I’ve always felt it is very important to learn from others. Especially those you feel are doing things really well. I’ve been blessed in that I’ve had some brilliant journalists and writers as mentors in my nine-year career, and I’ve always learned something from them – including, of course, Money Marketing’s very own editor Katey.
I have also worked with a few people, who I’m not going to name – for obvious reasons – who have taught me how not to go about journalism (no one from Money Marketing – just to be clear).
At my first job, the brand I worked for held a lot of events and one thing which we tried to make sure featured at all our conferences was a speaker from a different industry. At a conference about energy, for example, one of the speakers may have been from a broadband start-up.
There are plenty of things energy retailers can learn about customer service. In the same way, I think there are many things advice firms can learn from other sectors or professions. Not just about service, but about the implementation of new technology.
This week, I headed up to Edinburgh for Lang Cat Live Home Game 3. The event featured bagpipes, Irn Bru, Scottish tablet, kilts, a massage chair at Parmenion’s exhibition stand and an old-school Pac-Man competition (see video highlights here).
Perhaps more importantly, though, there was also plenty of great debate and discussion.
One session I found especially interesting, given my belief that it is important to learn from others, was the opening speech by Starling Bank’s chief technology advocate Jason Maude.
In it, he laid out three lessons for disrupting and innovating, based on Starling’s experience in retail banking.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously said: “Move fast and break things, if you’re not breaking things, you are not moving fast enough.”
What he meant by that was not: Let’s release buggy code, let’s release whatever out into the atmosphere.
He meant you have to actually get stuff in front of customers to know whether it’s working or not.
“You can create any magical code you like completely in isolation,” said Maude, at the event. “But unless it is actually out there doing something for someone, then you don’t even know if it’s working.
So, sometimes you need to get stuff in front of people, rather than hiding things behind the scenes.
But the finance industry said, after the years, that’s all very well good for those big social media companies to do these fly-by-night things where they release tweets. “No one cares if you miss a tweet, or a post. No one cares if that goes missing,” Maude said.
“But if a payment goes missing, that’s a big problem. Everyone complains about that. So we decided to abandon this ridiculous ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy – that’s for them over there.
“We release things slowly, and sedately. We are conservative with a small ‘c’, because everyone trusts us with their money, and they won’t trust us if we start doing things wrong.”
“So what happens is the finance industry adopted a process of changing very slowly, very conservatively, and nothing ever went wrong,” he added. This is, of course, sarcasm.
Plenty of things have gone wrong in the finance industry.
“We at Starling like studying these disasters,” said Maude. “We are fascinated by these disasters and how things went wrong, because we want to avoid those things.”
Move fast, and break things or move slow, and break things. If you’re moving, you break things.
The world is changing, not just in consumer expectations and how customers work. But also in what the regulator expects. And that requires a change to systems in some way.
So things are going to break. If you change, we know that “all change runs the risk of breaking”.
“We’re going to have to ask ourselves: How do we embrace change but, at the same time, retain this good element of being conservative with a small ‘c’ with people’s money in order that they trust us?”
Maude listed three lessons for finance companies wanting to shake things up in the space.
The first one is: Don’t make change and stability enemies of each other.
“Many people when they talk about change and stability, talk about these two things being in balance with one another.
“The problem is, if these things are in balance, what that means is that if you try and move one up, the other one has to go down.
“You will find that different departments are on different sides of the seesaw.”
Sales and product development are trying to push up innovation, whereas the risk compliance and legal departments are trying to push up safety and security.
You’ve got different sides of your organisation at war with each other, trying to push up their side of the seesaw, which pushes down the other side.
“At Starling, we’ve changed the model of this to make sure that the innovation and change development and the safety, security and reliability, support each other.
The second principle, Maude said, is you have to concentrate on resilience.
“Resilience doesn’t ask the question, how do we stop things going wrong?
“Resilience assumes things that are going to go wrong. Things are going to fail. You are going to fall down. And then you ask the question, how do you recover quickly from that?”
And finally, principle three is you have to disconnect the business change and the system change from each other, to a certain degree.
“As long as you have created your system so it is resilient, you will be able to create a situation where the engineers can release as often as they like to try and get a new feature into a position where it can be turned on,” he said.
“That way, you can move the software at one speed and the human beings at another. They need to run at different speeds from each other. Because software needs to be developed fast.”
