Have you ever been presented with some information and you're just trying to work out, is this what I really needed to know? And was it the simplest message that you could have got as well? This is where storytelling with data comes in. A book I've read recently and it's got me rethinking about the kind of information that we present within petals and within our team environments. And what story are we trying to tell or are we just bombarding you with with useless information? This is a topic I'll talk about later on in the eighth petals weekly with me S jobling. So this is the eighth petals weekly and this is where I will reflecting weekly on all the things that I've been doing with petals. Hopefully giving you a bit more inside knowledge as to what's been going on, but also some takeaways to think about with your teams. It's been an interesting week. Let me say last week was fun. I'm not gonna lie. It was a bit of a change of scenery, obviously recording a lot of it away from home. I'm back in my studio. That's still work in progress, as you can probably tell. Not many pictures up yet. Don't mind cup of tea at all. But that being said, there have been a few efforts going on behind the scenes that we'll go into now. But before we get into all that, let's do some of those natural scores. So this week we've got productivity 2, enjoyment 4, teamwork down to 2. Learning is a average 3, Serenity's 3, which brings a score down to 2.8, which is again down 0.4 from the previous week. So let me explain what's been going on. So last week, as I alluded to, it was going to be a little bit tricky trying to get everyone working together. It was bad time for 13. We've all got kids and some with much younger kids. So with it being school breaks, not very easy to get that time together out of hours. So what I did do, I tried to chip away at some of the stuff on my own where I didn't necessarily need some of that teamwork. I had a look at that SHAD CN component library that we want to use for building out the web app. The pipeline wasn't very friendly with me. I'm not going to lie. I was struggling to get the builds working myself. So I'll put a pin in that until I know that I can get some quality time to collaborate with the engineers on this to make sure that we get it working properly. First time and then we can start exploring how we're going to use those components within the whole app. In the meantime, I did shift my focus back to the marketing site. I know I've said before, that's a Q2 plan and it still will be, but in the meantime I can get some ideas flowing around what that's going to entail. I don't jump down some ideas around the sort of content that we want to cover. Obviously, new users that are not familiar with Petals explain what it is, how it works, how they can get started, bringing some case studies from people that have used it, what's works well, what hasn't, some of the examples and actually which I'll talk about later on. I did discover a great piece by an old friend, Paul D, who blogged last week about how he's managed to retain not just only build, but retain a really strong design team internationally thanks to the use of tools like Petals, which I will be speaking to Paul about later on in this show today. I also thinking a bit more about how people engage with other characters. There's recently been some hype around Duolingo, how they've killed off their main mascot duo, but I thought it's been a great marketing ploy to make sure that Duolingo is still relevant. And what it did get me thinking about was the people do engage or end users per se, do engage better with characters and Personas. And then again, this comes back to actually creating good Personas in your product development, actually thinking about what kind of users am I bringing in, am I bringing in leaders, am I bringing in team members, are we bringing in a bit of a mixture, which we really are. So what I started doing was fleshing out some characters and some Personas that we can use to demonstrate how things like Petals can work in all levels. So we'll have like a manager, we'll have a team player, we'll have some different personality types behind the scenes. And I started playing around with some animals even to kind of connect with the natural logic and language that we use with Petals. Very early days. Obviously not ready to share this yet, but it was really interesting to bounce These ideas around ChatGPT, for example, and see what they came up with and compare with some of my own ideas as well. So as you can tell, lots of rabbit holes to go down literally and metaphorically and we will share stuff as and when I've got stuff worth presenting with you. What I have been learning about this week though, is around Storytelling With Data, a great book written by Cole Nussbelma Naflich, which I will also put some links to her YouTube videos as well. It's got me rethinking about some of the early stuff that I've done from my old designer days, my own web app days as well. And it actually links quite nicely with some of the material that Brian created back in the late naughties, early tens. Anyway, he wrote a book called Designing with Data and Cole talks a lot about similar stuff, like what information are you trying to present? You know, what story are you telling from all the data? We can throw all sorts of data at you. And even like when we looked at Google Looker last week with how to get some metrics out, I don't want to just put all the data out there. And this is something you've got to be very careful with the petals as well. Lots of numbers crunching around. But actually, what story are you trying to tell with this data? Let's go back to my introduction when I was talking about my scores. I've now started using the visualizations that I've always used in the apps with the flower analogy. So you've got the heat maps petals all the way around with colors to indicate whether it's in a good place or not. And hopefully that gives you a better visual indication as to what's going on. But also what's the most important part? The numbers are probably the most important, but actually that average in the middle is. Is the most important, especially when you start talking about the extremes between the teams. Another visualization that we've got in the app is the heat map that we like to show for all the snapshots. So when all team members have contributed, you'll then get a color coded grid of how each individual contributed towards that snapshot. And that also tells an interesting story because then you can start to look for any themes, like if there are a lot of reds or greens and where are the trends, where are the outliers? And then ask those really difficult questions potentially. I was in a session last week and one of the individuals said, why are you stressed out to an individual? And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't target people out. But posed a question. Is there any reason why anyone has been standing out with poor serenity or why someone has been low in productivity? Also look at the positives. When you got all the greens around the heat maps or in the petals, call out why you know, what has been so successful in the past couple of weeks or whatever time frame you're looking at. This is a really fundamental point I want to get across with petals. It's an enabler for conversations and you've got a lot of data to go around. It's very subjective data, be careful how you use it. But tell that story as to why you've come up with these scores. Okay. By making a bit of a twist to our episode this week, I invited along Paul to talk about his blog post and how he's used petals with his distributed team and any lessons we might learn from his situation. Again, nice little story, let's get into this.

I, I, I gently introduced him to it and, and it was great. So I created a, a spreadsheet and in that spreadsheet was everyone's names. This was a Google Docs spreadsheet. And I set up a little, little drop down so that I could mark each of the different pedals attributes to the scores that they gave. So it was nice and easy and quick for me to do that. And I, I ran that for, I would say about two and a half, three months before I started to, to look at the data because I, I really wanted to get a score from them every week that would have given me the most accurate results. And I think even the pedal system recommends that, you know, weekly data. But like I said, because, because of the time constraints and what was happening, I couldn't do it. It had to be every other week. So there's a little bit of dilution there in the data that I received, but it was better than nothing. So I went with it and I wanted to have enough data to really kind of extrapolate some good information from it. So credit this spreadsheet. And then I added another column for any additional notes if there's any, any weird stuff. So maybe this guy had family bereavement or something, or maybe this guy just got a promotion or, or this girl had an issue with a manager. Something like, so that if there's any spikes or dips, I've got some kind of reference. Yeah.

At that point, really, wasn't it just for your, your own benefit and theirs in a way. But what happened then? Oh yeah, cool. Now I know why that score dipped or spotted.

Absolutely. I mean, I'm still taking notes during the one on one as usual, but these were notes that would be anything extreme or out of the ordinary or anything that was like an anomaly. Just to add a little bit of context. Um, so then, so I've got the spreadsheet and then here's, here's the beautiful thing about it. I, I Fed all that data into an AI engine and just to analyze it and, and to draw some graphs. Yeah, and it was amazing. I was able to, to, to track essentially the emotional journey of the team over the course of three months.

And fascinating to watch though, as you as a. Leading the team as well. Going. It's going up, it's going well. Yes.

Yeah. I mean that's, that's the easy statistics. The thing I found most interesting was, was when it was dipping. And yeah, I mean that's never good, but that's, that's a, that's an action point. That's something that you can kind of go, okay, well what's happening here? What's going on?

Yeah.

And at the time we were doing a dashboard redesign for, I mean it was essentially the, the entire company. It was very high visibility. This was a dashboard redesign that was going to permeate about 90% of our verticals. So it was important to get right. And there was a lot of stakeholder feedback. There was a lot of leadership direction. Should we put it like that? Opinion. Yeah. Lots of conversations. And there was a lot of, a lot of stress around it because Dubai is a place where people get what they want. From my experience, culturally. Yeah, culturally, from my experience in Dubai, money is not an object. People if, if they want something done and they want it done fast and they want it done right, then they just get it done. There's none of this, you know, pick two out of the three. Do you want it done right, cheap? No, I want all three. And that's just. So there's a little bit of that culture trickling down of where, where leadership just expect things to be done either on time or, you know, and there's always impossible deadlines floating around. I know a lot of teams struggle with this. I know this permeates every single business in the world. But there's a little bit more of a higher expectation for this Dubai based business where they just, they wanted the impossible done yesterday in every sense of the word. So there was a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. So this dashboard redesign was causing a dip right across the team. And I was able to pick up and identify that through, through looking at the stats. I noticed that before we started this project, everyone was, yeah, everything's great, you know, fours, fives, whatever. And then this project happened and I was able to go, okay, right, well this, this is the point where we started to get into the nuts and bolts of getting this thing done. And then I noticed that it would dip even more once Leadership had conversations with myself about the timeline and expectations and then I would have to then communicate that back. So. Oh, okay, here's where this conversation happened. So what do you do about this? How do you turn this around? It was, it was fascinating to be able to overlay the, the timeline of the projects that we were working on on top of the timeline of when these peaks and troughs happened through pedals. And I was able to then go and talk to my team and kind of understand like what their challenges were. And there was, they said to me, look Paul, it's, it's a time crunch. I've got all these meetings that I need to do, I've got all these other expectations on my plate, plus I've got pressure to get this done. I'm not having fun with this work, I'm not enjoying doing this work. They said I'll get it done but it's not the most fun project in the world. And of course as a manager you have to go, well, you know, not everything's going to be roses. Everything you do that's just part and parcel of the job. Some things are going to be amazing, some things not. But what I was able to do was with that feedback, go and kind of look at the team's bandwidth overall.

Yeah.

And after discussions with the team we said okay, right. On Wednesdays what I can do as your manager is I cannot put any meetings in your calendar on a Wednesday. Wednesdays can be heads down Wednesdays that will unblock you at least a portion of your week to have some proper heads down work to get this stuff done. Let's not worry about one on ones, let's not worry about meetings, let's not do any of this catch up nonsense and anything that was not a prior zero critical event, we're not having a meeting for. And after I did that, I mean it didn't solve everything but it let the team know that I was on their side. It did help adjust some of the stress, it did help to alleviate some of that. I mean I, I, I don't know what the ideal solution for them would have been but it was the most I could have done for them at the time and I would not have known about that immediately if it hadn't been for, for pedals helping to guide that way.

Really interesting stuff there from Paul and I really appreciate his findings. The time he's based over in Pacific time states. I'm in the UK so there's an eight hour time difference there. And again, evidence you can do this but you really have to factor into how you have those conversations. Hopefully some useful stuff for anyone that's following the petals weekly there and hopefully it'll inspire some more of you to reach out and join me for the conversation. I'm gonna wrap it up there call it for this week and hopefully you have got some insights to what's going on with petals. Got some ideas as to what you might want to do with your own teams but also think about that storytelling aspect that we talked about earlier. Do all the typical social things like subscribe, repost, whatever just as long as you're following along. Give me something to go on. I know this stuff is landed said it being useful. We're up to eight episodes now and I'm going to take stock at the quarterly marker so hopefully I can get more engagement from you all and in the meantime hopefully you will help your teams grow and I'll be back next week with the 9th weekly.