The OpenWater Blog

If a Tree Falls on Tim’s House… Does the OpenWater Office Make a Sound?

Yep: a tree fell, narrowly missing Tim’s house. Luckily, no one was hurt and the property damage was minimal. No elephants were involved.

Do You Have an Elephant Problem?

We’re taking proactive steps toward failure-proofing. Why? Elephants.

An “elephant problem” is the tendency to make reactionary decisions based on what is in front of you. You may jump to a solution that is wrong simply because you’re freaked out.

Another way to describe faulty decision making is the “survivorship bias” mentality. By evaluating your “survivors” you’re overlooking invisible causation (often the true culprit).

The results are the same: reactionary decisions without careful evaluation. Both are exactly the kind of decision making businesses want to avoid. Yet, because these logical fallacies are so common, it takes calm vigilance to root them out.

(For example, we often observe organizations struggling to establish long-term business processes. This is especially difficult during staff turnover. Learn to minimize these errors in our forthcoming piece, Guide to Change Management.)

Metrics Matter a Ton

OpenWater has launched a new initiative, lead by Tim, to evaluate the effectiveness of all departments over the coming weeks. The plan is to observe best practices, set specific goals, and get/give feedback more quickly. This will help us avoid “elephant problems”.

Rooted in our company attitude of continual improvement we are doing this for two reasons:

1. What gets measured can be improved.
2. We are building our ‘war chest’ of talent and fiscal resources. By taking an impartial inventory we lay the groundwork for future growth and expansion. We think that one cannot be a good steward of resources — of any kind — without understanding and accepting your starting point.  

Launching GDPR

All clients connected to the European Union must comply with new legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation and Privacy Shield (GDPR).

GDPR covers a range of rights pertaining to online activity, such as data use disclosures and the right-to-be-forgotten. Similar legislature exists in Canada and might be coming to the US down the road.

We take client security very, very seriously. We are finalizing and documenting our GDPR compliance now. It should be ready by the end of March if not sooner.

New Conference App Integrations

Additionally, we launched two app integrations into our Growth Stack. OpenWater clients can now sync with two conference app leaders: Guidebook and Core-Apps.

Optimism continues to be at a high, fallen trees or not!

Photo: A tree fell over in Tim’s yard during recent wind storms.

Katie McCaskey

Katie is OpenWater's Content Director. Her interests include entrepreneurship, permaculture, and blockchain. She enjoys spicy food and salty words.

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