It has been 7 years since I started Figure.NZ.

During this time we have learned that lots of things are needed for people to be able to use data to thrive, and we have realised many of these things do not fit under Figure.NZ’s charitable mandate.

I am going to step out of Figure.NZ to establish Figure Group, a company that will work on the other things that need to happen. Our wonderful Ngapera Riley will take over as CEO of Figure.NZ from 1 August 2019.

There are important reasons we think this transition should happen now, and we are all really excited about what comes next.

A case for change

Towards the end of last year I started to feel like there was something I was missing. People use and love Figure.NZ (based on the feedback we get), yet we have not managed to embed anywhere near as broadly as we are aiming.

I felt myself retreat over the past 6 months to do some really deep thinking, reflecting, and observing. That process led me to some clarity I had been missing.

Whilst useful today, Figure.NZ is really built for a world that does not exist yet — a world where as a society we have truly evolved to our new digital and information age. We have not yet reached a state where our communities, companies, and country are organised in ways that value and encourage people to think with rigour, and then empower them to do something different based on new understanding.

When Figure.NZ works with groups of people across different sectors and industries, we start out with very enthusiastic engagement and a desire to have the world described above, but when we roll up our sleeves to get stuck in with how data can be used to help them, we collectively come up against some big stumbling blocks. Simply put: most of our societal structures and systems are not yet built for the new world. Rather, they are digital versions of our old ways of doing things, and are generally still hierarchical. We have not built the process of thinking into the way we operate, nor do we really have ways of valuing and supporting the process.

For everyone to be able to truly use data to thrive, it means having:

• Easy access to all the information and data that matters.
• Capability and tools for people to think strategically, ask questions, and make decisions.
• Environments that put people in the centre and support them to think.
• Systems and structures designed for people to then engage with, if they choose.

We have started with just one part of this work (processing and publishing public data so it is easy to find and use) but without the other parts in play, we cannot achieve our real mission.

What happens now

So that Figure.NZ can focus firmly on its main charitable objects, I am going to step down as CEO of Figure.NZ to establish Figure Group, a new company that will work on other areas that we need to create this new world we see, but that are not appropriate for Figure.NZ to take on.

Figure Group intends to donate a percentage of its annual revenue from day 1 to Figure.NZ. I do not have more details to share on this yet, as I need to wait until I have made the transition out before getting the perspective I need to create the detailed plan.

It is with enormous delight and gratitude that we have appointed Ngapera Riley (Te Arawa) to take over the position of CEO of Figure.NZ from 1 August 2019.

After a time on our Figure.NZ board in 2017, we recruited Ngapera into the role of Deputy CEO 18 months ago to eventually take over the CEO position.

Ngapera’s previous role was Global Director of Kea’s World Class New Zealand Network. She is a member of Te Pokapū, the core working group of Te Mana Raraunga Māori Data Sovereignty Network, as well as a Board member for InZone Education Foundation, for Te Ohu Whai Ao — Māori Indigenous Business Development Trust, and for Pinnacle Programme.

I will remain as a trustee of Figure.NZ, unless there any unmanageable conflicts of interest that arise as I set up Figure Group.

To start with though, after a celebratory handover ceremony on 31 July, I am going to have the month of August completely off!

From 1 September I will be putting the Figure Group hat firmly on my head, and figuring out where to from there. I am really delighted about getting to this space of clarity, and enormously grateful for the support of my Board and team for these next steps.

If you would like to know more, here is a recent chat Ngapera and I had about what this transition means to us.

A graceful transition was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re delighted to sign this open letter to New Zealand asserting that we don’t require people to have formal qualifications in order to be part of our team.

We care about how capable people are and how that matches what we need, we care about their ability to learn, and we care about their alignment with our purpose and values. We think there are many different paths that could be taken towards having these attributes.

The NZ Talent initiative launched yesterday, with 100 businesses already committed to not requiring applicants to hold a formal qualification for a range of skills-based roles.

Since yesterday’s launch, our team has been reflecting on how this has always been an important stance for us. We’re an example of how people take all sorts of paths through life. Several of us don’t have tertiary qualifications, or we have qualifications that are only vaguely related to the work we do now.

As CEO and Founder, I’m qualified to be a secondary school physical education teacher; our Chief Technology Officer is a high-school drop out; one of our Senior Developers has Bursary (side note: this prompted us to realise that not everyone in our team knows what Bursary is); our Chief Operating Officer is a lawyer with a BA in Russian; and our Product Manager is trained in psychology. To be fair, that last one probably holds a lot of value! Also, at least 3 years had gone by before we realised that one of our team has a doctorate.

We don’t share this to trivialise study. Rather, we think it’s important to recognise that degrees aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to finding work you love, and that you can bring value to a workplace whether or not you have a bunch of letters after your name.

We also want to acknowledge that some of us have had opportunities along our career paths that others may not have had. Privilege definitely plays a role when it comes to finding work, and it’s important to remember that.

We hope the NZ Talent open letter helps businesses to think differently about who they hire, and why; and we hope it helps those who are looking for work to see their own value too.

Read and sign the letter here.

What do a PE teacher, a high-school drop out and a graduate in Russian have in common? was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written with Kimberley Bartlett, Figure.NZ’s Head of Communications.

We’ve just added three wonderful humans to our board — Ngapera Riley, Robett Hollis and Te Aroha Morehu. Since the beginning, people have seemed genuinely curious as to where and how I find board members (and why I enjoy my board meetings!), so it’s made me reflect on how I think about my board.

Having the support of the right board at the right time means being constantly conscious of where the organisation is at.

The people on the Figure.NZ board team are my peers and my friends. They offer me a safe place to dare to dream and are my biggest cheerleaders, but, equally, they’re comfortable challenging me — either directly or by lifting my sights. This combination of a place of safety and a place of challenge is critical for me as the CEO and Founder of a social enterprise that has set itself some fairly hefty goals to achieve by 2022.

I had the idea for Figure.NZ whilst lying on a picnic blanket in 2012. One of first things I then did was to form a board, and in the five years since it has shape-shifted its way into three different forms. I made this very early decision because I wanted to be surrounded by people with expertise whom I knew would give me confidence.

I’ve since learned that doing this so early on was unusual, but I’d seen the ill effects of Founderitis — described by Forbes.com as “the my way or the highway approach to running a business that can destroy a startup” — and I couldn’t assume I was immune to that. I firmly believed it needed to not be about me, and so I set the board up from the start so that it wasn’t.

There were eight of us, and the thing they all had in common, as well as being awesome people, was that I knew they would put our purpose ahead of creating something that reflected just their own lives and desires.

What I hadn’t anticipated and am now enormously grateful for is the sense of accountability that came with setting up a board straight away. Each month from day one I had to report back on what I was doing. And this made me think really consciously about what I was doing.

As the organisation and I progressed we began to get the sense after about three years that I needed other skills and expertise around the table. I consider board members to be a bit like teachers in the sense that you don’t expect your primary teacher to follow you to secondary school, nor your secondary school teacher to become your tertiary lecturer. But, they all have absolutely crucial roles to play.

Yes, it can be hard to say goodbye, but the schooling analogy provides a sensible framework and helps me convey the appropriate level of respect for whoever is contributing at each stage.

The initial group of eight helped me form the idea into something solid and craft the purpose, but what I then realised I needed was the influence of people who are accustomed to dealing with lots of money. To me, money was scary, hard and unknown; and I needed help breaking through that. So, I entered the second phase of the board with Vic Crone and Stephen England-Hall by my side, and this is where the three of us began the process of lifting Figure.NZ from feeling like a traditional type of charity to an organisation that began to think quite differently about revenue streams, and daring to dream beyond small amounts of money.

We kept it tight for a couple of years, just the three of us, as we felt it was important to get to know each other. But recently our trio decided we’re familiar enough with each other now to feel confident to add other people without fear of losing the magic. We saw that whilst we absolutely need to retain a strong focus on governance and financial oversight, that it’s now time to start reaching into communities in different ways and communicate how to use numbers in bold ways.

Enter our three amazing new board members — distinct because of their different backgrounds and networks, and united in that they each have experience on the social community side and with building businesses; and a care for Aotearoa:

• Te Aroha Morehu is the General Manager of Culture and Identity for Auckland based iwi, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, with his mahi/work recently extending into a digital strategy. Te Aroha is an executive board member of Planet Maori.
• Ngapera Riley is the Global Director of the World Class New Zealand network run by Kea, the Kiwi Expatriate Association. Ngapera is on the board of the InZone Education Foundation.
• Robett Hollis is a lifestyle entrepreneur and runs Aranui Ventures which owns FRONTSIDE, a content consultancy and video production agency, AIRTIME, an action sports community and ColabNZ, a network of creative shared workspaces. Robett sits on the NZ Tech Industry Association Board.

They join Vic Crone (Chief Executive of Callaghan Innovation), Stephen England-Hall (Chief Executive of Tourism New Zealand), and me.

We’re now feeling a new energy and dynamic flowing through the group, and it’s a delight and honour to have Robett, Te Aroha and Ngapera join us — we all just feel so privileged to be working together.

As to how I found them ... the answer is both simple for me and probably annoyingly unclear: I meet people through various ways every day, and when I do I get to know them, not what their current role is. And when I’m really tapping into the direction of Figure.NZ and dreaming about what it will feel like when we achieve our next step — I can just feel who should be standing there with us. To date everyone I’ve asked has been honoured to be chosen, and it’s often their reaction that signifies to me that they really get how big this adventure is and that it’s not about me or them. I don’t just look for skills (luckily there are others around me to check my blind spots!), rather I’m on the hunt for people that make me the best leader I can be.

Whether the board enables my leadership through emotional support and confidence, the identification of blind spots, skills I don’t have, or strategic thinking, ultimately, it’s the ability to pull through the expertise of board members into day-to-day operations via the CEO that makes a board so valuable.

Which brings me back to the place of safety and the place of challenge that comes with my fellow board members supporting me — but also questioning me. It’s absolutely this combination which makes me feel that at each monthly board meeting I can take a pause, reflect on where we are, before looking up to take another step. At my most vulnerable, my braveness comes from those at my side. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini kē.

Welcome aboard was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It can be harder to get started because we all have to learn how to think about and value things differently, but the result can be huge impacts at a scale not seen before.

Numbers are a language that hold stories about our country. They tell us how many cities are in New Zealand (14), how many Labradors (42,000), or which region has the most hectares of kūmara (Northland, by a long shot!).

Although these numbers are valuable for understanding the world around us, most people don’t use New Zealand’s numbers, and most of New Zealand’s numbers aren’t used.

Figure.NZ was established to make it easy for everyone to find and use our country’s numbers, and to get people using them. We do that by taking thousands of inconsistent spreadsheets and files spread around hundreds of websites, and using the software we’ve designed and developed to turn this into something future-proof, consistent and useable — all free for everyone to take and use from https://figure.nz.

You can find out more about us there but to sum up, we’re a charity — and that’s unusual in the data space. We don’t fit the criteria for traditional supporters like philanthropic foundations, and investment or R&D grants are closed to us because we don’t tick the business box.

This means we’ve had to think differently.

In the search for solutions I didn’t give much credit to the idea of corporate sponsorship, because I thought it would mean too much compromise. But that changed when I met ASB Bank execs, Steve Jurkovich and Russell Jones.

During a pitch to Steve about an idea that would eventually become Business Figures, he stopped me mid-speech and said: “Look, great idea, let’s fast-track it. I totally get what you’re doing and I’m thinking the big win is really just backing this for New Zealand”!!

One year in I’ve been reflecting heaps on what the partnership has done, such as:

• It’s why we can go to schools around the country and run classes at no cost to anyone.
• It’s why we can say yes to so many of the talks we get invited to do.
• It’s why we can drop everything and answer a question when the media contacts us or someone tweets us a query.

And the awesome consequence of being able to say yes to this really visible stuff is reach. It means we are seen, which is critical to our mission of getting people to use numbers.

Other things ASB Bank have contributed is giving us a home in their office for six months, and enabling me to give my team security as employees rather than contractors.

It strikes me actually that through this support, we’ve been freed up to operate in a completely different way. It feels like we’re entering a new era — one in which a corporate entity can do good by backing a social enterprise to make a country even better. And as CEO and Founder, the key thing for me here is getting the headspace to keep dreaming big — for me and for my team.

Saying that, it’s not all sparkles and unicorns. When we first got more security in 2016 we had to learn to operate differently, and it was really hard. We all shudder when we remember it as it was really confusing to change pace and not need to sprint and take short-cuts.

But, having the ability to take the time to go deep and get the Figure.NZ house in order before moving forward is why things feel so solid now. On a practical level this allowed us to take the time to document many things about Figure.NZ openly on http://tohu.figure.nz/, which people are now able to copy from, for free, and use as the basis of their own health and safety or remote-first policies.

One of the other cool things it’s enabled us to do is work on the formation of a group called Figure’s 20. Think Ocean’s 11, but with New Zealand public and private sector organisations (and minus the larceny). This group of 20 organisations are each committing some funds for three years to Figure.NZ to provide practical support for the future of New Zealand. Without having a foundation of support already in place, we simply wouldn’t have been able to invest the time required to make this happen.

The first year of working together hasn’t been about ticking off a list of 20 things the bank needed us to deliver on. This has meant it’s been difficult to know when we’ve achieved success, but the high level of trust has allowed us to get our foundation strong and lift our focus from the small things. And I absolutely believe we will deliver substantially more value to ASB Bank than they could have ever sponsored us — in the traditional sense — to do.

One year ago we asked a big business to take a leap of faith, to back our efforts for Aotearoa, in a way that saw everyone in the country benefit — knowing full well that this was going to be difficult to measure.

They have changed our world and yet in the scheme of theirs we are tiny. Sometimes this worries me — what are the effects of such disparate positions in a partnership? And then I remember — we might be small, but our impact is huge. And in a bunch of ways it’s the perfect symbiotic relationship. Because when big business backs social enterprise, the country wins.

When big business backs social enterprise and the country wins was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are only just getting started. We’re continuing to grow in utility, usability, scope, ambition and reach. In our mission to democratise data, we will be taking Wiki New Zealand to a broader audience. We want all New Zealanders, young and old, great and small, tech-savvy and old-school, to feel that we are a place for them. To come to us excited and curious with hunches and questions to figure out, knowing they will find insight, inspiration, and new ways forward.

That’s why today we’re becoming Figure.NZ.

It’s a name that is a call-to-action, as well as a description. We want all New Zealanders to feel they can figure out how to use better information to make better decisions. When we figure things out together, we move forward together as individuals, businesses, communities, and as a nation. It’s a big mission, but we are up to the task!

Figure.NZ fits our mission and describes us. Here’s some of the reasons we love it:

Literally: A written symbol, especially a number; another name for digit; calculations with numbers; geometric forms consisting of any combination of points, lines, or planes; visible shape or outline, form, or silhouette of a thing; an object that symbolises something; a pictorial or sculptural representation; a diagram, a design or pattern; an illustration or explanatory diagram in a text.

Verb: To make a likeness of; depict; to conclude, believe, or predict; to consider or regard; to calculate or compute; to visualise; to reckon.

Surrounding vernacular:

• Figure out: To discover or decide; to solve or decipher
• That figures: To seem reasonable or expected
• Figure in: To add in or include, as in making an account
• Figure on: To depend on; to take into consideration; expect; to plan
• Go figure: Used in the imperative to indicate the unexpectedness of something; an expression of surprise, astonishment, wonder.

This is the first of many exciting new developments on our journey. We look forward to sharing more with you.

Best,

Lillian and the team at Figure.NZ

Originally published at figurenz.tumblr.com.

Wiki New Zealand is moving forward was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I went surfing in Maui today and caught a few really nice rides. I also had an experience that has given me clarity over how I approach things, and how I want to be treated as a CEO.

As a big wave was looming, the guy I was out with said ‘just push your board behind you and dive under this one’. So I did. The strength of the wave snapped the leg-rope cord, and I felt the board release from me. I came up to the surface behind the wave and the guy asked me ‘can you swim?’ as he went to retrieve my board, and I replied ‘yip’, and as I saw him paddle off after it, and also saw the set of waves coming towards me, yelled ‘but I don’t want to be left alone’. I still had my paddle with me, and held on to it as I dove under the next few waves, surfacing for a decent amount of breath between each. And then I realised — I can see waves on either side of me, I’m feeling some rushes of adrenaline and a little anxiety from being in this situation, and I can’t see anyone. And I thought — I do not feel like I am probably going to drown, but I feel like this is the start of a situation that could eventuate in that. So I put my paddle up vertically in the air and waved it. When the guy paddled over to me I said explicitly ‘I feel really anxious right now’, and we proceeded to get on his board together and head towards shore, where on the way a couple of other surfers paddled out with my board to hand it over and said nice reassuring things as they did.

None of this was that dramatic, I’m guessing no one else will really think about it again.

But as I was recounting the experience to a friend this evening, I realised that the way I acted is the exact same way as I act in business, and it’s the way I expect my team to act with me.

I call it ‘managing up’. As a CEO, I have to make a lot of decisions every day, some of them tiny, some of them carrying a lot of weight. The most valuable thing my team can do for me, is to surface issues/concerns/opportunities as soon as possible.

When I held my paddle in the air I thought — I’m not about to die, but ‘I would like help’. And then I found it fascinating that in the back of my mind I felt a bit guilty, like I shouldn’t be asking for help unless it was absolutely critical — and then I quickly realised, but that’s now how I like to be treated. Asking for help isn’t what you should do when you’re desperate, it’s literally when you would like help. I dearly appreciate it when someone surfaces an inkling of a concern in time for me to deal with it.

If you think of a graph of a company’s performance, showing a proposed line leading to success and a line leading to failure (of whatever measure you find most valuable), you don’t want someone to raise the flag 1mm before failure. The attribute you would most value, is someone’s ability to call it when you are 1mm below the line of success, at the very beginning of the divergence.

A few months ago I had a board meeting. At the start of it I said to my board — “I’m worried about money and I need your help”. We proceeded to write down all the opportunities on the table, the likelihood and the other paths we could chase in different scenarios, and we got on the same page regarding what we would do if different looming opportunities went away etc. As it turns out, all of the things on the table closed, and the result was a solid and positive outcome. But that’s not the point. The moment I felt discomfort, and an inability to be ‘sure’ we would nail what we set out to do, I raised it. I didn’t wait ’til my last breath to raise my paddle. I did it as soon as I realised the outcome was no longer certain. I didn’t for a moment worry about being embarrassed that I needed help.

The result is that those with their hands on the levers are immediately able to act and respond, and to help create settings that will lead to success.

It took me a long time to really understand what ‘managing up’ meant. I remember in a previous role, my employer would talk to me about it, and I would try, but it was a long time before I ‘really’ understood the essence. It’s hard because of the layers of doubt and fear we have around being judged for failures. By our thoughts of ‘even though this isn’t going well, it’s so minor I can probably turn it around on my own and no one will know’, without realising that asking for help, even just surfacing our thoughts that things aren’t going as well as they could, is what makes all the difference between succeeding and failing.

I felt a bit embarrassed to wave my paddle in the air today, but I’m damn glad I did.

Originally published at gracefullillian.com on June 3, 2015.

Put your paddle in the air was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“In the past year I have met with about 200 people from the public sector. And every single one of them has seemed passionate and smart, and has been a real pleasure to deal with. And that has been really surprising to me, and really surprising to others in both the private sector and the general public when I talk to them about my experiences.

But it shouldn’t be, right? It shouldn’t be surprising. We should know how dedicated and caring you are, we should know you better. So why don’t we? Why is there such a strong separation between sectors when we’re generally working towards the same goals?

When I reflected on what we need for leadership in the future, I wanted to talk to you about being fearless and how I’ve learnt to tear down the imaginary walls between all of us — both within and between sectors, and how much easier it is to operate when you don’t put people, including yourself, into a box.

And I wanted to tell you to be brave and bold, and to talk to you about how we need to take some risks to do some really great things.

But then I got really stuck and confused in my thinking. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realised I couldn’t see how you, leaders in the public sector, are even allowed to win.

I don’t know of any examples of public sector leaders who have been publicly appreciated, thanked, and recognised for knocking it out of the park for New Zealand. And I also know that is not because it hasn’t happened — just look at the special country we live in and what has shaped it.

The environment that you lead in seems very different from leading in the private sector, where the support and appreciation you get is ongoing, where your wins actually result in you being even more armed with resources and platforms to win from. And whilst that’s not the reason to do anything, it really does make a difference. And I think we could be better at showing that appreciation and support of you.

So thank you, from me. I see what you do. I see how hard your teams work. I see how many directions you are pulled in and the different people you have to please. And I see that you are dedicating your most valuable asset, your time, to making New Zealand the best it can be.

We are all extremely fortunate to call New Zealand home, and as I said in the opening sentiments of my TEDxAuckland talk:

We have everything we need to be a country that is cohesive, wealthy, filled with smart, healthy people enjoying a variety of lifestyles in a gorgeous environment.

We have everything we need to be a country that is fragmented and poor, filled with uneducated and unhealthy people who struggle every day and are surrounded by a damaged environment.

It’s in our hands, all of ours, to shape the future.

Instead of arguing over where we currently are, if we are performing well or poorly as a nation, and who is to blame for anything, I think the question really is:

Could we be even better?

To me, the answer is ‘heck yes’. I’m excited about what we can do. I think we really do have everything we need, and that the only limitations we have are those we impose on our own thinking and actions.

So there are two big principles that we can embed to shape the best future possible:

1. Arm every person with information they need to make informed decisions
2. Establish an environment where every person feels safe to innovate and try ideas

And when I say every person, I mean every person.

They sound really simple and obvious principles. In discussions to date I haven’t come across anyone who doesn’t think they are really valuable. But when you step back and think about it — we don’t actually have either of those, very few people are really armed with the information they need to make informed decisions, and very few people feel really safe and able to throw ideas out there and give things a go.

So the question I then ask myself is — is there anything insurmountable in the path to operating by those principles? and I haven’t been able to think of anything. By no means do I think they are easy things to implement, but I certainly think they’re worth the effort.

We need really good leadership to understand and implement these principles, but it requires a different style of leadership than what we are used to.

And I’m not just talking to you as leaders of the public sector, this type of leadership shift is required from all those who have their hands on levers to change things, to change the environment people operate in. But it does include you.

When the flow of information was far more contained, part of a leader’s job was to disseminate and share information. But we are now in an environment where expectations for individuals to be able to access information on their own, without it going through intermediaries is far higher. We don’t accept that one person can be the portal to both the questions and the answer for us. We expect to participate and to be privy to the information and thinking that leads to decisions, and we expect to be involved in them. This type of thinking and expectation isn’t everywhere yet, but it is becoming the norm as we have new ways of sharing information.

Leadership then becomes a lot more about creating the best settings — about asking the right questions, asking the right people those questions, about creating the right mechanisms for information flow and decision-making, and about really working with people.

Yes, of course, we still like to feel inspired by our leaders, but that’s no longer from them telling us what to think, it’s from when they unlock something within us that enables us to realise more of our own potential, and to know that if they are doing that on a grand scale, the benefits will be great.

So here are some thoughts on how we can think about the two principles I am proposing, and why they are important to how we lead:

To the first principle: Arm every person with information they need to make informed decisions

It is cheap and easy to disseminate information now. So we need to make sure the information people have is the right and relevant information, and that they know how to think about it. Part of that is data that can inform thinking. Data is not something that has been widely accessible before, but it is what we are solving with Wiki New Zealand and I hope to work with each of you to do that. But there are many other types of information that people need in their thinking. And I’m certainly not just talking about information the public sector can share with the private sector and the general public, I’m talking about everyone — the private sector likely has information you could benefit from, and I suspect within this room you all have information and experiences that would be really valuable to share with each other, and with private sector leaders.

If we all become more conscious about the information that we have, the information we have access to, and are aware of, and if we ask the questions — who else could benefit from this? and, how can I get it to them? I think we would make a giant impact on the information people have as they make decisions.

Arming people with information is not about spending years designing and creating one giant place and system, it’s about everyone individually, or in their teams, today, and tomorrow, being more conscious as they operate. Thinking — What am I seeing and learning? What do I know exists? And what mechanisms are there for me to share this more widely? It’s about feeling a sense of responsibility to disseminate information to others. You, we, may be holding on to information we assume everyone knows, information that could dramatically shift how people think and the decisions they make.

And the second principle: Establish an environment where every person feels safe to innovate and try ideas

I think this is extraordinarily important and absolutely underpins our ability to evolve and move forward.

When I step back and think about how we all operate throughout life, very few people feel truly safe to innovate and try ideas, to share things and to work together. I talk about this with people a lot. It astounds me how many people simply feel they can’t or aren’t allowed to.

The term ‘innovation’ gets bandied about a lot, but all it is, is coming up with something ‘that is more effective than what already exists’, it’s not just something seen at the heart of a software company, it’s an approach to life, it’s about trying new things, it could be just suggesting a more efficient way of running a meeting. Innovation is an ongoing process of improvement, adaptation and iteration, and it really requires individuals to feel they can speak up and blurt out ideas. Some of the best ideas I have been involved in have come from building on thoughts and insights from many people, and if anyone had not felt free to share, the whole outcome would have been stifled. That has absolutely been the case with the way Wiki New Zealand has been shaped.

Every one of us has the ability to be innovative, it’s usually fear that holds us back. It’s important to remember that we are sometimes responsible for creating that fear.

We need to feel safe working together. And we need to know how to engage. And this is absolutely not the case now.

Often the public sector is referred to as being very siloed between agencies, and it is, but it is not alone! It is everywhere — within agencies, between companies, between academics, between the public and private sectors — there is so much fear around operating together. I work across all those areas, and I see it all the time. There are imaginary walls built up all over the place, and people do not know how to cross them.

The result is a great lack of understanding about others’ roles, and the hats they wear. What I see especially, is when the public sector try and do something and it doesn’t go wonderfully, the media, private sector and general public just start throwing stones, and all that does is require higher walls to be built, walls that are risk averse and require more hoops to be jumped through and signed off before movements are made.

It results in all of the things that stifle innovation and don’t allow ideas to be trialled fast and where necessary, failed fast. We should not be designing our strategies for risk. We should be designing our strategies for the optimal outcome, and then managing the risk involved.

Then when I look at the private sector, and the people I know there also are wonderful, and they work hard, and a lot of them have solutions our country could benefit from and they want to share what they’re doing with New Zealand. But they don’t know how, it feels too hard and opaque — some of them ask me — how do you work with Government? Who do you talk to? How does it all start? And their perceptions are dramatically different from reality, simple things like — they have no idea you have big existing streams of work that you’re executing and can’t just jump on a new idea. It’s not because they’re don’t care, they just don’t know.

We are all accountable for the environments we create for others, and how safe they feel, and I believe we would all do well to remember that.

I wonder, if you feel safe to innovate and try things. I wonder if your teams do. I wonder how we get a public sector that feels relaxed about collaborating with their private sector peers.

What would happen if every person asked themselves at every turn — am I creating an environment where every person feels safe to innovate and try ideas?

I think there are two main areas of questions to address:

The first, is: What can you do? What can you do to make your team feel safe to innovate and share ideas? What can you do for those in the private sector so they feel safe and enabled to talk and share with you? What can you do for the general public so they are on the journey with you? And what can you do for your ministers so they can feel free to let you fly?

And the second is: What do you need? These two principles aren’t just for others, they’re what all of us need. And sometimes, we need to define what we need and ask for it, to get it. What do you need from the private sector to be able to better work together? What do you need from the general public to feel safe to try things? What do you need from your team to be able to trust them to operate with freedom? And what do you need from your ministers to feel supported to innovate and try ideas?

So this is me, extending a hand, to you. I will work with you to help further increase my own understanding and yours, I will work with you to help break down the imaginary walls between sectors, and I will share with you everything I know.”

Originally published at gracefullillian.com on April 16, 2015.

We should work together was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are democratising data.

Wiki New Zealand is a charity with a clear purpose — to get people using data about New Zealand. We are doing this by bringing data together in one place and displaying it in simple graphs. Collaboration is central to how we operate, and the tools and functionality to really enable this will be released in the coming few months.

In the meantime, have a sneak peek at a demo video we’ve created to show you the technology that we’ve built.

Things aren’t perfect on wikinewzealand.org — we have taken the site public as soon as we could, and will iterate and improve it from here. We’ll be continuously adding new graphs and features, and improving the functionality as we learn more about how you want to play with it.

If you want to get involved, check out some of the ways you can contribute here.

If we’re not useful for you, we’re failing. So we are always happy to hear from you about what you like or don’t like, and what we could add to make it even easier for you to use data in your life.

Many people have helped us on the journey so far. Thank you all. And especially to my core team — I am deeply grateful for all of you every single day.

Best,
Lillian

CEO, Wiki New Zealand

Originally published at figurenz.tumblr.com.

Welcome to Wiki New Zealand was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tension between departments and roles in tech companies is normal. Different fields of practice have been taught to optimise for different outcomes. When they come together in business it ceases to be about the ideals of each and brings together all areas to strive for one leading goal. This convergence and need to execute brings tension. Good tension makes for efficiency, innovation and collaborative problem solving. Bad tension makes for delays, inability to execute and a rubbish working environment. This session will involve discussion about how to optimise for good tension.

I had the start of a very annoying conversation the other day. I was talking with my CTO and the direction of the conversation was making me incredibly frustrated. I suddenly said wait hold on, what is the actual topic of conversation we’re having here — what lens are we looking through? And we realised that he was looking through a ‘long-term tech vision for Wiki New Zealand’ lens, and I was looking through a ‘trying to nail down the next dev milestone to tell external parties’ lens. As soon as we realised and articulated that, we agreed both conversations were important, and that we’d start with the the long-term vision conversation first, which went awesomely and then moved to the specific delivery discussion. This was a really clear example to me of how tension between different fields of practice and their priorities can arise and can be extremely frustrating for everyone involved, but it also demonstrates how it can be managed and reduced pretty simply, just by asking the right question at the right time.

Tension is ‘the state or degree of being stretched’, and whilst connotations of the word ‘tension’ are often negative, it can be a good thing or a bad thing. Over the past decade I’ve worked in a few different tech companies and by having points of comparison, I’ve started to recognise how tension makes a huge difference to working environments and outcomes. There can be a lot of tension between departments, such as the dev and sales teams, and it can be really productive and useful, or it can be very frustrating and make for a rubbish working environment. And I’ve seen both. Being stretched and having to work together to solve problems and debate trade-offs is good, but completely breaking the ability to communicate and understand each other isn’t. When it’s not managed well, tension can often manifest through really explicit disrespect amongst a team and an inability to get everyone working together and executing well, but when tension is humming, you see products go out the door efficiently and in record time, and that they’re what customers want, and you see people throughout the team are able to discuss and negotiate trade-offs openly and really test and push the limits of how we think, and of what can be done together

Two things that lead to tension being really damaging, are discipline ideals and communication styles.

So a story to illustrate what I mean by discipline ideals.

Think of 6 countries, each with a different language, different culture, and different social understanding of what success means. Take 4 people from each of those countries, and put all 24 people into a building together. Everyone is sitting together in groups based on their country, the name of their group is after their country, and they have each been given different materials, different tools and different technology and communication processes — the ones that they used as they were growing up, and that are all really different from each others’.

Now nominate one extra person to go along and join them, it doesn’t matter which country they came from, and have them tell the groups what their definition of success is, and tell them, that they must all work together to achieve that, whilst also ensuring they achieve success as is defined by their own cultures, and that if any group fails, they all fail. Give them the deadline and ask them to get going.

Imagine how that would work, how much of a disaster it would be for the different groups to work together without any translation service, or ability to discuss what they think success is and how it relates to the others. Imagine how powerful it would be if you were able to take the really valuable experiences and points of difference from each group and combine them in a really cohesive and clear direction.

This is how I see the situation we deal with in our companies.

We generally spend years training in our area of expertise. Whether it’s formal training, informal training, the books we read, the friends we have, the communities we’re involved in. It shapes our language, the way we communicate, our expectations, and how we define success and what our discipline ideals are, and our beliefs about the optimal way to work and execute.

All of these things shape the lens that we usually look through. By lens I mean something that facilitates and influences perception, like if I said I want you to think about an issue such as technology in schools through the lens of a student versus through the lens of a parent. You’d be thinking about very different concerns and benefits, and priorities.

It’s fascinating to think that we spend most of our time before we hit the workforce honing a specific lens in one discipline, and then we get a job where we are hired to think using that lens and given KPIs based on that lens, and put together in an environment with a group of teams all armed with different lenses. And yet we are never really taught how to value, communicate or translate with the others.

It can be ridiculously annoying. Sometimes we have what are called T people, those that have some deep expertise but that span across departments, like a T, and they try to work between departments and translate, but in my experience that doesn’t often really help the core problem which is that many people just simply don’t value other roles, and don’t understand why they are important or crucial to success, and that’s huge right! And a fundamental problem with huge effects.

The other thing that I think makes tension really negative, is the different communication styles we use. It’s taken me years to really realise this and to understand how differently we think and communicate, and the impact of that. For me, the most stark contrast is between people that think to talk, and those that talk to think.

Oh my stars this has driven me nuts over the years. I definitely think to talk. I would much prefer to stay quiet as I’m thinking, and then say something when I’ve got clarity. But I’ve mistakenly always assumed that’s how everyone operates.

Because I don’t tend to say something until I’ve thought through the implications of it, I assume that when others talk they are giving me processed and thoughtful information, so I’ve always been a very active and engaged listener, and intensely listen to every word people say. So it totally bamboozles me when I am talking to someone who starts talking and just keeps going and going and ends up in a totally contradictory place from where they started. I find it really exhausting and confusing, and I feel super frustrated that they’re wasting my time and taking 7 minutes to explain something that could take 30 seconds, if they had spent 6 minutes thinking.

It was literally only a couple of years ago that I realised those people are talking so that they can think, and that it is how they get their best thinking done, and that realisation has removed a lot of the frustration I’ve always felt around that. I don’t understand it, and I still find it a bit strange, but I can accept it. I also know that others have found my silence a bit odd at times.

I see others experience similar frustration, a lot. And especially as people in our own departments often communicate similarly to us, the situation seems most apparent and dramatic between departments and when we’re engaging with others who have different styles it creates a lot of annoyance and negative tension. For those of us who don’t like to fill silences unless we have something specific to say, that can seem rude or disconcerting to others, and for those who need to verbally speak through their thinking process, that can seem rude or disconcerting to others. And there is no ‘right’ or ‘better’ way, and it makes things a whole lot easier when we know that, and can recognise which style others around us are using.

Getting good tension is really important for individuals and at a whole-company level, both for enjoying our time, doing satisfying work and having good relationships, and also for producing good results for the company. There are tools that can be used, but I think it’s really hard to solve. In the conversations I’ve had as I was exploring my thinking around this topic I’ve found lots of people who experience the negative effects of tension and don’t have any way of addressing and fixing it.

When I looked around at the commentary on the topic, I didn’t find anything that I liked. A lot of ideas for what could be done seemed to be work-around attempts or handling people with gloves, rather than actually understanding and addressing the core issue.

I think the core issue is that we typically don’t understand and value others’ roles as much as our own, that we think people are a bit dumb for not understanding and valuing ours, and that we aren’t really taught how to share our perspectives in a way that helps bridge that understanding. #### What I have learnt:

I’ve worked in a variety of different roles, and there are things I’ve learnt about others’ roles, that I was really surprised to learn, and they’ve reshaped my thinking and reactions:

1. Software is never finished, and that’s a GREAT thing: I’ve been around software development for the past decade, and I’ve always known it is never finished and that there are multiple ways to solve things, but it’s only really been in about the past six months that I’ve understood how valuable and great that is, and I find it really interesting it took me THAT long to understand that. The conversations I’ve had since that realisation have been really quite different and far more productive, and I’ve been able to really embrace the process and feed into it and off it, and stop freaking people out quite so much with things I say and assume.

2. Salespeople have some of the best product insights: In New Zealand, sales people often don’t have a very respected position — I say in New Zealand specifically because I have discovered that’s very different in the US and the art of sales seems far more valued, compared to here where often sales is seen as an undesirable and annoying role. But because they are dealing directly with the customer and actually SEE them working and hear their questions and understand the use case context more, they should often be in the rooms on product discussions because their insights are valuable and unique, not just lobbed something coming out the end of the pipeline. I know many NZ founders who really suffer from not engaging with sales people earlier in the process, who think it’s just a piece they can tack on after they’ve built their product, and then get a huge shock when they start engaging in the selling end.

3. Expensive executive dinners are often really important: This is a funny one. I remember when I was really new to working in a business and would see executives going out schmoozing people over from the US etc., spending hundreds of dollars on meals and trips to Waiheke, and I thought it was the biggest trickery ever and entirely not work! But over the years I have learnt how incredibly valuable those times are. Big deals aren’t done between strangers, they’re done between people who have spent enough time together to know, trust and respect each other. Now that I see the end-value of those times, I think the expensive dinners are cheap for what value they bring with new partnerships etc., and that they are most certainly high stake and require a set of skills and traits that are not easily taught.

4. Telling stories and good communication is really crucial: I have seen companies with a truly great product solving real problems for people, but totally unable to tell the story in a way that means people quickly grasp it and want to be part of the journey. And language is really important — when someone says ‘do you support X’, there’s a big difference in saying ‘No, but we will in three weeks’, and ‘Yes, it will be available in three weeks. The effect of the different styles is HUGE on a customer, as all they hear is the No or the Yes, and there’s a whole set of skills around that, that marketing and sales teams understand, and that other departments often this is just polished smooth talking trickery.

So these are some examples of things I have learnt, that now make me value others’ roles better. But they have taken YEARS to learn, and there’s been a lot of frustration and misunderstandings under the bridge during that time.

Some final thoughts:

I think there are things we can do more proactively to try and get the tension humming well, but I really don’t think there are any magical answers, and I certainly don’t think handling others with gloves is the right answer — I think whatever is done has to be genuine and thoughtful, so I’ll share what some of my thoughts on that are

1. Identify the lens: This is what I demonstrated in my initial story of the conversation between my CTO and I — what I mean by this is starting conversations by framing them around what the conversation is really about. I don’t just mean the topic, because that’s usually pretty clear, I mean the type of conversation — is the conversation a thought-experiment fun thinking kind of brainstorm conversation, or is it one where one party needs to leave with a really concrete decision on something. They are very different types of conversations to have, both important.

2. Share the real problem, the one you’re aligned with: If we go and talk to each other describing exactly what we want someone to do, we are assuming we know better than them how to solve the problem. That may be right a bunch of the time, but that’s shutting off the option for when we aren’t right or when there is a better solution than we know of, or trade-offs we don’t realise. Don’t go to someone telling them what you want them to do, rather share the real problem and give the opportunity for people to find other solutions. For example, if you go and say ‘I need this feature implemented asap’ to someone in dev, it’s highly likely that’s not going to get as good a response as if you went and said ‘There’s a potential really large customer who I’m talking to, they really want to start using our product but they’re worried because they can’t do X yet — can we discuss any options for how we can make things work for them?’. When you actually share the real problem it can be really simple to solve, or, to figure out why it can’t be solved. When I was the Chief Strategy Officer for a software company there were some features I knew were important to potential customer that I wanted to have implemented ASAP, so I talked to the Chief Product Officer and he sent me the roadmap with dev priorities for the next few weeks to look at and said yip let’s talk. I looked at the list and as I went down it I realised there was absolutely nothing that could be bumped from it for the things I was talking about, so I could accept that and understand it without feeling the frustration of just not being able to get something done and feeling like I wasn’t being listened to other others just didn’t understand.

3. Understand what drives you and your discipline, but remember that no one actually cares as much about your stuff as you do: I realise this sounds a bit mean, but it’s pretty true. We might all think the parts we play are the most fascinating and fun, but that doesn’t mean they are. We need to accept that and learn how to communicate the important and the relevant pieces, and do it without thinking that those who are outside of the bubble are morons.

4. There’s a thought experiment I did the other day, so: imagine if the KPIs for a marketing team were based on the number of support requests filed each month and the time it took to solve each, imagine if KPIs for the dev team were based on the staff satisfaction ratings throughout the company, and imagine if the HR department was judged on the number of customers a company had. Whilst it’s not something I think would be very useful to implement, when I was considering the environment that that would create, it did spark some thoughts and realisation of how the structure of our organisations tends to keep reinforcing our belief that the roles we play are most valuable, because they’re what we get assessed on and focus on, and don’t tend to be formally connected to the priorities and success of other parts.

5. Remembering the wider purpose of what we’re doing can be helpful: Hopefully, you’re being valued for your expertise wherever you work. But remember that you operating perfectly in isolation is not going to make a business successful, there will be a overarching purpose that is pulling all the different strands of expertise together to deliver on something, and it’s likely impossible for there to be an overall win just by you winning. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that, because we’re so head-down and focused on our own projects and targets. But being able to tap the wider purpose that everyone is aligned with and driving for should be a way of getting on the same page somewhere, and being able to work backwards from there for specific discussions and trade-offs and understand why sometimes what you want, isn’t best.

6. Have a mechanism for sharing tension: Kind of seems obvious, but it’s really hard when you’re in the middle of an extremely frustrating conversation or situation to really step back and think, wait, what’s happening here? Perhaps it’s just a case of being conscious about when it happens and being brave to stop a conversation and reframe it or ask the question about what lens is being used, what the purpose is etc. Or perhaps if it’s a company-wide initiative there could be trigger words that can be used to suddenly make everyone acknowledge that there’s a frustrating disconnect happening and the convo should be stopped and clarified.

7. To help ease tension at a company level, it can be useful to get representatives from each department in the same room, especially when there needs to be a change in direction and strategy, and have each representative feeding into the process and discussing and agreeing trade-offs. Really talking to each other, using language that really simply describes concerns and ideals, rather than simply asserting solutions or having a strong hierarchical approach. Some companies do this pretty well, but there can be huge issues when one of the people is a bit of a dick, and is misrepresenting the team they are supposed to be feeding in from. Having even one of those can be really dangerous and make for a really dumb working environment, so it’s really important to have a mechanism that allows anyone to lob things directly into the discussion circle.

8. So one of the biggest things I think we can do, with lasting results, is to work towards knowing others’ roles and perspectives are valuable and necessary, even if we don’t really understand them and what they do and why on earth they choose to do it. I had a good convo with Vaughan Rowsell from Vend about this the other night, and we came up with the BEST IDEA, which is to make a trader card game based on this. The idea being to have cards for each type of role you have within a company, and the rules to have certain requirements before you can do certain actions etc. — for example if you don’t have a lawyer card in your hand people can steal your cards, you need enough schmooze points before you can do deals, and you have to hold your developer cards for a set period of time before being able to act on having a product. We thought it could be a really powerful way of getting people to simply see the value of each others’ roles and why they’re a necessary part of a business, and really critical to enabling what it is we want to do ourselves — feel free to borrow the idea!

Originally published at gracefullillian.com on September 11, 2014.

Tension was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I did not expect my life path to be curvy. I grew up truly believing my path would be straight and really really normal. So it was initially quite surprising and challenging for me when it started to curve, and when it seemingly went backward and upside down I had to learn to deal with the motion sickness that comes from that.

I used to think that knowing and planning my path in advance was important, but now I value not knowing. I plan my next steps, but not all my steps. I really value being able to seize opportunities and not feel constrained or penned into a direction just because I once thought that’s where I would go.

I started my career as a high school physical education teacher as that was the best job I knew existed when I grew up. During my first year teaching I was asked by the CEO of a software start-up company to come and work for her.

Every day when I was teaching I tried to encourage my students to reach for the stars and take opportunities and I thought, well I kind of have to do that myself so I jumped and took the job at Massive Software. Many people thought I was crazy as they thought I was wasting the years of my university education; but I refused to be stuck to that because of a decision I made when I was 17.

I knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about business. I started as the CEOs Executive Assistant and just jumped in with both feet — failing about, learning and doing as much as possible, and a few years later I was helping her run the whole company.

When I was at Massive I learnt how to move and think fast, how to hone and listen to my instincts and how to make things happen and just DO stuff. It was an incredible six years, I did lots of travel especially to California where most of our customers were, and the visual effects industry was really sparkly to be part of. I was continuously pushed to run and jump and do and make things happen.

When the company went offshore I took a job at think tank The New Zealand Institute. It was pretty much the opposite kind of work. I sat at a desk, quietly, and had to dive really deep into one piece of thinking and research at a time. It was exhausting to start with. I had to learn to think differently, and I learnt a whole lot of new content to think about.

When I got both of those jobs — at Massive and The New Zealand Institute — I looked really rubbish on paper. But both times I just refused to let my past restrict what my next steps would be, and I was fortunate that both times the people hiring me could see that and my willingness to learn, and they took the risk hiring me.

I then went on to start Figure.NZ which I’m now the CEO of. For the first two years I did it half-time whilst I was strategy consulting on the side, and then the Chief Strategy Officer for another software company. I’m now full-time Figure.NZ and am having the absolute time of my life.

I have never felt more ME as I do right now. I am spending my days bringing something to existence from my mind and bringing people on the journey with me. It feels magical to create an organisation from nothing, and to realise we are doing something that nobody in the world has done before.

When I reflect on what caused each bend in my path, I can pinpoint some really important moments that I am very thankful for, and at each curve there was a challenge and a really conscious decision to make — I had to choose to change direction and accept the risks associated with that.

I have given myself full permission to curve and bend my path as I see fit, forever. It allows me to make sure that I love what I’m doing, and to make sure that I can continue to learn and grow. It’s interesting to muse on the pressure we feel to continue doing something we decided to do years ago, as that implies a model where we aren’t allowed to learn and adapt.

I don’t think we should be afraid to test what we’re doing and if it’s still the best thing or not. If we question it and come back with the answer that yes, it is the right thing, then we surface with more motivation and commitment. If we test it and realise that it’s not the right thing — then in my opinion that’s something I never want to hide from.

As I have altered my direction and moved to different roles and across industries, I have had to consciously put myself into a position of being a junior multiple times. That could be hard if you wrap your self-worth around that. But for me, it has been absolutely worth it every single time.

When I reflect on the most important things I’ve learnt in the last 15 years, they’re of a very different type than I would have guessed when I was younger.

The things that I value most are the thoughts I have that shape how I feel and act. There are 6 in particular that I frequently and consciously think, and it fascinates me that most of them sound quite negative, and exactly the opposite of what you would expect to be motivational…

1. No one cares about my life as much as I do. I used to really care about what other people would think about my decisions. This included family and close friends, right through to acquaintances and people I barely know. I have come to really grasp that ‘we’ are the most affected by our life decisions, and whilst others may have an opinion and voice it, and they may care deeply about us — all that anyone that loves us really cares about is if we’re happy. This realisation deeply affects my life now, it means I feel a great deal of freedom about what I choose to do with my life, and I know that it is actually up to me to do what ‘I’ believe is the best thing, not something I can expect to come from or be the responsibility of others.

2. I am wrong, and I don’t know it. If we operate under the assumption that we don’t know everything, and that we are not right about everything we do know, it stands to reason that there are things we currently think, that we are wrong about. What that means for me is that I feel less concerned about ‘being found out’ to be wrong about things, instead I assume it to be a very normal part of life. It makes me feel more comfortable sharing my thoughts and ideas, and it makes me really consider what others are saying and testing to see if they know better or more than I, rather than feeling I need to assert my own rightness.

3. I am responsible for how I think. Sometimes it feels like we can’t help our thoughts, that things surface in our mind and we can’t help it. And whilst that is partly true, I have come to see it’s not completely true. We can actually choose to push things out of our mind. It can be hard and it can take practice, but we can absolutely do it. We can also choose how we respond to things. A real example of this is with one of the first Board meetings for Figure.NZ we were all supposed to be meeting in person. A few hours before it, one of my board members text me to say they weren’t going to be able to make it. I felt instantly really ragey and frustrated because it was ruining how I’d planned things. But then I thought — wait, I don’t want to be a CEO who can’t deal with things that arise, I want to be calm and unflappable and able to take anything in my stride. Realising and articulating that to myself actually changed how I felt, instantly. It was the first time I’d really consciously done that before and it felt very powerful.

4. I am going to die. This sounds negative, yet similar to the first point, this one really makes me feel a huge amount of freedom — freedom to try and fly, freedom to do what I really believe is the most important thing that I can be doing with my time. My time is all I really truly have, so reminding myself that it is finite really motivates me to make sure I’m spending all my minutes consciously. That doesn’t mean I can’t relax for fear of wasting time, but it does mean I consciously choose to relax and enjoy the heck out of it.

5. Most of the lines are imaginary. This is one that took me quite a few years to really grasp, and I think two things have helped me realise it. One is that because I have entered new industries a bit mid-way rather than starting off in them from a young age, and because I have taken roles that I haven’t been very qualified for officially, I tend to just apply first principles to things and work my way through to what makes sense. That is limiting in some situations, but in others it means that I do things before I realise that I ‘shouldn’t’. I have always gone up and talked to people, and asked people for things, and then a few years later I sometimes look back and blush and think ‘I can’t believe I did that, I’m glad I did, but if I’d been more trained, I would have realised that was odd’. The other was through my experience at Massive and the way our CEO operated. She refused to see lines that everyone else saw and it was absolutely magical to witness what happened because of it.

6. I can’t do better than my best. I absolutely accept myself, and that involves accepting that I cannot do better than my best, and knowing what my best is. Sometimes my best is world class, and sometimes, about twice a year, my best is staying under the covers for a day watching terrible tv shows. As long as I have a really honest line of communication with myself around what my best is, I never feel guilty. I refuse to feel guilty for who I need to be and what I need to do.

I am here to be perfectly me, and you are here to be perfectly you. We are here to be brave, we are here to sit in the driver’s seat of our own lives, to really, properly, drive and be responsible for the direction we take.

Finding out who you are, what you care about, what you believe in, what you will stand for, what you will fight for, what you love, what you hate, what you’re amazing at, and importantly, what you can learn, is more valuable than I can properly express.

Knowing those things is what brings everything else together so you can operate as your best possible self. It is entirely relevant to your work, both the way you operate day to day, and your long-term path.

Knowing what you need to function well is critically important, and it’s your responsibility to know that and ensure you have what you need. When we have our settings right the rest is so much easier and fun.

If I had a magic wand and could pick one thing to do it would be remove fear. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? It’s a question I ask myself frequently, whether it’s when I’m facing large things in life or small things like — should I send this email and risk looking dumb? and when I realise fear is the only thing stopping me, I have to do it.

In large teams and organisations I understand there is a fear around people stealing ideas and claiming them as their own, of you not getting credit for what you’ve done. You are not as good as your last idea. You are way better than that. Your mind is an engine that can produce many great ideas, and the value that you will get from continuously sharing and collaborating with others, rather than protecting your turf, is huge and something I only properly believed after trying it and experiencing the outcomes.

I think that many people are held back by fear. Fear of being wrong, fear of being found out, fear of others being better, fear of being rejected.

And those things are all very likely to happen! Truly operating without fear does not mean believing they won’t, it means accepting they will and not letting them define you when they do.

Better by design. That’s a pretty commonly used phrase, and I think it applies to life as well as business and products. There are things that I consciously do to make my life better, by design, that I will share with you.

1. Find out what you care about and align your work to that: When you marry your passion and your profession your life will change. Waking up and being able to pour your energy towards something you truly care about is extremely powerful. I’ve had jobs that weren’t aligned before, when I was younger. And it’s fine, and sometimes it’s necessary. But when you can, it changes not only the enjoyment you can get from your days, but your effectiveness and ability to innovate. And finding out what you care about isn’t something that you do once! Rather, it’s something you continuously tap into as you learn and evolve and give yourself the freedom to build on your experiences.

2. Know what you need and know what you want: What you need and what you want are two very different things, and they’re both valid and important to know. What you need is relative, I don’t just mean food and water. For example, one of the things I need to function well at work is an environment where I feel accepted exactly as I am. Knowing what you want is important, which leads to the next one…

3. Set goals and celebrate things as you achieve them: If I asked you to list 8 things you achieved last year I suspect most of you would struggle to remember. A few years ago my friend and I were both in pretty rubbish situations, so we decided to put it in our calendars to meet a year later to celebrate how far we’d gone since then. We’ve done it every year since and have learnt some interesting things from the process. Each set of goals so far has been REALLY different, and it’s really neat to see that as an indication of how much changes, and it also gives a sense of freedom over current goals, knowing that whilst they are important now, they do not define us. We’ve also learnt how easy it is to forget what we’ve achieved, and we found that when it came to looking at the list to see what we’d done that we’d completely forgotten some of the goals we’d achieved earlier in the year. It’s important to celebrate the wins before resetting.

4. If you are going to fail at anything, make sure that you do it being you: It’s pretty likely that we’ll all fail at things from time to time, but I think that deep regret only really comes from going against your better judgement. Especially when you believe you can’t do better than your best, doing something different from what you think is best, because you’re afraid, is not doing your best.

5. Ask questions and admit it when you don’t know something: I think this has been one of the most powerful things for me. I grew up really naively. Happy, but naive. And so as I became exposed to more experiences I quickly learnt that there are fast ways and there are slow ways to learn. If someone uses a word in a meeting that you don’t understand, or an acronym, and you don’t speak up and ask what it means, you can easily fall behind in your overall comprehension of the conversation and your ability to contribute. I have also found that by being bold at asking people to teach me things, and following it up with really listening, results in really deep teachings from a whole heap of experts that teach me faster and deeper than anything I could do by going home and looking up things online at the end of the day.

6. Get good sleep, drink enough water, exercise regularly: It’s pretty mind-boggling that we hear this advice pretty much our whole lives and yet rarely follow it. There are lots of good habits we get told about, but these 3, are right up there with life-changing. Even after one week of sleeping say 10:30 PM — 6:30 AM, starting the day with 15 min cardio and 15 min strength or toning, and drinking 2L of water throughout can absolutely transform how you feel and operate. Do you realise, that being tired is not something we have to put up with? I got to the point where I thought that being tired was just what happened as you got a bit older and worked a bit more. That is not true. It happens because we don’t care for ourselves properly, and when we do, the energy that follows is astounding and results in far more productivity than just working longer hours.

7. Take time for yourself: This is the most important one, because without it — you’ll never really hear the answers to the rest, you’ll never know what you really care about and how to align it with what you do, and you’ll never know what you’re afraid of and what’s holding you back. I need alone time. Without it I feel really uncentered. I know I need it, and I know it’s my responsibility to make sure I get it. Even just 15 min lying in the sun on the carpet can do wonders.

All the things I’ve talked about are really about making sure you get what you need, and that you know how to work to get what you want.

Putting yourself first and making that all happen can sound selfish on the surface, and my previous CEO and I had an issue that took over a year to resolve because of it. In the start-up years we all lived together and worked ALL hours of the week. I was the only one who got 8 hours sleep, who walked every day, and who made sure I saw friends once a week. The CEO thought it was really selfish of me, and we continued to discuss it philosophically, not dramatically. Over the year everyone else experienced burnout of sorts and dropped the ball and had to be rescued, including her. When that happened, it really sunk in that it never happened to me, and that it was because I made sure I got what I needed.

Putting yourself first in a raw and reasonable way is what enables you to do, give and serve at a high level, and sustainably.

Originally published at gracefullillian.com on September 4, 2014.

Perfectly you was originally published in It Figures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.