Don't Waste the Reboot: A Yak Collective project

Hi there Innovation at Scale readers! I have an announcement today that I think will be of interest to any readers of Innovation at Scale.

I’ve been collaborating with The Yak Collective, a loose network of independent consultants, and today we published our first collective effort, a deck of 25 creative and unexpected provocations, ideas, and action frameworks to navigate the Covid-19 crisis:
Don't Waste the Reboot

The goal is to offer organizations of all sorts — business, nonprofit, government — a real and meaningful alternative to traditional mainstream sources of advice, counsel, and intelligence for navigating this crisis.

Please do check it out, and pass it along to people in your organization who could take inspiration from some of our ideas!

The deck is organized around six core themes:

• Response & Learning

• Experimentation & Innovation

• Reboot Mental Models

• Sensemaking & Storytelling

• Complexity & Resilience

• Deploying Indies

My contribution to this deck is Idea #1, Responsiveness > Preparedness. You can find it on slide 13, including a brief case study about H-E-B’s COVID response, which you might recall from a previous issue of this newsletter.

There are lots of other interesting and challenging ideas in the deck; a few personal highlights for me were:

• Designing for Continuous Adaptation by Vaughn Tan, which offers organizational responses to the “succession of new normals” that will follow the present crisis

• Surfing on the "Edge of Chaos" by Paul Millerd, which offers insights on how to design an organization as a “complex adaptive system”

• Restructure as a Small-World Network by Vinay Débrou, about the sweet spot between disparate bets and tightly coupled strategies when planning for uncertain futures

• Reverse Anthropology by Jordan Allen, about the role that outside viewpoints can play in driving organizational change
  

About The Yak Collective

The Yak collective is a network of independent consultants who all have their own consulting practices, but also work together on larger projects. If you are intrigued by an idea/framework, feel free to reach out to the relevant contributor directly. The Yak Collective is not an agency or intermediary. We are trying to develop a very different approach of developing and delivering business ideas and intelligence based primarily on effective and fluid collaboration models inspired by the open-source software world. You can learn more about us at our new website, yakcollective.org

Like bits and pieces of what you saw in this deck? Feel free to contact one or more individual contributors directly! The Yak Collective is not an agency or intermediary. Our members collaborate because they want to, and each of us maintains their own independent consulting practice. We offer you a catalog of ideas and people to choose from, not a bundle.

Like a lot of what you see? Contact Paul Millerd to loop The Yak Collective into your reboot efforts. We will assemble the right small team and set of ideas to work with you, in whatever way is most effective. It might be a study or report. It might be facilitating a workshop or series of conversations for your executive team. Or it might just be an ongoing conversation with one or more of us.

Want to hang out with us LIVE as we work these problems? Join our Discord server. Our working process is literally open. Any independent consultant from anywhere in the world who has ideas is welcome to join our efforts, contribute to and lead collaborative projects. Any prospective client is welcome to hang out as well.

Help us reach decision-makers: If you'd like to help us out, you can do so by spreading this word in your network. Just forward this email to decision-makers at organizations you think could benefit from discovering these frameworks.

Connect with us

Follow The Yak Collective on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to keep up with new releases and to join in the conversation.

If you're an independent consultant or potential client, you're welcome to join our Discord server and hang out with us live as we do our collaborative work. Just ask me for an invite.

Here's the link again: Don't Waste the Reboot

Read, share, and let me know what you think. And stay tuned! You'll be hearing more about The Yak Collective and its work in the coming months.