If you have read the book or seen the movie, Moneyball, you know that trusting your gut leads to insanity.  In other words, you make the same poor selections, resulting in the same dismal performance, over and over again, all while hoping for a different outcome.  In a word, insanity.  Data saves us from ourselves, whether it be in baseball, business, or higher education. 

When considering the post-COVID landscape, one of the more difficult sectors to predict is higher education. With many potential students having postponed their enrollment during the pandemic, will they come back for undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral degrees or seek out different paths? And for those who do return, how will their expectation for learning and campus lifestyle have changed?

Teams within startup companies endure environments fraught with challenges. Revenue generation, valuable resource management, investment security, talent attraction, market capture, and more all require incredible focus for any company, though the missteps by small organizations can prove fatal. Enduring such challenges by small teams requires critical thought and poised communication. Consider the following three key tenets of small team communication success, built around the deliberate “thought” that precedes the “speech.”

When you observe the trajectory of successful organizations, whether Microsoft, Apple or upstarts like the Dollar Shave Club, and Warby Parker, it’s clear that innovation sets them apart from the competition.

Empirical learning - the practice of developing knowledge from direct investigation and experience – is one way the Agile software development framework enables small teams to deliver value quickly.  If teams do not take the time to truly step back and honestly inspect & adapt their work together with transparency, they could greatly hinder this learning.