text file/document. You can use a notes app, google docs, paper, whatever. It usually takes me 15-20 mins to create them.

I have two inputs: a template with the six categories all ready to go, and last month’s personal commitments so I can see if there’s anything I want to carry forward.

2 | CHECK

During the month, I review to see which ones I’m on track with and which not. I review about once a week and it usually only takes five mins or a little more.

You can use iOS’s built-in reminder app, your calendar, or something else.

It’s essential to regularly review for two reasons. First, you’ll see that you are actually making progress - I always feel great when I see I’ve made progress. Second, if you have 20 or 30 commitments, several of them you’ll have forgotten about and won’t have done anything. The main outcome of a quick review for me is a handful of specific tasks added to my todo list.

3 | END-OF-MONTH REVIEW

I do a really simple review at the end of the month and I just update my list. It takes around 15 minutes. I update each personal commitment line like this:

• % I was successful - personal commitment description - some commentary or note

So real life examples:

• 30% - Continue going swimming 2x, bouldering 1x & run 1x per week - illness (me and [wife] and [kids]) and December busyness

• 100% - Dad time with kids at least two half days - I love it when the kids say “Daddy, I want to do something with YOU and I’m able to take the time for it!

• +++ - Discuss crypto portfolio with [wife] (+++ is for those opportunities that just come up during the month that are significant enough to jot down)

What’s the percent based on? Just my subjective opinion. Even commitments that seem to be fluffy and unmeasurable, for instance: “Feel good about our team offsite going in and after” I know I can evaluate and give a % to.

I don’t share my evaluations or have to justify them to anyone, so I can just be honest with myself. I’m totally ok marking some things as 20%.

Extending this process

I’ve practiced this for all of last year. Spontaneously, I decided to do an “end of year review” and it took no effort to get a good overview what I cared about for the whole year. And best of all, it gave me a marvellous feeling to look back and see how many important things I did in the last year. I was also able to extract a few key themes that I didn’t do so well on and I can work with going forward. Things like: I still seem to consistently deprioritise my finance/security commitments.

Another thing I started doing was to share my personal commitments with my wife when I made them at the beginning of each month. This took zero extra effort for me but helped me strengthen my relationship with her. It’s a condensed view of what I care about and what I’m struggling with right now. She’s more aware of what I’m trying to get better at and she even been able to help me on some of them.

So that’s all.

It gives me deep satisfaction to think about what’s important and then see that every single month I make it happen. I make my health better, I make my relationships better, and I accomplish bigger things at work. I’m proud of my progress.

Maybe you want to give it a try too, for a month or a year, and see if it helps you to spend more time on the things you care most about.

Let me know if any of this worked for you: mcclelland (dot) jeff (at) gmail (dot) com.

Photo credit: Pexels on Pixabay

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All quotes throughout this blog post come from the article “We Will See the Return of Capital Investment on a Massive Scale” by Mark Dittli on themarket.ch published 14-Oct-2022. It’s well worth a read.

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I read this thought provoking article which was an interview of investment strategist and historian Russell Napier. I was so enthralled by his article that I did something I never do: I watched youtube. Just to glean a little more insight from a brilliant thinker. Russell argues that: “Many investors today still pretend that we’re in the system that we had from 1980 to 2020. We’re not.” And he predicts that we’ve already moved into an investment climate similar to what was in place starting at the beginning of World War II:

“I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital….This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979.”

What he describes is especially applicable to Western economies. In particular those that are heavily indebted (Japan, Southern Europe, USA).

What’s the big idea?

He has solved one of the biggest things I’ve been puzzling about lately. Governments have spent atrocious amounts of money first because of Covid and currently because of Putin and it can’t be possible to keep going on like this. So, what will governments do to get out of all of this debt they’ve accumulated?

Russsell gives an answer: with credit guarantees to commercial banks. Here’s the short of it:

Step 1: A shift in control of the monetary supply. Central banks no longer control the money supply. That’s their job, but they’ve been neutered. Governments (politicians and bureaucrats) effectively control the money supply by guaranteeing loans issued by private commercial banks.

Step 2: Crises happen and the government solves them with money they create using credit guarantees. There’s always a crisis that the public expects the government to pour money into to solve. Covid, Putin, climate change are just the first. There will always be more crises for politicians to solve:

“the politicians in government will say they are elected to pursue these policies. They are elected to keep energy prices down, elected to fight climate change, elected to invest in defence and to reduce inequality”

Governments can’t resist using this powerful tool. So they will use it a lot, and importantly, mostly for their favoured causes.

“For the government, credit guarantees are like the magic money tree: the closest thing to free money. They don’t have to issue more government debt, they don’t need to raise taxes, they just issue credit guarantees to the commercial banks.”

Step 3: Repeat for 15-20 years. This will continue to work for a fairly long time because it will be popular with the public:

“People are screaming for energy relief, they want defence from Putin, they want to do something against climate change. People want that, and elected governments claim to follow the will of the people.”

Step 4: Economies bake in persistently high inflation. Because this tool (guaranteed loans) will get used so much, the economy will face steady, high inflation. But it most likely won’t cause hyperinflation.

This is our reality now

We’re already well on our way. The pattern was first proved with covid responses in the West, but already the European energy crisis follows the same four step pattern:

“Out of all the new loans in Germany, 40% are guaranteed by the government. In France, it’s 70% of all new loans, and in Italy it’s over 100%, because they migrate old maturing credit to new, government-guaranteed schemes.”

Nearly all Western governments — and therefore the main trading/saving currencies — are pursuing this strategy (save, perhaps, Switzerland).

What will the results be over the next 20 years?

Good: Governments inflate away lots of debt - from 300% of GDP down to a more sustainable 200%.

“Engineering a higher nominal GDP growth through a higher structural level of inflation is a proven way to get rid of high levels of debt. That’s exactly how many countries, including the US and the UK, got rid of their debt after World War II”

Bad: Massive capex investments into favoured industries - good for those industries, but on net, not good for the economy because the bets won’t generally be economical. It will take a decade or two for the incompetence to show though.

“When the UK government did this in the 1950s and 60s, they allocated a lot of capital into coal mining, automobile production and the Concorde. It turned out that the UK didn’t have a future in any of those industries, so it was wasted and we ended up with high unemployment.”

Ugly: 6-8% a year inflation, every year for 15-20 years, means any person or company who has wealth is at a high risk of seeing it inflated away. The scenario Russell describes (6-8% for 15-20 years) would mean you lose 58% to 78% of your wealth. That means each $100 you have today will be worth as little as $21.45 in 20 years.

But this government-fueled spending spree can’t go on forever. So it won’t. The result will be stagflating economies in 15-20 years depending on the country / currency / quality of the investments / economy. Stagflation means high inflation plus high unemployment. The high unemployment comes because all of the capex investments will largely be invalidated by then as good investments.

But what does this mean for investments?

Throughout the article, Russell lays out a few basics. Regarding equities he says:

Within equities, there are sectors that will do very well…This capex boom could last for a long time. Companies that are geared to this renaissance of capital spending will do well.

The article hints at several opportunities and risks for investment in this new investment era. I’ll expand (speculate?!) on Russell’s points.

The types of sectors that will do well

Russell lays out that some sectors will get massive investment: "The great problems we have – energy, climate change, defence, inequality, our dependence on production from China – will all be solved by massive investment.”

I would add the following additional industries are also likely to do well: research, education, health. All of the industries Russell mentioned and I added are favoured industries by most governments. Why?

• Huge investments already go there. Perhaps because they’ve captured the government. This will only accelerate when more money is up for grabs.

• They’re all social goods. They’re all easily understood by the public and politicians. They’re an easy sell.

Beyond those industries there will be some effects from inflation itself. Those industries that require high long-term capital investments and who aren’t in favoured industries will really struggle. That includes anything Venture Capital (VC) funded, perhaps even tech startups like mine (though I hope we’re favoured!). Capital, both in terms of equity and debt, will be much more expensive over the coming couple of decades.

So that’s broad sectors, but individual companies within sectors will vary dramatically in performance due in this new era too.

The types of companies that will do well

The main determining factor of success for a company will be: are you favoured for government largess or not? Some firms will naturally be better positioned than others. All other things being equal, the winners will tend to be:

BIG: Larger firms are more legible to governments and will also be more effective lobbyists. They will get the meetings and be able to organise themselves. Tiny firms, or even collections of small firms won’t be able to organise themselves. Financial firms that are “too big to fail” will indeed not be allowed to fail.

ACTIVIST: Firms that invest more into lobbying will get more of those sweet government dollars. Those firms that are already well connected to politicians will do well.

COMPLIANT: Firms that are good corporate citizens will do better. So it will pay off especially to keep on top of your taxes, engage in Public Private Partnerships, contribute to social goods.

DEBT-LIGHT: Firms that have relatively low debt compared to competitors in their sector will do well because debt will be way more expensive going forward.

SERVE-THE-YOUNG: Inflation effectively robs the rich (who are usually older) and gives to the poor (who are younger). Old rich people lose some of their wealth but young people (and immigrants, and those less well off), who have few assets will mainly see their incomes rapidly rise. As a result, companies who serve young people (with few assets) will do better than those who serve rich old people.

The impact on other types of assets

Russell indicates that gold is likely to do well: “Gold will do well once people realise that inflation won’t come down to pre-2020 levels but will settle between 4 and 6%.”

I would add that some crypto assets will be a good investment for the same reason as gold. Not all crypto, but those crypto assets which have fixed supply, most notably Bitcoin. Etherium might be especially well placed if they stick to the plan to burn ETH with every transaction decreasing the total amount of ETH, and thereby increasing the value of each remaining coin.

That said, crypto is only a good investment at the right price. It’s hard to say how much of today’s price is based on short-term speculation. Arguably, it’s relatively low as I write this at the end of 2022. But overall, over the 15-20 year horizon, given the probable 60-80% inflation over that period, an asset that is guaranteed zero inflation (BTC), or even negative inflation (ETH), looks attractive.

Russell warned against government bonds: “Avoid government bonds. Investors in government debt are the ones who will be robbed slowly.” Normally (e.g. between 1980 and 2020), bond yields would get too high if inflation was too high, but this won’t happen going forward:

“You need a domestic investor base that is captured by the regulatory framework and has to buy your government bonds, regardless of their yield. This way, you prevent bond yields from rising above the rate of inflation. All this is in place today, as many insurance companies and pension funds have no choice but to buy government bonds.”

I would add that not only do you have to avoid bonds in your own portfolio, you need to also avoid exposure to those who will be harmed the most when their bond investments don’t pan out. So for instance, big government pension programs (which have lots of government bonds) will be severely short of cash, which means retirees won’t get their full pensions, which means retirees will have to cut their spending, which means businesses serving retirees will do poorly. It’s worth playing out the 2nd and 3rd order effects for this new investment environment.

Which regions to invest in

It’s not outlined in the article, but this youtube lecture describes what’s coming for the Euro area. In particular, how the Euro can’t possibly work in this new scenario where 27 individual governments are guaranteeing credit (thereby creating money/inflation) in an uncoordinated way. Russell indicates the problems will hit Euro countries harder and sooner than, for instance, the US/UK/Japan.

I agree that Euro-area countries have a high risk of catastrophe. Euro-area countries might be in a “tragedy of the commons” type problem whereby 27 nations have the power to cause harm mainly to the others and there isn’t a strong enough structure (e.g. European governance) to prevent it.

The USA seems better placed not only because it has a strong federal government, but also because it’s still the world's reserve currency. This last fact seems to be starting to change (maybe the Yuan, maybe Bitcoin), but seems unlikely to me to radically change, even over the next 20 years.

Russell also warned against investing in countries/currencies that are likely to need to enact capital controls (meaning you may not be permitted to exchange it).

“Switzerland, for example, will probably stay away from these policies, but it will see continued inflows of capital, creating upward pressure on the franc. Sooner or later, Switzerland will have to bring back some forms of capital controls. That will be a feature worldwide.”

So that’s it

I got a lot out of this article as well as Russell Napier’s YouTube lectures and interviews (no channel, just search for his name). If I’ve piqued your interest, it’s well worth your time to explore further. He tweets under the Library of Mistakes and is worth a follow.

He’s identified a fascinating and what seems very likely path. I wish it weren’t the path but if it is, I feel much better prepared not only to weather it, but make the most of it.

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I wrote it originally for my brother-in-law who just finished his PhD and wanted to get his first real job. His challenge, like so many, is that a lot of his experience, as great as it is, doesn’t count for that much when he switches industries. Also, he doesn’t know anybody in the industry, or the best companies, or even what the roles typically do.

He’s likely to spend a ton of time applying, become frustrated, and have to accept a low level job at not a great company just to get in the door. Then build his way up over several years. Only then might he get the job he could perhaps get today if he used a different job search strategy.

So I’m going to lay out a few techniques that will work a lot better than the default way. You don’t need to follow all of them, but each part increases your odds.

Why do I think it’ll work? First, I’ve gotten an impossible job before. I had finished studying in Holland but was living across the world in Canada. I wanted to return to Holland to work but I didn’t have a work permit and would need a sponsor. Basically it’s a ton of extra work if they want to hire me as opposed to any of the 500M people with European passports. Plus I was 8h timezone away. I ended up applying for 172 jobs over 6 months and received two offers. I wrote custom cover letters for every role, had countless 6am interviews. I know the struggle but I got a great job. I’ve also written this based on my experience interviewing and hiring >100 people in Skype, Wise, and Salv across all kinds of roles. I know what impresses me and increases the odds of saying “yes”, and it’s not obvious to most who I meet in the interviews.

So let’s jump into the problem you’re facing, especially if you want a very different role than you have today.

The problems with a ‘normal’ approach

Roles are so specialised nowadays. It’s a needle in a haystack. There often aren’t that many job posts that seem suitable. The companies might not be interesting. Or the product/industry sounds boring. Many roles are misnamed. For instance, most “data scientists” are glorified analysts. If you’re a hardcore (Maths PhD) data scientist, you wouldn’t enjoy this work. Not only that, you wouldn’t be the one chosen anyway since you’re both over- and under-qualified.

Not only do you not find exactly the right role, when you do apply you’re one of 50-200 applicants. With that many applicants, no matter what you write on your CV or cover letter, the robot or HR person reading it is very unlikely to move you to the right pile. It’s just a numbers game.

If you’re switching career tracks, you don’t have “real” work experience (according to your resume/CV). As a result you have a higher than average chance of just being cut before they know anything about you.

Oh, and you’re also stereotyped

Unfairly, I might add, but it doesn’t matter. Stereotypes are used to reject you before they get a chance to meet you and get to know you. For my brother in law, his stereotypes as recent PhD graduate are:

• People will assume he’s not a practical person - He’ll only care only about theory and not about how things get implemented in the “real world” with imperfect data and boring business problems.

• People will assume he’s not a people person. They will be concerned that he’s a reclusive nerd who’s not a good team player. Anybody who knows him knows there’s nobody more charismatic and outgoing, but that’s the point. He has no way of conveying this in his resume/CV. He needs to meet people in person so they can see this for themselves.

If you’re coming from a different field, you’ll have different stereotypes about people like you. Don’t hide from these stereotypes. You’ll have 5-8 people evaluating you during the hiring process and it’s healthy to assume at least some of them will think some of these. So address them.

So, you’re stereotyped, up against 50+ other faceless resumes/CVs, and only have a handful of really promising roles you want. Doesn’t sound too promising.

But there’s another approach that will help you find the right role for you with a lot less stress.

Three steps to success

There are just three steps. They’re all simple to do. Literally anyone can do them. But they’re not easy; they take real courage to execute.

Step 1 - research the opportunities

Don’t start by searching for a job. Start by learning about people in jobs that you want. It’s easier than you’d think to do this. Simply reach out to people on linkedin who have the jobs you think you might want and ask to meet them for a 15 min video call. Linkedin search is pretty good! It’ll take you 10-15 mins a day to reach out to 10-15 people (linkedin has a daily limit of cold connection requests).

Here’s a couple of messages my colleague Mallory used (for a different research purpose) that you can adapt:

Hi Robin! We haven't met, but I see we both know Khalid. I'm doing research on the pains (and joys!) of working in AML. I see you're an AML analyst, so I'd love to pick your brain if you're up for it. Would you be up for a 15 minute call sometime soon? - Mallory (friendly, curious human)

Hi Dainius! We don't know one another, but I'm doing research into the pains (and joys!) of working in AML and compliance. I see you're doing that not only right now, but you've been in AML for awhile even with WU & SEB. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Would you be up for a 15m call? -Mallory

1-3 people (10-20% of those you reach out to) from your daily batch of 10-15 reachouts will say yes. You’ll have no problem using up 15 mins, but the most useful things to ask are about:

• What do they really like about their role? [So you can find out if whether you’d even like their role]

• What are their biggest challenges day to day? [so you can be sure you know how to answer questions about those]

• What’s expected that you should know about that you don’t know about? [So you can prepare good responses in interviews]

Aim for 10-20 of these conversations and take good notes. You’ll be phenomenally more knowledgable with an investment of 20-30h over the next two weeks.

Also, you might have such a good connection with a couple of people that they’d be willing to meet you for coffee to continue the conversation. Many people want to mentor, and you can tap into that if you have a good match.

Here’s why this kind of research is an extremely useful first step

You’ll get connections on linkedin in the industry. I’m not sure this is true everywhere, but in Europe, Linkedin is king. It’s the first place you look if you’re considering someone for a role. As a candidate, you need to have at least a few hundred connections to seem like a normal human being (think stereotypes again). These connections can be a superpower too once you get to steps 2 and 3 (see below). When you have common connections with the people who you’re interviewing. It seriously helps if your interviewer says, “so I noticed you know my friend Mike” and you can be completely honest that you don’t really know Mike but last week you interviewed him to ask him all about his role.

It’s the fastest way to find out what different roles/companies/industries are actually like. Find out what people in those roles you’re considering actually do day-to-day and whether you’d like it. Find out if perhaps a particular company is amazing or terrible. Interviews are usually too high pressure for you to really absorb and reflect.

It’s motivating. These conversations will be the highlight of your day. Job searching can be frustrating and lonely and filled with rejection. But these won’t be. You’ll enjoy talking to smart people who are excited to talk to you. Nobody does this so this will be the highlight of your interviewee’s day too.

You’ll become an industry insider, overnight. Every industry and company has its own lingo. You’ll find out the specific words they use to describe their work. It’s subtle, but you’ll be much better perceived by future hiring managers because you speak their language, at least a little. You’ll also be able to prepare better for the interviews because you’ll understand the main problems they face in that industry and/or company.

After you’ve researched the roles with a series of 15 min conversations, you’re ready for the next step.

Step 2 - direct reach outs to potential hiring managers

You need to start reaching out to leaders/managers who might be hiring for a role you would like. If you can find their emails, use email; otherwise use Linkedin connection requests.

If you just ask, “are you hiring?”, 95% of the time the answer will be no. And the other 5% will be “yes, go to this website”. This won’t get you anywhere.

So what should you write? Your ultimate ask in the first email should be rather soft. Build trust with them first. Something like:

• Direct angle: I’m fascinated by your team/this article you wrote and I’m thinking of applying for XYZ role. Would you be willing to tell me more about XYZ role over a short call?

• Research angle: I’m fascinated by what you do at XYZ. Would you be willing to meet me to tell me more about what your team does?

• Newbie angle: I’ve just finished my PhD and starting to search around. I noticed you transitioned similar to how I’m hoping to do 10 years ago / You’ve done XYZ for a long time at ABC.  Would you be able to recommend how I go about a job search?

Basically, try to tap into their mentoring instincts first before asking about specific job opportunities. And tap into what you learned in your research from people in the same industry, or similar role, or same company.

It should be a short email (2-3x 1-2 sentence paragraphs). Assume they’re busy people: most hiring managers I know have 4-6+ hrs of meetings everyday, receive 100+ slack messages and 20+ emails. Every. Single. Day. Write something just for them, get to the point and have just one clear ask.

Try to meet in person

Aim for an in-person coffee meeting if possible. Why? It takes way more effort to truck yourself across the city, but that’s the point. It’s effortful. They will feel more obliged to either tell you stuff or introduce you to others. Plus, if you’re charming and a normal human being, you’ll build much more trust and empathy.

If meeting physically isn’t possible (e.g. you’re in different cities) or they’re not up for it, virtual will have to do.

When you meet them, use everything that you’ve learned in your research. Position yourself as someone eager to learn, and work, and problem solve. Share what you know about them (based on some googling). Try to guess what the challenges might be for their company and their team. Be genuinely curious and learn all you can about how they came to be in the role, in the company, in the industry they’re in. They’ll be delighted to tell you their story.

If one of them is actually hiring or they know someone who is, you can be sure that they’ll tell you. You can follow their instructions on how to apply. You probably won’t get any formal advantage skipping hiring steps (the process is usually fixed), but that’s ok; you’re way, way ahead.

In fact, you’ve probably increased your odds by at least 10-20x (from perhaps 1-in-50 to 1-in-5). It’s that much of a difference.

Use your coffee meeting to 10x your odds of landing the role

You have at least three huge advantages with will transform your odds.

You can write a killer cover letter talking about their problems and how you could solve them. 99% of candidates cover letters only talk about themselves…because the candidates don’t know anything about the company’s problems. But you do. So talk about those problems - the company is hiring you to solve their problems. You can say things like “Mike from team XYZ suggested I apply. He thought that my experience in ABC might be a good fit in solving problem DEF.”

You will talk like an insider in the interviews. You’ll know the products, and problems, and if you’re lucky, some people’s names.

You have a champion in the house. After the interview (step 3, below), you can reach back to whoever you met for coffee and say “thanks, Alice, for encouraging me to apply for XYZ. I just met Bob and Claire. They were awesome and I got even more excited to join!” At the very least that makes Alice feel good. And if Alice knows Bob or Claire, there’s a very good chance they will reach out to them and put in a good word about you.

These three things will 10x your odds. They completely set you apart from other candidates. All this from a few coffees with interesting people a couple of steps ahead of you in their career. The next step is to smash the interviews.

Step 3 - Interview well

Research

The first step to interview well is to prepare well. Research the individual people who will be interviewing you. If it’s not clear from the invite, it shows courage to ask the HR person setting up the meeting who you will be meeting. Don’t skip this step and go in blind.

Search at least: (1) google, (2) linkedin, (3) youtube (for conference presentations). Try to understand: What’s their role? For how long have they been in that role? How long have they been at that company? Do they have a similar background or a completely different one than you? If you’re technical, are they really technical or not at all technical? You may need to speak in a really different way to ensure you’re understood.

You’ll be interviewed by your (senior) peers, your direct manager and their manager (and maybe others). Each interviewer will all have their own background and things that they care about testing you on. Be especially mindful of overcoming the default stereotypes with people who have a totally different background from you. For instance the boss’ boss might have a business background and might come in thinking you won’t be practical or good with people (eg stereotypes).

If you have mental cycles available, try to figure out what the question behind the question is: what are they trying to validate about you with that question? For instance, the simple softball question, “why do you want to work for ABC Corp?” might really be asking, “Do you even know what ABC Corp does?” or “how well did you prepare for this interview?” or “do you care about ABC Corp’s mission?” You won’t always know in the moment, but trust your gut on what aspect to emphasize and, if you’re really confused, ask them to clarify: “interesting question! Just to clarify, are you interested to know more about X or Y?”

Ask good questions

Great interview questions from the candidate are often more impressive than great interview answers. Get the interviewers to think that it’s really you who’s interviewing them. Be confident but not arrogant.

Here are some question areas that will help you to both understand the role/company but also show off that you’re curious, ambitious and a good team player they want to hire.

Truly understand their problem

• What’s the biggest challenge in this role/in this team/in the company? [be ready to share how you’ve tackled similar problems before]

Understand what the hiring managers care about

• Tell me about your vision / mission / longer term goals?

  • Shows that you care about that which is what they’re supposed to care about, doesn’t matter whether they do or not

  • Shows that you’re imagining yourself there and contributing for a long time.

  • Allows them to talk and give you juicy details you can use to craft your other answers

• What are the team’s OKRs (or KPIs)? [shows you care about the team and delivering]

Understand what you need to do to be successful

• If I was really successful in 6 months (or 12 months if it has more that 1000 employees), what would that look like? [shows you’re aiming to be ambitious, helps you understand if their expectations are too high or too low]

Understand the team dynamics

• Why are you hiring for this role? [“we’re growing the team” is the best answer because it means the team is trusted/useful; if they’re replacing someone, ask why the person left (shows you have guts to ask and you might learn something pleasant/unpleasant)]

• Who will I be working most closely with? Which teams does this team work most closely with in the rest of the organisation? [shows you really want to understand the details and how you can be useful]

Wrap up questions

• What are your thoughts on me / main concerns after this interview?

  • Shows you have courage (only 5% of people have the guts to ask this)

  • Shows you want feedback and can handle it (many people can’t)

  • Shows’ you’re straightforward / easy to work with (dispelling potential stereotypes)

  • Allows you to immediately address their main concerns (this can save your chances if you’re on the borderline)

• Ask what the hiring process is and when you’ll hear back [gives you an excuse to send a friendly follow up when they don’t get back to you in time, which they usually won’t. And keeps you from waiting around if they’re not interested]

After the interview

When the interview is done, you have one more opportunity to impact your chances. Usually the decision on whether you pass/fail the interview round is made within the first 5 minutes of the interview. But not always. So don’t assume the decision has been made. Keep working.

Try really hard to give yourself an excuse to send them something useful as a follow up after the interview(s). “Here’s that article I mentioned” is perfect. It can be an article, blog post, YT video, podcast episode or book. It should be relevant, but it doesn’t actually matter as they probably won’t take time to look at it. You want to come across as genuinely outgoing and helpful. Like you’re already a part of the team. Almost nobody does this (like 1%, so you’ll stand out so much if you just find a way to do this).

Also, if there’s an assignment, put in effort to make it pretty & professional. Seriously. This counts for a lot more than you would expect. It shows business sense and addresses a stereotypical weakness for many people. If possible, use the company’s colours and their logo. Show you’d fit right in and level up the team’s professionalism, making them all look good.

Step 4 - Profit

The rest is up to you! Enjoy your new job.

What about Salv?

I’d be delighted if more people looking for a career at Salv followed this advice. Do ask my colleagues what their job is actually like. Do google the amazing things the people interviewing you have done and be curious about them in the interviews.

These steps are all easy to follow but almost nobody does them. It takes guts to reach out to a random person on the internet and ask them for a virtual coffee. It takes real work to prepare well for interviews.

If you’re taking these steps it means you have discipline, you have courage, you work systematically and learn fast. These are phenomenal attributes for any candidate for Salv or anywhere else you choose to work.

You deserve a fantastic role at a phenomenal company. And you’ll get it. Good luck!

Let me know if any of this worked for you: mcclelland (dot) jeff (at) gmail (dot) com.

Photo credit: carolynchristine on unsplash

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How Wise uses self-leadership principles

As of now (Nov 2015), Wise is largely driven according to Evolutionary-Teal (self-leadership) principles. We have a strong purpose. Our Wise values are deeply embedded into our daily lives. Leaders focus much of their attention on culture & helping their team and colleagues to achieve, as opposed to giving directions & prioritising. Information sharing tends to be open. We mostly trust our colleagues to get on with it.

For each of the topics I’ve estimated where I think Wise is today on a spectrum of the dominant paradigm used in most organizations (Achievement-Orange) and the one (Evolutionary-Teal) that we mostly use. It’s not necessarily better to be more Teal. Obviously also, I’m generalizing across an incredible number of activities, teams and people.

Purpose

Wise is strong on purpose. We stand for fairness & transparency in finance. This mission is woven into every important discussion. A few examples come to mind:

• We focus heavily on purpose in our recruitment to the detriment of many candidate’s who don’t prepare for this being truly important at all. But for Wise, it is. Their Amber/Orange upbringing means that they’ve never seen a mission taken on any importance.

• Our “revolutionary” and “get it done” company values speak to purpose

• The way we think about pricing - long-term “sustainable” focus and aligned with our mission of fair finance

• 
  

Some thoughts on what purpose looks like in Evolutionary-Teal organizations

“With the transition to Evolutionary-Teal, people learn to tame the fears of their egos. This process makes room for exploring deeper questions of meaning and purpose, both individually and collectively: What is my calling? What is truly worth achieving?”

Structure & roles

Orange organizations have relatively strong hierarchies. Less structure than Amber, but still a pyramid hierarchy. Leaders spend time synthesizing all of the inputs from below and making decisions.

Self-managing organizations skip the formal hierarchy and embrace the network diagram. Employees don’t really have job titles, and take on multiple roles. Roles are fluid but have strong commitments that are clearly defined. If you take on a role it’s a commitment to your peers (the others in your portion of the network) and you take it seriously.

Wise leans towards teal, but not completely.

A few examples that come to mind:

• Orange/Teal: Our autonomous teams are in principle Teal, but there’s still a formal team lead (orange).

• Orange/Teal: We have some hierarchy. I see 3 formal levels (leadership team, team leads, the rest), and 4 total (splitting TL’s into those that go to Q-planning and those that don’t). So there’s some structure, but given our size, not much. Even though there are now 500+ of us we’re using the same little amount of hierarchy as we were when there were ~50.

• Teal: The way we’ve formed new teams organically (Cards, Payme, business, etc.) and how teams have defined themselves what it is they do is evidence for that. I think we’d see more movement beWiseeen teams if we were more teal.

• Teal: People are often encouraged to take on challenges outside of their remit and many here have the challenge of wanting to take on too many things.

• Teal: Hardly anybody puts effort into job titles & striving for the next “promotion”. Search our employee list for potentially ego-boosting hierarchical words like “VP”, “Director”, “Chief”, “Manager” (excl. product manager), “Head of” or “Senior” and you’ll come up with very little.

• Teal: Individuals collect many “roles” that define their unique contribution. These are ever-changing.

• Teal: Central support teams (IT, Infra, Analytics, HR, Finance) are tiny relative to our size (<10%?) and trending smaller as a share of total.

• Immature Teal: I don’t think we’ve figured out good processes for accountability or for governance yet. So far the leadership team has taken on this role as the rest of the organization hasn’t stepped up. The book walks through several examples of practical ways teal organizations have solved this.

The structure is fluid & adaptive in teal organizations:

“in self-managing [organizations] structure is both less necessary and more impactful than in traditional organizations. Less necessary because culture is not needed to overcome the troubles brought about by hierarchy. And more impactful, for the same reason—no energy is gobbled up fighting the structure, and all energy and attention brought to organizational culture can bear fruit. From a Teal perspective, organizational culture and organizational systems go hand in hand, and are facets of the same reality—both are equally deserving of conscious attention.”

Everyone feels responsible for Wise. This usually is illustrated by the large share of conversations about our customers and our purpose which cuts across teams.

“[in one org] we each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation.”

We try to hold others accountable with monthlies and quarterly planning. In teal orgs this takes on a profound importance. Extensive practices are built up to give people the tools to do this effectively.

“In traditional companies, when one person doesn’t deliver, colleagues grumble and complain but leave it to the person’s boss to do something about it. In self-managing organizations, people have to step up and confront colleagues who fail to uphold their commitments. Morning Star and other self-managing organizations readily admit that this essential piece can be tricky to put in place and to maintain. The process is effective to the degree that there is a culture within the workplace where people feel safe and encouraged to hold each other to account, and people have the skills and processes to work through disagreements with maturity and grace. Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin—you can’t have one without the other”

So far Wise hasn’t explored too far in this direction. One recent exception that comes to mind is the one-to-one training/discussions for TLs.

KPI’s, budgeting & forecasting

Here I believe Wise is mostly grounded in Achievement-Orange thinking. We focus quite a lot of energy on setting KPIs, setting quarterly targets and measuring performance against predefined targets (too much according to some Temperature Survey results). We’re doing this in a way that the best-run Orange companies operate. That being said, we don’t put nearly as much effort into it as many companies, and we focus more on learning than many Orange companies do.

A couple of examples come to mind:

• Orange: The KPI tracker & KPI meeting, our focus on MNU’s

• Teal: Some team’s retros highly focused on learning & adapting

Want to be more teal around KPIs & planning?

The book has some ideas around how Teal organisations handle these topics;

Why Teal orgs have mostly given up on setting targets:

“Targets are problematic for at least three reasons: they rest on the assumption that we can predict the future, they skew our behavior away from inner motivation, and they tend to narrow our capacity to sense new possibilities. Life is so complex, and events and circumstances change so fast, that setting a target is mostly guesswork; a year after it has been set, a target is in most cases just an arbitrary number—either so easy to reach as to be meaningless or so challenging that people must take shortcuts to meet the number, actions that will hurt the company in the long run.”

How teal orgs use processes like budgeting very selectively and for a clear purpose of making a decision, not for controlling behaviour:

“For example at Morning Star, units present their budget and investment plans to a budget task force, composed of volunteers from all parts of the business, that can challenge the numbers, and offer opinions and suggestions. Budgets are used to make decisions, not to control performance.”

A subtle effect of sharing performance too widely (for instance via the KPI tracker):

But self-management implies that teams monitor their own performance and don’t need other people to tell them to get their act together. In a subtle but very real way, teams’ psychological ownership is undermined when they know the CEO can look over their shoulder in real time to monitor their performance. The most subtle, and perhaps most demanding, change for a founder or CEO in a Teal Organization is to leave behind the sometimes addictive sense that others need you to make things happen.

Teal organizations can use KPIs & targets, but they have to be careful not to slip into the pattern of using them to control behaviour. Teal orgs have found more effective ways of holding people & teams to account besides KPIs.

“In the end, paradoxically, we feel safer in a world where we give up the illusion of control gained from predicting the future and learn to work with reality as it unfolds. They shoot explicitly not for the best possible decision, but for a workable solution that can be implemented quickly. Based on new information, the decision can be revisited and improved at any point. Decisions are not postponed because someone thinks more data or more analysis could result in a better decision. The decision can be reviewed at any time if new data comes up or someone stumbles on a better idea.”

Wise’s culture of action is strong. Partly because sometimes our data is so sparse, we just have to forge ahead with a workable solution. We generally focus on learning instead of blaming. If something doesn’t work, we just move on and make it better next time. The book describes how planning & decisions change in a teal org:

“Just as important, when decisions are small and we are used to revising them often, it also becomes much easier to correct a decision that proves mistaken.”

Trust & information sharing

On this aspect I place us mostly in the Evolutionary-teal side, based on a few things that come to mind:

• Teal: At Wise most information is shared widely. In fact, so much information is shared that one of the top issues from the Temperature survey is about information overload.

• Orange: I have noticed some topics are still not shared as widely as they would be in truly self-managing organization: raw individual or team performance, salaries, extremely strategic decisions (fundraising, profitability).

• Teal: Most teams are trusted, with little oversight. Marketing is trusted with millions in budget and all teams are trusted with hiring and budgeting sensibly.

• Teal: Our organization is extremely flat by most standards and everyone is approachable with “no drama & good karma”.

Here are some more specific thoughts on how Teal organizations build a culture of trust:

“Founders and leaders of self-managing organizations get asked the same question over and over again: isn’t it risky and foolish to let people make decisions without top-down control, especially when money is involved? In their experience, it is less, not more risky, because better decisions get made. But the really interesting thing is that the choice beWiseeen trust and control is seldom debated on a rational level. It’s a choice that gets made based on deeply held, often unconscious assumptions we hold about people and their motivations.”

Where we still have impediments to sharing information this may stem from deeply held assumptions we share about human nature:

“Organizations routinely talk about their values and mission; Teal Organizations talk about something even more fundamental—their basic assumptions about human nature. This has to do, I believe, with the fact that self-managing practices are still countercultural today. Many of us hold deeply ingrained assumptions about people and work that are based on fear, assumptions that call for hierarchy and control. Only by shining light on these fear-based beliefs can we decide to choose a different set of assumptions.”

Perhaps studying how information flows can be a powerful way to understand the underlying assumptions in Wise:

“In most workplaces, valuable information goes to important people first and then trickles down to the less important. Sensitive information is best kept within the confined circle of top management. If it must be released more widely, it needs to be filtered and presented carefully from the best possible angle. The underlying assumption is that employees cannot be trusted... Because the practice is based on distrust, it in turn breeds distrust among people lower in the hierarchy... In Teal Organizations, there are no unimportant people. Everybody expects to have access to all information at the same time. It’s a “no secret” approach that extends to all data, including the most sensitive.”

The benefit of building trust is improved accountability:

“When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return. Emulation and peer pressure regulates the system better than hierarchy ever could. Teams set their own objectives, and they take pride in achieving them. When a person tries to take advantage of the system, such as by not pulling his weight and slacking off, his team members will be quick to let him know their feelings.”

How leaders lead

In many ways our leadership team & team leads embrace self-leadership principles. In self-managed organizations, not everyone is equal, but influence is not derived from position or tenure. Instead it’s derived from a leader’s moral authority - their ability to help inspire the team to achieve the organization’s purpose.

Here I placed us mostly in the Evolutionary-Teal camp, based on a few examples:

• Teal: The way our leadership team (and many others) focus on asking provocative questions instead of demanding answers is clear evidence of this. And even though we’re over 500 people, we have very little formal structure, and no demand for more.

• Teal: At Q4 planning, the way Taavet asked us to think about other products. He didn’t demand it, he didn’t say how or even what we should work on. He didn’t re-organize us.

• Orange: Taavet & Kristo in particular send some phenomenal emails - on our purpose, on what they’re proud of, and where our biggest risk lie. But, I’ve never seen the rest of the organization discuss, debate, challenge, clarify, or reinforce. And I haven’t seen many others (outside of the leadership team) step up and write these pieces either.

• Teal: At Q4 planning at least 20 of 40 people said they were presenting externally about Wise this quarter. Probably a bunch more outside that room.

The role leaders (more broadly than just founders/CEO’s I’d argue) play in teal orgs:

“The founders and CEOs of self-managing organizations don’t have hierarchical power, but they often carry much moral authority. Each of the founders and CEOs I spoke to during this research was keenly aware that his or her presence, words, and actions carried particular weight.... For good or bad, the behavior a CEO models ends up shaping the organization in profound ways. If they are keen to see their organizations work along Teal practices, they need to role-model the behavior associated with the three breakthroughs of self-management, wholeness, and purpose.”

The Teal paradigm is new for most, and feels different, so even when it’s ultimately a more natural and fulfilling state, it’s hard to get used to. A key challenge is staying true to the principles during hard times:

Whenever a problem comes up, someone, somewhere, will call for tried-and-proven solutions: let’s add a rule, a control system; let’s put the issue under some centralized function; let’s add a layer of supervision; let’s make processes more prescriptive; let’s make such decisions at a higher level in the future. The calls can come from different corners—one time it’s a board member who will call for more control, another time a colleague, a supplier, or a client. Over and over again, the CEO must ensure that trust prevails and that traditional management practices don’t creep in through the back door.

But it’s in those moments that our true culture and assumptions about human nature are revealed. Peter Theil’s standard advice: “Don’t fuck up the culture” means defending the founding principles, keeping true to the organization's purpose and trusting individuals.

So if many of leadership’s traditional Orange roles are taken over by the organization, what do leaders do all day?

“In [the evolutionary-teal] paradigm, we don’t “run” the organization, not even if we are the founder or legal owner. Instead, we are stewards of the organization; we are the vehicle that listens in to the organization’s deep creative potential to help it do its work in the world.”

One interesting example I came across is a CEO of a 7,000 person nursing organization who manages “primarily by blog post”. The example shows how fundamentally different teal orgs can be especially for leaders:

Leadership by blog post requires a degree of candor and vulnerability that few CEOs in traditional organizations would feel comfortable with. Once a post is published, there is no going back. Critical comments and rebukes are public for all to see; they cannot be erased and cannot be ignored. The blog post is like an impulse given to the organization; what the organization does with the impulse is beyond the CEO’s control. What seems risky when looked at through a traditional lens looks wonderfully efficient from an Evolutionary-Teal perspective. A blog post you write from the comfort of the sofa in the evening at home can turn into a decision the next afternoon, endorsed by thousands of people in the organization...If people disagree with your thought, you have lost 15 minutes of your time … but gained a new insight into what the organization thinks.

One of the interesting ways to look at what leaders do in Teal organizations is to look at the broad, strategic, fundamental questions that they ask their peers. These types of questions would not get much focus (especially at lower levels) in Orange organizations.

In conclusion

That wraps up a long, LONG exploration of self-leadership. I’ve found it absolutely fascinating to dive into this excellent book and try to see how it applies to a living, breathing organisation that I know and love.

You might ask, 6 years later as I write this, how is it now at Wise? Unfortunately, I don’t know — I’ve been gone too long. I can say that these principles were largely lived throughout the time I was there, and we had grown to 1,700 employees total.

You might also ask, how is it at Salv? It’s a bit too early to tell. We have 40 people as I write this and the first handful of teams are just emerging. Largely we’re at the same points as Wise was on the spectrums.

I’d love to hear if this framework seems useful. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

Go back to the main page or if you missed something, go to the main introduction covering self-leadership.

Self-leadership is the latest evolution in how people organize. It’s relatively new and not yet well understood. Although we at Wise are working this way every day, there are many myths that can be put to rest.

Myth 1 | Self-leadership = no leadership

Self-leadership requires everyone in the organization to step up. Everyone must in some sense become a leader. The hard decisions that managers, directors and executives make in Orange organizations still must get made. But every individual now has to make those sorts of hard choices, make tradeoffs, do in-depth analysis, worry whether they’re making the right choice. Highly self-managing organizations have found ways of making smart decisions:

Almost all organizations … [use a process] called the “advice process.” It is very simple: in principle, any person in the organization can make any decision. But before doing so, that person must seek advice from all affected parties and people with expertise on the matter. The person is under no obligation to integrate every piece of advice; the point is not to achieve a watered-down compromise that accommodates everybody’s wishes. But advice must be sought and taken into serious consideration. The bigger the decision, the wider the net must be cast—including, when necessary, the CEO or the board of directors. Usually, the decision maker is the person who noticed the issue or the opportunity or the person most affected by it.

To some degree, we use monthlies and quarterlies at Wise for this purpose.

There should be no doubt this is hard:

“In hierarchical organizations, managers are responsible for delivering the numbers.” … [but in self managing organizations]  “all colleagues have the obligation to do something about an issue they sense, even when it falls outside of the scope of their roles. It’s considered unacceptable to say, “Somebody should do something about this problem,” and leave it at that; if you see a problem or an opportunity, you have an obligation to do something about it, and most often that “something” is to go and talk about it with the colleague whose role relates to the topic.”

Myth 2 | Self-leadership = empowerment

Many Wisers who’ve worked in other organizations that primarily operated from Amber or Orange principles know how hollow “empowerment” can feel if the context isn’t right:

“Many organizations today claim to be empowering. But note the painful irony in that statement. If employees need to be empowered, it is because the system’s very design concentrates power at the top and makes people at the lower rungs essentially powerless, unless leaders are generous enough to share some of their power.”

In teal organizations it’s genuinely different right from the foundation. Everyone. is. powerful. Everyone has the power to make the important decisions that drive the organization forward. In fact, everyone must take on the responsibility to use this power. You cannot be a victim in a Teal organization:

“You can’t take refuge in blame, apathy, or resentfulness. Everybody needs to grow up and take full responsibility for their thoughts and actions—a steep learning curve for some people. Former leaders and managers sometimes find it is a huge relief not having to deal with everybody else’s problems. But many also feel the phantom pain of not being able to wield their former positional power.”

Myth 3 | Self leadership = chaos

If there’s no hierarchy, what keeps people from slacking off? “The short answer: intrinsic motivation, calibrated by peer emulation and market demands.”

More specifically, everyone takes a leadership role, at least to manage themselves. Everyone is responsible to honour their commitments. And everyone also has both the power and the responsibility to put on the “boss” hat “to bring about important decisions, launch new initiatives, hold underperforming colleagues to account, help resolve conflicts, or take over leadership if results are bad and action is needed”

Myth 4 | Self leadership = everybody is equal

Everyone in an organization has a unique contribution to make to serve the organization’s purpose. Contributions change over time as both the people and the organization develops. Everyone has the power and responsibility to make the biggest impact they can using their whole self.

That being said, self-managing organizations recognize that formalizing power structures can be problematic ego traps which are disempowering:

Job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy. We can quickly get attached to our job title if it carries social prestige, and we can easily fall into the trap of believing we “are” our job identity. And in a hierarchical system, it’s all too natural to start considering that we are somehow above certain people and below others.

Nor are roles/jobs clearly defined nor fixed. People are complex (especially who bring their whole self to work):

“People are not made to fit pre-defined jobs; their job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities they pick up based on their interests, talents, and the needs of the organization.”

Myth 5 | Self-leadership = no hierarchy = no career path

Everyone has the power to pursue their inner purpose and to push the organization towards its purpose. There is no limit to the challenges they can take on. When everyone has this power

“people naturally come across so many opportunities to learn and grown that senior leaders don’t need to worry about people getting the right exposure....Careers in self-managing organizations emerge organically from people’s interests, callings, and the opportunities that keep coming around in a liberated workplace.”

And self-managing organizations free up vast amounts of energy because nobody “spends time on talent management, succession planning, or career planning.” Roles and personal development becomes fluid and natural: “When there is only one promotion coming around every few years, people are ready to put up a fight for it. When every month there might be some changes to roles within the team, everybody is more relaxed.”

Myth 6 | Self-leadership = for startups only (i.e. it cannot scale)

The companies researched in the book ranged in size from 90 to 40,000 employees. They spanned every industry: nursing, schools, electricity production, heavy manufacturing, food processing, software development, non-profit. Some companies have been self-managing since the 1970’s.

Up next

Ok, now that the myths have been put to rest, let’s see how it applies to a living breathing organisation. Namely Wise (TransferWise) as of November 2018.

Part 3 - How Wise uses self-leadership principles

You can also go back to the self-leadership intro page, or the main page.

This post in particular summarises this book’s research into how humans have gone from tiny bands of cave dwellers to enormous organisations.

Organisations throughout human history

In order to understand organisations in the modern day, some context of the different ways people have organized over time is useful. There’s a long history of different ways of organising:

Now, let’s look at each stage in turn. The first stages are highly condensed because they’re not relevant to the modern day, but explore the book for a fascinating in-depth look.

Archetype: hunter & gatherer, 3-24mo old infants

When/Where: ~150,000 years ago. A few isolated tribes today.

Characteristics: Very basic understanding of the world. Can only react to the environment

Archetype: hunter & gatherer, 3-24mo old infants

When/Where: ~15,000 years ago

Characteristics: Very basic understanding of the world. Believe forms of “magic” drive the world. People don’t see themselves as individuals. Life happens without much control. Death is not seen as particularly real (therefore a high incidence of murder).

Challenges: No ability to plan, reason, or improve. At the mercy of the environment.

Archetype: Gang / war zone / mafia

When/Where: Isolated tribal village, inner city gangs, war zones & failed states where normal society completely breaks down. Works well in extreme, hostile environments.

Organizational Innovations: The first organizations. Can organize towards larger goals

Characteristics: Overwhelmingly powerful leader who must regularly use it (often cruelly, to make a point) in order to keep people in line. The moment the leader is seen as weak, they’re challenged. No formal job-titles and a shallow hierarchical structure. Relatively small or because the leader’s power breaks down after 3 or 4 layers.

Challenges: Inherently fragile, can’t scale or plan for the future, must enforce brutal rules in order for any stability to emerge.

Archetypes: Army, Catholic Church, primary school, early factories

When/Where: Many large traditional organizations today. Emerged starting in 4000 BC along with the rise of agriculture.

Organizational Innovations: “Organizations can now plan for the medium and long term, and they can create organizational structures that are stable and can scale.”

Characteristics: “The Amber ego seeks for order, stability, and predictability” by creating institutions and bureaucracies. Dominated by substantial hierarchies and strictly defined roles.

Self-worth & value as a person is defined externally - how well you fit in with the cultural norms. You do what the general says because he’s the general. What the general asks for is never questioned and it doesn’t matter who the general is. You follow or else you risk being kicked out, losing your entire identity.

Challenges: Wastes our ability to question & improve, especially those that don’t conform to the dominant perspective:

“It can be unpleasant, to say the least, to be a woman, a homosexual, an untouchable, or a free thinker in a Conformist-Amber society.”

Underlying worldview of people: Assumes workers are “mostly lazy, dishonest, and in need of direction.” Jobs (especially at the front lines) are narrowly defined, carefully prescribed, and strongly supervised.

People internalize and conform to their rank in the society. People at the same rank are interchangeable. Creativity is discouraged.

Archetype: A machine, well run large company (Walmart, Coca-Cola, GE, Microsoft)

Where/When: Post-industrial societies 19-20th century

Organizational Innovations: Meritocracy (in theory, not always in practice).

Focus on effectiveness encouraging questioning of the way things are done. Encourages research into how the world works and skepticism. More minds are tapped in pursuit of knowledge, with less regard of their affiliation or rank. For the first time in history, you won’t be disowned or killed if you stand against the dominant beliefs.

Characteristics: Achievement-Orange is the dominant structure for the largest companies today. Most companies today aspire to be more orange (and less amber). The lingua franca of business is Achievement-Orange:

“We talk about units and layers, inputs and outputs, efficiency and effectiveness, pulling the lever and moving the needle, accelerating and hitting the brakes, scoping problems and scaling solutions, information flows and bottlenecks, re-engineering and downsizing. Leaders and consultants design organizations.”

Strategies & plans are made at the top and cascaded down strong hierarchies. More people & teams are trusted to make decisions & execute. Leadership manage by goals, scorecards and budgets.

Top managers are consumed by meetings, frontline staff are disempowered, by design:

The higher you go, the more lines converge. It is only at the very top that the different departments such as sales, marketing, R&D, production, HR, and finance meet. Decisions are naturally pushed up to the top, as it’s the only place where decisions and trade-offs can be informed from the various angles involved. It’s almost deterministic.

Challenges: In the pursuit of effectiveness: “corporate greed, political short-termism, over-leverage, overconsumption, and the reckless exploitation of the planet’s resources and ecosystems.”. Essentially, orange organizations become globally powerful, and narrowly focused on their goals. They cannot focus on potential negative externalities they create.

We “effectively live in the future”, focusing on achieving the next goal and spend little time in the present celebrating the life we have or embracing aspects of ourselves that don’t match with orange ideals. Our focus is “solidly materialistic”.

Underlying worldview of people: Meritocratic: Anyone can rise to the top, so long as they pursue effectiveness, material ends, and act professionally.

Archetype: Many non-profits

Where/When: Emerged 18/19th century. Wildly embraced in the 1960/70s. Today, Southwest airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, many in academia, Cooperatives

Characteristics: Rail against the greed and singular focus many Orange organizations take. Culture, personal development, and motivation are paramount. “Matters are judged by the criteria of belonging and harmony”.

HR play a central role & leadership play a servant role. Lots of employee-centric activities like 360-degree feedback, morale surveys and training.

Green orgs are “highly sensitive to people’s feelings. It insists that all perspectives deserve equal respect. It seeks fairness, equality, harmony, community, cooperation, and consensus.”

A small but extremely influential community focused on “the abolition of slavery, women’s liberation, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and democracy.”

Three organizational Innovations:

First, empowerment - Aim for equality, and where that’s not possible then to push decisions down the hierarchy.

Second, values-driven culture and inspirational purpose - “where leadership genuinely plays by shared values, you encounter incredibly vibrant cultures in which employees feel appreciated and empowered to contribute. Results are often spectacular. Research seems to show that values-driven organizations can outperform their peers by wide margins.”

Third, multiple stakeholder perspective - Leadership focus on making the right choices for all stakeholders (investors, customers, suppliers, community, etc.)

Archetype: Rainforest, organism, spiderweb, organizations you may have heard of like Valve, W.L. Gore (makers of GoreTex), Patagonia, HolocracyOne

Where/When: Handfuls of organizations starting ~1970’s. Many more started in the 2000’s. Some organizations have thousands or tens of thousands of employees.

The shift can happen when we get over our own egos. We “can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life. We can learn to minimize our need to control, to look good, to fit in.” “With their ego under control, they don’t fear failure as much as not trying.”

Highly adapted to sense & adapt. Work well in complex fast-changing environment.

Characteristics: Teal individuals and organizations are not fearful of being judged by society. Self-worth is defined internally by how well their behaviour aligns with pursuing their inner purpose. The ask themselves: “does this decision seem right? Am I being of service to the world?”. The biggest risk is a life half-lived. “we are able to make decisions that might seem risky, where we haven’t weighed all possible outcomes, but that resonate with deep inner convictions.”. Teal organizations “take action, even in the face of opposition or with seemingly low odds of success, out of a sense of integrity and authenticity.”

Three organizational Innovations:

First, purpose: People align behind an organization’s purpose (and only join if their inner purpose aligns). Their success (as an organization or person) is judged against how well it achieves the purpose. Purpose is central to the organization

Second, wholeness: Encourage everyone to bring their whole self to bear in pursuit of the organization’s purpose. A professional mask is not needed.

Third, self-leadership: System based on peer relationships, without hierarchy or consensus, even at scale

Challenges: For those who’ve grown up in Achievement-Orange organizations, each of the Evolutionary-Teal innovations have a steep learning curve (essentially unlearning many of the fundamental orange “truths”).

Individuals and organizations have to let go of the “beautiful illusion of control” present in Orange organizations: “It’s a much higher bar, and a much scarier standard to let go of those illusions, to get clear on purpose and to stay conscious and present in every moment”

In a teal organization, “Everybody, not just a few at the top, is vested in his or her work, the organization’s purpose, its culture, its results, its reputation”. In particular,

“People have to take responsibility for their actions and their relationships; they are no longer shielded from unpleasant news and difficult trade-offs; there is no manager to hide behind or to pass the buck to”.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

So which stage is best?

The book is careful to emphasize:

There is nothing inherently “better” about being at a higher level of development, just as an adolescent is not “better” than a toddler. However, the fact remains that an adolescent is able to do more, because he or she can think in more sophisticated ways than a toddler. Any level of development is okay; the question is whether that level of development is a good fit for the task at hand.

But, given the complex and fast changing world we’re a part of, Teal organizations can develop strong advantages. They can thrive in complexity where an Orange organization will struggle to get the nuanced ambiguous information up the hierarchy fast enough and integrate it well enough to adapt. I’ll take you through some of the benefits I see in the rest of this document.

Organizations are not just at one stage, and neither are individuals. Some practices in an organization, or some ways that individuals act are associated with a particular organizational paradigm. For instance, the way Wise looks at KPIs seems largely orange, but the way we align around purpose is definitely Teal. People can switch their dominant model, and organizations can shift more practices towards another paradigm.

Next up

Now, let’s explore the key myths related to self-leadership:

Part 2 - Resolving the myths about self-leadership

You can also go back to the self-leadership intro page, or the main page.

I was so inspired by the book an Wise that I wrote this long essay (6000+ words), hosted a long lunch interview on the topic with Wise co-founder Kristo, and got probably 100 Wisers (of 500 at the time) to read the book.

Looking back, my work on this topic is one of the things I’m most proud of. And it was definitely one of my most important contribution to Wise’s success.

--

Now, back to Nov 2015

Why do this?

A lot of our success is due to our culture built on a foundation of self-management principles. But self-management has it's challenges: for the 100+ Wisers onboarding each quarter, for all Wisers whose role changes every 6 months, and for everyone who struggles with cross-team collaboration. I have three things I want to achieve by writing this down:

• Language: It should give us a language to speak about how we organize the way we do

• Why Wise is special: It should help us understand why Wise feels different than most other employers we’ve worked for. It should resolve some of the concerns people have, especially around scaling our culture. It should also help us clarify to candidates and new joiners why we work the way we do

• A path forward: If you’re convinced that self management is good for Wise, it should start to shape a path forward to further evolve our culture

To do that, I’ve split it into three sections.

• Part 1 - A history of how organizations have evolved [8 min read]

• Part 2 - Resolving the myths about self-leadership [5 min read]

• Part 3 - How Wise uses self-leadership principles [15 min read]

Excited?! Let’s get started!

But first, three notes:

1. This post builds upon the framework and research described in this excellent book: Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux. All of the quotes you see here are from this book. I hope this piques your interest to read the whole thing. It’s an intense and academic book, but there’s also a shorter, illustrated version for those so inclined. You can also check out a long Youtube video of Frederic talking about the ideas in the book.

2. I’ll use “self leadership”, “self-management” “evolutionary-teal” and “teal” phrases interchangeably. “Self-management” is a sub-component of what this author calls “evolutionary-teal” organizations. I prefer the team “self-leadership” over “self-management” so I try to use that except when it’s in a direct quote from the book.

3. The book describes the organizational types with colours & an adjective (eg “evolutionary teal”) as a shorthand to help aid recall. Part 1 will help you familiarise with those names.

Let’s dive in to part 1

My sister runs a fantastic car dealership. They closed for the first couple of months of the pandemic but slowly were able to restart their business. The problem was that the straight sales commissions that made sense pre-pandemic weren’t attractive during the pandemic. Sales people, rightly, had no clue whether they’d sell a car. Her plan was to effectively give a fixed salary instead of pure commissions, at least for some time.

I’d been thinking about compensation structures a lot and so I sketched out one idea that would be way better than either extreme of straight commissions or fixed salaries, but also wouldn’t be the tiny-bonus compromise that most companies use.

1st, 2nd and 3rd order incentives

Getting compensation right is all about aligning the incentives correctly. The implication is that before designing a compensation system (or changing it), the most important thing is to think about what behaviours you want to incentivise. For instance, do you want:

• More teamwork?

• More hitting the numbers at any cost?

• More of something else?

Every choice you make also has downsides as well as second and third order effects. For instance, if commissions are pooled within a team (effect), people will start slacking off (2nd order effect). When people start slacking off, top performers leave (3rd order effect).

Here’s how it would work

It requires you to build a small phone app. I will happily build it. It's not complicated.

In Canada, people get paid every two weeks. Let’s say they all get paid on a Friday, and the amounts have to be put into the accounting system by Wednesday. On Tuesday of that week, all the sales people need to log in to this app and allocate 'points' to all of the other salespeople. If there are 10 sales people total, they'll get a pot of 90 points to allocate (9ppl excluding themselves X 10 points). They can give all 90 points to one colleague (and give the other 8 zero), or give everyone 10. It’s completely up to them how they allocate points. But it’s their responsibility as well: they can’t not do it.

But how should they allocate points? Every employee, either in the app itself, or on paper or however, will get the relevant stats (deals closed, calls made, etc.). You'll also come up — jointly as a team — some kind of agreed list of values. Do you value teamwork? Do you value closing deals? Do you value mentoring more junior colleagues? etc.

Behind the scenes (in the app), there's a formula that converts all of these points, from all of the team, into salary/bonus. Essentially, say you have $30,000 to allocate and there are 10 sales people. On average everyone would get $3,000, but top performers might get 20 points instead of just 10, so they would get $6K and others, who got less points will get less.

Likely, it’ll be a hidden allocation. Salespeople could see that they got: 6, 8, 12, 2, and 4 points and the total, but they wouldn't be able to see who the 2 came from.

Why might this be a good system?

It strikes a balance between the cutthroat individualistic commissions and 'we're all in this together' structure that will eventually lead to a team of slackers. The goal is to mitigate the worst effects of both, and still preserve the benefits. Other half-way measures often get too complicated and gamed.

It's super-hard to game. The first couple of times you use this system it’ll feel weird. I’m 100% sure of that, but then it'd be dead easy, and the overall scheme would never vary. When there are only individual commissions, it’s financially profitable to steal deals sometimes. Not with this system. When everything is pooled, it makes sense to slack off sometimes. Not with this system.

It'll feel democratic, fair, and empowering. People often feel powerless, especially when it comes to compensation. They complain endlessly about management's poor ability to judge, and how the system is rigged against them. They're often right. This system gives them the chance to fix it, not just once but every pay cycle. Everyone has a different definition of ‘fair’ but norms would quickly emerge to define it clearly. Everyone will know super clearly what they need to do to increase their own pay. Be valuable to the organisation and their colleagues (however that’s defined by the norms that emerge).

It forces everyone (not just managers) to assess performance. Assessing performance ‘fairly’ is insanely hard (even in something as numbers driven as sales). And managers aren't actually good at it. They're just one person and they see just a glimpse.

People can't help but be helpful in a system like this. Being an asshole will destroy you in this kind of scheme. So everyone will be nicer. But they won't slack off either, because it’s so obvious and so resented. When things are going well, and everyone's pulling together, it'll be glorious.

It will work with whatever bonuses come down from headquarters. Most of the bonus schemes are for the dealership, in which case this scheme totally works. And the sales team will be doing so well that you’ll get more of those sweet dealership bonuses. Individual awards like “top salesperson of the month” won’t work or will have to be refactored.

Eventually, if something like this takes off, you'll have no problem attracting and retaining salespeople, especially the kind, hardworking, collaborative people who would succeed in a system like this.

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Update: well, this stalled at the idea phase with my sister. But, I would build an app for some other organisation in my own time, for free, if someone has the guts to test it out. I’m totally serious about this. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

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Photo by Remy Lovesy on Unsplash

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With 50+ autonomous teams and 1,000 employees, we’ve learned how to scale autonomous teams and avoid creeping bureaucracy.

I recently spoke to a founder of a small startup. They had 15 employees and were starting to defined clear roles and teams. He knew that the organization structure decisions he was making now would influence how the company would operate long into the future.

He understood that when companies are small — 15 people small — everyone has tons of autonomy. With that autonomy comes responsibility. Every employee can and must do whatever they think is necessary to help the company to succeed. His core concern was how to keep that going far into the future. How to keep everyone laser focused on the company’s mission and on it’s customers. How to keep moving fast, regardless of the challenges.

He was intrigued by how Wise operated and reached out to learn more. He’d heard we operate differently than most companies. And we do.

He had the six questions you see below on his mind. I hope my answers give a good overview of how we operate autonomously at scale. It should also provide some insight into how our structure enables us to move fast in pursuit of our mission.

Q1: How does Wise operate?

We have around 50 autonomous product teams - teams who own a portion of our product. The teams themselves are centred around customer problems and are similar to other tech companies: conversion, help experience, payment methods, and many others. They’re different from many other companies because they’re autonomous. They self-assemble, set their own vision and KPIs, and execute mostly on their own. As a team, they have the freedom to do most anything they see will have an impact, but the responsibility to own whatever they sign up to. My colleague Harsh described in fascinating detail the principles that our Engineers live by.

Besides our globally-focused product teams, we have 8 regional tribes who focus on customers in different parts of the world. For instance, there's a LatAm tribe that supports every aspect for customers in Latin America. Tribes are composed of Bankers (working with regulators and partner banks), Product Managers, Engineers, Marketers/PR, Analysts, as well as a bunch of people to support with daily operations: Customer Support, Verification/KYC, Fraud/AML and Operations.

The main objective when we’re thinking about how we operate is how to move fast. Fast to launch new markets with a genuinely useful product. Fast to iterate on our existing product. Fast to adapt our organization as we grow. Ultimately, fast to deliver real benefit to more and more customers. And fast in spite of the fact that we’re now 1000 people spread around the world.

Q2: What are the benefits we've had so far?

First, we're incredibly close to customers. If you look at our apps or our website, you might think our product is as simple as money transfer from A to B. We hope you think that. But under the hood there’s enormous complexity. Regulations, banking partners, processes, as well as data and verification requirements are different in every single country. Our small autonomous and highly responsible teams can build the regulatory and banking relationships needed to build a quality product that’s unmatched.

Second, there's almost no politics. This stems from the fact that employees have both the freedom and responsibility to figure out for themselves what to focus on. If someone disagrees with you or your team, they just tell you. Further, if the topic is important enough to them, they’ll come help you fix it. With 50+ teams and 1000 people running full tilt, this doesn’t always work. But magically, it usually does.

Third, we naturally adapt to change well. We've been put to the test numerous times over the last four years that I’ve been there. Each time we’ve been tested, the result has been no layoffs, no reorgs, and we haven’t gone broke. Not that it was easy, but when there are almost no politics you can be more pragmatic and just get crazy hard things done without much fuss.

Most importantly, it's thrilling to work here. As an employee this is the biggest benefit of all. I can join or create a team to work work on whatever I think will help Wise the most. Over the past 3 years that’s ranged from Marketing, Finance, Business Intelligence, Databases, and most recently Planning and People/HR topics. Not only does nobody get in my way, they support me. It seems logical, but I’ve never seen it happen in another organization to the degree it does in Wise.

Q3: What are the pitfalls you've had so far?

It’s a lot more responsibility on your shoulders. Personal and team autonomy sounds great, but sometimes it's extremely hard. Employees need to make a lot more decisions on their own without a manager telling them what the strategy is. Which country should we go to next? Which team should I join? What should I work on this week? Should I give this customer a discount? We don’t have enough liquidity - which customer's payments should we delay and why? These are all incredibly hard questions that employees at every level are expected to figure out.

It’s hard to hire. Ambitious people thrive because they can see the direct impact their work is having on our customers. They get addicted to the high of delivering so much (because nothing is in their way). These kinds of people are hard to find and select for so a lot of our attention goes to hiring and onboarding new joiners.

Traditional solutions to organizational problems usually won’t work in Wise. For instance the default solution for cross-company planning when they get big entails inviting only “senior” employees to plan at a highly abstracted level. But we don’t do that as it would reduce team accountability and slow down execution at Wise.

Instead we use a “startup of startups” concept, where each product team is like a small startup within Wise. Each team chooses 3-5 dedicated coaches (like a startup’s board of advisors) to go deep into their plans each quarter. Our planning processes substitute - and in many ways transcend - the control/feedback mechanisms to a more typical hierarchical structure. This process is in no way perfect, but it’s improving every quarter.

Finally, on challenges, it’s hard to aggregate our strategy up. Each of our 50 teams prepare or update detailed plans (10-20 written pages) each quarter. But you need to be superhuman to even skim all of the plans and retros each quarter, much less give meaningful feedback. So almost nobody has a complete overview of Wise. That sounds problematic, but in practice it isn’t. Nobody in any business has a complete overview. In more hierarchical organizations you have to abstract away (all of) the important details. So the main challenge with this is that it feels scary, especially for new joiners.

Q4: How do you manage 'every day business' work?

I.e. customer support and fixing bugs across the app when they're not part of a KPI

Every team and tribe define their mission and a scope. On top of that, every team choose KPIs and targets to guide them on their journey. In practice this is hard. Some teams are great at this. Some - like brand new teams - have a steep learning curve.

None of our teams have a crazy backlog of bugs. Our reviews on Android, iOS, and TrustPilot speak to that. Product bugs are covered in the scope for the team, but not usually as explicit targets.

We’ve done this with extremely fast feedback loops. As fast as a glance across the desk. PM's and Engineers interact daily with Customer Support and Operations teamm-members. In fact, they often sit at the same table. As a result, product teams are absolutely hammered if they don't fix important bugs right away. Not only does this mean a higher quality product, it also means our Customer Support team members can clearly see the product getting better and aren’t dealing with the same problem over and over again. For PM's, Customer Support and other operational teams are an invaluable partner to gather customer insight. PM's lead planning and prioritisation (that’s their job after all) but they have a holistic understanding on which to balance product quality and development speed.

Q5: How do 'management' roles fit into the model?

I.e. VP of engineering or Head of HR.

We do have most of the VP roles you’d expect. But it's turned out to be crazy hard to find senior level hires who both know the discipline and can thrive in our culture. The VP roles we’ve filled in the last 2 years have all taken 1+ year intensive searches. All other VPs have grown up in Wise.

Our Leadership team needs to work differently than executives in other organizations. They need to do less. This is harder than you’d think.

Our autonomous teams are responsible for making many more decisions than in other similar sized organizations. But there are a fixed number of decisions to make to run an organization. So a consequence of increased autonomy is that our leadership team must make fewer decisions. As such, they almost never take the final decisions, set targets or budgets, or decide strategies.

So what do they do all day? They lead, in the best sense of the word. As they don’t generally take final decisions, they help their teams to make the right decisions. They ask a lot of provocative questions. Our Leadership team supports the teams to set ambitious visions, clear KPIs, and to deliver what they promise. Mature and successful teams need help finding the next challenge. New teams need help figuring out their vision and their capability.

Our Leadership team also works with our board and rounds out their day fighting the fires that inevitably come up in a fast growing company. And interviewing and hiring: lots of that.

Q6: Who leads the teams in terms of delivery?

Is it always a PM or someone else?

Generally yes, Product Managers lead our 50+ product teams. We maintain a quarterly planning cadence and most teams aim to have a 12-18 month product vision they’re working towards. Each quarter, each product team updates their plans and KPI targets and shares this with the rest of the company.

Almost nobody formally reports to PM's though (only other PM's and some analysts). Our Engineers report up through to VP Engineering. Customer Support report up to the head of CS. Teams are autonomous, but we encourage personal "autonomy" as much as possible. Engineers have to decide whether they work on X or Y. One phrase we live by which our founder Kristo said is, "if you fail to inspire an Engineer, you'll fail to inspire your customer." As a result, Engineers (and others) can and do move on to other teams if they’re not having an impact.

Finally, functional teams like Engineering, Analysts, Finance, Legal, People/HR all create plans as well. This is in addition to the plans for the product teams they're embedded in. For example, there are Engineering problems that cut across most teams. Engineers need to carve out time from their product teams to work on those.

So, is it possible to scale autonomy?

So, for my startup friend with 15 people: bureaucracy as you grow is not inevitable. Wise is at least one proof point that an organization can exist and function well past the point that you all fit in one room.

The way we operate is fundamental to our success until now and surely well into the future. It enables us to stay close to customers, get the details right in each country, and move extremely fast. Not that it’s perfect: we have different challenges than other organizations of a similar maturity.

In the end, our focus on autonomy/responsibility, and customer impact is that employees put their hearts into their work. Ambitious people thrive because they can set their own objectives and see their impact everyday. My colleagues agree: read what they have to say on glassdoor. Imagine the energy when 1000 people are working together with all their passion. That’s Wise.

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But if this kind of a culture interests you, consider joining us at Salv. We’ve taken the best from Wise and made it even better. We’re starting to grow really fast now, so it’s an exciting point to hop on board.

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Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash

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How to think about the tensions scaling up a startup

This is too simple, but hear me out. You can split start-up people into two camps. Some we’ll call Prophets. The others are Professionals. Organizations like Wise have both. Every company has both.

Why do we care? Three reasons.

The first is that when startups are fortunate enough to grow up — i.e. not die or remain in low-growth purgatory — tensions between Prophets and Professionals is the main struggle.

The second reason is that this (extremely simple) split explains both how and why culture evolves as organizations grow. It’s not size of the organization that governs culture, but the composition of Prophets and Professionals.

The last reason is that culture can change in an instant. Take Wise. 46% of Wisers (Wise employees) have been here less than a year. Many of them have already hired others. They’ve barely had time to orient themselves, much less understand this (now huge) organization and they’re already responsible for making incredibly important decisions about who will be successful here.

So, let’s find out who they are, shall we.

Let’s start with Prophets.

Prophets are visionary. They’re oblivious to how insanely difficult a mission they’re on with the organization. They're the last to give up hope when the company inevitably hits walls.

They’re religious fanatics for whatever they’re working on. They’re focused on the long-term success of the mission. They’re selfless. They can take big bets in a way only a fanatic could. They’re willing to take tremendous risks. They’re collaborative, rarely competitive.

But… and there’s always a but.

They’re rare, and hard even to find, no less recruit. Their religious fervor is fragile: if they lose faith in the mission or the belief that the mission will happen, they leave. Thus they need strong signals that they’re succeeding and that the mission is on track.

So what about Professionals you ask?

Professionals are pragmatic, focused on delivering short-term measurable results. Every company needs Professionals. They deliver at a high level. They set goals and aggressively pursue them. They diligently pursue and deliver traction. They’re relatively abundant and actively pursue new opportunities so they seem even more abundant than they are.

Great, right? Well…

Professionals care to the extent that they’re incentivised to: to the extent of their salary, stock, and future reputation/marketability. They aren’t driving the long term culture or mission. They can be competitive which is useful if they’re helping your startup compete, but problematic if it’s one team vs another.

So who are you?

Nobody’s purely one or the other. I’m probably 70/30 Prophet. Kristo, one of Wise’s founders is probably 95/5 Prophet. But interestingly, I’d diagnose Taavet, Wise’s other co-founder, as much more Professional and less Prophet.

Also, you’ll change over your lifetime. And be influenced by the organizations you find yourself in. For instance, take a mid-life crisis. You quit your high-paying job at the bank, then dedicate your life to something. You move dramatically (20-50%) towards becoming a Prophet in one fell swoop. Your family thinks you’re off your rocker. And you are. Just say thank you.

And it should be said — leaning Professional or Prophet has nothing to with capability. Both are smart, hard-working, friendly, etc. Both can be stellar employees and colleagues. Or terrible duds. It depends on the organisation and role they find themselves in.

But really, who’s better?

Well, you need both. High-growth startups die if they don’t have both. Again this is far too simple and unscientific, but… Prophets uncover the opportunities and Professionals bring them to life.

A team of only Prophets will get nothing done. A bunch of Professionals have nothing (transformational) to get done. In the startup world, you’re dead in either case. So startups need to thread the needle and keep a balance of both.

So you need both, but like any good cocktail, in the right proportion. Are Prophets rum and Professionals, Coke? Prophets will add some excitement to your evening … but also f*ck you up if you have too much. You need some Coke in there to smooth the evening out and make sure you make it to tomorrow. Is this a terrible analogy? Yes. Ok, let’s move on.

How the mix changes in an organization

Founders typically lean toward Prophet. They have to be or they’ll give up too fast. But they need to gain traction to build a business. They need to channel their Professional instincts or hire a team who have it.

Early employees often have Prophet tendencies as well. No matter what they’re doing startups are David’s in a world of Goliaths, facing impossible odds. Later employees in a company are much more likely to be professionals. I’ll explain why shortly.

I’m sure a huge organization — HSBC for instance — has Prophets. But the ratio is probably 99:1 Professional today. I’d ballpark Wise today, at the end of 2018 — an incredibly mission-driven company — at perhaps 50/50. Wise has 1,500 employees today. Other much smaller organizations have never had more than 10% Prophets. And not since the founding days.

So it’s not size directly that causes an organisation to Professionalise. You don’t need more professionals as you get bigger. If your professionals are any good they make things so efficient they eliminate their own jobs.

So causes organisations to Professionalise?

It’s really simple actually. Through hiring. This is unintended but transformational. It starts a flywheel that manifests as a rapid change in how the organization feels, how it works, and what it pursues.

It comes down to just two small behaviours:

1. Professionals only hire Professionals

2. Prophets hire a mix of Prophets and professionals

So why don’t Professionals hire Prophets?

Professionals don’t understand their motivations and can’t connect as easily with them. Prophets are irrational believers who don’t care that much about short term results. As employees, they tend to ask tons of philosophical questions instead of just getting down to work and delivering.

And why don’t Prophets hire only Prophets? Three hurdles:

Prophets are rarer anyways and make themselves hard to find. They’re working in another organization on a similarly inspiring mission. They’re not looking to move. You have to sell your organization’s mission to them. This all takes tremendous effort that few have time for.

Second: Prophet’s CV’s generally suck. They don’t care about clearly showing small tangible results. They’ve generally been headhunted or found jobs through friends, so they’ve never had to create a really stellar CV.

Last: Prophets are inspired by other Prophets. Organizations that already are or become Professional-dominant aren’t fun for Prophets. So they won’t join.

An organization can Professionalise so fast

The shift towards a Professional-dominant culture happens in the blink of an eye in high-growth startups because their headcounts are doubling every year.

So let’s imagine two basic assumptions are true:

• Prophets hire 70% Prophet/30% Professional. Professionals only hire professionals.

• Everyone already hired in the company hires 1 additional person each hiring round

Based on my gut, this is how it looks at relatively successful startups all the way from 2 founders to a healthy 2,000 person organisation over 5-7 years.

Here’s what that looks like in a table:

So, the company starts with two Prophet founders (top row) and then by the time they’ve grown to about 2000 employees, 89% of their team is professional.

This model is obviously simpler than reality: nobody makes hiring decisions alone. The actual numbers don’t matter; the trend will be just slowed down or sped up.

It’s inevitable in this silly spreadsheet model. But is it inevitable in reality?

Anecdotal calibration

In early 2019, my colleagues Mallory & Jihan gave a presentation to the rest of Wise introducing the idea of Professionals and Prophets. Here’s how the team categorised themselves:

Wise was (and still is!!!) a fantastic place. A lot of that I credit to having a ton of Prophets. Many more (perhaps 4X more) than would normally be the case at a startup of it’s size. In my little spreadsheet model, that would indicate that Prophets hired other Prophets 9 out of 10 times.

What can you do if want more Prophets?

A few things.

First, retain the ones you have.

When teams lose a cherished “oldie” and say “it’ll never be the same with out you”, they’re often lamenting the fact that they’re losing an incredible Prophet, and whoever will replace them is much more likely to be a Professional.

Just keeping with this little model (which is obviously way too simplified), when a Prophet leaves and a Professional takes their roles, all of the downstream hires will now be Professionals too.

The way you keep Prophets is by keeping them engaged, challenged and rewarded. They need a huge mission to chase (bigger than whatever team they’re in), challenges way above their head (bigger than their actual role), and to be clearly recognised for taking big chances that Professionals wouldn’t dare to. Sometimes the risks they take will fail. This has to be ok or they walk. And it’s your team & organisation that are screwed, not them.

Actively seek them out

Prophets are hard to find, hard to recruit and hard to decide to hire (as they seem risky). You need to consciously focus on it because the default bias is strongly in favour of hiring Professionals.

The best prophets need to be headhunted. They need multiple lunches, friendly calls, company & team decks sent to them. They need open conversations with Prophets already in the team. Take time for that.

Once you’ve piqued their interest, they need a hiring process that a Prophet can do well at. Ask for portfolios and give them test assignments that demand creativity. Use interviews to ask about taking risks, stepping way outside their responsibilities, doing things they’re entirely unqualified for. Don’t let the hiring process get bogged down in discussing qualifications, work history, and career aspirations.

Carefully consider who’s making the hiring decision and how the decision gets made. Don’t make it some kind of unanimous committee decision where every person can veto. Rather, ensure there’s at least one person is willing to bet their reputation that this person will do amazing work.

Finally, once they’ve joined, set Prophets as free as possible. Train them up on whatever their job is, but don’t box them into just that. Talk to them about the big unsolved problems and see if they’re interested in trying to solve one.

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2021 update: Now that I’m a co-founder of Salv, and we have 40+ team-members, you might ask: “what’s Salv’s split of Prophets and Professionals?” I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. But I can say that we’re getting into the phase where it starts to matter. It especially becomes important when we as co-founders start to have less influence on hiring decisions. We always do a founder interview and this will continue at least until we hit ~200 people. As a company we’ve taken on some seriously big bets — initiated by Prophets — and patiently seen through to the end by Professionals. I’m thrilled at the balance we have in the team now. But it’s such a critical balance, it’s something I’ll keep a close eye on as we scale up.

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I’d love to hear if this simple framework seems useful. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

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Photo’s by Ruthson Zimmerman on Unsplash and Adedotun Adegborioye on Unsplash

I've been thinking about this idea that we all do a mix of different types of work with markedly different values. $10/hr, $100/hr, $1000/hr and $10,000/hr. I realized a few things.

It’s not hard to figure out

First, I was surprised but it’s relatively easy to know what price level a task is. Almost everything that I do professionally feels easily mappable to $10 or $100 or $1,000, at least loosely. Some tasks that perhaps take an hour might be separated into 15 mins of $1,000 and 45 mins of $10. Some examples:

• $10: Arranging meetings, basic slack stuff, finding people on Linkedin, sending rote messages. Copying and pasting, refreshing marketing reports. Checking on task statuses.

• $100: most professional thinking/doing tasks. building reports, writing decent emails, feedback on docs, writing any kind of code or setting up reports. Most writing that I do.

• $1,000: This is harder and more rare so I have fewer examples. Discussing strategy with Taavi (my co-founder) and others. Pushing people in the team to stretch themselves. Coaching people in the team to get over hard things. Organizing big projects so they actually get done.

• $10,000: I'm not sure I've done this recently, but I think it might include, impressing our board, coming up with the metaphors, diagrams, etc. that make the complicated simple, obvious and appealing. Very strategic and hard choices within Salv. Probably firing someone (because the cost of not doing it is so enormous).

What it means

As expected, most of the work I do is at the lower price range. It's so easy to get bogged down in $10-$100 type work. But it got me thinking that I have a duty to try to increase my average hourly rate.

Thinking about what tasks that I was doing that were in the $10-$100 range made it easy to imagine delegating more or even hiring a Personal Assistant (PA). If I could take these tasks off my table I might gain 10-50x more time to spend on $1,000 and $10,000 than I do now. That’s an incredible opportunity.

Sometimes the same weekly activity can be worth completely different amounts. For instance, I have a lot of 1:1 conversations with my team. Sometimes, if we’re just going over tasks, it feels like $10 work. But occasionally, our 1:1 conversation is profoundly valuable and easily worth $1,000/hr. It’s not realistic that every 1:1 would be so impactful, but given how many opportunities I have every week for this, I have a huge opportunity to test out how to bring the average value of 1:1s up. Perhaps with a few tweaks, I could 10X the value of my 1:1s.

I was also thinking that I could incorporate it into my task system. I could try to make the most each day - i.e. 4h of $10, 2h of $100, 30 mins of $1,000, etc. That'd give me a strong incentive to think super carefully about the tasks I take on. If I optimize my days around making the most in funny-money-impact-dollars, I’d maximise my impact at work.

The last effect might be the most important hack I’ve found. If I have a really crappy day, metaphorically earning just $500, I can totally change it in 15 mins. Simple, genuine acts like thanking someone can make a huge impact and perhaps double my impact for the day. And even though it’s funny money, taking that 15 mins really does feel like I’ve doubled my impact for the day.

Can it extend beyond the office?

Because of my ancient GTD-addition, my whole life is in my task system, not just my work. So I was wondering what value I’d put on things that weren’t work. Like making a delicious meal, or going to the gym.

What I realised is that some non-work activities are way super refreshing (like exercise, or writing, or playing with kids). Some just give mild satisfaction from accomplishing them (cutting the grass, washing the car). So even there, there’s multiple orders-of-magnitude difference in the same way. I should ask, What would I pay to have this experience? For instance:

• $10/hr - kinda don't like it, but happy to get it done.

• $100/hr - satisfying. A good meal.

• $1,000/hr - absolutely thrilling. Incredible conversations or moments with kids or my wife.

• $10,000/hr - once in a lifetime experiences.

Therefore, my goal outside work could be to spend at the highest level possible. If I do this, I maximise the happiness in my life.

And not only that, it comes full circle because if I spend a lot (of this hypothetical fun-money), I’m far more energetic at my work. A great life helps me bring my A-game. Relaxing, sleeping and eating well, exercising, spending time with my kids, working with my hands all give me an awesome feeling. When I'm tired, miserable, or just have a boring weekend, I'm far more likely to want to work on $10/hr tasks than $1,000.

By the way, I’ve never actually measured this out task-by-task, hour-by-hour. For me, it’s useful as a way to think consciously about how I spend my time.

I’d love to hear if this framework seems useful. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

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Photo by Celyn Kang on Unsplash.

Background

I recently learned python. I’m not good at it — I still suck — but I’m a lot better. I was reflecting on how I learned it. In particular, what obstacles I had to overcome as well as how a couple of colleagues helped me. I was also reflecting on my experience teaching SQL to at least 50 people and what types of problems they encountered most.

What it means to suck at coding

Everyone who starts coding sucks at first. But what does it mean to suck? Basically, you suck if you can’t do anything useful with it. Why can’t you?

1. Because you don’t know the logic and the syntax. It’s not natural to you yet. Why?

2. Because you don’t have enough experience with it. Why don’t you have much experience yet?

3. Because doing anything in a language you don’t know is a slow, hard slog because of errors. Why is it slow with a lot of errors?

4. Because to learn a language (to stop sucking) means overcoming many errors until you know what you will do if you see error X. You may not know exactly what the cause is, but you’ll have a strategy to solve it, and you’ll be confident that you will be able to find a solution.

Learning a language starts at the bottom of this list (4. strategy to solve errors), then your speed improves (3), then you build up your experience (2) and then you understand the logic and syntax (1). Then you don’t suck anymore. Yay!

If all that’s true, then you can really accelerate how fast someone learns a language by focusing on (4) - helping learners fix errors faster. Everything falls into place much more easily after that.

Focusing on solving errors fast

Learning a new language is about learning how to be ok with failing many times in a row until your ratio of fail to succeed on each line of code gets above some threshold (say 50%).

In general, you’ll fail every time you try to do something new in a language, and you’ll also fail most times to do the thing you successfully did last week. But you’ll get to success faster the 2nd time, and even faster the 10th time.

It takes multiple times of seeing the same error (5-10 for me) before I "learn" something that I will remember for a week. And I probably need to encounter a particular error 30-50 times to learn it permanently.

When teaching students, the value that teachers add is that they've seen the error many times and know one or both of the following naturally:

• What is causing the error (just from looking at the code)

• How to debug it (if it’s not an obvious problem or they don’t know the underlying data structure)

Debugging is a learnable skill. Essentially, the best strategy is to narrow the problem down to its absolute essence. To do this:

• Creativity is needed

• Hypotheses are needed

• Experience helps, but is not necessary

Theoretical solution

Take the absolute simplest python task:

var = 1
print "var = " + var

Gives this error:

TypeError                   Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-9-63b6d99501e5> in <module>()
      1 var = 1
----> 2 print "var = " + var

TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects

If you’re not familiar with python (or programming generally as many learners aren’t), you don’t know:

• What exactly the problem is

• What ‘str’ and ‘int’ stand for and maybe the word concatenate. What TypeError, Traceback () or the rest of the error message is saying.

• And most importantly, you don’t know: what to do next to solve it

  If you had a good teacher sitting beside you, they would help you understand all of those things. But you don’t.

  So, what if you could automate what a good teacher would do. Well, perhaps you can.

  Each learner has made this error many times (i.e. 30-50 times to get to the point where it’s hard-wired into their brain), and collectively, every single python user has made this exact error many times. We can leverage that. How?

  By figuring out what the likely solution is. How do we know what the solution is? It’ll follow this pattern:

  • Try X → fail

  • Modify X slightly → succeed

  So, to automate this learning (using the example). When you type this:

  var = 1
  print "var = " + var
  

  And get the error above, we can search for examples in your code history where:

  • You got that exact error

  • Then immediately after, with very similar code (i.e. fuzzy matching or diff distance) you didn’t get an error. The change you made before is very likely to be the solution to this new problem.

  More concretely, it would quickly find that this example on the right which syntactically identical to the a couple of examples that didn’t give an error:

  

  And with those two examples - from your own coding history if possible - the learner will be able to debug their current issue much faster and accelerate how quickly they learn.

  Technically how it might work

  Capture every code execution along with the error codes if there are errors. For python, a library like this might be the foundation. Or this. Or this.

  When an error occurs at code execution, a browser window will open. In that window:

  1. All of your previous executions that resulted in that error are listed, ordered by how similar the code is that caused the error. Your code is highlighted first because it might flag your memory and use variables you understand.

  2. But also the closest related code patterns from other YSAC users that eventually worked are also listed

  3. Automatic, streamlined google/stack overflow/github search provides the top answers likely to help

  4. [later paid option] ask for help from a "code coach" - offline or real-time via chat. A mechanism to quickly provide everything the coach would need to be able help the student.

  For (1) and (2) it’s basically a matching algorithm to find similar code that failed then worked. A nicely designed diff interface makes it easy to figure out what subtle changes made it work.

  For (4) cost is fixed for the student and usually $2-20. Coaches would bid on it and receive the code. If the question isn't clear, nobody will take it. Coaches would provide back:

  • Code that doesn't error (including an automatically created diff)

  • Explanation of the error

  • If the code still doesn't work 1-2 retries would be possible as well as 1:1 chat to quickly ask clarifying questions

  In principle, this sort of structure could work for any programming language and maybe even natural languages (English, Spanish)

  Benefits

  If I think about my own learning pace, I’d estimate that having this would have helped me to learn python at least 2-3x faster. That’s an enormous gain.

  The gains from this will be highest for those with the least experience. And it could make the difference for many between getting over the initial learning “hump” and giving up. That’s huge.

  Updates

  It links well with the ideas in this blog post: How to help a student get unstuck.

  --

  I have no intention of pursuing this right now but I’d be delighted to hear if someone is working on something like it. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com

  Go back to the main page.

  Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

There was just one problem: planning was broken.

-- START --

Outgrowing “the way we’ve always done things”

Every quarter — over the last 6 years of TransferWise’s existence — each product team has presented their plans to the rest of the company during a special day. That’s what “the planning day” is.

It’s the glue that keeps our autonomous teams together. Everyone knows how it works, what they need to do, and what they’ll get out of it.

There’s just one problem. It doesn’t work anymore. We now have more than 700 people, 35+ teams, and they’re spread across the globe.

There are bunch of traditional ways we could solve this planning conundrum, and obvious reasons why these wouldn’t work:

• Give each team just a few minutes to present a super-concise message: but it’s so short, what’s the point?

• Make planning just once-a-year: nope, the world changes way too fast.

• Make it three days long: we ain’t got that kind of time.

• Do it over hangouts: a 10-hour 9-office “can you hear me now?” marathon is insane. Just no.

• Only invite “senior managers”: Really? You don’t know how we work at Wise, do you?

Etc, etc, etc. None of these would work for Wise.

How we decide important things at Wise

You’d think this is a problem for our founders and senior leadership team. In a sense it is, but they won’t solve it. Instead it’s a problem for whoever thinks it’s a problem and takes the time to solve it. One of them is me. Over the last couple of quarters, with a few colleagues, I’ve helped to put together the plan for “the planning day.”

Like any of our product teams, we gathered feedback from our customers: the people of Wise.

Decision time

Some of feedback we collected was radical, some modest, but in the end it was our decision. When I read through the feedback, I found a kernel of an idea on how we should do it. But it was such a different idea. We’d never tried anything like this. It’s our one and only chance this quarter to do planning. If it failed, we waste 600 people's time,. Or worse, we might derail some teams. The stakes were high.

Since two of my planning team members were on holidays and the other was unreachable, it was my decision. I pitched it to my colleagues (who in spite of being on vacation gave feedback) and a few others who I thought could help me evaluate whether we should take the risk.

I decided we’d do it the radical way. Completely differently than we ever had. And see what happens.

So what happened after I made the decision?

I winced when I sent off the email describing the new plan. I emailed everyone. All 600 of them. I wondered if I could get fired for stepping so far out from what was expected.

The first reply I got back was a simple “Love it!”. The second response was this though:

I hated receiving this feedback because she was absolutely right! It was in the front of my mind. I wrote an extensive pro-and-con list and got feedback from a dozen people on it. I very nearly did not do it for the exact reasons my colleague pointed out.

But then I did. For a few minutes, I wondered whether I’d made a huge mistake.

A few minutes after that I got this message from my colleague Wander (who was the main inspiration for the idea) in slack:

I got a bunch more messages that afternoon. The vast majority echoed what my colleague Wander wrote. At that point I felt good, but surprisingly, still not great. I still had doubters, but I guess you can’t make everyone happy, right? I knew going into this that not everyone would like this plan. I knew there were potential downsides, but I hoped that the net benefit was positive.

Reflecting on the decision

But then… a bit later, after the buzz of making the decision had worn off, I felt different. I was ecstatic and knew the risk was worth taking. What changed?

I realized that if I’m not getting messages like the first — concern that we’re changing too much too fast and that we don’t know what will happen in the future — I haven’t pushed the limits. If that happens, I’ve already, consciously or not, stopped myself far short of what I might just barely pull off. And I’d have resigned the whole team to doing the familiar, even though it’s not working.

I don’t know if this idea will pan out — we’ll see in a month — but I’m confident now it was worth trying.

-- END --

I’m incredibly proud I took this chance. This was the very first “Mission Days” for Wise. It’s evolved and is still going strong years after I left Wise.

Go back to the main page.

NOTE: I wrote this in February 2018 when I was working at Wise (formerly known as TransferWise). It was originally meant as an internal guide, but is applicable in any organisation with perhaps 150+ people.

PART 1 - WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW TO SET THEM UP

It outlines the two key roles and clarifies the types of problems cross-team guilds can and cannot solve.

How to set up cross-team guilds

In a fast growing company, there’s an endless list of problems you can choose to throw yourself into. So many things could be better than they are. We’ve developed this concept of a “cross-team guild” that’s helped us do more than we could if we only relied on our teams. How to make them work isn’t well understood even within Wise. So this is my attempt to explain how and why they work.

What are cross-team guilds?

A cross-team guild is a small group of employees, usually no more than 5-7, usually from different teams and offices, who work together to solve a business problem.

There’s a single person or small group (not more than three) who compose the “core” of the guild and other members who help out, particularly with execution.

Guild members commit 5-30% their time from their main role towards the guild’s objectives. They’re not created from above (like a task force) but emerge from the business as needed. Some are long-lasting, almost permanent virtual teams, others work feverishly for a few months until they’ve solved a particular problem and then dissolve.

Over the last four years I’ve been fortunate to have created and contributed to more than dozen cross-team guilds in Wise. They’ve covered a wide variety of topics: from managing our analytics stack, to team-planning, to leadership development. Some have failed spectacularly. I’ve helped bring back some from the brink of death. And others have wildly exceeded everyone’s expectations and are now central to how Wise works.

If they’re set up and run correctly, cross-team guilds can do things a team never could, with less effort and higher impact. So let’s now dive into how I’ve seen them work best.

How to set up cross-team guilds for success

The first lesson is to start small. You’ll eventually do tons of good work, but just like with a startup, you need to MVP it. Figure out the core problem you’re solving (for your customers) and solve it. It should feel like a small side project, not your day job.

Step 1: Recruit guild members

Start with a small group of people. Search for people who are extremely motivated to solve the same problem you want to solve. A cross-team guild is an extra responsibility on top of their day job. You can’t strong arm them into helping you (not that this works anyways). Don’t get people who will help you just as a favour; their motivation tires fast.

Then help the guild members be successful.

Step 2: Set up the initial guild

You shouldn't put too much effort into setup. Treat it as an experiment: do the minimum to get it going and see if it’s worth anyone's time. But your ragtag group of initial guild members will need three things to have an initial impact:

1. A clear scope and purpose for their work. Those helping you will need to justify at least to themselves - but maybe to their lead/manager as well - why they’re spending time on this. Make this easy.

2. Tasks that are clearly aligned to that purpose with short-term measurable impact - they need to see their extra efforts pay off with clear impact. If they have even a small but clear impact, they might be willing to make a long-term commitment. But if not, there’s no chance.

3. Hold them accountable. Participating in a cross-team guild is an extra responsibility above what their team have asked them to do. But - assuming you have a clear scope and purpose defined - the work you do in the guild is important for the company. Guild tasks often fall into the “important but not urgent” category and hard to prioritise above “urgent but not important”.  Guild members will need reminders about why it’s important and their impact. So plan the work together to get buy-in. Leave nothing unclear about ownership. Check-in regularly on how they’re progressing. Remove any roadblocks they encounter.

If you get the initial parts right, you’ll be on a good track. Most cross-team guilds I’ve seen not work out have failed to do these three basic things. That said, there are a few other pitfalls to watch out for.

Step 3: Watch out

Don’t ask for too much – A cross-team guild is essentially a volunteer organization. You’ll need to be patient spinning the team up. Be patient and wait for the right people to be sufficiently motivated before recruiting them. For instance, we wanted to build a guild around wellbeing (managing stress in a chaotic environment). We especially wanted to help offices far abroad where we weren’t, like in Tampa. But there was nobody in our Tampa office who was passionate about that topic. So we skipped Tampa for the first quarter. Make the case (with a clear vision) to people who want help from, but accept that it might not be a priority for them.

Don’t let standards slip - just because it's voluntary it doesn't mean its poor quality. In fact, it has to be the opposite. Quality contribution is even more important because you simply can't waste time. You have no dedicated resources. The default is to not do it. Use that constraint to focus your attention on doing only those activities that will clearly impact.

Don’t go broad - It’s tempting to try to change the world with your cross-team guild. But not only are you not going to (especially at the beginning), if you think you are, this will cause you’ll fail. But, you can absolutely deliver a small tangible impact if you define your scope correctly. Focus on solving a small problem that you and your colleagues face every day. Then, build your ambition over time as your list of impacts stack up. If you’re successful, others will be interested in helping you. Then, you’ll have a shot at changing how your company operates and what it’s able to do.

So, once your cross-team guild is set up, how should you work together as a group?

Who does what?

There are two groups in any guild. There’s a “core” person or small group and then there’s the other members of the cross-team guild.

Guild members will be taking actions in their own office or in their own part of the organization.

So, how do they work together? First they plan their activities and create commitments as any other traditional team would. In Wise, all teams plan quarterly and so do our cross-team guilds. Second, the core team will support before (to set commitments and mentor on setup) and after (to reflect on the outcome, and plan next steps). But during the activities guild members usually work independently.

What does the core team do?

There’s always a core group of individuals who lead the guild and take on a special responsibility. To lead the guild, this core person or team will need to do three tasks. They may also execute on the plans as would any other guild member, but these activities are what they need to do as leads. The guild won’t work if these things are not done well so it has to take priority. These are Coordinate, Clarify, and provide some Core Capability.

Coordinate – By its nature, the cross-team guild is loosely knit, so over-invest in communication. Clear and frequent communication is also the only way to hold guild members accountable. This is the most time consuming role for the core part of the cross-team guild. There’s going to be tons of activity going on if you’re effective as a cross-team guild; work hard to keep up and keep everyone in sync.

Clarify purpose and KPIs - everyone who has a day job will find it hard to prioritise this work. Reinforce and clarify why you’re doing this at all and take time to clearly measure the impact.

Core capability - if you’re starting or leading a cross-team guild, you often have more experience on this topic. You’ll need to guide others. That may mean doing some more technical tasks, writing best practice docs or just mentoring others.

What does the rest of the guild do?

Execute. They need to make whatever you’re doing as a cross-team guild happen. If you can’t execute, then you’re not a guild. You’re a discussion group. So what does it mean to execute? Its three things:

Commit to action - Every member of the guild needs to commit to doing something with a tangible output.

Develop the approach - The guild members need to figure out which actions to take, and how to run them. There are often many approaches possible. For instance, for a topic like burnout: is it better to get an external expert to speak? Or an employee who’s been through it? Or bring in experts to talk 1-1 with people. Or make a document? The guild members need to make a decision on how best to deliver the content.

Carry out - Then they need to do it. They need to take the concrete actions they committed to and that they figured out was the best way to do it. This is the most time consuming part for cross-team guild members.

Whatever work the guild members do is their own. They own it. For instance, if Britta hosts a Lunchwise (gather employees together to listen to an external speaker) in London, that’s hers. She’s figured out how to make the event work and she made it happen. Publicly celebrate all that they’re doing and motivate them to do even more. The only thing the guild has helped with is to figure out how to help Britta to do more events, and to do them a bit better. The core guild can build her confidence that she's having an impact (through mentoring, sharing insights about needs, showing impact on KPIs, etc.).

When should you create a guild?

As a final point, guilds are ideally suited to certain types of problems. They tend to be a particularly good in two scenarios:

Diffuse problems. The type of problem that’s not worth any one team’s time but if you add it up across the whole organization it’s a big problem. Where the threshold of inaction prevents a team from forming around it. For instance, business intelligence tools are used across the business, but no one team uses them a lot. So maintaining these tools and making them work well for Wise is up to a guild called “self-serve data.”

Testing whether a team is needed - The second scenario guilds work well is when you don’t know if a dedicated team is needed or not. A cross-team guild is a good way to figure that out fast, without much cost.

There are also a few scenarios where guilds are inappropriate:

• When a lot of people need to be involved (more than 7-10). Instead form a proper team around it, or set up multiple guilds - with different leads - who can work independently.

• If you don't have the resources/capabilities to deliver something valuable with the resources in the guild. If you need engineering capability to have a meaningful impact, and you don’t have that, a guild won’t help you. You shouldn’t ever hire someone external into a guild: guilds repurpose existing energy only.

• When you can’t lead it properly. If you can’t (or don’t want to) commit your own time, can’t clarify the problem, can’t manage the communication, then you can’t be successful. You’ll just waste your own and other’s time.

PART 2 - SIX REASONS WHY GUILDS WORK

Why a group of cross-team volunteers, working part time, can help an organization achieve far more than traditional teams if set up correctly.

Reminder: what are cross-team guilds?

A cross-team guild is a small group of employees, usually no more than 5-7, usually from different teams and offices, who work together to solve a business problem. There’s a single person or small group who compose the “core” of the guild and other members who help out, particularly with execution.

Guild members commit 5-30% their time from their main role towards the guild’s objectives. They’re not created from above (like a task force) but emerge from the business as needed. Some guilds are long-lasting, almost permanent virtual teams, others work feverishly for a few months until they’ve solved the problem they wanted to and dissolve.

Why would anyone think this could work?

Cross-team guilds really shouldn’t work. You’re a group of volunteers – as a guild lead, you can’t tell anyone what to do. You’re usually spread across teams and offices – so you barely see each other. And you each give 10-30% of your time – so it’s hard to keep focused.

And yet, they work wonderfully well if set up correctly (see part 1). I’ve been a part of more than dozen cross-team guilds in TransferWise across a wide variety of domains.

So how can that be? I’ve found six reasons, which I’ll walk you through next.

1) Guilds deliver impact or die fast

This sounds like a problem, but it’s actually a feature. There’s a high bar for impact for a cross-team guild. You’re borrowing all of your resources from other people and other teams. If those people are doing good work in their main role, the work they do in the guild has to be fantastic or it won’t be worth their time to help you.

If it happens that you can’t deliver impact as a guild, actually, that’s ok too. Everyone just goes back to their (higher-impact) day job. There’s little disruption if a cross-team guild stops as compared to dismantling under-performing teams.

So cross-team guilds give an organization a fluidity that teams can’t. Guilds almost never get off-track the way teams do because they just stop if they’re not working, and people go back to their regular tasks. They also can’t create politics the way a team whose existence is threatened can.

2) Guilds can “hire” to solve a problem far sooner.

A full-time employee - if they’re any good at their job - does an astonishing amount in a year. You need to accumulate an incredible backlog of tasks before you can justify hiring an additional dedicated resource. So you mostly don’t. You wait until you and your team is too stretched. And then it takes at least half a year to create the job spec, recruit, hire, and onboard. So years can pass by the time you accumulate a sufficient need and actually hire.

Many fast-growing startups are spread out across the globe to be closer to customers. For example, TransferWise has 9 offices at the moment and several of them are small (under 30 people). So, for instance, it’d be great to hire someone to focus on analytics in Singapore, they don’t need 1-out-of-30 people to focus on analytics.

But if you set up a cross-team guild, you can often get 10% or 20% of someone’s time in Singapore. Right now. And this can solve most of the problem (and delay hiring for a long time).

3) Guilds capitalize on local expertise

It doesn’t make sense to hire someone for analytics in Singapore right now. But it also doesn’t make sense to hire someone centrally - for TransferWise that means in Tallinn or London - to cover Singapore. First, in terms of timezone, because we’re 6-8 hours behind. Second, because we don’t really know what it’s like in Singapore. We’ll do a worse job of understanding their needs. So a 10-20% commitment from someone - in the Singapore office and supported by the analytics guild - is beneficial.

4) Guilds are bridges

When organizations get to scale, there are hundreds of employees, a bunch of offices around the globe and dozens of teams. Individuals and even small teams can get lost and even isolated. And teams that get isolated can get wildly off-track and either just waste time or in the worst case start working against the organization.

But guilds help to bridge the gaps between teams. It’s a benefit to the organization that everyone in the guild is a part of another team, probably 70-90% of their time. If you’re leading the guild, it’s a huge pro to work with people from across the org who aligned with you on a topic you care about.

5) Guilds test more ideas

You’ll assemble a team of part-timers, all with slightly different interests than you. You can’t direct them in the same way as you could if they were your team and you hired them yourself. This sounds like a disadvantage, but the benefit is that you can learn a lot from their experiments. Then you can rapidly spread the good practices that emerge around the organization.

6) Guilds give new motivation to experienced employees

The jobs that people are hired to do often either get boring if the org is changing slowly or change beyond recognition if the org is changing quickly. Participating or leading a cross-team guild helps employees test out new career paths more and sooner. This is win-win-win for the employee, the guild and the organization.

Sometimes, this shift in focus will lead ambitious employees to move completely into to a new area of the business or form a permanent team. This is how I ended up moving from leading analytics to leading one of our people (HR)  teams. And this is how half-a-dozen of our analysts moved from Customer Support into being full time analysts in one of our product teams.

But switching career paths is not the main goal and overall doesn’t happen that often. The main motivation for someone to join a guild is to solve a problem that bothers them. By joining the cross-team guild, they’re able to do it.

To wrap up

Cross-teams guilds are a super power we’ve developed in Wise. They allow us to solve problems years faster than if we hired dedicated resources. They shut down automatically when they’re not needed and allow best practices to spread around the organization with lightning speed. They give a new challenge to employees who join a guild and build bridges across teams and offices.

And fortunately, they’re not hard to set up: all it takes is a handful of motivated people, a clear scope and some alignment and coordination. Then they just need to start small, focus on quality and being patient to let it grow naturally as success stacks up.

So, if there’s a problem you think a cross-team guild could help solve, go do it. Let me know how it goes and reach out if I can help clarify anything. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com

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The challenge: Many students in Estonia and everywhere are stuck at home and getting restless. They're not able to go to regular classes, enjoy extra-curricular classes, or hang out with their friends. Many parents need to work, and restless kids don't allow for that.

Simon Holland Tweet

The opportunity: There are tons of interesting people also stuck at home, also getting restless. They also want to do something to help their community keep its sanity throughout Covid-19 but don't know what they could do besides self-isolating.

The technical solution

I'll build a small mobile web app to help interesting people give short video-based learning sessions for school-age kids. The app & all content will be 100% free. Topics will range from cooking, to life in other countries, to singing lessons, to what life is like in startups. The sessions shouldn’t be just lectures, but be highly interactive. Groups will be small (typically 3-7 kids in a session).

The core 'app' will be built in glideapps + google sheets + apps script. I’ve built side projects with this and I know I can build it myself in my free time. Free video conferencing (Hangouts, Zoom, Messenger, WhatsApp) will be used as well as doodle for scheduling. I'll get help to localize it in Estonian & Russian.

The impact

Young bright students have an unprecedented opportunity right now to lean into learning. They'll discover that there's a whole world ready to teach them outside of the classroom. Their parents will see them getting positively obsessed with something sparked by one of these sessions.

School vs life

Interesting people will have a small way to give back to their communities when their communities need it the most. They'll be able to wholeheartedly contribute. They'll also get creative and learn more than a few new skills along the way.

Feedback welcome (from two groups)

1. Parents of school age kids - If this existed, would your kids be interested & have time?

2. Interesting people - would you commit 1-2h a week to share your enthusiasm for a particular topic with curious kids?

I have no intention of pursuing this right now but I’d be delighted to hear if someone is working on something like it. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com

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Photo by Ralston Smith on Unsplash

An informal conference that puts 50 teachers and 50 people from tech companies together for an afternoon.

Together they focus on how to help students develop the essential skills they’ll need to thrive in tomorrow’s economy.

Teachers develop a new appreciation for what students need, put together a plan, and start to build a network of people to help them bring it to life.

What’s needed for Estonia to thrive?

Tech companies — whether in Estonia or elsewhere — will revolutionize the world. The only way for Estonia to continue to transform economically is to be at the leading edge of this change.

Fortunately, more interest and money than ever is pouring into improving the Estonian education system. For instance, Eesti 2.0, which is focusing on leveraging technology in schools.

Much of the focus of education reforms are about technology itself, or tech skills. But technology on its own won’t help.

Tech companies need tons of talented people. There are many Estonians with the technical skills (as evidenced by the Pisa test results). But they're missing the attitudes and behaviours they need to be successful. This is largely a result of their schooling, not something innate.

What’s the problem?

Estonia ranks highly in the PISA test compared to nearly every other country. This is amazing, but many people are concerned that high test results aren’t enough for Estonia to continue to thrive.

Those who work in tech know this. They reflect on the skills that were essential when they were building Skype, Wise (formerly TransferWise), Pipedrive, Veriff, and others. The skills needed are totally different than are tested in a PISA test.

The most important skills needed in tech today are actively discouraged throughout education in most schools. These include essential skills like self-leadership, giving/receiving feedback, listening, story-telling, creativity, planning. Students are taught exactly the wrong lessons that hinder them until they’re able to “unlearn” them as they develop in their career.

Those in tech also think about the education they received (which hasn’t fundamentally changed in the 10-30+ years since they left) and wonder why it hasn't developed quickly like tech has.

Most shrug and say that teachers are older and reluctant to change. And even those teachers eager for change, don’t know what is needed or have the resources to make it happen.

Perhaps, but even this seemingly intractable problem is solvable.

So, what can we do?

A half day conference that brings together K-12 teachers and people working in tech companies in Estonia. Why this?

• Focus on teachers - they’re the ones who can affect change the fastest. administrators/government are too invested in the current system. And there are too many students (20-30x more?) to rapidly impact.

• Focus on bottom-up change - Top-down will take too long and get corrupted

• Start with a fast MVP and rapidly build → test → learn → repeat.

• Focus on building relationships. Build collaborative bridges between communities that should be intimately linked

• Focus on growth potential - find a solution that could rapidly expand to support most/all students in Estonia (not a few hundred at, say, a new perfect school)

Who exactly?

50 teachers from across Estonia

It should be only teachers, not administrators who attend. They have to work with students every day so they can implement their ideas quickly and independently. We should also make sure it's not just teachers from elite schools.

50 people from tech companies in Estonia

Tech people who attend should be those most passionate about education. They should cover a broad spectrum of roles. We should limit HR people to max 10%.

Other considerations on who should join

This is meant to be a quick MVP. It could even be smaller to start (20+20). It requires a balanced number of tech+teachers for the event activities to work.

What will happen?

Here’s an initial brainstorm of activities:

• Tech + Teacher speed dating - 3-5 rapid fire conversations (hints given on what to talk about). Could be a good ice-breaker.

• Tech + Teacher Discussion panels - covering the topics the conference is interested in: self-leadership, feedback, creativity, etc. In particular illustrating how capable students/people are if you give them space to grow.

• Tech side-by-sides - 30-60 min sessions where tech people show what they actually do, and what skills are most important. They could even spend time - 1-2 weeks - in tech companies as “researchers” in the summer learning more in-depth what it’s actually like. They just have to share their results with the community. We can set up funding to pay them for their time if necessary.

• Tech + teacher co-presentations - share stories of how tech + teachers have worked together to improve how teaching is done.

• Tech people talk about their best teachers & classes (inside school, post-secondary, and on the job) and how they helped them think.

• Lesson plan hacks - tech + teachers work together and hack a lesson plan that teaches some fundamental skills (i.e. self-leadership, feedback, listening, story-telling, planning). Maybe the tech person helps deliver it after

What will the outcome be?

What’s in it for teachers? 50 teachers in Estonia come away with a clearer understanding of the skills their students will need in the 2020s, and have the support of 2-10 smart tech people to help them.

What’s in it for tech? 50 tech people come away with projects to help Estonian students in the future. I know from Wise, Salv and elsewhere that there are a ton of people who want to help with this.

What’s in it for the organizers? It’s a small test, organized with little effort, that could lead to something fantastic.

Other considerations

• It could be in English or Estonian. If in English, it’ll pre-select teachers who are younger and more globally minded (a decent filter for the initial community). It’ll also allow tech people from around the world to help (like me!). But it’ll scare away teachers/tech folks who aren’t that comfortable in English.

• It should be positive in tone. There are endless problems but this conference should focus on making something better, fast (i.e. how everything is done in tech)

• It should probably be in Tallinn just for logistics, but try to get people from other cities as well. It might be worth it to arrange transportation (in the future) so logistics/cost aren’t a barrier to broad participation.

• We could self-fund for the first event, but in the future tech companies would happily sponsor it.

• We should think about gender balance to make sure it’s not 95% female teachers and 95% male tech people.

• It should be pitched as the start of a regular series - so people invest energy in building up something sustainable.

• It should feel exclusive. Both need to apply to attend in order to self-select the people who are going to be most excited.

I have no intention of pursuing this right now but I’d be delighted to hear if someone is working on something like it. It probably works anywhere. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com

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Photo by Matthew Osborn on Unsplash

• People considering joining our mission at Salv. My co-founder Taavi has a tons of his thoughts online but I’m harder to find. This is a start.

• Salvers who are thinking about how to scale up Salv. A lot of what I captured here I learned helping Wise to scale.

Personal growth

$10/hr or $10,000? - thoughts on how to value your time, maximise your impact and have a great life. [4 min read]

Pushing yourself to take big risks - reflections on when I took 600 people down a radically different path that ended up creating a key ritual in Wise’s success. [4 min read]

How to land your dream job - An unconventional approach to get a more interesting role, at a cooler company, with nicer people, with a lot less stress. [16 min read]

The most important 0.13% of my month - We each have 730 hours in a month. I transform how much I focus on what’s important to me by making Personal Commitments using just one hour a month. [8 min read]

Building a great organisation

Self-leadership & Wise - A careful reading of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations and applied to Wise (TransferWise) circa 2015. 3 part series [8+5+15 min reads]

Prophets & Professionals - A simple model that describes why the culture in startups change as they grow. A useful framework for how to think about the tensions scaling up a startup [6 min read]

Autonomous teams at scale - how Wise learned how to scale autonomous teams and avoid creeping bureaucracy. [10 min read]

Scooters are fun. But… - On why you should choose a company with a mission where you're convinced you're making the world a better place. And on how we work at Salv. [11 min read]

The definitive guide to cross-team guilds - What they are, how to set them up and why a group of cross-team volunteers, working part time, can help an organization achieve far more than traditional teams. [14 min read]

Why we don’t have a BI team at TransferWise - How I set up the analytics team at Wise (circa 2015), and how it helped Wise scale faster. [6 min read]

So you think you’re data driven - Every team has data but many either don’t know how to use it or misuse it for planning and setting KPIs/targets/OKRs. This guide can help. Circa 2017. [7 min read]

Investing

Investing like it’s 1939 - How we’re returning to an old paradigm of investing similar to 80 years ago [10 min read]

Beyond the Beach: Seychelles in the Era of Global Sovereignty - how this enchanting beach paradise could transform into a global powerhouse. [10 min read]

Playing with AI

The Art of AI T-Shirts: Your Way to One-of-a-Kind T-Shirts - A step-by-step guide to creating affordable, custom tees with the latest print-on-demand tech. [6 min read]

Startup ideas

VC-Backed Careers - Making the case for investing serious cash into people’s careers, VC style [6 min read]

YSAC - You Suck At Coding - There’s a huge opportunity to accelerate how people learn to code [6 min read]

Compensation

A tech alternative to commission sales - How a small app and process could align incentives better to achieve higher sales team output. [5 min read]

Learning / teaching / improving education

Lean in to learning - an idea to make education more useful. I envisioned it during the first weeks of Covid but looking back it seems increasingly relevant, as remote learning becomes default. [2 min read]

Teachers of tomorrow’s leaders - an comprehensive plan for a conference that pairs up top teachers and leaders from the tech sector. [5 min read]

Anti-money laundering (AML) & Financial Crime

Why we couldn’t ignore AML - Why, of all the problems in the world, we at Salv decided to focus on AML. And why it’s such an interesting problem to work on. [6 min read]

Criminals are fast. Your AML must be faster - why speed and fast feedback loops are the critical missing ingredients that are missing in most AML teams. [5 min read]

Can Machine Learning save AML? - About the challenges of applying machine learning techniques in the real world [16 min read]. Shorter version [6 mins]

I've often met people, sometimes just briefly or sometimes for longer stretches, where I just thought they're amazing, but totally unappreciated in what they're doing. For example, an astonishingly good waiter in a dingy Pizza Hut in London. My thought at the time was, "he'd be the best CS agent TransferWise ever had". Or someone like Kaspar working in a Business Intelligence team in Swedbank. He spread his wings so wide once he got into TransferWise. Or my colleague's daughter's football coach, who's so talented at building teams and bringing out potential in people, at age 21. Or my hairdresser, who's so good with people, but can't escape the grind of hairdressing. Or me, perhaps, at 22, doing data entry.

The people that spring to mind, and so many more I've met, have the potential to do incredible things. And, for myself, I'm proud to say that I'm incredibly happy with what I've accomplished. Perhaps me doing mindless data entry was a necessary step in my journey. Einstein worked at the patent office, after all.

I've also coached and mentored lot's of people. For instance, I've taught quite a few people SQL to the level that it becomes their job, and totally changes their career trajectory. I've helped a few people on various teams get through super difficult decisions and tough times.

But I've often wondered if I (or anyone) could help certain types of people accelerate their Personal growth.

Now that I have some experience working alongside venture capitalists like our excellent lead investor fly.vc, I can see how a similar approach could be helpfully applied to people, not just startups.

Seedcamp, another of our investors, has over 1,200+ founders of companies they’ve invested in over the past 10-15 years. Seedcamp has set up a ‘founders forum’ and every new founder has access to the collective intelligence of all other founders. I’ve asked half a dozen business-critical questions over the last couple of years. No matter how obscure or tricky a question I ask, I get six excellent answers in a day.

Imagine if smart, ambitious people had an incredible forum like this to support their career.

Every few months, we have a board meeting routine. There are two key parts. First, we have about 7 hours of 1:1 conversations with each of our key investors and advisors. They've all been there, done that, and these conversations often change our strategy. Second, we carefully think through what we're doing and why, then play it back. We get clear ourselves on what we're doing and why.

Imagine if smart youngsters had this kind of attention on their development, and took the time regularly to cement their learnings.

Our Investors, obviously, have given us some money too. Quite a lot in fact. Enough for us to breath. Enough for us to test and fail, and struggle forward until something works. We know that we can take enormous risks now because we have enough to pay salaries. If we were bootstrapping, we'd have to be far more cautious.

Imagine if smart young ambitious people also felt secure enough (that they won't be out on the street) to take much bigger career risks than they do today.

I can see massive potential if this could be set up:

• More people willing to start a startup or join one before it's a safe bet

• People quitting awful jobs faster. This would degrade bad companies faster, or force them to fix themselves faster. It’s a win for every employee.

• Less burnout. Fewer people would sacrifice their health for a paycheck.

Who would I invest in?

The biggest impact (and biggest potential returns) probably come from people who are unlikely to do well already. For example, if someone is already top of their class, is socially normal/likable and healthy, they're going to do just fine. Investing in them and even mentoring them won't add too much incremental value.

Instead, I'd invest in the oddbods. The people with the strangest CV's you've ever seen. Super talented people working terrible jobs. Brilliant people who are so bored with traditional school that they put in zero effort in it, and scrape by because they put all their effort somewhere else. People with incredible niche hobbies where they put 10x more effort than seems healthy. People who are super smart, but so nervous around others that they can't present their ideas well, and can't possibly pass an interview well. But give them a test assignment and be truly astonished.

A great example of career progression

These are the people who — if helped, mentored, coached, given enough money to breathe — are capable of incredible things. If they don't get help, perhaps 1-in-10 will figure it out anyway, because they're brilliant, but the other 9 will end up achieving far less in life than they could.

These people are all still super risky. Even if this program is totally successful, most will still fail, which will be depressing. This is the same as in traditional VC. But perhaps, if they're surrounded with the right structure, instead of 10% achieving greatness, 20 or 30% will succeed. That'd be incredible not only for them, but for the world.

What would they use the money for?

Taking riskier jobs - 6 years ago I was paid extremely well at Microsoft, but got an offer to join a startup called TransferWise (known as Wise now). I took a big pay cut (and therefore a big risk) by making the leap. Now that we’re hiring, I see first hand how few are willing to take the short-term downside (lower salary), for massive long-term upside (massive career growth and a shot at significant equity).

Taking risk in whatever job they have - At Wise, I made it my mission to do at least one thing every six months that I thought had a good chance of getting me fired (but that was very good for Wise). For instance, I changed how the whole company does quarterly planning, just 3 weeks before the deadline, after consulting 5 of the 800 people affected. Later, I moved from leading a team of 30 analysts & data scientists and joined the people team to lead one of the sub-teams where I had no formal experience. There are many other examples from me and others in Wise. But it's extremely rare. What could make it less rare? Would I have been willing to push even more limits if I was sure I'd be fine financially even if I did get fired?

Training / education - this is the traditional use case. Maybe? It makes sense in the US where education is so expensive. But in Europe, education is generally cheap or free. Living abroad while studying is expensive though, so perhaps supplementing more movement would help. I know some people go to their local university, even though it's worse, simply because it's too expensive to go abroad.

What would it take to get going?

Money - obviously it would take some. But if we think about even seed round VC money, it's not a lot. The max per person might be something like €25-50K. This is nothing in the world of VC. I could easily imagine a world where 20x €25K cheques to individuals pays off better than a typical 1x €500K seed cheque. And there are an unbelievable number of VCs out there. Taavi's talked to probably 100, and we get emails every week. Money can be found for sure if there's a model.

Legal - This kind of thing has to be allowed. The tricky part most likely is around share options which generally can't be pledged. I think the payback couldn't be based only on salary. Simply because it won't be attractive for investors, and it screws up the incentives between investors and individuals.

Governance - Like VC relationships, there would have to be standard easy to understand agreements (like Shareholders agreements) and rituals (like board meetings, monthly updates)

Selection process - there would need to be a healthy and fairly automated deal flow as the tickets are so small.

Marketing - to youngsters will be needed to fill the pipeline and get them excited.

I have no intention of pursuing this right now but I’d be delighted to hear if someone is working on something like it. Let me know at mcclelland (dot) jeff at gmail.com.

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Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash