Startup Systems

The skills-based approach rests on two important frameworks. The first is the late Edgar Schein’s organizational culture model, in which culture builds upon a foundation of basic underlying assumptions — employees’ shared assumptions about what drives successful outcomes to challenges in their organization’s specific context. Underlying assumptions... See more

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, prototyping, and generating creative ideas—to transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.

When using design thinking principles, you bring together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is... See more

The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.

“Why didn’t they simply do the perfect thing on the first attempt?”

The short answer is: that’s not how this works. Things are not linear or clean. We can only asymptote towards perfection through trial and error.

Product-market fit progresses in levels . It’s not a binary state where you have it and you’re golden, or you don’t and you’re not on the path. But it’s also not a vague spectrum or fuzzy sliding scale, where you can’t be sure where you’re at.

To actually engage in deep work, they not only have to create the time on their calendar, but also have to experience the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with being offline. Getting more precision around what you find aversive is the first step in learning more effective ways to deal with the emotions that come up.

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly... See more

“Almost always, when I look at a team or project at a larger org trying to make a decision with differences in opinions, the root of those differences almost always starts with shared context,” Weiss says. “Or lack thereof.”

The first step to identifying if your team is lacking shared context is to ask yourself a series of questions, Weiss says.... See more