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Individual Space:
A NavCenter™ Environment for an Enterprise
of One
James B. Smethurst
September 21, 1997
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How can a personal work space be transformed into a NavCenter™
environment? How can an individual make use of the NavCenter concept? In developing
the NavCenter concept, we have discovered that a certain number of "Rules
of Engagement" (standards and practices) go a long way towards helping
a NavCenter space fulfill its purpose. In transferring the NavCenter concept
to an individual's workspace, we have found that the Rules of Engagement for
a NavCenter environment can still be applied, with some minor modifications.
(Please see the "Rules of Engagement"
article to familiarize yourself with these terms.)
Straw Dog Design
This represents a subtle shift in focus for organizing your work each day. A Straw
Dog for each day, designed to achieve certain goals, to bring certain pieces of your
vision into reality, allows you to remain immersed in the context of your vision
even while you focus on task-level work.
Circle Up
This concept takes on a new meaning for an Enterprise of One. One application of
this is to be able to bring together your value web in a physical space to work together
on the larger venture which you all constitute. Another application is to bring together
the stakeholders of any particular project on which your enterprise is working.
Sponsorship
By venturing into the world as an Enterprise of One,
it is all the more important for you to maintain one or more relationships with a
sponsor or mentor with more experience in your field of work and from whom you may
seek counsel.
Center Maintained as an Invitation to Work
As with a larger NavCenter environment, a more organized environment
allows you to concentrate on the work at hand and to find the things that need
finding. The ritual of resetting the space can become especially important for
an E of 1 as a way to end the work day, leave the work in the space, and free
yourself to enjoy your time outside of work.
Real Artists Ship
Document, document, document! Keep track of
thoughts, phone calls, meetings, projects with work products (even very simple ones) that
give context, provide synthesis and propose next steps for each of the events
that occur. Organize these products in such a way that you can access them
quickly and easily when the need arises in the future. You have ONE chance
to document something--NOW. You never know at the time whether or not it might
be useful in the future to have a synthesis of an event. For more on this
concept, see the 10 Step Knowledge
Management model.
Being There
You must be committed to this work. This must be the work you love. You must choose
to do this work, or you should be doing something else. When individuals create enterprises
of one, this rule is normally the reason for doing venturing into self-employment.
A Day in a NavCenter Environment
8:30am
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Enter the space prepared to work. The space was reset the night before and waits
invitingly for you to begin. Your first task is to revisit the Straw Dog for today
that you designed the night before. Given the nature of the calls and meetings scheduled
for the day, you have decided that today's theme will be nurturing the value web.
Last night's design seems to hold. |
8:45am-
9:30am |
Scan
the newspapers and two selected magazines for articles related to members
of your ValueWeb™ community and the industries in which they operate.
Enter significant findings into your archives database. |
9:30am-
11:30am |
Conference call involving stakeholders in a project that is moving towards completion.
The project has gone well, and the various pieces of the value web
represented on the call have been pleasantly surprised by how smoothly things have
gone.  You begin laying groundwork for cultivating more projects with this collection
of people. You coordinate a physical meeting of these people closer to the project completion
date. |
11:30am-
12:00pm
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Debrief yourself on the call. Compose and send the messages that were promised during
the call. Include a brief work product that synthesizes the contents and tone of
the call. |
12:00pm-
2:00pm
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Lunch with a potential customer out of the office. The customer surprises you by being
much more enthusiastic than you had imagined. Thinking back to your Straw Dog, you
had scheduled a call this afternoon with a few investors to consider some long range strategy.
You decide to postpone that call and invite this customer back to your office to
continue this discussion. This customer, you realize, will add both resources and
diversity to your value web, if this relationship blossoms, and therefore this break
from the Straw Dog nevertheless achieves the kind of goals you had hoped for today --if
it works. |
2:00pm-
4:30pm
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You return with you customer to your NavCenter. The space is still configured
for your individual work, but you quickly fold your workstation out of the
way and set up a small collaborative space in front of the 8' Work Wall. The
customer spends these few minutes looking in fascination at the information
you have displayed on half of your WorkWall™ units--project status
maps that are tied together and to the mission statement above, interesting
articles and information about members of your value web that you have posted
on hypertiles, quotes that you have stumbled across recently that you have
found to be relevant to the work at hand. Once
the space is configured with a small round table and two chairs facing the
four feet of WorkWall space that remains free, you sit down with the customer
and discuss the possibilities of your relationship --how
each of you might fit into each other's ValueWeb communities, what your
individual visions
are and how they might complement each other, what projects might allow
each of you to add value to each other on one level while exploring other
possible avenues
along which the relationship might develop. You use the WorkWall unit to
scribe the session.
You reach a tentative agreement with the customer and arrange another meeting. |
4:30pm-
5:15pm |
You debrief yourself again and enter this information into your knowledge base. You
set up the necessary files and records for a new customer. You iterate the wall scribe
and arrange for it to be delivered to the customer as a work product the next
morning. |
5:15pm-
5:45pm
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You reset the space and configure it for the work that will begin the day tomorrow. You design a
Straw Dog for tomorrow, again accounting for the progress of today and for the tasks that
are scheduled for tomorrow. Once these tasks are completed, you leave the space until
the next morning. |
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