Getting RACI

Managing a small team can be very hard, especially in a startup where job descriptions are fuzzy and what you work on can change from day to day. When Melanie joined the BGV team she introduced us to the RACI framework and I think it’s pretty useful.

Basically you work out everything you have to do as a team and then allocate (usually different) people to be:

Responsible: the person who does the work to achieve the task.
Accountable: the person ultimately answerable for the completion of the task.
Consulted: the people whose opinions are sought during the task through ongoing communication.
Informed: the people who are kept up-to-date on progress, but often only on completion of the task — there is just one-way communication.

We do it slightly differently to the way it’s often described in guides (including the Wikipedia article linked to above). Rather than having job titles across the top we have the RACI headings. We also don’t do it for tasks, we just do it for what we call our work streams (I have no idea how we came up with that word but it’s stuck) which are our ‘projects’ in Basecamp. What we end up with is a one-page matrix of all of areas of work with four columns that tell us who is responsible and accountable and who should be consulted and informed.

You can also then flip it on its head and you have a set of job descriptions by creating bullet points for individuals’ responsibilities and things they are accountable for.

So far we’ve reviewed the two documents about every six months which seems about right for us although you might need to do it a bit more frequently in the very early days.

Your phone knows how you feel

There’s a fantastic feature article in the New Yorker this week about the quest for software that can recognise human emotion. I like it for two reasons. Firstly, because I’m genuinely interested in different forms of ‘input’ to technology, whether that’s gestures, voice recognition or facial expressions. But secondly because it’s a great story of a startup struggling with the issues surrounding the potential social impact of the technology they’re developing.

The story is hooked on the two researchers turned founders who initially see the potential of the technology to help people with autism understand the emotions of people they’re talking to. But when they provided their software for trial by the MIT Media Lab’s corporate partners, it became obvious that they had other ideas — generally about how to sell more stuff through advertising.

With a new CEO brought in one of the founders was ‘forced out’ and the company is now essentially a market research tool, and a very lucrative one. As the article says of the remaining founder:

“Kaliouby doesn’t see herself returning to autism work, but she has not relinquished the idea of a dual bottom line. “I do believe that if we have information about your emotional experiences we can help you be in a more positive mood and influence your wellness,” she said.”

That sounds like a bit of a fudge to me — although I do hope they return to the medical possibilities. We do a lot of work with BGV teams helping them understand these dilemmas ahead of time, especially before they choose potential investors who I think are one of the biggest influences on this kind of future ethical choices.

The window seat

One of my favourite things is flying over big cities — I always choose window over aisle. Landing in Heathrow from the east usually means a couple of loops in a stack, then over the Olympic Park, turn right at the O2 and then slowly descending along the river, past our office, the Houses of Parliament, Fulham FC and Kew Gardens. The photo on the homepage for this site was taken a year or so ago on a flight back from California. Taking off from San Francisco, the plane heads out towards the Pacific ocean as if you’re leaving the city behind but then turns right, straight over the Golden Gate bridge with a view of the city and the Bay Area below.

Vincent Laforest hit the front page of HN yesterday with a series of amazing night time high altitude shots of New York (incidentally this set me off down a rabbit hole of wondering how New York came to also be known as Gotham — it’s not straightforward!) and Jason Hawkes photos got a lot of coverage a couple of years back for his aerial shots of London.

I know it’s probably not great for the people who live on these routes, but where are the best airport approaches in the world? I’d love to see more.

From Buddhism to McMindfulness?

There was an interesting programme written and presented by Emma Barnett on Radio 4 yesterday afternoon about mindfulness. I certainly learned a bit about the history of how the practice transitioned from its Buddhist roots to become a Western phenomenon. I think it also came across that while it can sound like a bit like a cult, the benefits do speak for themselves and the academic work on its effects are pretty well established. I also found the backlash against it from some naysayers quite funny — it’s been dubbed McMindfulness by some. The law firms and other companies that have started to introduce it to their offices sounded very level-headed about the whole thing and I can imagine mindfulness in the workplace will be a growing trend.

Addiction, dependency or enhancement?

Thinking a bit more about technology it strikes me there are three different ways of considering the effect it’s having on us. The first is that it’s becoming an addiction, which I wrote a bit about the other day and there are plenty of people trying to use psychological tricks to make us click on more ads.

The second is that we’re becoming dependent on it because it is genuinely useful, which I find less troubling. As Julian Baggini writes in this weekend’s FT:

“Some find our increased reliance on such mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere grow up unable to remember anything? Any gains should outweigh the losses. Brain power is a finite resource and we don’t want to use it all up on data storage and retrieval. After all, savants who remember everything often understand very little. Being able to outsource some of the grunt work of cognition frees up our brains to do the interesting, creative processing of the information. The best way of keeping our minds engaged and active might well be to let them extend far outside our skulls.”

Finally there’s the possibility that digital technology is actually enhancing us. Not just freeing up time and headspace to do the same things better but making us more powerful and able to do things that human beings have never done before. As the years go by, that becomes an ever more likely possibility and one that we’re only just beginning to really think through.

Just a longer selfie stick

I’ve just finished reading William Gibson’s new novel The Peripheral and it’s very good. One of the main ideas in the book is the ability to be somewhere (and actually sometime) else through technology either through inhabiting a kind of android body — the ‘peripherals’ of the title — or more mundanely through drones.

I think it was Chris Anderson (ex Wired, now 3D Robotics) who described drones as ‘a longer selfie stick’ and predicted that people would use them to film themselves — maybe doing exciting things like windsurfing but in the future, maybe just walking along the street. Perhaps it could be narcissism that drives the uptake and development of the technology. Personally I’m more interested in this kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6zDDsX5xYcA

How to give advice

We’re about to kick off the next cohort of BGV and that means shifting into a mode of being available to offer advice to the new startups. That’s a very privileged position and I don’t take it lightly. Having been on the other side of the table I know that not all startup advice is good advice or even welcome.

I have a few rules of thumb:

Listen first — I like to know as much of the story behind the people and the venture before offering my perspective.
Ask good questions — sometimes you need to ask the obvious ones (‘how are you going to make money’ etc) but also try to approach it from a different angle.
Offer your experiences gently (both good and bad) — if I do have direct experience of the problems the team is facing, I don’t assume the situation is the same. I’ll also try to explain how I got it wrong (what not to do) as often as explaining what I think they should do.
Offer analogies or comparisons with care — saying you should do what X company did isn’t very useful, especially when you don’t have real inside knowledge of how they did it.
Be clear when you don’t know the answer — if you’re asked for advice on something you don’t think you can help with, just admit it.
Give the opportunity for people to find out more — I’ve often found that offering up useful things that people can read can be helpful, whether that’s books, articles or talks.
Think about it afterwards and follow up — I always try to think more later about questions I’ve been asked for advice on. The best ideas sometimes take a bit of time.

Healthcare, technology and costs

We’ve got a few more health related startups than usual in the BGV cohort that starts next week which set me thinking about the role of technology in improving our health and the healthcare system. This comes at a time when the NHS is in the news for all the wrong reasons again. Winter is always crunch time when the system goes beyond its staffing limits. My former colleague Simon Parker tweeted this a couple of days ago:

Unfortunately I think Simon’s right and it’s unlikely we’ll hear politicians talking about anything other than a bit more money and fractional increases in staffing numbers. This will be nowhere near enough as demographics mean that healthcare costs are going to rise much more quickly than that. In fact, they’re already rising across the developed world, independent of the type of healthcare system.

At the same time I read Albert Wenger’s blog post on healthcare deflation which paints a very different picture of the future:

“All in all then I am quite optimistic that we can make progress in reducing the cost of healthcare and that technology will ultimately act as a deflationary force in this field as well.”

Albert sets out all the different ways that technology could help, comparing it to education which he’s also considered. It’s a variation on the ‘software is eating the world’ argument — that technology will enable better organisation of resources and that it will help provide huge amounts of information for free that could reduce the burden on formal healthcare.

From our experience at BGV, there are signs that Albert is right but there are still huge barriers to adopting new technology in the NHS. Some are legitimate (proper protection of peoples’ medical information for example) but others are just knee-jerk reactions, rejecting the new for the sake of it.

Politicians might do better reducing the barriers to innovation and the tools that help healthcare professionals do their jobs better than just finding a few percent increase in the budgets.

Standing up

One of my resolutions was to give a standing desk a try. It turns out that desks specifically designed for the job are flipping expensive (Ikea’s one with motors to let you choose the height is the cheapest at £425 and has limited availability in the UK), so I googled around and quickly found lots of hacks people have used to build one on the cheap.

The one I went for was this £14 combination of a few bits from Ikea that I’ve now popped on top of my existing desk. It took about 15 minutes to put together but seems to be holding up after a few days. I also read quite a few people saying that getting a foam mat really helps from a comfort point of view so I picked up one of those for £23.25 from Amazon.

I have to admit it has had a pretty immediate positive effect. I don’t know whether it’s just a spurt of productivity from coming back to work after a break but I do find myself a bit more focused at my desk when I’m standing. I also find I take more breaks and so I’m drinking more water which also leaves me feeling more hydrated at the end of the day. We’ll see how it goes but so far so good!

Should you develop a new business model or use an old one?

Sometimes the biggest innovations created by startups aren’t the technology they build but their business models. If you can devise something that’s not just a better service but a better way to pay for and organise that service then you could well be onto a winner. Archetypal examples include Google providing a new business model for search (and ultimately for advertising itself), Airbnb providing a new business model for holiday rentals, Zipcar for car ownership and so on. When people talk about disruptive startups (I prefer ‘transformative’ personally), it’s often business model innovation rather than technical innovation that’s in play.

The issue is that creating a new business model is really hard. It’s easier to look at the existing options in your sector and then find that you struggle to grow quickly (as Oliver Quinlan points out in this piece for Nesta, that’s mainly what has happened in education technology for schools). Or you can take one business model and adapt it for another context. This is one of the reasons you get so many startups described as the X of Y (e.g. the Uber of paper aeroplanes or the eBay for cocktail waiters). Occasionally this works of course — subscription services are now common in lots of sectors and reputation based marketplaces exist for everything from electronic parts to unicorn meat.

But I wonder whether we should think harder. Sometimes a new business model could be a better answer but we reach for easier options instead. I’m not arguing for disruption for disruption’s sake but I think there could be huge gains if we can develop careful interventions that can change the balance of power in entrenched and unjust systems rather than just fitting into existing patterns and flows of money.