Concepts and theories

Critical thinking

Criticism can be both a virtue and a vice. And we understand It’s a normal human quality. People tend to criticize things they don’t understand or find bizzare to their own beliefs and values.

The most important thing is to never criticize for the sake of criticizing and include rationalities, facts and data while taking decisions. Seeking the flaws won’t add anything to humanity. Critical thinking can be useful for complex situations. Where facts and data are all related in a vogue way.

By revealing the unneeded details and investigating the situation we can find the ultimate truth. It’s like zooming out to see all the evidence and the big picture before taking actions. And there is nothing above criticism or absolutely flawless, as long as our minds can work and reverse the process.

Criticism should even start from the basics. This is the only way for uncovering truths and discovering new astonishing things. Taking things for granted will lower your inspiration levels.

It’s critical mentality that will be able to connect the dots from unrelated sciences. Sometimes questioning our projects comes up with better results than the first analysis and gives us more insight. Although this might lead to remanufacturing the entire project but it will definitely yield in better results and push us to the limits.

Critical thinking is all about asking questions and doubting the reality, theories and the whole norms.

As Simon Sinek points that out “it always starts with why”.

People sometimes neglect the reasons behind their actions and keep following a certain pattern for a while, aimlessly. The question of “why” is the last thing they resort to. The golden circle theory implicit that before taking any action you should be thinking of the “why” behind it.

The trigger or the reason that made you go in that particular direction. And certainly it is not profits as they are merely a result. People buy why you do it, not what you do.

Critical thinking also reduces the gap between our ideas and the totally opposite points of view. It gives us the opportunity to explore why things that seem so irrational to us makes perfect sense to others. And through this journey we get to create our own rules and beliefs.

Surrendering for the fact that “this is how we found it” is never better than asking “Why not?” and “What if?”.

We encourage everyone we meet whether a new team member, partner or trainee to take the same approach especially when reviewing themselves from time to time.

What if I spent more time reading, playing sports, coding this other game. We encourage people while reminding ourselves of the importance of having a 360 degree view and adaptation to different points of view.

This methodology is an essential part of our decision making process. We approach projects in the same way as legos. With this sense of discovery, we try different compositions equipped by science and experiments.

We always start with why

Perhaps Simon Sinek’s popular quote on how solutions are made influential is the most truthful saying in the business world.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

There are many examples proving this in real life. Starting with Toms shoes, ranking as one of the best sellers due to its emotional story. As they donate a shoes for every shoes bought, they managed to have a strong why behind what they produce and that what made their Solution successful. People bought Toms shoes for “Why” they made it not for “What” it is.

So while crafting any solution, we make sure that it follows our company’s beliefs.

Design thinking

As the father of design thinking and the founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as (d.school), David Kelley puts it out:
“The big thing about design thinking is that it allows people to build on the ideas of others instead of just having one thing at a time, a thread is formulated and then somebody from somewhere else thinks “ Oh that makes me think we should do that” and you get in place where you can’t get alone with one mind.

Building our own box

In today’s world, you will find many people thinking much lower than the average level, they believe that failing can be an excuse for not trying. And worst of all, they think that dreaming big is a risky attitude, although there are different ways and styles of thinking, people always choose to be in the safe zone even if it hinders their innovation.

Thinking big is not the nature of people. Humans tend to believe that they deserve less than what’s their right or believe that doing things similar to what already exists is a game well-played. The concept of thinking big, requires setting higher goals and exceeding them.

Flexible Solutions

If you can’t change while flying, you will lose ground to someone who can.

Having lean solutions means a bigger ability to adapt. Stuffing solutions with features, bigger teams and thick process increases its total mass. Leading to less flexibility with future changes. On the contrary, less mass solutions can change their priorities, production technologies and focus.

If your competitors can change faster than you, it’s a huge disadvantage.

Staying lean lowers the cost of change and no money, marketing power or man power can buy you this agility.

Always Open

We have no secrets. And this glass box approach enables us to evolve on a bigger scale. We believe that in the modern era, it’s always for the best that a company shares information with all its employees, keeping everything transparent generates a feeling of trustworthiness and leadership inside out.

In production, having a closed environment might be a good way of making money. You are the only producer of this type of goods and there is no other way of knowing your secrets; however, this strategy might hinder your growth as it will isolate your production from a valuable source of improvement. It also drags the humankind backwards by restricting the access to certain knowledge and information that might be needed for development.

In Baianat we seek community development so we perceive sharing knowledge as our duty towards the world and part of our mission to spread awareness.

We hold summer workshops for students with the sole purpose of educating them, letting them explore their potential and widening their horizons.

We have open source libraries and products that would help developers innovate and dream further. We share everything we know in our pursuit of empowering the next generations.

Everything inside Baianat is shareable. You might find team members knowing the company budget, or why we decided to do this investment. This doesn’t just place everyone on the same level of understanding, but also increases their loyalty.

Stress free

Being workaholic is the shortest way of getting burnt out. People spend hours on “ jobs” they don’t like and sucks the life out of their souls. While we wonder everyday, why we should spend the next 30 years of our life working when we could spend it learning something new and meaningful.

If you ever feel like you’re working your wills top when you find obstacles along the way. The concept was first introduced by David Allen in his book (getting things done), The thing that creates stress is the overwhelming feeling that you have a lot to do and can’t get anything done due to having no space in your mind to think freely and in an innovative way.

In our daily routine, we get many ideas sparkling across our heads and instead of carrying them around everywhere, we place them as empty files on our drive for the next book/project/ campaign.

For instance, when we get the idea of a new feature or a new marketing methodology, we document that and keep it in our R&D section for later review.

We add all the needed details that are related to that project or idea so if anyone wants to take it from here they can easily know what we were thinking of. And on individual levels, we might have more than 5 new assignments per day, however, we are aware of our queue and next steps so we experience no stress as we don’t keep anything in our heads that takes more than just one step to get done.

Although we recognize how important time is, this is not the only critical factor for stress free productivity. Instead of asking for more time, find a system that helps you manage, remember and remind yourself with the upcoming tasks.

As David Allen pointed out, nature seems to get a lot of stuff done, but it’s not stressed neither worried. Part of the stress in our daily work life, is the fact that we are not resilient enough to change, and in our rapid pace work environment and non static life, we need to shift focus between things smoothly; while doing that we keep everything outside our psyches to save it from the mess and leave a space for creating creative mess.

How we get ideas

In Baianat, we work on different projects and ventures that were all gathered through the time. We were never born like this, these ideas were formulated under this brand architecture as we grow in knowledge, capabilities and most importantly as we managed to dream bigger.

The end result is not what makes us proud as much as it’s the entire process we have been through. As we believe in our rule in advancing communities, we don’t think of what we do in terms of functionality but in how it will benefit humanity and fulfill their needs.

However we don’t stuff our projects with all the features in the world. And as we find a project so pumped up with features, we split it for a better user experience.

Sometimes ideas just hit us while doing further research or reading a case study of a product. In this scenario, we first make sure that they are tested enough before launching them or turning them into a full project.

Modern approaches

As we work in the digital era, we know that some concepts don't apply anymore. even if they are a few months old, with each month new refreshments and additions are made by the SEs, social platforms and many other resources controlling the internet, These people are not doing these updates for fun or to make your life a painful process.

On the contrary, with each Android update, improvements are made for better performance, and as Baianat, we always follow this culture of working on latest version.

You can find us working with a tech that has no documentation yet. or implementing a strategy or business model that we just learned about yesterday because it's only a few months old.

And we don't just follow the modern approaches for the sake of following it. But most of the time, it's the most convenient solution for many situations we face.

We hate those MBA guys, who believe that humans and businesses should be all run the same way. And that successful business plans have a certain formula. But as Google co-founder Larry Page pointed out, If the plan doesn't take the them further then why have it in the first place. And if the old traditional approaches are just hindering our business growth, why should we follow them?

20/80

According to Pareto Law, 20% of inputs is responsible for 80% of outcomes. Which means that 20% of work time can produce 80% of all the work. And only 20% of the team can produce 80% of the production.

These percentages can vary little up or down but they yield the same results. In Baianat we try to push ourselves to get those 20% of time done multiple times per day.

Money comes last

It was earlier on our days when we realized how minor it is to have a goal of collecting money, yes you can’t change the world when you’re broke, but seeking money will just doom you away.

Making money is not that hard and you can always find your ways to attract more clients and companies. But this is not how we wanted to play, as if we want to contribute more to the world development, we must work on certain types of projects that provide a true value to mankind and those are mainly business related not entertainment projects.

We make major investments even in critical times because we believe that what we pay today will come around as future benefits. And by all means, Money can’t be a goal it’s just a means of reaching a bigger target. And if it became a goal it doesn’t define success yet.

We spend a lot on our production and invest a lot in our humans as we know that creating a pipeline of solid talents and resources is the ultimate success security.

Dealing with fails

We open our doors and hearts for failures and welcome them as a dear old friend, once we experience it we analyze the reasons behind. What caused us to fail? Was it time, timing, costs, human capabilities, technology, market conditions, lack of responsibility or just lack of passion? We get closer to the situation and live with our failure for weeks and sometimes months then we reverse the process and the solution works.

But nailing it is not what matters; what is more important is the lessons we learned. These valuable lessons we learned over time are part of Baianat DNA. No one could have failed the same way we did. But we are grateful for being full of flaws, and we embrace a culture that encourages everyone to make excellent mistakes. This is how we grow and gain more experiences.