Elevating Teamwork: The Five Ideals Concept from "The Unicorn Project"

The Five Ideals concept from "The Unicorn Project" by Gene Kim is a set of guiding principles that can help teams achieve excellence in project management. These ideals are based on the belief that successful projects require a culture of collaboration, experimentation, learning, and improvement.

By adopting these ideals, teams can create a work environment that fosters innovation, creativity, and continuous improvement, ultimately leading to successful project outcomes. In this post, we will explore the Five Ideals concept and how it can help elevate your organisation's teamwork and project management practices.

The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity

“Locality in our organizations allows teams to make decisions without having to communicate and coordinate with people outside the team, potentially having to get approvals from distant authorities or committees so far removed from the work that they have no relevant basis to make good decisions,” he says, clearly disgusted.”

It is the opposite to hardcoded changes, procedures that never change, and “we always do it this way” approach. For the leadership, it means decentralised command. It would help if you allowed people to make individual decisions for themselves. They know the best. The First Ideal is also one of the prerequisites for asynchronous work. We can’t depend on someone else to move and progress our work.

The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy

“For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.”

Back to back meetings, steering committees approving your work and the lack of the sense of achievements at the end of the day. Nightmare, but yet, it’s the daily bread for many people. The Second Ideal is about the flow. We should be able to focus on challenges. The challenges should be hard enough to keep us motivated and engaged. On the other hand, they should not be too complicated to avoid exhaustion. (Look at the graph of The Flow concept by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work

“The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. It is the dynamic that allows us to change and improve how we work, informed by learning. As Sensei Dr. Steven Spear said, ‘It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.”

It is the core for agile method. It could be implemented to work, parenting and in life generally. We should always keep improving our environment. It could be as easy as moving your coffee machine to the better spot, so you save 15 seconds in the morning. Through running retrospective after every complete project or outage. Up to deciding what to learn now, so that you can improve your skills and apply for a better job. But it all starts with tiny steps, that will save us literally two seconds.

?? Recommended read: “2 Second Lean Book”.

The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

“The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.”

The Fourth Ideal is the core of growth. If there is no psychological safety, people will follow the orders, do the minimum required to keep their job and in the end leave at the first opportunity. Psychological safety allows creating the culture of mutual respect, bonds of loyalty, growth, love, help and readiness for assistance. Trades of character that we know from another book: “Heroic Leadership”.

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

“And if we can’t experiment, we can’t learn!”

It is so easy to forget, even when we look at the other four ideals. We want to work locally, have fun while working on the newest and shiniest technology. We want to keep improving our daily work and do it in an environment that is friendly. But why we do what we do? What is our inner compass when we make decisions? It’s too easy to get detached from the broader company mission. We do what we do to serve our customers. It could be internal customers and could be our external, paying customers, but our mission should always be to keep the short feedback loop with them. Experiment, improve and produce value for them and with them in the process.

The Five Ideals concept from "The Unicorn Project" by Gene Kim is a set of guiding principles that can help teams achieve excellence in project management. These ideals are based on the belief that successful projects require a culture of collaboration, experimentation, learning, and improvement.

By adopting these ideals, teams can create a work environment that fosters innovation, creativity, and continuous improvement, ultimately leading to successful project outcomes. In this post, we will explore the Five Ideals concept and how it can help elevate your organisation's teamwork and project management practices.

For more lessons from "The Unicorn Project" check my blog post 3 lessons from the Unicorn Project.