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 By: Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and MD of This is Milk When Covid hit I was four months pregnant with my second child, Neve, and managing an established business with a small team. I’d gotten into a place where we were comfortably earning enough money and had overcome the start-up anxiety and challenges that plagued our early years. We had clients, consultants and a team, and everything was, well, comfortable for the first time in my 5 years of running the business.
I was about to travel to Dubai in March 2020 to deliver training to a client, and as a pregnant traveller, I kept hearing ‘are you sure you should be travelling?’. I hadn’t really paid much attention to the chat of what was then just termed ‘The coronavirus’, on the basis of not wanting to add worry to my pregnant self. I was abnormally anxious in my early pregnancy, specifically in relation to the climate emergency.
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 By: Joe Triccas, Product Manager, Neve For a long time, I have been left in awe at the great work mental health charities like Samaritans do to help people in difficult times.
Whilst it's not a long-term solution, having someone who doesn't know you to just talk at helps lighten the load and clear your head. I'm not sure I'd ever be able to work on the phones myself (too many years of customer service roles early in my working life), so the least I could do is help raise funds for Samaritans!  There are countless leadership books that can help build psychological safety in your business. The team here at This is Milk have selected three titles that highlight the importance of psychological safety which help high performance leadership and deliver a happy, healthy mindset at work.
 By: Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and MD of This is Milk Part two of my book review blog covers two books about equalities and change that I would recommend.
 One of the key elements of building success in your team is for every single member to feel psychologically safe. Results from an ambitious internal research project undertaken by Google in 2012 showed that the most important dynamic of effective teams was the existence of psychological safety. But what is psychological safety and why is it of benefit to your business?First let’s remind ourselves that psychological safety refers to the belief that you can speak up and express yourself without having to fear negative consequences.
In a business team context this has been best defined by Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School.  By: Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and MD of This is Milk The first book is Donut Economics by Kate Raworth.
 By: Kerry Freeman, Psychological Safety Index Practitioner Company culture can sometimes be really hard to see when you’re in it. We make 100’s of small modifications to our behaviour to ensure we fit in and get on inside our organisations - that’s just human behaviour. And rather than suffer with cognitive dissonance – that weird feeling you get when you take an action which isn’t in line with your thoughts – we tend to justify or rationalise those modifications, sometimes without even noticing, to continue to fit in.
But there are key moments where your culture will come into sharp relief. Imagine you’re in a meeting. An idea for a product or service has just been pitched by your manager. Immediately you know 2 things – it’s going to have negative impact on your most vulnerable customers, and your team is going to hate doing it.  By: Morgane Tanguy, UX Designer at This is Milk Opening presents on Christmas morning, my grandma’s buttery cooking, this wine from 1997 I once tasted, the smell of pain au chocolat on Sunday mornings, the cold wind from the sea on my cheeks... Those are sensory and joyful moments I lived, naturally captured in my memory, without any effort.
As humans we all have memories. Those memories are created by conscious and subconscious experiences that trigger emotions. These emotions (positives or negatives) triggered during this experience increase the chance of memorising the experience, which explains why I remember those memories a few years later.  By: Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and MD of This is Milk A simple tool to help you make the right choices for your business A few weeks ago I took a look at the very first GANTT chart I did back in March, when it was just me sitting at my coffee table thinking 'right, what are all the things I need to do to get This is Milk off the ground?' This was just after I’d been having a slight melt down thinking ‘there’s so much to do, how on earth am I possibly going to do this?!'
I put everything down on paper that was in my head, gave them indicative timeframes and sequences and then almost unintentionally didn't really look back at it. I did it, wrote it all down, and set it aside. It was an exercise of catharsis more than anything else.
Welcome to our latest Three at Three. In this week's episode, Kate Pickford discusses Psychological Safety Indexing with Kate Carmichael from Re:markable, Who is a Intent based leadership pioneer and Fearless organisation practitioner.
Kate asks her:
We hope you enjoy it, and if you'd like to connect with Kate, click her name to go the her Linkedin profile.
We are kicking off our 3@3 series again.
This time Kate interviews Adam Underwood an Employer Engagement Officer for The Larder. Kate asks him:
We hope you enjoy it, and if you'd like to connect with Adam, click on his name to go to his Linkedin profile, or find him on The Larders website.
If you have any suggestions for future Three at Threes, or would like to take part in one, we'd love to hear from you.
email us.  By: Al Morris, Head of Client Services at This is Milk This article was originally published in 2018, and updated in 2022. See for yourself how much has changed in only four short years. Pick any 10 people and ask them how much they think our lives will change in the next 10 years. If you do this, you will no doubt hear a tonne of ideas, concepts, visions & evolution's that could radically change how we perceive the world. To see proof of this, you only need to look back at the last ten years and see how radically our day to day world has changed. http://uk.businessinsider.com/18-tech-products-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago-2017-7/#1-the-ipad-1 Things like AirBNB, Uber, Spotify, Google Chrome, Oculus, Kickstarter, Netflix and Android have become so integral in our day to day lives that it's hard to remember how things operated before. It's a sign of fantastic design and an overwhelming desire for change.
There has never been a period in time, when so much, so quickly has had such an enormous change in human behavior. So what is next, and if all this change seems too much, what's staying the same?  By: Al Morris, Head of Client Services at This is Milk Al MorrisHead of Client Services, This is Milk This article was originally published in 2018, and updated in 2022. Covid-19 expedited digital change within organisations. This forced companies to implement digital transformation. The Impact of culture on Digital Transformation Company culture is a term that is often heard when advertising a business to prospective employees, however the implications of culture run deeper than the perks of a job.
As we move towards a world that adapts and changes at break neck speeds to the needs of the customer, it is essential that the culture of your business matches your transformative qualities. It is no longer enough to strive for fun, friendly & Pizza Tuesdays. Digital transformation requires a level of commitment to change that allows the transformation to progress quickly and naturally. Research from Boston Consulting Group found that 79% of companies tested that addressed culture change sustained strong performance, this compared to 0% for those that neglected culture change. (40 companies tested)  By: Maria Ciotec, Web Developer at This is Milk My Digital Accessibility Journey
I imagine one day all digital content on the web will be accessible. Imagination is part of the creation process but imagination without transformation into reality won’t bring significant value. With that concept in mind, I have started my accessibility journey implementation in Neve. I didn’t previously have experience in implementing accessibility, but I have recently started to demonstrate great interest in the topic. Knowledge is not something innate but rather something that we acquire along the way and therefore my interest in this topic grew significantly and I have learned lots of beneficial things in terms of implementing accessibility into a product. Since one of the core objectives of Neve is to make it accessible, I started to show interest in it from the very beginning. I have made this objective one of my main goals and I am fully embracing it while developing Neve. I immediately understood the importance of implementing accessibility into our product, especially when considering how helpful this can be for our potential users. I felt like a knight who was chosen to conquer the unknown, to bring glory into the realm of Neve, hence my quest of implementing accessibility into the product has been my main focus ever since.  By Angela Prentner-Smith
As we move further into 2022, I want to reflect on a condition that has come to the fore for many people over the last 18 months. October may have been ADHD month, but the whole of the pandemic has surfaced ADHD for many individuals for the first time. Why? With the constraints and limitations on our lives, for a large number of people the condition became unmanageable, and many took their first-ever steps seeking help for issues that were there all along. Living with ADHD during a pandemic is particularly challenging, and I am personally committed to raising awareness of what the condition really means, and why the world needs to challenge the stigmas associated with it.  By Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and MD of This is Milk Way back in 2020, whilst I was on maternity leave with my daughter Neve my phone pinged. Actually it was more than one ping - it seemed every channel I’m active on was pinging me with a notification of a Civtech challenge. Those in the know were poking me to have a look at the Scottish Digital Academy’s challenge ‘How can digital help invent the future of immersive learning?’ Truthfully, I was just a few weeks post-partum, surviving a pandemic, and parenting a 6 year old, who was just starting to get his life back – the last thing on my mind was spinning up a technology business. But still... the messages kept coming, and eventually at the request of my team, I joined an 8pm call one Wednesday night and we generated a bunch of ideas on a Mural board. This was the start of what is now ‘Neve’ - an immersive learning platform with inclusivity at its core. An interview with Jason McSweeney  At This is Milk we're all about upskilling and reskilling and our recent intern, Jason, was the perfect fit. Whilst running his own Thai boxing gym, Jason started studying UX and design in his spare time. He soon became passionate about UX - so much so that he recently shut his gym to retrain as a UX designer. We asked him about his journey up to this point, how the pandemic has affected his career, and the benefits of starting afresh at 40.
Tell us about your journey up to this point. I moved from Ireland to Scotland 15 years ago to work as an admin manager for JD Gyms. This was followed by stints in Glasgow and London as a Sales Rep for Coca Cola and Vitamin Water. While I was doing this, I also started working as a personal trainer and running a Thai boxing gym. Redundancy gave me the opportunity to focus on the gym full time, which I ended up running for 10 years. How did you end up in the world of UX design? While I was running my gym, I started to take an interest in graphic design. I was hiring people to do promotions, social media and advertising. I’ve always had a creative side and realised that it would be much quicker if I learned those skills myself!  You've all heard of the carbon footprint, but what about the digital carbon footprint? The digital carbon footprint is all the emissions generated by online activity via digital technologies.
It may not be something you've considered much before, but there are small things you can do that will have a big impact on reducing our collective digital carbon footprint. Let’s talk about it: the internet pollutes the environment. The internet uses a lot of energy. Any digital activity, such as searching and browsing the internet, sending an email or uploading images generates CO2 emissions. The cloud also has a big part to play in this. The data we store in the cloud is materialised in data centres and vast servers. These centres and servers need huge amounts of energy to run and to support the internet.
An interview with Angela Prentner-Smith
Dyspraxia is a condition that affects around 10% of the British population, yet it’s still generally misunderstood. To mark Dyspraxia Week, we asked our founder and MD Angela Prentner-Smith a few questions about Dyspraxia, her diagnosis, and how it affects her life and work.
When did you first notice you had Dyspraxic traits? As a child, I was labelled as clumsy. I was the kid that cried in gym class because I found it so hard. My nan used to say I was covered in bruises. Dyspraxia affects your gross motor skills, and your fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are things like running or playing ball. Fine motor skills are things like handwriting. So along with my general clumsiness, I also found handwriting incredibly difficult. Although I could read before I started school, my handwriting was about two years behind everybody else's. My handwriting is still not good. However, during my school years, nothing was picked up. I don’t think Dyspraxia was even a consideration when I was at school. Even now, how many parents would recognise Dyspraxia in their children? Raising awareness about the condition is a priority. Does Dyspraxia just affect your coordination? Dyspraxia is also known as ‘Developmental Coordination Disorder’, but I don’t think that term covers all aspects of Dyspraxia. Working memory is also one of the things that affect people with Dyspraxia, and I think that has even more of an impact in the workplace and at school than the coordination issues. The ability to retain sequences of movements and sequences of words is also harder for people with Dyspraxia.  The mistakes I made - and the lessons I learned - when I started This is Milk
Being in a position to reflect on 7 years of building This is Milk, has been a humbling experience. I’m thankful for being able to make the decisions I have in life, and as a result made the learnings I have. As they say, you learn by doing. When you’re building a business – your focus is always, at least in part, on looking successful, so although you experience much hardship as you grow, it’s not always appropriate to share your failings and therefore your learnings. Today, I feel comfortable in sharing what I learned in those first few years, and in another 7, I’ll be sharing what I’m learning today! Be your own salesperson In the early days I had the courage and bravery to start a business, but I lacked the confidence to make sales and pursue the business I needed to. I looked to others to do this for me. But when you first start a business, you need to be the salesperson, you need to have enough confidence to do that yourself. 
In today's 3@3, our Inclusion and Engagement consultant Lynn Pilkington talks to UX Designer Morgane Tanguy about all things digital accessibility.
In the video interview, Lynn asks Morgane: Why is digital accessibility important? Who benefits from digital accessibility? And how do we make things more digital accessible? If you're interested in learning more about digital accessibility, Lynn and Morgane will be facilitating our 1-day course (split over 2 mornings) on the 2nd and 3rd of November. You can find more about that here or send us an email if you'd like to find out more. If you're looking for the web accessibility standards Morgane mentions in the video, you can find them here. We hope you enjoy our latest 3@3, and if you'd like to connect with Lynn and Morgane, click on their names to go to their Linkedin profiles.  By Tremis Skeete Building products than resonate with many customers are not built in a vacuum. We want to build products customers love, and that sometimes requires connecting with what real people care about and understanding from their perspective what problems are worth solving.
How do we connect with these customers in order to understand them? This is where identifying customer types can be useful in focusing research activities. Here is one way you can identify three customer types. There are essentially three types of customers that use your software product: 1. The cold customers: They historically have not expressed a deep interest in using the product, and if they do, they rarely use it.  By Joe Triccas
*This blog post takes inspiration from my old colleague's blog post. “All of us have a finite amount of effort, and a finite time to spend it in.” The above quote from the referenced post really resonated with me and gave me an insight into something that was missing from my expectations of myself and those around me. It is easy to measure time and assess how much stuff you got done in that time. What is difficult is understanding the level of effort you expended in that time.
This week, User Researcher and Designer, Bobby King talks to Tremis Skeete about sketch noting. Tremis asks him:
If you have any suggestions for a future Three at Three, or would like to take part in one, we'd love to hear from you -email us. |
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