Reflecting over 10 years of CTQ..
.. And on to new beginnings
The Journey
It was Nov 2013. Ramanand Janardhanan had quit his job and I had wrapped up Tender Leaves, my previous startup. We wanted to do something together. We didn’t have any definite idea. So we tried to find our Ikigai - look at what the world needs, what we are good at and what we enjoy. There were no definite answers about what we wanted to do. But we were clear about how we’ll do it. We wanted to be remote; work with and for smart people; we were not sure what we were going to build, so we didn’t want to raise any money.
We were big fans of the book Made To Stick. We wanted people to be thoughtful and deliberate and asking questions was a big part of our identity (quizzing or otherwise). So the early candidate for our name was Made To Thinq. But we didn’t want to force people to think. 'Opt-in' was very important to us and what we wanted to offer to people. We wanted people to Choose To Thinq.
Our ‘Why’ was always clear - we wanted to constantly up level ourselves and others we interact with (customers as well as our own teams)
And thus, started the journey in 2014.
Formative Years
Running experiments was almost second nature to us - we tried out a bunch of services and product ideas, across innovation, employee engagement, quizzing, customer engagement, learning, content development, quiz platform, storytelling, content curation, designing offsites, after school learning, habit building, social media advocacy, hagiographic quizzes, social media engagement. We even presented a bunch of ideas to a politician on how to influence voters as well as party members!
We initially worried about not having a simple answer to “What does CTQ do?” But soon realised that it’s a feature and not a bug.
The other question was upleveling - for what?
“Upleveling for future relevance” became clearer to us around the time we turned 5. The pandemic didn’t change much about how we work - the world said we were preparing for it since 2014.
Our focus for the next decade
There was another question that we were asked often - are you a painkiller or a vitamin? It's a euphemism in the world of startups for “Is what you sell a need for the customer or a want?” IMO the essence of the question may be correct but it’s an incorrect comparison. Vitamins may not fix your pains but many pains and life-threatening conditions occur in the first place due to vitamin deficiency! If teams don’t think about their future relevance, there may not be a future (where you could have potentially used a painkiller!)
In Test cricket, great batters take a fresh guard after a milestone like completing a hundred. They don’t take anything for granted and recommit to the journey to 200! As we turn 10 this year, we have chosen to focus on the following:
Vitamin C - Reinforcement of the desired culture you believe will help you stay future-relevant.
Companies in remote/hybrid find it difficult to engage with their teams in a smart, meaningful way. We help them reinforce the culture they want to propagate.
Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India want to build a culture of innovation. We help them get their teams to engage with the innovation agenda and deliver tangible value for the company.
Founders have spent time and effort to articulate their company culture and values. We help the founders reinforce their company culture and values through a calendar of activities and interventions.
Vitamin L and Vitamin M - With drivers like multi-generational workforce, AI, virtual work etc., your leaders are in a constantly changing world. You need to up level your leaders and people managers to stay future-relevant.
Vitamin L helps leaders to develop new playbooks for leading in the virtual world.
Vitamin M enables front line managers of today and the future, learn foundational topics and managerial best practices.
Meaningful interactions - Times when teams come face-to-face are becoming rare and thus should be treated as a precious resource. We design specific interventions during offsites to deliver strategic value out of these interactions. Say No to boring offsites.
CTQ Compounds - Our subscribers continue to compound their wisdom by reading one curated article every day. These already smart people are building a further advantage over others! CTQ Compounds turns 5 this year!
We may have narrowed down our focus but we will continue to experiment. And we are excited about the ideas we are working on.
And a new avatar!
Besides taking a fresh guard, we are also donning new clothes. The branding, logo and the website for CTQ needed a refresh. You will see the changes over the next few days. We are also taking this opportunity to update/ clean up/ republish some of our old content like CTQ Smartcast and CTQ Smart Levers. This is the first edition of our older newsletter, ‘The Upleveler’, which is now coming to you in a fresh avatar from Substack. We are switching CMS providers for our website and we need to manually migrate the blog posts. During the transition, some old videos and blog posts will go ‘missing’ for some time. Eventually, they will all find their way back on the new website.
On to the next 10 years - to help teams and individuals be continuously future-relevant