A rare chance to work inside one of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth tech companies, see what open company no BS looks like, and work with their teams to spin up solutions - fast!🔛

ShipIt gives you 24 hours to innovate. Build stuff. Simple, technical, insane. Doesn’t matter what. It’s about ideas made actual, and about teams humming.

It’s kinda like 20% time. On steroids. (This happens once a quarter right across the world and 1000’s of people join in).

What struck me most was the people inside Atlassian, their open ways of work, patterns of collaboration, the fluid free flow of information.

These are seriously talented, authentic, passionate people working open, working fast, no BS, no power plays, with rapid cycles of communication>ideation>synthesis>focussed work>start again.

This is unsurprising given Atlassian’s values-first tilt on the world. And people first approach to hiring.

If you walk through any Atlassian office across the globe, you’ll see their values everywhere - hanging like flags, expressed creatively on walls, part of the living culture and bounce boards of the work that’s done day by day:

Open company, no bullshit

Build with heart and balance

Don’t f*ck the customer

Play as a team

Be the change you seek

But the take out here is that when we talk ad nauseam about innovation, about its process and methodology and science, what we’re really talking about is the way we as REAL people best work together in teams to stand our ideas up. Simple. (As long as you’ve got the right people in the room in the first place).

I’m a big believer in no BS, bringing my authentic self to everything I do, and working with people and in ways that make sense - to me, and the bigger world. 🌏

This #ShipIt experience has restored my faith in what great work looks like.

Future ways of work are already here. At @Atlassian. No BS.

As a female founder, mother of four girls and passionate #STEM and #diversity advocate, I am doing what I can in my sphere of influence to drive diversity and inclusion, ignite conversation, table the metrics and push for progress.

But diversity is indeed a very wicked problem.

Entrenched cognitive biases, fixed cultures, diversity fatigue and too much talk and too little action mean we’ve actually still got a long way to go before D&I and gender is no longer on the agenda. (Run the numbers on the number of women in tech/STEM/funded startups/ASX or Fortune500 CEO leadership roles/government senior level positions. Not good.)

We keep talking/reading/town hall-ing about team diversity as a critical driver of innovation and problem-solving, but unless we can cultivate it/hire for it/celebrate it/elevate it/action it, our best attempts at innovation will always be constrained.

Atlassian’s recent State of Diversity Report 2018 reveals why the D&I dial isn’t actually moving despite the conversations about cultural shift and commitment to D&I in the US and Silicon Valley right now.

This is, of course, an endemic problem.

To effect any real change we need to sweep company-, startup- and society-wide, top to bottom, bring more chairs to the cap table, break down mindless bureaucracy, shift fixed mindsets, share our stories, build D&I skills, action inclusivity programs, push against status quo, employ empathy, and put people, values, balance and belonging before the BS of empty D&I PR rhetoric.

We also need to commit to active end-to-end processes and systems that mandate diversity as an accountable, transparent line item, and usher in a new world of work practice where we hire for diversity of not just faces but races, places and think spaces (mind sets).