What are you going to do with Day 1?

Since the pandemic began, and especially in some segments like hospitality, every day seems like a new beginning or a new Day 1. In the coming weeks and months we will have moments in the weeds, moments of celebrations and moments of failure (learnings), but let's think about a few things: 

Creativity, disruptive thought, and innovation have never been more important. In a past post I shared my thoughts on how constraints and "inside the box" thinking drives creativity, but we should also consider DOUBT.

Doubt opens our minds (remember to stay open minded longer) and allows us to doubt the rules that have made us successful. Doubt recognizes our models and rules can and must be broken. 

It is important that we redefine how we measure success. If we compare ourselves to how we were successful last year we may be setting ourselves up for failure. 

When we have bad events during the course of the day or project remember to move on to the next thing to shrink the time we spend on the bad event. Ultimately the good events will outweigh the bad and we then control the bad parts of the day better.

Solve the tomorrow’s problems by reacting to the root causes of today’s challenges, but focus on the future

I like to think about innovation, change and the future with three mindsets:

1.    Attacker mindset – what will it take for us to disrupt the business model

2.    Agile mindset – experiment, speed to market, we don’t know everything

3.    “Failure is ok” mindset, but let’s call it learn fast as opposed to fail fast