But one step at a time.

What even is a B Corp?

A “B Corp” or “Certified B Corporation” is a type of company that voluntarily undergoes a rigorous social and environmental performance audit. This process is carried out by the independent non-profit organization B Lab.

The “B” in “B Corp” stands for “Benefit”. It symbolizes these companies’ efforts to not only maximize profits, but also to create a positive social benefit. By incorporating social and environmental goals into their business practices, B Corps strive to create holistic value that goes beyond purely financial metrics.

What characterizes a B Corp?

1. Social and environmental responsibility: B Corps are committed not only to maximizing profits, but also to having a positive impact on society and the environment. In doing so, they take into account the interests of employees, communities, suppliers and the environment.
2. Transparency and accountability: B Corps must report transparently on their social and environmental impacts. This promotes accountability and enables consumers to make informed decisions.
3. Legally established commitments: B Corps have stipulated in their founding documents that they not only consider the interests of their shareholders, but also the interests of other stakeholders.
4. Assessment and certification: To be certified as a B Corp, companies must undergo a comprehensive assessment covering various areas such as governance, employee treatment, environmental impact and customer satisfaction.
5. Best practices and collaboration: B Corps are part of a global movement of companies committed to a more sustainable and equitable economy. They share best practices and often work together to achieve greater positive impact.

Certification as a B Corp certifies that a company meets strict social and environmental standards and is committed to positive social change. It is a kind of seal of approval for companies that pursue social and environmental goals as well as financial ones.

What does B Lab want to achieve?

B Lab is the network transforming the global economy for the benefit of all people, communities and the planet. Our international network of organizations is leading economic systemic change to support our shared vision of an inclusive, just and regenerative economy.

We started in 2006 with the idea that a different kind of economy is not only possible, but necessary. We became known for certifying B Corporations, i.e. companies that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. But we do much more than that. We are building the B Corp movement to change our economic system – and to do that we need to change the rules of the game.

B Lab creates standards, policies, tools and programs that change the behavior, culture and structure of capitalism. We mobilize the B Corp community into collective action to address key societal challenges.

By harnessing the power of business, B Lab has positively impacted more than 150 industries in over 80 countries to help them balance profit and purpose. Together, we are shifting our economic system from benefiting a few to benefiting all. We are shifting from concentrating wealth and power to ensuring equity, from exploitation to regeneration and from favoritism in individualism to interdependence. We will not stop until all companies are a force for good.

The Nerd Republic as B Corp

Ever since Republic was founded, it was clear to us that we wanted to break new ground in the way we work and act. We looked into different approaches and certifications quite early on. It was important to us to “really” do something and not just decorate the shop window. In our research, we came across B Lab and basically fell in love with the approach straight away.

We were particularly impressed by the comprehensive approach with regard to employees, the community, customers, etc. Internally, we already work in a very innovative way. We eliminate positions in favour of roles, have full transparency, self-organization and personal responsibility. Externally, we have a sustainable focus. This is not only ecological, where we travel by public transport and offset the remaining emissions. We also see our customers as partners and attach great importance to being perceived as a partner rather than a supplier.

Our journey started around August ’23 with the decision: “We’re just going to do it now.” At the time, we didn’t quite know what to expect on the journey and how much effort it would really involve. Despite our already good alignment, we found the certification process in particular to be very value-adding. We came up with some good new ideas for our company, took some low-hanging fruits with us and prepared a thick backlog for implementation.

B Corps certification is not the end, but the starting point of a journey. It is about the continuous development and implementation of measures. It is also very important for us to talk about it. We believe that even small posts, small tips, can inspire other people and organizations. From there, something new can emerge and another small step towards a better world can be taken.

Next Steps – With you?!

If we have piqued your interest in B Corps with this article, you are very welcome to contact us. We will accompany you on your journey to certification and beyond. Starting with basic information on certification, we can accompany you with a “delta analysis” and provide advice and support for B Corp certification. In addition, we have special workshops that deal with the topic of sustainability from a B Corp perspective. Together, we work on topics and ideas that go beyond the CO2 calculation in the context of sustainability.

Please get in touch with our Tomorrow Manager Kathi. You can reach her easily at hello@nerdrepublic.de

The post The Nerd Republic is a B Corp! first appeared on Nerd Republic.

What are we trying to achieve?

The aim is to have a self-learning course produced by an AI. We are aware that we will combine different AIs in order to achieve the best possible result. Simply pressing a button and three minutes later everything is there will not (yet) work.

We have chosen the upcoming course “Agile Estimation and Prioritization” as our self-study course. We are of the opinion that the topic can be grasped well, i.e. is challenging enough, while it should also be implemented well by AI. There are numerous sources and articles (the AI has been trained) that can be referred to. At the same time, the course can create good added value and can be easily differentiated.

Basically, we want to satisfy our curiosity a little. Will it work? How will this course feel? What will the feedback be like? Will it all be like this in the future? Where will boundaries arise? Everything is so exciting

If you don’t just want to read the blog, but also want to experience the course, you’ll find it here:

Where do we see limits to course creation with AI?

We will see where the limits are at the moment. However, as we already have some experience with AI, we are currently assuming that it will probably not be 100% AI. To be honest, we had already thought about having this accompanying blog created entirely by the AI. Then again, it is probably important to have a “safe space”, and we ultimately want to document our steps as well as possible.

What we will probably do manually is the front end of the course. This is where we describe the content and the AI setting of the course. In addition, we bring in our knowledge of the subject and use it to create the prompts. The course will also have a few typical Republic chapters such as “Welcome”, “Change Log”, “Introduction Republic”. We will also manually pull in these elements from existing courses and adapt them accordingly.

What comes from the AI?

At the start of this project we assume the following setting:

• Course structure is created by the AI of Learnworlds
• eBook content is created by Chat GPT, Creaitor and others
• Images are created by Midjourney
• Learning videos are created by Synthesia

What questions are unanswered at the start of the AI project?

We have a few ideas that we would like to implement, but we need to delve deeper into the subject.

You probably know that there are different types of learners. Some learn better by reading, some by watching, and others like to listen or experience learning. We want to try to find the perfect solution. The whole thing should work via an initial assessment and on the basis of this, the course is put together for the learner in a personalized way, basically multilingualism would also be possible (mentally). We have ideas for this, but need to test it a little. Perhaps this is not the right way to go.

October 14th, 2023 – Online

The course is online. We have built the frontend and put the course on pre-sale. The frontend was largely created without AI. Too many elements are too special for this, especially with regard to the typical course structures of the Nerd Republic. Most of the images were created with Midjourney.

October 22nd, 2023 – The Course Structure

The time has come. We start with the structure of the course. An AI is connected to our learning platform. It is possible to enter parameters for the course structure via a UI. The AI then generates a structure from this.

We want to try to get it right at the first attempt. We lose some of the fun if we screw, turn and twist ten times. So we put in as much as possible and work with the structure we get. We keep potential deletions to ourselves and only include topics in a new iteration once our product has been produced in iteration 1.

Our parameters:

• Activities: Include videos, eBooks, audios, exams and a Certificate of Completion
• Build eight sections (we will add our classic introduction and conclusion manually later)
• Include six sections with activities per section.
• Use the following key topics: Challenge of Project Planning in VUCA, Basics of Agile Estimation, Story Point Estimation, Fibonacci Series, Planning Poker, Velocity, Prioritizing in Agile, Weightest Shortest Job First, Magic Estimation, Getting Things Done, MoSCoW Prioritization.
• Base the learning activities on the following paragraph:
• “Agile estimation plays a critical role in the effective planning and implementation of projects. Mike Cohn, a renowned expert in Agile methods, has made a significant contribution to this with his concepts. Using the Fibonacci sequence for estimation allows for a gradual and realistic estimation of effort as it better reflects the uncertainty and complexity of tasks. By breaking tasks down into smaller units, known as user stories, planning becomes more agile and manageable. This decomposition allows teams to set clear priorities and focus on those tasks that offer the highest added value. Another important tool in agile estimation is planning poker, which is based on the consensus of team members. This encourages collaboration and allows for a broader perspective when estimating. In summary, Agile Estimation emphasizes the importance of flexibility, collaboration and continuous adaptation to successfully meet the challenges of dynamic projects.” (Created by an AI)
• The teaching approach is to be implemented according to Merrill’s first principle of learning.
• Course level: Beginners
• Course participants: People with initial contact with agile frameworks. Here especially in the implementation of first methods.
• Tonality: Friendly

The AI has used these parameters to create a course structure. You can find it on the course page and in the course. At this point, we recommend that you get the course… then it’s even more fun to follow the whole thing.

October 26th, 2023 – Create a book list for recommendation

In almost all our courses, we recommend books from the relevant subject area at the end of the course. These are given a short summary to make them easier to categorize and are linked to the Buch7 page (you should definitely take a look – the sustainable book trade).

This task smells very much like a task for the AI. We choose the now well-known chat GTP for this. We also use the KISS approach (Keep it Simple, Stupid) and don’t mess around with the prompt too much:

“You are to create a book recommendation list for a group of agile coaches. Create a list with 10 books related to the topic of agile estimation and prioritization.”

We receive a list of works we know. A few seem new after all. But that’s great, you can’t know everything. We also get a short one-liner for each of the works. That’s not enough for our book description. So we ask the AI to add more here. The second round is also a bit short. When we specify that we need one paragraph per work, it goes like butter.

We are basically happy with the result and start transferring it to the course, picking out cover images and linking them to Buch7. As we transfer the texts, we realize the disadvantages of our prompt. Basically, every book explanation has a subordinate clause along the lines of: “Agile coaches will like this book because…”. This is a bit monotonous and also has an exclusionary effect. The AI has simply stuck to the single person in the prompt and thus not only refined the content selection, but also targeted the person linguistically. This is not tragic, but it could have a bit more pizzazz. In line with our rule of deferring changes to the next iteration, we put this in the course backlog. Certainly, another text should be generated for each work.

But we also noticed: three of the ten works could not be found at all.
We couldn’t find the works on Buch7. A cross-check on Amazon did not return any results either. The title and author on Google didn’t give us anything either. But no problem. After all, we have an AI at the start.

We take a sample with: “Agile Estimating and Planning Your Project” by Mike McLaughlin.
This was advertised to us as:
“In ‘Agile Estimating and Planning Your Project,’ Mike McLaughlin provides Agile coaches with a practical guide full of actionable tips. The book goes beyond theoretical discussions and provides coaches with tangible strategies for effective agile estimating and planning. Using real-world examples, McLaughlin ensures that coaches not only understand the concepts, but can apply them in the dynamic environment of agile projects.”
Sounds good. But can’t be found. So we ask:

“The work ‘Agile Estimating and Planning Your Project’ by Mike McLaughlin cannot be found. Can you provide further information that would allow us to find the work.”

Here comes the sobering answer:
“It appears that there is a mix-up or error regarding the book title “Agile Estimating and Planning Your Project” by Mike McLaughlin. To the best of my knowledge, which extends to January 2022, there is no book with this exact title by Mike McLaughlin.

It could be that it is a newer publication, published after my last knowledge update in January 2022. To find the book, I recommend searching the latest book directories, online bookstores or libraries. Alternatively, the exact title or author may be slightly different.

Please check the exact details or give me more information so that I can help you better.”

Small downer. We assume that the other two plants have the same problem. Check. AI task solved rather averagely. Once again, without curation, it’s not perfect.

November 15th, 2023 – We feed the AI for our articles

Once we have set up the structure, we start feeding the AI for the eBook articles. Here we rely in particular on Creator.ai. The tool has proven to be quite easy to use and creates good articles. We use the well-known Chat GTP (3.5) from time to time. Robinize also gives us a good idea of how other articles are structured. This helps with the structure, but is only ever a guide. We do not want to provide “trending” articles but rather informative added value.

This phase will now take a while. The progress can always be viewed within the course as well as in the front end of the course. There you can always see an insight into the course chapters and how much “reading time” the system is calculating.

The post An entire course by AI? first appeared on Nerd Republic.

We always say prioritization is a wonderful thing, and we need to learn to embrace it as such! What’s the alternative? That we have more resources than ideas? Isn’t that actually a much bigger problem? It’s really like having a free day over the weekend. There are so many things to do—how nice is it to pick the “low-hanging fruits” (maybe even in the garden)? But how do we do that, both in the workplace and on the couch?

Possible reasons

First, let’s look at possible reasons why we struggle with prioritization. Often, it’s simply that we don’t really want to prioritize. We have a series of projects and initiatives in front of us, and our deeply democratic nature wants to make everyone happy. So, out comes the “watering can,” and everyone gets a share of the resources. Implicitly, everyone knows which projects are big or small and which project managers are higher in the pecking order. Things shift back and forth a bit, but fundamentally, everyone gets enough. “Enough” is the right word, as this approach resembles food distribution on the savanna. The kudu has been caught, and the lion distributes the meat according to rank. After all, he is responsible for the pride and has to maintain internal harmony. If not everyone gets something, rebellion threatens. Sometimes, there’s even a bit left over for the hyenas – the outsiders.   

The “kudu in the watering can” approach may also stem from the lack of a unified strategy within the company, making it difficult to set priorities. If the company is operating with vague strategies like “We want to be the market leader,” then allocating resources becomes naturally challenging. Actively working on this is essential. At the same time, this approach provides space for innovation, and when topics are truly owned (keyword: ownership), decentralized decisions emerge… isn’t that what every leader actually wants? Finally, not having to make the decisions themselves.

By the way, on the topic of strategy, we recommend our self-study course on Objectives and Key Results, as well as taking a look at our OKR live workshops.

First, let’s get organized…

Fortunately, in the Nerd Republic, we also have more ideas than resources. Once the initial tasks were completed, the need for prioritization quickly became apparent. So many courses need to be built, some things just have to be done, and there are still projects and company development. This resulted in a very long list of things “that should be done.” In the first step, we separated them. It would be “wrong” to mix some topics together. Is it really sensible to compare an OKR course with the integration of external freelancers? In our jargon, we call this whole process Value Streams. Behind that are large conceptual “pots” where we categorize the topics (well, actually more than that, but let’s keep it simple here).

So, we identified three streams: Course Development, Company Development, and Must Do’s. The latter is a bit more flexible than the term suggests. For example, it includes a rebranding. We will go through this step, and it will happen. We don’t say… “Well, there’s no capacity right now to launch the new website.” These are essentially topics that “always need to be addressed” and have to be worked on, but not in the sense of regulatory requirements where something has to be implemented by a specific deadline (though, of course, that could apply in your context). After organizing our work in this way, we moved on to prioritization.

WSJF – Weightest Shortest Job First

The Scaled Agile Framework uses the WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) estimation method by Don Reinertson. We’ve had good experiences with this approach and apply it as well. The idea behind it is that it only makes sense to quantify the so-called Cost of Delay (relatively speaking) and divide it by the Job Size/Work Size of the item. This helps you, as mentioned in the introduction, to identify the low-hanging fruits. So, we ask ourselves: What is currently causing the most pain and offers the greatest leverage if we manage to address it, while the smallest item is the best for us because it doesn’t block for too long? We then split the Cost of Delay, according to Reinertson, into three factors: User Value, Time Criticality, and Risk Reduction/Opportunity Enablement.

The entire equation then looks like this:

So, how does this work in practice?

• We have three large lists, divided into our mentioned Value Streams.
• In our tool, Monday.com, we’ve created a table with individual fields and automatic calculations based on the formula.
• We schedule a meeting and ensure that all participants are clear on the topics to be discussed. Any last uncertainties are addressed, and then we get started.
• We’ve chosen a 1-10 scale, but you can also use the adjusted Fibonacci sequence and remove the 40 and 100. We rank the items in relation to one another, where 10 represents the highest (highest User Value) and 1 represents the lowest.
• Someone from the team breaks the silence and throws out the first number for an item.
• This is how we discuss the items, create a shared understanding, and organize them. As the saying goes, “sometimes you win, sometimes you lose”—but we always win through dialogue. Then we go through each column, comparing items one by one.
• The facilitator needs to pay attention to certain things, for example, ensuring that User Business Value is not mixed up with Time Criticality during the discussion.

This is what our table looks like:

We aim to do this on a quarterly basis. There’s an additional loop where we review our strategy and assess how we’re progressing. If we want to adjust specific things, have new insights, or there’s concrete demand from the market, we take that into account.

Forever and ever?

Is this approach good and valid forever? Probably not. In the first round, it gave us structure. In the second round, focus, and in the third round, depth. In the fourth, it starts to crumble. The reason is that the lists simply become too long. And they grow longer than we can build speed and capacity. At that point, it no longer makes sense to prioritize 50 items per stream when we know we will only be able to implement five per quarter. So, we’ll need to make adjustments here and do a pre-selection.

There’s a general danger in this. Especially in large companies with a lot of politics, power structures, and the inevitable struggle for scarce resources, this pre-selection process can be very emotional. It leads to hard battles when it comes to prioritization. What’s behind this? Probably, a lack of understanding of what the organization can actually accomplish. Entering the race and consciously placing 50 topics when only five will make it through creates a lot of friction. If the strategy is not clear, there is also a missing filter to bring some order to the ideas.

Finally, employees are often strongly attached to projects (people become tied to the work, instead of the work being brought to the people). As a result, there’s a systemic interest in pushing “one’s” topics through. Otherwise, I might not have a job tomorrow. This is different in our case. If we’re not working on the OKR course, we can always focus on the Teal course for Reinventing Organizations. There’s enough work for everyone.

In the future, we will increasingly focus on a pre-selection process and ask ourselves: What topics do we need right now for our strategy, and what is a good idea that might come later?

Conclusion

We are big fans of prioritization because it gives us focus. We’ve had good experiences with the WSJF system from SAFe and Don Reinertsen. The system is relatively quick to implement and can also be applied in functionally diverse groups. It helps not only with prioritization but also with gaining a shared understanding of the work and why we are doing certain things. The larger the company, the further the individual stakeholders are from this understanding.

If you have any questions about the approach, feel free to reach out to us or book one of our SAFe courses. We’d be happy to share our experiences.

The post Prioritization at the Nerd Republic first appeared on Nerd Republic.

It all starts with an idea

In order to give you a feel for who you’re dealing with, you can gain some insight into our founding history here and find out what we were actually thinking.
To start with the most important thing: we didn’t actually think that much at first. It was more a feeling we had that it was time to develop new ways of working. Back then we didn’t know what exactly it would mean, how exactly it would work or what it would be called. Sounds chaotic, doesn’t it?

But it wasn’t really like that. We were highly motivated to get started and simply work things out without getting too mental about the whole thing.
We had a clear goal in mind: we wanted to help rethink business and create sustainable, evolutionary forms of organization.

We want to work better. Working TOGETHER. Live.

Definitely not an easy goal, but that’s exactly what makes it so exciting for us.

The impulse for founding the Nerd Republic came from Stefan. At the time, he was still lecturing at XU Exponential University and discussed Frederic Laloux’s book ‘Reinventing Organisations’ with the students. This led to the motivation to rediscover and reinvent work and organisation.

In August 2022, it was time to get down to business. Together with friends, colleagues and anyone else who was interested in the topic, ideas were collected on what a concept and a journey together could look like.

‘One of the problems with nerds is that they don’t recognise that they are nerds!’ – or in other words: finding a name

The basic concept was sketched out, so we wanted to get started. However, it soon became clear that it wouldn’t be that easy. Organisational matters had to be dealt with more quickly than expected. Including the question of a name for the child.

Our original thought was that it would come to us at some point and until then we would simply get started. Easier said than done, because even when we were creating the email addresses, we realised that the longer we postpone searching for a name, the more work we have to do afterwards to rename all the channels again.

So how do you find a name for a construct that is not yet fully developed?

It was a bumpy road, starting with a mobile phone list with over 40 names, collections of attributes that we could identify with and British pub names. All of these were nice to have but nothing really fitted. We wanted something that suited our working model, so we had to leave the familiar paths. We ended up with names of famous pirate ships. You’re beginning to understand where the ‘nerd’ in our name comes from, aren’t you?

We found out in the process that back then the captains of the Pirate Republic of Nassau called themselves the ‘Flying Gang’.
That sounded a bit too much like a breakdance group for us, but the republic triggered something. After that, the rest almost happened by itself. We had already worked together before we started Nerd Republic, so we already knew each other well. The word ‘nerd’ often came up during small talk that went a little too far at the beginning of meetings. This was also the case after a monologue about films in which the following sentence was uttered: ‘One of the problems with nerds is that they themselves don’t realise that they are nerds’. Everyone laughed, except one person. Can you guess who?

Nerd Republic. The feeling was the right one. Funny and somehow identifiable for all of us. It was a long journey, but it was worth it.

What has the name to do with consulting?

We want to be funny with our name, but also much more. Traditional corporate environments often restrict humour. They promote very clear characteristics and imprints. Workers are rational and ego-driven in a system that demands you to be masculine. If you want to reach the top, you sometimes need elbows, golf and beer with the boss, don’t forget the power and practice it.

This is exactly what we want to change. People are so much more than the mask that unfortunately has to be put on too often for work. We sit in the basement by the fashion train, go ground-hopping at football matches, know every film quote and cry over kittens.

Everyone is a nerd somewhere, and that’s a good thing. Is that relevant for the job?

Not in companies that are machines and use people as resources, while chairs are assets in accounting. Here, every part should be the same.
However, if we rethink companies as a social, creative and innovative system, we see it as a key element to create environments that perceive us as people and that we shape as people.

If we say we want nerds, then we also need the next step in the organisation. Let’s create self-determined systems, far removed from monarchies and dictatorships. Structures that turn informal decision-making hierarchies into formal ones and are driven by purpose. Forms of organisations in which people are no longer just resources, but a lifeline for further development.

Way ahead

Is the great revolution coming? The term revolution comes from the French and describes a rotation around one’s own axis, like a bicycle tyre, for example. However, this also means that after the rotation we are back at the starting point. In our opinion, it’s not the big BANG! but the evolution of organisations. Every plant grows a little differently and that’s a good thing. Some organisations develop faster, others a little slower. Some grow higher, some not so much. We want to support organisations in finding their goal and their way there.

The post Once upon a time in a design office in Düsseldorf… first appeared on Nerd Republic.