At Nobody Studios, our mission is to build 100 impactful companies in five years—an audacious goal, but one that forces us to move at an incredible pace and adapt to real-time changes we see in the world around us.
The key to moving at such speed is enabling our team’s creativity while having solid rigor in the way we work. This keeps our quality high as our tempo increases.
For us, it’s not about steering groups, sign-off reviews, and committees. It’s about having a system we can trust to make great decisions with minimal delay and right-sized bureaucracy.
We seek the ideal thresholds to hold ourselves accountable without hamstringing our talent with burdensome processes that kill momentum and ingenuity.
Great Teams Operate With Confidence
Whenever we engage with a team, we look for signs they’re working in a way that fosters meaningful collaboration, and empowers people to bring their best. For example:
- Effective processes in place to understand how decisions should be made, and by whom
- Aligning regularly by sharing options, recommendations, choices, and results
- Seeking truth to inform choices
- Speaking to customers openly and often
- Shipping software continuously
- Proactively asking for help when needed
- A system of governance to tackle complex problems that’s improved over time
Getting the right mix of these elements allows teams to move at the “speed of trust.” And the pace of that movement is becoming more and more vital. If it’s not there, you’ll struggle. If it is, you’ll be far more likely to succeed.
The trick to continually accelerating your speed of trust is sensing your thresholds sooner and designing your feedback loops.
(Read this blog about What Makes Somebody A Nobody)
Thresholds: Faster Decisions AND Better Quality
People often think there has to be a trade off between speed and quality. It’s a myth—we can have both, and we must.
Trust in your decision making systems helps you sense information thresholds sooner and decide faster, knowing the rigor of your system will keep quality high.
How much information is enough to make a decision? That’s the critical question you must keep evaluating.
If you wait to get it all, you’re probably too late. If you don’t get any, how are you really informing your choices?
When people understand how decisions should be made, they’re freed to keep making progress, knowing the guardrails will keep things from going too far off course.
For example, when we onboard talent at Nobody Studios, there’s no long process of five assessments and 12 interviews. If two Nobodies think someone is the right addition, we just go with it and initiate a project to test the relationship.
This way, we all quickly get to experience what it’s actually like working together. We learn by doing, shifting from analysis to action so we progress.
Feedback Loops Ensure and Improve Quality
To make sure your thresholds are effective and always getting better, you need feedback loops to assess your results.
Regularly reflecting on the outcomes of your decisions, along with continuously improving your systems to keep raising the quality bar will let you ramp up your speed as your trust in the system increases.
Tighter feedback loops give more control, and they de-risk speed. The higher the uncertainty and risk around a particular decision, the shorter you’ll want your feedback loop. Start small to learn what works and what doesn’t by reflecting on the results.
The key is to learn your way through the uncertainty by taking action, not by analyzing or waiting for certainty to magically emerge.
To continue the onboarding example, when working with a new Nobody, we start with a small project, especially if it’s a high-risk area.
We observe how the process unfolds and what results it yields. Then we deepen the relationship as trust grows. Meanwhile, we’re making progress toward our goals through the work being done.
It’s simple, human, fast, and effective.
(Read this blog on Putting People Back Into Performance Management)
Redefining the Speed of Business Creation
The vehicle we’re creating will optimize for speed in company creation, ensuring people bring their talents to bear and make a meaningful contribution to Nobody Studios.
We source ideas from the crowd. Those that generate debate and get our network of Nobodies excited give us a signal that the crowd is interested.
The energy behind such ideas will hit a threshold telling us we should actually explore it more. We can turn it from a debate into a prototype that we can test quickly, and then bring that back to the crowd for feedback.
We can use this process to go faster, iterating and improving, or deciding it’s a no-go, killing mediocre ideas quickly and scaling the winners rapidly.
The future of work and business…
…will be defined by velocity and a people-powered system that allows for continual experimentation and course correction in real time—our speed of trust.
If you’re excited to be part of a revolutionary company at the forefront of innovation and global impact, our doors are open. Talent, influence, and capital are the lifeblood of our business, so let us know what you bring to the table.