The Novavi Way

An overview of our purpose, values and habits

Purpose

Novavi means ”I will renew”. It symbolises the deliberate intention and practice of focused renewal.

What is the impact we intend to have in the world?

As a collective, our focus right now is excellence in the following domains:

• Kaizen coaching, mentoring and teaching intentional ways of work, from strategy elaboration and deployment to smooth tactical execution.

• Adaptive oversight and leadership education and evolution. This includes building cultural awareness and enabling improved impacts in organisations.

• Disciplined Agile and FLEX value stream excellence services.

• We are also open to embracing all other evolving agile and lean principles, frameworks, practices, methods and ways of work.

Since most of the Novavi community lives in New Zealand, we are most comfortable serving the timezones from Hawaii to India. However, as we live in a global village, we welcome opportunities and will explore ways of working with anyone.

We aim for long term thriving and sustainability rather than growing Novavi aggressively. Novavi is not intended to be an attractive purchasing target. However, Novavi spin-off initiatives may become targets for acquisition by other business entities.

Values & Habits

Ecological Health and Sustainability

We value the long-term survival of human culture and work to see humans thrive in harmony with the planet.

• We intend to thrive indefinitely, inspiring customer delight through joy in work

• We practice mindfulness and balance

• We actively monitor the Novavi demand funnel and adjust capacity as humanly possible

• We use just enough, just in time; we let go of the things we no longer value or use

Joy in Work

Thriving in work over long spans of time needs joy as a key ingredient. We love what we do, and claim joy in our work at every opportunity. We actively cultivate awareness, energy and positivity.

Joy is found in:

• persistent deliberate practice with intensity and effort.

• helping others to find their own ikigai.

• overcoming challenges.

• mastering and perfecting skills.

• achieving insights.

Joy is not:

• "jazz-hands" constant happiness.

• having lots of loot like bean-bags, ping-pong, pool tables, gaming systems, etc.

• a pursuit in itself.

Customer Delight

We start each day with customer value in mind. We work in a spirit of service. We always aim to leave our:

• Coaching and mentoring clients with improved outcomes.

• Course participants with a sense of insight, accomplishment and satisfaction.

• People with a sense of achievement and professional growth.

What delights today is expected tomorrow. So, we keep inventing new ways to delight, and continue to satisfy by practicing kaizen.

Safety & Courage

The balance of courage with psychological and physical safety is our foundation. We manifest this through:

Respect

Everyone is due respect in celebration of their very existence. We practice:

• Kindness - when in doubt, we answer with kindness.

• Curiosity - when hurt or confused, we answer with curiosity.

• Empathy - we feel with people, cultivate awareness of and manage our own emotional landscapes.

• Compassion - when we notice people suffering, we consider alleviation alternatives. We focus on key constraints and seek impactful causes rather than just symptoms.

Inclusion

• Value comes from understanding people and their environment , in their myriad variations.

• Variety of thought and action - we stay curious, always ready to evaluate different perspectives.

• Harmony - we build connections among people and practice sensitivity to maintain them.

• Fair and Equitable - we cultivate radical transparency so that we always reach a fair outcome.

• Positive social impact - we are mindful of our social interactions and include them in our kaizen.

Insight

We actively seek feedback and alternative perspectives. We cultivate insight by balancing self-awareness with the perspectives of people around us.

Feedback

When people behave in a manner that:

• enriches their community, we offer reinforcing feedback - we appreciate people for their good actions or habits. We call out the specific behaviour and spell out the positive impact. We celebrate behaviours that help us flow value better. By cultivating valuable habits, we make steady deposits into each others' emotional bank accounts. Our teams get stronger, and our customers and clients get more value flowing to them sooner.

• harms their community, we frame redirective feedback as an exploration:

  • We believe there are no difficult people, just harmful behaviours - people can change their behaviour, if they intend so .

  • We focus on the behaviour, not the person. What you did is not who you are. We are all prisoners of our usual work system, and it often forces us to act in sub-optimal ways. We believe you could change your behaviour, if you choose to do so. If we cannot reach a win-win after substantial effort, then we go for no-deal.

  • We explore in a sequence similar to: I need your help. Did you notice that when you did X the impact on us was Y? What do you think? What would you like to do about it? How can we do better together?

All humans are due unconditional respect. However, behaviours do not automatically benefit from this attitude. In other words, while I respect you, when you behave in a harmful manner, you have broken trust with me, and debited your emotional bank account with me. If you get overdrawn despite feedback, then we will have to agree on no-deal, as win-win has become impossible.

We also strive to improve our coach-ability – we hold our opinions loosely, ready to experiment with or embrace new ways of thinking and behaving.

Conflict Navigation over Conflict Resolution

Conflict brings energy - this is always good , when managed well. Under-pressure that causes delay, waste, confusion or apathy is not good. Over-pressure that causes harm is also not good.

Conflict resolution is often rushed. The "You're wrong, I'm right" style of resolution is usually ineffective.

Instead, we navigate conflict for win-win outcomes. We strive to learn all we can understand from opposing perspectives. We cultivate creativity to integrate and converge on win-win approaches. We use conflict to strengthen our social bonds by overcoming intellectual and physical obstacles together.

Professional Mastery

We cultivate the discipline to practice deliberately for a daily advancement in our skills. We focus on results and let go of excuses.

Simplicity

We keep things simple as can be, no simpler .

Simplistic means we've oversimplified and lost some critical aspects of the subject under study. Simplistic mental models lead inevitably to many unexpected mistakes.

Simple means we've found a safe and efficient way to use abstraction. With a simple understanding we can reason about and act on a complex situation successfully, with few unexpected mistakes.

Pragmatism over Dogmatism

We seek to learn what works and why. We work with hypotheses, then run experiments and gather evidence. We learn from the evidence, and we adjust our hypotheses. Repeat.

We strive to reveal and challenge dogmas in thinking and biases in perception. When found, we supercede them with suitable hypotheses and experiments to build better ways of thinking.

Deliberate Practice

We practice at the edges of our ability, to push the mastery of our skills.

Systemic Perspective

We practice systems thinking and systematic exploration. We flow our focus of awareness between different contexts of activity – personal, team, organisational, industrial, national, global. In this way, we create better value and outcomes.

Autonomy and Paired Work

All our people have the support to find their own way . We help each other to build confidence and courage. We gently seek permission to help. We fearlessly ask for help.

We pair to learn together faster.

Integrity

We drink our own champagne:

• We practice what we teach and coach ;

• Novavi is at all times an example of excellence in the use of the guidance we offer our clients.

We ask our customers’ permission to practice radical candor:

• We cultivate radical transparency. There can be no exploration of genuine improvement based on deceit;

• We are fearless in speaking truth to power.

We strive for excellent customer fit:

• Win-win or no-deal. We don't do this work just for the money - we do it for mutual benefit. Our clients get better outcomes, we live our ikigai;

• We will decline to accept work for which we believe we are not a good fit;

• Instead, if possible, we will recommend other professionals for whom we think a good fit might be possible. We may also decline to make any recommendation.