How it started
In 2019 I turned a PDF syllabus into an online learning platform for paragliding instructors. That became Online Training Concepts, which grew into instructional design, video production and custom software for clients who needed training to be better than a checklist.
Aktiga came out of that in 2023. The name comes from the Swedish aktieägare, shareholder, which started as a joke about ownership and turned into the actual point: a small team that owns the outcome rather than the ticket.
Deming, and why a carpenter cares about systems
The studio is built on W. Edwards Deming's ideas, which I came to late and wish I had found twenty years earlier. Deming is usually filed under manufacturing and quality control, but the useful part is simpler than that: most of what looks like a people problem is a system problem, and blaming the person leaves the system exactly as broken as it was.
The pieces I use almost daily:
- Constancy of purpose. Decide what the work is for, then stop relitigating it every quarter.
- Drive out fear. Nobody reports a problem early in a shop where problems are punished. You end up finding out at the worst possible moment.
- Improve constantly. Not a transformation project. Small, continuous, boring improvement, forever.
- Cease dependence on inspection. You cannot test quality into a product at the end. It has to be built in from the first cut.
That last one is pure carpentry. You do not fix a crooked frame with trim. You fix it when it is a frame.
Deming
The W. Edwards Deming Institute The non-profit Deming founded in 1993. Good starting points are the System of Profound Knowledge and the Fourteen Points.What we actually build
Learning platforms, custom web applications, and products of our own. Some of it is client work for organisations including nonprofits. Some of it is ours, built because the tool did not exist and somebody had to make it.