Welcome to The Diamond.

A newsletter to keep you in the loop & help you get s$%t done more efficiently.

To tailor your experience, let us know what you’d like to read about:

In this edition of The Diamond

• Why ‘The Diamond’?

• The 4-question test to see if OKR is right for your org

• Someone put a data centre at the bottom of a swimming pool

• Get something useful out of ChatGPT with the ‘expert imposter’ method

• Steal our favourite monday.com automation (we call it the Deadline Fudger)

• This week’s album cover: Death By Excel

Why ‘The Diamond’?

No, it’s not because we love Bling. Although we do.

The title of our newsletter comes from our approach to solving hard problems: The Double Diamond method.

Here’s a clip of our CEO, Sha, explaining what the double diamond means to him.

We live by the Double Diamond.

It's a design thinking process with four stages:

1. Discover: We ask open-ended questions to get a deep understanding of the problem you're trying to solve.

2. Define: We take insights from the Discover stage to define the problem and set clear goals, so we design the right solution.

3. Develop: We use our creativity and expertise to develop a tailored solution that meets your specific needs.

4. Deliver: We implement the solution we've developed and give you ongoing support to make sure it works.

4 questions to ask your leadership team before implementing OKR

OKRs are a strategy & goal-setting framework popularised by Google and others in the 90s and 00s.

When used effectively, OKR is known to enhance innovation & drive massive performance improvement. OKR is not just for the tech industry, but it’s not for all businesses either.

Before embarking on an OKR change project, consider these 4 questions:

1. Is our current goal-setting process effective?

If the answer is yes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

However, if you want to set clearer, more lofty goals and improve collaboration & innovation, OKR could assist.

2. Do we have a clear Vision? 

OKR without a vision will not work. The beauty of OKR is its ability to align people to big, hairy audacious goals. Without a clear organisational vision, those goals will veer off track.

3. Is failure an option?

Truly innovative companies like Google measure themselves on how much they fail, not how much they succeed. Failure is key to innovation.

Truth is, 99.9% of organisations aren’t wired like Google. You may not have room to fail in your environment. OKRs may not be right for you.

4. Are we willing to commit the time & resources required for implementation?

OKR is not a set-and-forget solution.

It’s designed around a regular cadence of updates & alignment across work groups. Early on, you may experience more meetings, not less.

Plus, any change project takes significant resources to communicate the benefits, enable users, overcome resistance and embed new ways of working.

If you answered these questions favourably, OKR may be a way to break down silos & achieve better business outcomes.

Click here for a more in-depth look at OKRs & how to set them, or steal our trail guide below.

You’ve heard of a data lake, but this hits different.

The heat generated by a small data centre in the UK is being used to heat an Olympic swimming pool in a bid to fight rising energy costs. We’ve definitely wanted to chuck our computer in the pool once or twice so we love the idea.

ChatGPT is so hot right now. Try these ‘expert imposter’ prompts and see how it could help you (or steal your job).

Knowledge workers everywhere are half stressing, half celebrating over the rise of AI tools. The best-known among them is ChatGPT. If you’ve ever mucked around with it, you’ll have a feeling for its power.

Use these prompts from LinkedIn creator Sam Szuchan and you might get ChatGPT to produce something you can actually use.

Our favourite monday.com automation

This simple automation (we call it The Deadline Fudger) will give you some breathing space on projects :) Use it sparingly...

Today’s album cover

Each edition we’ll use Canva’s AI to generate the cover art, and share the prompt we used.

This week’s piece is called Death By Excel

Prompt used: A Salvador Dali painting of a person staring into a computer screen displaying an infinite Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with endlessly complicated figures and details.