The Quest Mentality
Jim March is a legendary organizational theorist* who posited that organizations create value (or "new knowledge") in one of two ways: either by exploring new possibilities or exploiting old certainties (ie executing known opportunities with known resources). His research dealt with how to balance the tradeoffs inherent in larger organizations seeking to do a bit of both, as they generally compete for the same pool of scarce resources.
By definition, entrepreneurship is an exploratory endeavor. How founders set the exploratory frame for the team sets the tone of the work environment, and is an incredible signal of the valued ways of working together. I was talking with Ellie Buckingham and Miri Buckland, co-founders of The Landing, and was blown away by what they call, "The Quest Mentality" inside their growing organization.
Ellie: "The team has a quest mentality. We are so excited about the product we have in the world, but it's just the start. It's nowhere near the fully magic thing yet, but we're getting there."
Jeremy: "OK, you just said the word 'quest,' and I don't know if that was just an offhand comment, but it felt to me like that's something you've thought about before and I'd love to hear more about what that means."
Miri: "Shout out to one of our former teammates, Allison, who came up with the phrase, 'The Quest Mentality' - it has really stuck with our team. In a way that has been ultimate phrasing for us to apply to the company as a whole. Framing it as a quest is much more fun. At this really early stage, we are still searching for product market fit, and I think that acknowledging it as a kind of quest or journey requires a constant test and learn cycle of small iterations to get closer and closer to product market fit. It's what allows our team to move really quickly and feel like we are going after a common goal, even if we don't really know what product market fit looks like right now. So for us it's really just embedded in the culture of the team, as a way we approach everything from product mapping to solving bugs to where we see ourselves in a years time."
I love the way they're framing the work for their team, and thought it's a mentality that many others could leverage among their teams, whether in the context of an established organization, or not.
Have you used, seen, or experienced other frames that are useful to set the tone for exploratory teams?
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*"March is perhaps best known for his pioneering contributions to organization and management theory... (his) influence on students of organizations and management and his accomplishments in other areas of social science have conferred on him an almost unprecedented reputation as a rigorous scholar and a deep source of wisdom. In the academic literature, it has become de rigueur to cite his articles. Professor John Padgett of the University of Chicago wrote in the journal Contemporary Sociology that 'Jim March is to organization theory what Miles Davis is to jazz…. March’s influence, unlike that of any of his peers, is not limited to any possible subset of the social science disciplines; it is pervasive.'”