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Jonny is naturally a pessimist, and he is not sorry, even when the optimists among us find it uncomfortable. Pessimists exploit their state of mind to be well prepared, predict future challenges, and find multiple ways around them. Know your bias and don’t apologize for it
#Examples of optimism how to#
Find out how to see your team’s bias, what to do about it, and some practical methods for exploiting optimistic and pessimistic mindsets at different stages of the product development lifecycle. Stay with us to find out how to embrace both in your team. It’s how we manage risk, because ignoring them and focussing on optimistic thinking doesn’t make them go away. Yet executing on a big vision requires us to systematically identify and de-risk big assumptions. Without big thinking and unhindered optimism, it’s too easy to become preoccupied with incremental change that makes things better but doesn’t change the world. Teams and organizations need both optimists and pessimists. Watch Organizational Alignment Through Vision and Principles By Elena Luneva. Instead, they live in the future, obsessed with impossible missions, and are often considered unhinged and a little bit whacky. While a lot of customer innovation happens through persistent, methodical, and diligent work to iterate to success, most of the world’s great innovators aren’t known for it. It’s how we think bigger, push boundaries, and get beyond local optimization to reach new peaks. Optimism becomes table stakes for imagining what might be possible, creating excitement, and motivating people. It’s hard to envision possible futures that are worth pursuing without letting go of the constraints of today. There is a time and place for both optimism and pessimism. Instead, a healthy dose of pessimism might have saved this company time and money. No amount of optimism could help this project meet the deadline handed down. They didn’t realize each company used significantly different technology stacks, had products with strong overlap in some areas while missing gaps in others, engineering quality was variable, and many of the same terms were used to mean different things. They’d bought seven smaller companies, figuring that integration was going to be the easy part.
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I remember working on a complex programme, trying to help a cash-rich company aiming to launch a complicated social network. These have an ambitious scope, often with a fixed deadline, and all the stars have to align in order to succeed. We’ve all worked on a Miracle Project during our time building digital products. Instead, high performing teams acknowledge the role of both, and create systems of work that exploit their benefits equally. Let’s unpack optimism and pessimism, and look at ways to make the most of both in your team. Maya Angelouīeing optimistic isn’t better than being pessimistic, and being either exclusively isn’t enough to win. Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.
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