(This is a continuation of our #storytelling series, specifically https://federicoandino.com.ar/2022/08/23/storytelling-crafting-an-origin-story/)

You have crafted an elevator pitch Origin Story. Something that you can actually pull off the cuff, that can help you drive your brand.

But what can you do when you need to craft a longer story, not for improvised storytelling, but deliberate storytelling?

Let me introduce you to the greatest crossover in structures of the last hundred years: the three-act structure x the hero’s journey.

We’ll cover each more in-depth in the future, but let’s start with something actionable: crafting a longer-form Origin Story based on it.

We have to cover three acts, so the basic structure is:

1. Beginning
2. Conflict
3. Resolution

This we could very simple summarize at the product level with:

1. Idea
2. How we created the product
3. Where we are nowBut let’s make it more interesting with a little of Hero’s Journey. Let’s reframe the Three Acts:

1. The Opp: You saw it. This is when you explain what makes the product or your brand different. It can be context; it can be the product itself. But this is you being bitten by a radioactive spider. It is what defines the story.
2. The Struggle: unlike the “how we created the product” story, here the focus is on what the challenges were. Was that it was so new? Did you face shortages in production? Was your particular brand seen as disruptive? The focus here is not only on the challenges, but in the overcoming of them. We want to tell the story of us triumphing, but that only has value in relation to the challenge itself.
3. The Product: After all the struggle, how did your product or brand change? You cannot have the same thing as when you began. It will surely have changed. Perhaps some products or some brands triumphed almost at the gate, but those were inheritors of other attempts. If you share not the product but the experience of the creation, it is easier to become invested on it.This is a very easy 1-2-3 structure, but it remains a classic for a reason. Keep it and you will see how your own Origin Story takes form.

Once you get it into the structure, check these six points to make sure your story will connect to your audience:

• Tone: keep it light, keep it entertaining.
• Truth: don’t exaggerate or lie. One person who catches you and there goes your audience.
• Fails: Keep those occasions when you failed in. It makes the eventual success sweeter.
• 1st Person: telling a story this way resonates a lot more than the third person, since it sounds like a report. Telling in the 2nd person is trickier, but an interesting approach.
• To the point: trim the fat. We should summarize things that repeat themselves. We should highlight things that require special attention.
• Short: don’t beat around the bush. Keep the story moving. Aim at five minutes of total time.
• Record yourself, first on voice and then on video. See how it plays. And if you like, share your Origin Story on the comments! Next time, we’ll focus on the Hero’s Journey and how it can help (or hinder) Storytelling. See you soon!

Why Mindful Transformations?

Leaders, executives, managers. If they’re old school, they often ask it with an incredulous look.

What does Mindfulness have to do with an Enterprise? The no hierarchy thing is disruptive. Yes, the idea of focusing on value and cross-functional teams is new. But it makes a kind of sense.

Meditation? Meditation is for hippies, for yoga teachers, for people other than us.

I’ve responded to this kind of questioning by throwing the book at those who asked me. There are books I mention. I mention studies. The research backs it up. Websites like https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/building-the-case-for-mindfulness-in-the-workplace helps land the statistics on concrete cases. But lately, I do nothing like this.

Lately, I just summarize it into four main points.

So, here’s my new answer to why do you need Mindful Transformations which you can count in one hand while saving the thumb:

1. Creativity: Innovation is the name of the game. Innovation drives business, creates legendary products, makes a difference. But there’s another layer to Innovation: Innovation geared towards your work process. And let’s be frank: innovation feels great. When we innovate, we can see the effect that the change has on long-suffered problems. If we pause and recognize the moment, we want more. But that’s a great “if”. Mindfulness gives your people the tools to empower themselves to recognize the feeling and amplify it.
2. Joy: Often, work is very dull. Even if you feel challenged by it, the continuous burn down and stress can sap your energy. And in a Transformation, this translates into resistance and disengagement. Once R&D’s are in place, every single action becomes an uphill battle. Mindfulness helps counteract the effects of R&D in your Transformation by introducing moments of connection and joy in the middle of the workday.
3. Future Vision: If the day-to-day business is a slog, there’s zero interest in knowing the future of the company. If the routine brings only stress, our capacity to focus on long-term goals becomes compromised. By introducing stress-management techniques, we regain the enthusiasm for the future of our work and we can engage in a more creative fashion again.
4. Fly: One thing that Mindfulness techniques specialize on is not removing or crashing against obstacles in our path, but making those obstacles the path. Not reaching enough ratio? Instead of trying to brute-force our way, agility can help by testing hypothesis via MVPs. Are our metrics too innocent? The inherent fuzziness of User Story Points can help us adjust. But one thing that all these actions require is Mindset. If we try to implement an Agile framework without working on the Mindset of the people implementing it… we’re going to crash and burn upon that land called That was not my mistake. Mindset is the key to Agile and Mindfulness is a tool to work it. Not the only tool, perhaps not the best, but one that’s reliable, proven and has a great number of practitioners.

So, what do you think? Is throwing the book at people a better approach? Does Mindfulness make sense in a Digital Transformation? Do we need to create Mindful Transformations?

#mindfulness #digitaltransformation #agile

Working on an upcoming event…#ibm #event #mindfulness

So, you want to perform a Digital Transformation?

This is, today, the most common and most risky type of transformation, post-pandemic, at an enterprise level.

Digital Transformations are always changing, complex beasts, but they have a couple of things that stay the same and allow us to group them together:

· They focus on moving from a location and paper approach to a digital remote one.

· Usually, we do them via a shift of methodology. Depending on the Enterprise itself to adopt a new methodology or to adopt a methodology. This results in changes at a cultural, organizational, and work stream level.

· The primary goal of most Digital Transformations is better client satisfaction, greater innovation, or a clear focus on efficiency.

Having defined a Digital Transformation, I will do an overview of what are the best practices and approaches.

This will be, of course, my experience and opinions.

I will first divide the Digital Transformation in four arbitrary phases, which I call A.I.M.S., which means:

· Aiming: The phase in which we plot our way through the Transformation itself and we align expectations and goals.

· Inoculate: we go hard-for-broke with a skilled team, to build the beginning of the Transformation and gather momentum with a series of pilots and proof of concepts.

· Measure: when we make sure that what we’re doing is having the desired effect or we correct it.

· Scale!: when we have found the correct list of recipes, and how to measure them, it’s time to deploy them Enterprise-wide.

I’ll be covering the first phase next (Aiming), but what do you think? Does this sequence of phases, the A.I.M.S., make sense?

Please comment on and thank you!

#agile #enterprise #digitaltransformation

An experiential defense of vaccination

It finally caught up with me. After successfully evading the Corona Crown for all the pandemic, after dodging every risky situation, a PCR found me positive.

Mind you, I already felt sick. Headaches, fever, body pains. The works.

‘Ok’ I thought ‘we should be alright. We are not at risk since we have all the vaccine coverage. This will just take time’. I learned experientially about the importance of vaccination through the application of mindfulness.

Just to be clear about something, before we begin: I’m not any kind of qualified medical doctor or practitioner. I’m not a medic, nurse, or specialist in any biological science.

I’m also not any kind of untraditional practitioner of health, like a Reiki devotee or a crystal healer.

My work is mainly as a Strategy Consultant, with a specialization in Mindfulness as a tool to generate both systemic and personal change in corporation and their workers.

I found interesting, as both a meditation practitioner and teacher, how to apply my awareness to the process of my sickness and healing.

There was a very interesting correlation between the experience of vaccination and sickness.

This is just a personal and singular experience, but I found it helpful to document it.

I have three vaccines which followed a pattern.

After the first shot, I returned to work. Slowly, a general feeling of dullness dawned, followed by headaches and body pain. I found out that I couldn’t continue working, not in any useful way.

I went to bed to read, thinking that I’ll be up soon. Then, the fever came.

I had a pretty strong fever until the small hours of the morning. After that, I could sleep. I felt tired, but nothing else.

Second shot. I did this on a morning. By midday, I felt headaches. I went to my bed, fearing the repeat of the first.The fever came right on cue. I struggled, trying to distract myself, but I had to wait for the fever to break.

Third shot. ‘Ok, Fede’ I thought to myself ‘you’re slow, but even you can learn’. I had the shot, then went straight to my bed. Fell asleep as soon as I could. Slept through the fever. Woke up feeling refreshed.

Then, COVID came this week. I found out that it behaved the way it was supposed to. It was the experience of the vaccine, but amped up.

Every day, the same pattern: wake with headaches, mucus, body pain. Fever started mounting towards the end of the day. If I fought against it, I couldn’t sleep until the fever abated. If I tried to relax and sleep as much as I could, I just sailed past it.

Lying on a bed is easier said than done. My body, at least, hurts once the twelve hour mark is past. With mindfulness of posture, and small stretches, when I could do them, I managed.

Our thoughts are the main thing. All those questions. When I’m going to feel better? Should I call the doctor again? Do I have to lie here feeling bad?

This is where mindfulness comes into play; to help both manage our expectations and to relax on the experience.

On the expectation side, yes, we’re going to feel sick. But that’s what we can expect, isn’t it? By framing our expectations against our experience of the vaccines and seeing a similar pattern. We can be sure that this is not going to kill us. It’s not a bridge that we haven’t crossed already; it’s just that the intensity’s a little higher, nothing more.

On the experience itself, mindfulness can help us to manage those things, like posture, that we can manage and relax ourselves to those things we cannot. I don’t think that anyone can be fully comfortable during COVID fevers, but one thing that mindfulness teaches is to be comfortable while being uncomfortable. We need to relax into the pain and the fever.

Is it a good time? No, not at all.

Will it pass soon enough if we relax? Yes.

I did what I could. I took the strategy of my third shot iteration and reused it for COVID. I slept as much as I could, going to sleep at non-regular hours; just when I felt the fever rising. And it worked like a charm: I woke up refreshed and soon I was back on my feet.

The experience taught me more respect for the heroes of this pandemic: the scientists and immunologists who created a vast array of vaccines in a short time. Of course, I know that testing has proved them in a laboratory setting.

Still, it amazed me to see how well they prepared me for the actual thing. Not only did they create defenses in my system to not fall to the virus badly. It trained me on how to take the best course of action if I were to be infected.

So, this is my brief, mindful conclusion: if you still haven’t fully vaccinated… please do so now! I know you might read many people telling you about their personal experiences. This is mine, and I’m telling you, not only for yourself but for everyone else: this works.

And if you’re already have, please join me in thanking all of those who made these vaccines possible for all! The unsung heros of these years. Thank you!

#mindfulness #covid #meditation #vaccionation #experience #yoga

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there was Uncreative Writing.

So, this weekend has been a long weekend here, in Argentina. I took advantage of it in several ways: did a lot of exercise and I took a lot of long rides in my bike. Before the pandemic, I used to travel the crowded, difficult to navigate by car or public transport downtown Buenos Aires by riding my bike. I used to do 20-30 miles a day, on weekdays. But it seems almost in another life; for the last year and a half, my daily commute is from my bedroom to my living.

I also read a book that was recommended to me: the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Hollywood-Novel-ebook/dp/B08NL69YYT/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3SSYJO3FOQX10&dchild=1&keywords=once+upon+a+time+in+hollywood&qid=1626034904&sprefix=once+upon+a+time+in+holy%2Caps%2C314&sr=8-4 , the 2019 film by its own creator, Quentin Tarantino. This novel was…very surprising for me. Not only because of what Tarantino wrote, but because of how he wrote it. I’m going to very briefly go into it, so SPOILERS ahead.

What Tarantino does is not so much a novelization of his movie, but rather a re-edit and remix which only works juxtaposed the actual film itself. In the book:

• We learned that Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, killed his wife. Not only that, but he got away with murder three times and was planning on either killing or crippling Bruce Lee. He fantasizes on starting a cult like Manson and constantly treats women like disposable objects. We forget it when we look at Brad Pitt’s genial smiling face, but the book does not shy away from the fact that the character himself is a psychopath who just hasn’t been caught.
• He expands the story of the cowboy show where Leonardo Di Caprio’s Rick Dalton is working, and he uses to self-insert into their universe.
• But the most impactful change is the ending. Remember the flamethrower scene? How the Mason family attacked the protagonists?  Well, here it’s broached, out of time and sequence, in two paragraphs towards the first quarter of the novella, as something that will happen later on, in relationship to one of the protagonists’ wife. With that scene and that build up no longer there, the novel is an entirely different beast that the film.

This has been received with criticism across the internets. Blogs accuse Tarantino from being non-creative, derivate, just writing a script in novel form. But to my eyes, what Tarantino’s doing here is another kind of art, something that we do almost all the time, as consultants.

He is being UNcreative.

The poet and literary critic Kenneth Goldsmith defined Uncreative Writing as that writing that doesn’t produce new content by writing new material, but by remixing, re-matching existing materials and shining a light on some previous parts that weren’t in focus before. Now, this might require you to write some more detail, but it should be done in a way that does not contradict the previous material. So, Tarantino’s greater detail on Cliff Booth’s murdering ways, while (in my personal opinion) wasn’t very present in the movie in the book it doesn’t derail or contradict the character. But most of the new effect of the novel is done by remixing and rearranging focuses on characters, expanding and shrinking time on the spotlight, or introducing details that illuminate but do not contradict.

This, is effect, requires the existence of the film itself. While you might theoretically read the book by itself, with no prior knowledge, Tarantino has very astutely played for his audience, who probably by now (two years after it is debut) have seen it. In a scene, he shows the power that Roman Polanski has as a director to influence the way the audience thinks. I think he is aiming for the same here with his book.

(That he feels no compunction in making Polansky one of the more admired characters is in my opinion, either the most Tarantinesque virtue or his tacit admission that movies, for him, are the only thing that matters)

Whatever his aims, what Tarantino does is, in my opinion, a form of art. But a form of art which is much maligned, yet vital. The capacity to not be creative when you can be, when you are expected to be is a virtue that is very much absent in most of us, but, at the same time: how many consultants are creative? By “creative” I mean creating frameworks all the time, new concepts, new ways of working, etc.

I would think that most of us do that creative part of work not that much. Most of our work is Uncreative Writing. And that is ok. That is more than ok: the worst epoch in the Agile World, at least according to me, was the long stretch from 2008 to circa 2014, where everyone and their mothers had their own Scrum, their own way of doing Agile.

Wanted to do a Sprint Review? Sorry mate, these are called “group expositions” now and they are done via PowerPoint. Doing a daily? We do not do that, we do “chat-attack” via slack, but you need to upload topics via mail. And so on, ad infinitum.

It was such a relief when the Scrum Guide took over. Now we could agree at least on the basics of it and focus on what we wanted to emphasize. We looked at it Un-creatively and we made it work.

This is the kind of approach that, I think benefits our clients the most. We should focus on how to highlight and be artful in the way to combine previous, standard material. Bear in mind that every time we create something ad hoc for the client, this is something that must be factored in the training time of every single person who starts there. Time that, blown up to the level of even small corporations, adds up. Time that is not spent creating value for their clients, but rather in simply basic training to function. We should not only stop insisting that there’s more value in originality, but we should actually focus on the Uncreative skills that we use all the time. I think we are doing this already, without any reason or rhyme. How many of us are reusing templates, remixing presentations, jury-rigging Murals or Miro’s?

I would love a course on Uncreative Writing for consultants. I’ll look for it, and if I can’t find it, I’ll write it myself.

But only if I cannot find it first someplace.