A February 2021 poll by management consulting company Robert Half showed that 89% of businesses expect the hybrid work model – where employees split their time between home and the office — to be here for good. Moreover, an October 2021 joint study from Google Workspace and The Economist uncovered that 75% of employees believe their companies will fully adopt hybrid work within three years. 

This, of course, will require investment in new technology if the business of work (a.k.a. meetings) is going to continue. While many have tried to make do in 2020 and 2021 via an ad hoc solution of video chat solutions and online collaboration platforms, Zoom fatigue is real. Everyone from National Geographic to researchers at Stanford have explored the concept.

Connecting from wherever & meeting anywhere

One global operation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has recognized it must help its employees escape the feeling they’re trapped in a tiny box on screen. While it piloted a program in 2017 where it shipped VR headsets to staff, the events of the past couple of years have accelerated this effort. Now PwC is holding meetings in exotic virtual locales like luxury ski chalets, swanky penthouses, and, surprisingly, atop notable skyscrapers. There’s also an initiative underway to outfit physical environments with higher-grade microphones, video meeting screens, and their own supply of VR headsets (so everyone can join meetings at the Empire State Building’s observation deck).

We’ve done something similar here at Voltage Control. This past holiday, we shipped a headset to every team member so we could hold our annual party virtually within a space we created using AltspaceVR. While it wasn’t perfect — I built the room myself with very little training — it allowed us to explore the technology ahead of our upcoming Control The Room Summit, which will be incorporating VR as part of its hybrid component (more on that later).

Zooming in the Metaverse

Even Zoom realizes it will have to do something to make video conferencing more engaging. During its September Zoomtopia event, it announced a partnership with the Meta-owned Oculus. This took place only a few weeks after the company formerly known as Facebook rolled out its Horizon Workrooms.

This team-up will allow Oculus Quest headset users to join Zoom Meetings and use the Zoom Whiteboard directly within VR. Workers at home and the office can then brainstorm together, collaborate on a document, have more visually interesting conversations, or just socialize. You can learn more in the video below. 

The Zoom-Oculus-Horizon partnership isn’t the only option out there, though. Around the same time, Cisco revealed its Webex platform was getting a VR/AR upgrade called Webex Hologram. Alluding to the specter of “Zoom fatigue,” Cisco said it wants to support employers in reducing the friction between virtual and in-person collaboration. Not to be outdone, Microsoft soon offered its Teams users a product called Mesh, which is its take on a VR/AR meeting mash-up. In what has to be a nod to that old Xzibit Facebook meme, Slack is even allowing its users to read messages in virtual reality.

More ways to mix it up

Mixed reality is another technology that can bring excitement, engagement, and interactivity to hybrid meetings. Not to be confused with virtual reality, mixed reality incorporates digital elements into a real environment. Headsets like the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 1 utilize sensing and imaging technologies to merge physical and virtual worlds.

Mixed reality can empower facilitators to enhance meetings in really innovative ways, such as allowing you to explore 3D visual aids that you couldn’t bring into an actual meeting room due to size or weight. Not just confined to headsets, you can present mixed reality elements on screens in a meeting space when a speaker is captured on a video camera (you’ll just need someone in an edit suite to add the layers).

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How we’re experimenting with VR at Voltage Control

After running our third annual Control The Room facilitator summit as a remote event in 2021, we’re back at Austin’s Capital Factory on February 2nd  for a hybrid event. For those that can’t join us there, or simply prefer virtual, we’ll be utilizing Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR to bring everyone together despite the physical distance.

Ultimately we decided to virtually present the conference in a space built within AltspaceVR. We won’t, however, be forcing people into the VR environment, those joining remotely can participate via Zoom if they don’t have a VR headset, or download the desktop version of AltspaceVR! We will be raffling off several pairs ahead of the event because we want to encourage everyone to experience how VR can be deployed in the facilitation space. 

Regardless of how people are joining us digitally, we’ll have hosts monitoring the VR and remote platforms to ensure a feedback loop between the in-person and distanced attendees. VR and Zoom attendees will be able to interact and ask the keynote speakers questions, live, via the platform hosts. As you can see, we’re attempting to create as much connective tissue amongst the disparate environments as possible. 

Steve Schofield of MURAL Labs is additionally hosting a week-long VR build event with world builders and facilitators to explore facilitation in VR. Participants from MURAL, Meta, the Horizon Worlds Community, Voltage Control, and Control The Room will gather in Horizon Worlds to think, explore, and build prior to the Summit. The overarching theme of exploration will be on facilitating retrospectives. The outputs will be shared during the Control the Room conference!

If you’re worried about single-handedly integrating VR into your hybrid meetings, know that our effort isn’t the work of one person — it’s the work of many. We’ll have lots of facilitators available across Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR, as well as  an experienced contractor to run our A/V for us. Porting the event in Zoom alone requires him to set up three cameras and switch between them and an HDMI of the slides.

Control The Room will be our first time holding a hybrid meeting with this much technical complexity, and I look forward to sharing our post-event experiences with you. 

Want to witness our VR integration firsthand? Join us in-person or virtually at the Control The Room 2022 Summit. Single-day in-person tickets, virtual tickets, and tickets for separate workshops are all available! You can find more details here.

-Douglas Ferguson, President

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When it comes to facilitation, you may be leading a single meeting or conducting a workshop series, but one fact remains true of all: our purpose is to manage discussions, help create a safe space for ideas to emerge and grow from ALL participants, and ultimately to resolve the issue at hand. The best facilitators regularly ask, ”Why did we hold this meeting?” and “What do we need to gain from it?”

Beginning the journey of professional facilitation is much less daunting than it may sound. The path is sprinkled with knowledge, growth, inclusion of everyone, and ultimately, an environment where thoughts are unleashed by allowing everyone’s voices to be heard. Chances are you are already on this path! We want you to go from being a good facilitator to the best facilitator. You can do that by leveling un through the facilitator pyramid.

What is a Facilitator?

A good facilitator plans and leads a group to meet set goals. The group process is important to effectively reach those goals, work together, make decisions, and solve the issue at hand. 

A better facilitator takes what a good facilitator does and begins to steer the group toward a more open flow of ideas and solutions, allowing voices to be heard and a more flowing process, more freedom, and playfulness, to arise. 

The best facilitator takes all that a step further. Beginning with a psychologically safe space as the foundation for the group, creating active and engaging content, and utilizing stimulating tools to unleash the potential of every idea in the room.

Without the proper space for people to bring their most authentic selves, think of how many problem-solving ideas go unheard? How many meetings would have been more productive and more stimulating had we just moved one more step up the pyramid?

Pro-Tip! Check out our FREE download: Workshop Methods & Activities A collection of links to inspire methods & activities for your next workshop. Check out all of our FREE downloads here!

Our ‘Why’ for Facilitation and facilitation certification

We lead with the value of facilitation, and we offer unique guidance to a spectrum of clients. The pursuit of knowledge, growth, and leadership are just a few of our whys for facilitation. And to share our practice and knowledge with the wider community, we recently launched our Facilitator Certification Program. Through this program, we offer guidance and coaching toward the best in facilitation. Utilizing class immersion, playbooks, readings, and more, we provide a unique opportunity for the necessary practice and feedback facilitators need to grow. The feedback comes from not only instructors but colleagues as well. All of this leads into an opportunity for students to create a portfolio that will best reflect them as a facilitator, highlighting key strengths and your knowledge.

We believe that the future is facilitation, technology and the nature of work is changing, and we believe that if businesses learn the art of facilitation those changes do not need to be as intimidating. Facilitators encourage the ideas that shape how we navigate new workspaces, technological challenges, and social encounters.

A Job Skill You Need

We are seeing a trend in workplaces becoming less hierarchical, there is a growing need for interpersonal problem-solving skills. As we move towards this shift in power and traditional workspaces, we need champions of thought and ideas. We need facilitators to light the way for the colleagues who may be hesitant to share, or unsure about change.

“If we fail to adapt, we fail to move forward.”

-John Wooden

Truly productive meetings embrace change, and that means understanding how to navigate, through facilitation, conversations that may be tough. With the confidence of a facilitation certification, those conversations take on an ease, and even introduce an excitement, about the possibilities of change. Inclusivity is the key to being an effective facilitator. It’s time we shed the traditional, in-effective meeting structure.

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Are You Ready to Climb?

Ready to climb the pyramid? Receiving your Facilitator Certification will grant you the key skills you need through the support of a cohort of facilitator colleagues. By the end of the facilitator certification program you will be able to:  

• Identify a spectrum of game-changing facilitation methods and approaches
• Select the best facilitation methods for your facilitation context
• Implement the right facilitation methods to meet optimal facilitation outcomes
• Reflect on areas of personal facilitator strength and growth
• Cultivate a valuable professional facilitator identity

Passing the coursework means receiving certifications for EACH individual course, and after satisfying all certification requirements you will receive a full certification for your professional portfolios and to display on LinkedIn. 

Not only will you have the credentials, but you will have the key skills to amplify the ideas around you, problem-solve effectively, and create an environment of growth and movement!

The post How ‘Good’ Facilitators become the ‘Best’ Facilitators appeared first on Voltage Control.

It’s a common refrain in training circles that “practice makes practice.” In order to get better at your craft, to build the necessary skills and competencies to excel in your field, you must practice. You succeed and fail. You reflect on those successes and failures. And you get better. It was this frame that inspired our VP of Learning Experience, Erik Skogsberg, when he designed our recently-launched Facilitator Certification Program. We wholeheartedly believe that facilitation is the future as companies continue to transform amidst the pandemic and rapid technological change. And we want to help facilitators across industries thrive in their craft.

As a facilitation agency that leads with the value of facilitation for helping a whole spectrum of clients, we’ve gotten many requests over the years for providing a robust facilitation certification program. Growing facilitators wanted to build their skills with our unique guidance and wanted to be recognized for it. So, this summer, we started the process of designing a practice- and cohort-based Facilitator Certification Program. And now, over a month into our first cohort, we’re having fun and learning a great deal. In this post, we’ll share a bit more about the design behind the program, how its different components fit together to provide a robust learning experience, and share a few tips to help you in your growth as a facilitator.

Focus on the Right Facilitator Outcomes

As seasoned facilitators, we have a common set of skills we regularly draw on in our work. We used those skills to anchor the outcomes for the program. Overall, we want facilitators coming out of our program to know and be able to:

• Identify a spectrum of game-changing facilitation methods and approaches
• Select the best facilitation methods for your facilitation context
• Implement the right facilitation methods to meet optimal facilitation outcomes
• Reflect on areas of personal facilitator strength and growth
• Cultivate a valuable professional facilitator identity

These course outcomes bring into focus the key steps that an effective facilitator takes time and again to support clients across contexts in their work. Facilitators know and draw from a variety of facilitation approaches and traditions. Then, based on client needs, they select the right facilitation methods to best support clients in their articulated needs . Next, they implement these methods and maximize their impact in the moment with clients. After that, they reflect on areas of facilitator strength and growth to get better. And finally, with the first four outcome areas as a foundation, they are able to cultivate the optimal professional facilitator identity to thrive in the ways that facilitators hope to out in the world. To meet these outcomes, we crafted various learning experiences for our learners.

Dive into A Spectrum of Facilitator Learning Experiences

We introduce and model a spectrum of methods through readings, playbooks, case studies, and class immersion to reach these outcomes. We provide opportunities for facilitators to practice these methods in class and in their work contexts, receive feedback and coaching from both course instructors and course colleagues, and finally produce a professional portfolio that not only shows how facilitators have met course outcomes, but also is crafted in a form and manner that would resonate most with their facilitator audiences (could be LinkedIn, professional website, and/or internal HR employee portfolio spaces). It’s essential for us to support our cohort members as they create a portfolio that will be meaningful for them.

It was important to us from the beginning that the certification would be portfolio-based, asking students to show us and the world their growth through the course. We’ve found that a real difference-maker for facilitators in our industry to not only be able to practice their craft but also to talk about it in a manner that is compelling to the audiences they care about. Building a compelling narrative and facilitator story around practice is essential.

Facilitate and Tell a Purposeful Facilitator Story

Our certification is comprised of both synchronous and asynchronous course components, readings from facilitation texts such as The Art of Gathering, Gamestorming, Liberating Structures, and Rituals for Virtual Meetings, homework assignments to practice methods in facilitator contexts, and colleague and instructor coaching, all in service of creating a professional portfolio. And we base our overall instruction in what is known as a gradual release model of teaching. Our VP of Learning Experience uses this approach extensively, as he has trained hundreds of teachers and facilitators over the years.

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What this oftentimes looks like in practice is the introduction of a method by our instructors, immersion in that method that provides students with an opportunity to not only try it out from the participant’s role but also from the vantage point of the facilitator, and then gradually turning over the work of the facilitator to learners both inside and outside of the course. We then build in both reflection and feedback along the way all geared toward facilitators using that reflection and feedback to grow and get better at talking about their work as facilitators in their portfolio and to outside audiences. We find that this storytelling component is an essential part of the work of a facilitator that pays dividends both inside and outside of the facilitated session. And this storytelling is strongest when it is anchored in a strong purpose.

Anchor Your Practice in Purpose

In fact, so much of our work as facilitators is anchored in purpose. What are the purposes that our clients have for their work? What are the purposes for our work as facilitators with our clients? What are the purposes of each activity and method  we’ve chosen to best help our clients meet their purposes and goals? Being clear on and articulating  these purposes in a consistent narrative is essential to the work of an impactful facilitator. And so much of our work with learners in the certification program is focused here. We not only help our students to build competency in the work of a facilitator, but also to be able to gain deeper perspective and self-awareness about what they are doing and communicate that to a wide variety of audiences. It’s that vantage point on practice we’ve found to be the differentiator between run-of-the-mill facilitators and facilitator-leaders who are able to thrive across a variety of contexts.

Jumpstart Your Facilitator Growth

There are some initial ways you can jumpstart your facilitator growth using techniques from our program. As we mentioned above, so much of what we do is anchored in cultivating purpose(s): you in your work, those of your client, and for your growth. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to begin this process: 

• What purpose(s) do you have as a facilitator? Why do you do what you do?
• What purpose(s) do your clients have in asking for your facilitator support?
• Based on your purpose(s) where do you excel, and where do you want to grow?

Beginning to answer these questions can help you put a finer point on just where you might best lean into facilitator growth. These questions nudge you in defining what may have just been tacit or assumed. This also begins your process of building a compelling narrative for your facilitated sessions and, your own professional identity. Your answers and recursive asking of these questions can help you build focused practice and reflection and jumpstart your journey for deeper facilitator growth.

Commit to Your Facilitator Growth

The answers to the above questions can be a great launching point for your individual growth journey. They are also an excellent precursor to making a deeper commitment to your growth through our certification program. If you’re ready to dedicate the necessary time to take your facilitation to the next level and would like to do so with seasoned instructors and a supportive cohort, then submit your application today. Applications are due for our next cohort on January 14th, 2022, and then begins on February 11th, 2022. We’d love to see you in our next cohort.

FAQ Section

What key attributes are essential for effective facilitation?
Effective facilitation hinges on several key attributes, including emotional intelligence, strong communication, and consensus-building skills. Facilitators must be adept at guiding productive meetings and fostering collaboration, ensuring that participants are fully engaged and working towards shared goals. Additionally, a deep understanding of various facilitation techniques, including visual thinking strategies and methods of innovation, is crucial to successfully navigate complex group dynamics and drive collaboration in both traditional and virtual settings.

How does the Voltage Control Facilitation Certification Program help build facilitation skills?
The Voltage Control comprehensive facilitation certification program focuses on developing critical facilitation skills through hands-on practice and interactive learning experiences. Participants engage in practical exercises and practice sessions that help reinforce the fundamentals of facilitation, as well as advanced techniques. The program includes expert critique from seasoned facilitators, providing actionable strategies and personalized feedback to improve facilitation practice. In addition, the program offers a capstone experience, enabling learners to apply their skills in real-world scenarios and complete the program with a fully-fledged facilitator skillset.

What practical tools and resources are available to participants during the certification program?
The certification program provides participants with a wealth of practical tools and resources to support their learning journey. These include access to LUMA Workplace, design tools, and an extensive library of training tools designed to enhance facilitation practice. Participants also receive exercise files, additional learning resources, and access to workshop resources that they can use to implement facilitation techniques in their daily work. The use of these tools helps participants develop effective group collaboration skills and tackle various business challenges with innovative solutions.

How does Voltage Control ensure mastery of facilitation skills?
Voltage Control ensures the mastery of facilitation skills through a hybrid approach that combines online training with virtual sessions, practice opportunities, and expert coaching. The program offers 1.5-hour video courses, weekly challenges, and practical tasks designed to build core strengths in facilitation. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their learning through individual study and reflection tasks, which help reinforce key facilitation techniques. By offering personalized facilitation training and a flexible learning cycle, the program allows participants to progress at their own pace while mastering essential skills required for effective facilitation.

What is the structure of the facilitator certification program?
The Voltage Control Facilitation Certification Program is structured to provide a comprehensive learning experience through a blend of core and elective modules. Participants start with an introduction to facilitation skills and move through core modules that cover both foundational skills and more advanced, hands-on workshop facilitation training. The program also includes elective modules that allow participants to tailor their learning to specific areas of interest, such as mastering Human-Centered Design Facilitator methods or refining facilitation practice in different contexts. Upon successful completion, participants receive a legitimate facilitation certificate and gain access to a private facilitator community, where they can continue developing their skills alongside a cohort of peers.

Can I earn a certificate of completion through the online facilitation training course?
Yes, participants who successfully complete the 6-week online facilitation course will earn a certificate of completion. The online program offers a flexible learning experience, with both synchronous and asynchronous sessions designed to accommodate varying schedules. Participants will engage in weekly challenges, practice facilitation techniques in virtual sessions, and receive expert critiques from instructors. The course concludes with a final evaluation, after which participants receive their facilitation certificate, marking their achievements and validating their newfound expertise in facilitation.

What is the role of practical experience and hands-on practice in the certification process?
Practical experience is a cornerstone of the Voltage Control certification program. Participants engage in hands-on practice through practical exercises, coaching sessions, and immersive learning experiences. These exercises give learners the opportunity to apply facilitation skills in real-world scenarios, including the use of human-centered design methods, visual thinking strategies, and collaborative leadership skills. The inclusion of expert facilitator critique and feedback further enhances the learning process, ensuring that participants refine their skills with each exercise. By the end of the program, learners will have gained practical skills that can be immediately applied in their professional roles.

How does the Voltage Control program support the development of collaborative leadership skills?
The Voltage Control program is designed to help participants build collaborative leadership skills through a combination of coaching sessions, interactive exercises, and practical tasks. Participants learn how to effectively lead group sessions, facilitate consensus-building exercises, and drive collaboration within teams. The curriculum emphasizes actionable strategies that participants can implement in real-world situations, whether they are chiefs of staff, design leaders, or team leaders within their organizations. Graduates of the program are well-equipped to lead teams through complex challenges, using facilitation techniques that foster collaboration and drive positive outcomes.

The post Designing Our Facilitator Certification Program appeared first on Voltage Control.

Are you running a company and struggling with a particular business challenge or question about your users? Do you want to make sure you’re on the right path forward to success? You might want to consider hiring a strategic planning service. It is their job to analyze the position your company is in and work with you to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Be warned: they are blunt. But, they are also fair. You may not like everything they say, but they are effective.

Strategic planning is an organizational strategy used in companies of all sizes and verticals. It provides a plan and roadmap for a company and is a tool that should be used in fulfilling a mission or goal. Strategic planning services are experts in the key aspects of the strategic planning process and can help organizations outline and implement strategic planning initiatives. Successful strategic plans should clearly document specific goals and the action steps and resources necessary to accomplish them. Organizations without a strategic planning foundation and forward-thinking process are much more likely to face roadblocks, especially in today’s competitive environment. 

Still not sure if this service could help your company? Here is a basic rundown of all the ways you might benefit from hiring a strategic planning service.

1. A Strategic Planning Service Helps You Plan

A strategic planning service’s purpose isn’t to read over your plan and then check it off so you can go execute. Their job is to partner with you during this planning phase and actually work with you on it. They will analyze your company so they can lead you down the path of smart business decisions. Elements and components of a strategic plan include:

• Mission and vision statements for context
• Goal setting
• Strategy implementation timelines
• Progress monitoring timelines
• Benchmarks and/or objectives that inform progress towards goals and how they support the mission and values
• Defining how and when progress will be tracked
• Outline of roles and responsibilities for each employee or team

2. They Facilitate the Process

When a strategic planning service first comes in, they review everything that has to do with your company. They familiarize themselves with the ins and outs, from your employees to your goals. When you’re holding your strategic planning meetings, the strategic planning service can bring in an expert to help facilitate these meetings and conversations. This expert, or facilitator, is someone who plans, designs, and leads a key group meeting or event and can help when dealing with larger topics. They offer a non-biased opinion and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. 

Pro Tip: Check out Facilitation Lab, our weekly virtual meetup focused on helping facilitators hone their craft to help improve the quality of meetings. Control the Room, Voltage Control’s Annual Facilitator Summit is another resource for facilitators. The summit provides facilitators with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge on how to facilitate meetings that matter and connect with other facilitation and meeting practitioners.

3. They Ask the Big Questions

Strategic planning services ask all the big questions that you may be afraid to ask. Your answers to these deep, probing questions are the key to unlocking a more successful future. Because they are neutral and unbiased (and offer a fresh perspective), strategic planning services aren’t afraid to dig into potentially touchy subjects. This may feel uncomfortable at first but will help you learn more about your business and where you want to take it (and how to get there) in the long run. Strategic planning services can also help accelerate innovation through design sprints and innovation exercises. 

Pro Tip: Learn about when you should run a design sprint here and how Voltage Control can help here. 

4. Strategic Planning Services Challenge Your Status Quo

Similarly to the above point, a strategic planning service is not afraid to challenge the status quo and will do this often. That means everything you’re currently doing with your business is potentially on the chopping block. Strategic planning services take an honest assessment of your company’s situation and can help you identify areas in which your organization can improve. They will share their insights and recommendations with you. Big problems will be discussed in enough detail where you’ll be able to easily make changes. You’ll have the benefit of an outsider’s perspective to see what shifts you might want to make in your company. Embrace these new ideas.

5. They Keep What Works

That being said, strategic planning companies will also identify, highlight and keep what’s working well for your organization. Every company has its individual strengths. The role of the service is also to point out these strengths so you can keep them up and iterate upon them. 

6. They Offer Advice During Changing Times

We’ve all learned how much the pandemic changed the way we work. Strategic planning services can provide clarity and organization during uncertain times. In light of recent events, an effective strategic plan looks a lot different today than a few years ago, in large part due to the increasingly hybrid workplace. Your team members are probably not in the same location, or even if they are, may not all be coming into a physical office. Many organizations had to develop strategic plans when determining how to successfully work in this hybrid and virtual environment. 

7. They Analyze and Get Involved

The strategic planning service’s job doesn’t end with analyzing your company. They get involved in helping you develop, execute and evaluate a new strategic plan. They sit down and help build your strategic plan framework, which after the initial analysis and assessment, will typically include:

• High level strategy formulation and development
• Strategic plan documentation 
• Translation of high level plan into operational planning and action items
• Performance evaluation 
• Strategic plan review and refinement as needed

A strategic planning service can also help with team alignment, collaboration training, and team culture, even if your team is remote. 

Strategic planning is a necessary, positive process when an organization wants to tackle business problems and be set up for future success. Organizations considering strategic planning should also consider utilizing strategic planning services. They bring expertise and guidance, promote team alignment and provide a more streamlined process.

Create your strategic plan today

Does your organization need help to develop a strategic plan? Voltage Control offers training and facilitation services. Reach out to hello@voltagecontrol.com to learn more or schedule a consultation.  

The post Why You Need to Hire A Strategic Planning Service appeared first on Voltage Control.

Wolfgang Wopperer-Beholz is a London-based facilitator and self-described sense-maker who helps organizations and startups navigate change and complexity through training and coaching. He started his career as a student of philosophy and political sciences before becoming an entrepreneur. Most recently, he’s also dedicated himself to climate activism.

Through my conversations with innovators of all kinds, I’ve found that while someone’s “first life” might not seem related to their current career, it always has points of resonance and connection. For Wolfgang, his philosophy background directly impacts his strategic facilitation work: “It influenced my work in two different ways. One is that, when studying philosophy the way I did, there is a tradition that focuses heavily on logic, presenting sound arguments, and being very clear about what you’re trying to say. It was a training for dealing with complex issues and being critical of positions that are being put forward with an air of authority. I think it was excellent training for understanding complex issues.”

Second, he explained how philosophy gave him a reliable “bullshit meter”: “It comes with a critical attitude. You get very aware of bullshit. I developed a sensitivity for going beyond buzzwords and trying to understand the fact of the matter as early on as possible. I’m more relentless in doing that and a bit more critical than I would have been if I hadn’t I studied philosophy and political science.”

“I developed a sensitivity for going beyond buzzwords and trying to understand the fact of the matter as early on as possible.”

What makes a great facilitator?

As a fellow facilitator, I wanted to talk to Wolfgang about how he became a facilitator and what that designation means to him. First, he shared how he doesn’t think, as some might, that being a facilitator is about knowing all the answers: “I see myself not in a position where I can provide people with knowledge or answers, but where I can help them find answers and reveal the knowledge and the information they already have. I see my job as helping them think together and find solutions they probably wouldn’t have found if they wouldn’t have worked and thought about their challenges together. I wouldn’t have been able to provide them with these solutions either.”

For Wolfgang, a facilitator isn’t hired for the “gathering and processing of information and/or decision making.” Instead, he thinks this gathering and processing need to happen within the organization. He’s there to help them to that.

Three modes of facilitation

We also discussed how all facilitators have their particular style and strengths, and Wolfgang shared his perspective on what makes a good facilitator. He identified three forms of facilitation. First, he described an experienced facilitator he saw at a tech festival last year: “The main thing he helped us with was making sure everybody felt safe and that there was a process in place that would lead somewhere. He was very much in the background and helped us through the process just by his presence and by the aura he exuded.”

That in-the background mode of facilitating is one approach; personally, Wolfgang likes to take a more hands-on approach: “I am, compared to other facilitators, very keen on diving into the subject matter with the participants in my workshops.” For him, this takes the form of visualizing ideas as a way to make connections for people in the room: “I’m always trying to be part of the thinking process. I like to identify structures and connections and visualize ideas as we go forward. My way of facilitating is quite focused on generating artifacts or models that help my participants understand their challenges better.”

“My way of facilitating is quite focused on generating artifacts or models that help my participants understand their challenges better.”

Wolfgang then talked about the third mode of facilitation: “There are facilitators who are neither ‘mere presence’ or diving deep into the subject matter, but focus more on a rigid structure of the process. This can be a good way to help teams also, to provide them with a structure they can think freely in.”

No matter what type of facilitator you are, Wolfgang noted that authenticity is most critical at the end of the day: “What’s important for a facilitator that he or she feels comfortable within his or her mode of working. Something that’s authentic and natural and doesn’t play like ‘facilitation theater.’ The facilitation I don’t find very valuable is when you realize that a person is just doing what he or she does because they read somewhere that it’s supposed to be the way. But, there isn’t any understanding, depth, or authenticity in it.”

Innovation isn’t linear

In all of my conversations, I ask interviewees about the approaches they’ve seen go wrong in corporate innovation. Wolfgang’s answer: “Approaches that discount complexity and try to model innovation as a linear process, when in fact, it’s a complex adaptive system.”

The idea of complexity theory is something I’m fascinated by as well, so I asked Wolfgang to discuss how he got interested in the topic. “I think the first contact I had was almost completely isolated from my work context because it was intellectual curiosity. After working in product innovation and in diverse contexts with many different stakeholders, the only way to describe the situations we’re working in is by making use of the concepts of complex adaptive systems. I began to try and understand my work through that lens.”

He continued: “This is why I don’t think there is a silver bullet for innovation. Things are complex, and we will fail most of the time. If you use tools that give you a better understanding of why that is and how to react, it’s a more honest way of working than suggesting things aren’t as complex or easier.”

Interested in finding out more about complexity theory? Wolfgang suggests an online course called Complexity Explorer by the Santa Fe Institute.

Innovation and outcomes

Perhaps it’s the philosopher in him that made Wolfgang give me a comprehensive definition of innovation when I posed the question “What is innovation?” He said: “I begin quite canonically with innovation as the creation and introduction of new or significantly enhanced products and services, processes, or business models. This can be understood as either the practice of creating and introducing them, the process that structures this practice, or the system the practice takes place in. I’ve found the third meaning most helpful in my work.”

He went on: “When innovation is understood as the outcome this system produces, it isn’t an end in itself, but a change that creates positive impact on stakeholders — which is why they drive or embrace it. The key question then becomes: For which stakeholders does an innovation create positive impact — and for whom does it not? Does it profit management and shareholders? Does it profit users and customers? Does it profit employees and suppliers? And, most important to me, does it profit society and our ecosystem as a whole? Only if it does, innovation becomes progress.”

He summarized it this way: “So for me, understanding impact on all stakeholders is key to understanding innovation.”

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Ten steps to a successful innovation program

When I ask the innovators I speak with about how they would structure an innovation program, I never know where they will take the question, which is what I love about it.

Wolfgang took my question and laid out a constructive ten-step approach to a great innovation program.

1. Formulate a clear and ambitious overarching purpose.
2. Organize all needed competencies for turning the purpose into implementations in diverse interdisciplinary teams.
3. Structure their work in an iterative process focused on continuous learning and alignment.
4. Create space for expeditions and exploration early on, and for focus on implementation and shipping later.
5. Use products, services, etc. as the concrete social objects around which to organize, learn, align, and grow teams.
6. Provide semi-formal mechanisms to collect, evaluate, and incorporate feedback from all stakeholders into these objects.
7. Regularly decide on how to go forward with individual initiatives based on this feedback.
8. Collaboratively design and adapt not only the products, services, etc., but also the process you’re developing them in.
9. Use sense-making frameworks to create a shared understanding and support collaborative design, learning, and alignment.
10. Create an incentive system that fosters this explorative way of working, if necessary, independent from other areas in your organization.

Wolfgang reflected on these ten steps a bit more in our conversation and how he’s seen things go wrong in organizations that don’t have a firm grasp of the first step in his process — purpose. “In almost every kind of organization, there is some disconnect on the way throughout the organization structure, throughout the hierarchy from purpose to concrete action. There’s always some point where things don’t line up anymore, where there isn’t a good reason for doing things the way they are doing it, where it’s just a product of the silos they’ve built over the years. This is usually the main roadblock to get to a consistent understanding of ‘why are we doing what we are doing?’”

And to circle back to complexity theory, Wolfgang reiterated how this disconnect is not a simple fix: “This is something you can not solve inside of a single workshop. I’m always trying to create awareness of that — and then generate ideas how these disconnects can be dealt with more fundamentally than just patching them.”

Thanks for reading this summary of my conversation with Wolfgang Wopperer-Beholz. If you want to check out my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please see here.

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This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here

One of Heather Turney’s guiding principles as an innovation leader is: “Never be comfortable enough.”

“You either love me or you want to fire me. My job is to always speak truth about what we’re trying to do and the difficulty of it. And you either love that or you think that I’m annoying and want to get rid of me.”

To Heather, having the grit to take this perspective is essential in innovation. “You have to be comfortable in that space to do great work. Otherwise you’ll become just like the business and cater to the whims of the executives…”

“My job is to always speak truth about what we’re trying to do and the difficulty of it.”

Heather recently left Porsche after running their innovation program for three years. She has a long track record of working with world-class brands including The Coca-Cola Company, The Disney Company, Yahoo!, NBCUniversal, Compassion International, and the U.S. Soccer Foundation.

Now she works for an equally-esteemed company— Nationwide—where she is a core member of the team’s innovation pods, driving forward project progress, conducting design thinking research with users and ensuring innovation work aligns with the corporates current and future strategic goals.

She also has a very cool side project called Start Small, a company she started to bring design thinking practices to everyday people so they can use the techniques to build better daily habits, intentions, and goals.

Lean Into What’s There

When you are building a new innovation program, Heather spoke about the importance of honoring the great things that are already happening within an organization. “Too often, we hear people in innovation talking about their company needing a total transformation, disruption, and change — the need to scrap everything and start again from scratch.”

She doesn’t think that’s the right approach. Ignoring the work that’s already been happening will likely backfire. Any innovation team will need to partner with the folks that have been hard at work on the challenge before the innovation team got involved. Instead, Heather aims to lean into the internal initiatives and actions that are moving in the right direction. She looks for the innovative ways of working that are already there. “What are the things internally that you can lean on to help ramp up? If you take a moment to dig in, you can find that original, creative entrepreneurial spirit of the organization.”

“The biggest downfall is when you’re looking for innovation and transformation and you lean away from the organization. Instead, look around and find the stories, cultures, and experiences that you can lean into.”

“In order to change the narrative, you have to get people on your side to do the work of building.”

It’s all about partnership and taking a collaborative, rather than antagonistic, or throw-everything-out attitude. “In order to change the narrative, you have to get people on your side to do the work of building. It takes a village to build an idea. And if you ignore the village or organization and only focus on the idea, it will never go anywhere. It will not be able to grow if you don’t think first and foremost about the environment you need it to grow in.”

Starting Small

Heather describes her way of approaching problems as a blend of design thinking methodologies and Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change. She believes in starting small and ensuring that people have the right tools to act in new and innovative ways.

For example, when she was at Porsche, she wanted to give the team the tools that supported being “curious and creative.” They took a simple, fairly inexpensive approach; they gave everyone sticky notes and pens and tried a few small experiments rather than kicking off one overly-ambitious innovation initiative.

Heather tests smaller ideas as a way to learn and to define what the path forward should be. “Hopefully [the experiments] give us a more solid framework of what we think does work, what we think the real intentions are, and how we are going to turn them into action for the ultimate goal.”

This loops back to the concept of leaning into what’s already at play versus reinvention. She’s seen it go poorly when an innovation team comes in and tries to redefine a culture or a mission right off the bat. “It’s not about what you write down on paper and what the sticky note says. It’s more about what’s true amongst the people. Once you can live it, then you can define it. It’s hard to define in the abstract and assume that that’s how you’re going to live.”

Priorities & Storytelling

One important aspect of Heather’s role is working with leadership to understand their priorities and to “co-create what a balanced portfolio looks like.” By balanced, she means that you need both the short- and long-term view. Companies will always need to plan for short-term initiatives— the projects that are likely more expected and bring immediate value. But she also makes sure that the organization has its hand in fuzzier things that are longer term. These are harder, but they are also the potentially-bigger wins.

Beyond strategic thinking, being a great storyteller is another quality that Heather identifies as fundamental to her work and success. She connects this back to a human-centered design philosophy and a drive to always think about the consumer first. “I want to communicate what is happening and who it is happening to. I like to make the data compelling instead of just numbers and spreadsheets.”

She shared an anecdote from early in her career that illustrates the importance of storytelling. Heather had applied for and received a social innovation grant for her organization from President Obama’s office. “We had won this huge award and got federal recognition. We were literally signing the paperwork and then the board team says, ‘Can you remind me again why we’re doing this?’ I remember thinking—weren’t you the ones that said we should do this? That was an early lesson of how you should keep your stakeholders well-briefed so they understand the stories and the rationale behind things.”

It’s a lesson she pulls into her work today. “I’m always finding stories I think are compelling. It’s important, especially for the executives who are on your side and who are helping make that argument with the rest of the executive team. You need everyone to have the same powerful stories and the ability to share because culture is the story that you talk about.”

Meet the World Where it Is

In terms of companies that inspire Heather, she cited Netflix. In particular, she is drawn to the fact that when Reed Hastings started the company, he (supposedly, according to industry lore) had the vision for the Netflix we know today. However, as Heather says: “The technology wasn’t there and the consumers weren’t there. Nothing in the marketplace actually supported what he thought his dream idea could be.”

Yet, that didn’t stop him from starting down the path to the vision. But he had to meet the customers where they were at the time. (Which was still in love with Blockbuster!) “He took that initial idea and scaled it all the way down to: ‘What’s the most minimal idea that I can get to the marketplace to start growing a customer base. Then I can learn and scale it up.’ Eventually, he was able to make it into his idea.”

Heather finds two lessons in this story. First, if you have a great idea and it doesn’t work, don’t throw it away. “Think about what the market is ready for and what you can allow,” she said. Second, it teaches about testing and learning, rather than just building and launching.

Technology for Human Needs

Heather is optimistic that the next wave of innovation is not “technology for technology sake.” She anticipates the future is more about: “the blending of technology and human life to solve real, everyday needs.” She talked about Bird scooters as an example of rapid changes that are based in human need. In this case, Bird answered the need of helping people with “last mile” transportation.

“Day 1 everyone is confused. Day 5 people love or hate them, Day 30 walkers are automatically stepping aside for them and the city sidewalk construct has ‘changed’ to accommodate them.”

“It seems really simple, it’s a scooter. But, Bird nailed democratizing access to the scooters and how you actually get from Point A to Point B. Instead of too much technology, they thought about how they distribute to actually help people in their day-to-day lives.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Lean Into What’s Already There appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Taylor Dawson started his career as a design engineer at Lexmark and GE. Six months into his first job, he was tasked with designing a new toner cartridge for a Lexmark consumer printer. Throughout numerous experiences designing products for consumers, Taylor began to see a pattern in how product decisions were made. “We have industrial designers who work on projects and think from the consumer standpoint, but if there is ever a skirmish between engineers and industrial designers, in my experience, the industrial designers almost always lose. And they’re only involved at the very first stages of conceptualization.”

Taylor observed that being involved throughout the product lifecycle gave engineers more say in the development of the user experience. “Engineers are touching the first prototypes, running tests and labs, and they’re actually making key decisions that are critical to the user experience with absolutely no understanding of who the customer really is or what their daily use of the product looks like.”

Taylor saw a need to shift how product decisions were being made and he wanted to be a catalyst for that change. “I always wanted to get into a place where I would be able to actually impact how products were developed. Because quite often the first thing that you design, especially in a big company, ends up having an outsized impact on the end product. So we’re delving a lot into design thinking and how we avoid biasing the final solution.”

Challenging the norms of product design eventually led Taylor to become a founding member of FirstBuild, GE Appliance’s open innovation incubator. He shared with me his thoughts on why frameworks don’t suit innovation and how optimization and innovation are uncovered through entirely different processes.

Frameworks are too reductive for innovation

In Taylor’s view, innovation is supposed to be messy. “For some reason, everyone, especially people from a business school mentality or a big corporation mentality, likes to think that there is a neat clean process that you follow that is going to lead you to success.” He sees innovation as more akin to the chaos of life. “I think the reality is that the world is so much messier than that. It’s egotistical to think that you can reduce real life to a set of steps that, if followed, will result in ultimate success. If you try and do that you’ll find that you just continuously hit up against contradictions, and there’s no one simple process to follow.” Instead, Taylor believes in creating an environment of exploration where value can be discovered in the unexpected.

“It’s egotistical to think that you can reduce real life to a set of steps that, if followed, will result in ultimate success.”

Rather than distilling innovation into a process that anyone can do, it’s important to find people with the right mindset and initiative. “In the innovation space you’re trying to start something new, so you can’t reduce it to a series of steps. You need to be willing to learn and do new things that might be very uncomfortable. When we’ve hired people for the business side, I’ve tried to find people who have enough initiative to where, if we’re working on something new, they will just figure out what the next step is as opposed to being told what to do.”

“It’s more about the people than it is about the process.”

When making hiring decisions, Taylor puts less emphasis on degrees or experience that perfectly conforms to the job at hand. He finds a willingness to dive in to be a critical skill when it comes to innovation.“It’s not so important to have the right degree, to have the right set of experiences. It’s more important to have the right mindset and to have the willingness to go and do stuff that is uncomfortable or may seem like it might be beneath your station. When we’ve hired people, we really tried to find people who have the courage and the lack of ego required in order to get things done in that way. It’s more about the people than it is about the process.”

Hiring for innovation

Having a solid approach to hiring is important to the foundation of any innovation program. When possible, Taylor recommends working with a potential candidate as a contractor for a short period of time before hiring. “We make a practice of having an active talent pool of students that we’re circling through. You can find someone who works well with your team with the skill that you need. We’ve been able to have people that we knew well, or that we had worked with for six months or so, that we could bring on the team after we knew what they were capable of doing, that they had the right chemistry, and the right capabilities.”

When time is a concern or you’re trying to scale up quickly, look for people with a history of dealing in uncertainty and examples of a willingness to just figure things out. “I was hiring for a role that is very hard to find a cookie cutter solution for because we didn’t even know what the job was going to be. And two months after this person started, we knew that it was probably going to change a lot. So the person that we selected for it wasn’t selected because of their degree or because of their previous experience. They were selected because we knew that they had the initiative to go and figure out the next step. They were just that kind of person, and we’d seen them do it in a previous job.”

The rules for optimization do not apply

When approaching innovation, Taylor believes it’s important to recognize that the rules for optimization and the rules for innovation are entirely different. He shared one of his favorite observations which comes from Kevin Kelly’s 1997 article “New Rules for the New Economy”:

“Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.” — Kevin Kelly

“The reason I like this so much is that it cuts directly against the approach taken to innovation by large companies. You can wrap a process around optimization to achieve predictable yields in performance improvement. You won’t be able to wrap a process around innovation. You actually have to let go of the process and become comfortable with uncertainty.”

While optimization can be useful for a business, it ultimately leads to diminishing returns because processes can only be optimized so much. “For businesses that are currently existing, a 10% growth rate would be an awesome growth rate. They can create a predictable amount of extra value just by optimizing the things that they do well. The gain that you’re going to get through that is going to diminish over time until the point where you reach optimal performance.”

“You actually have to let go of the process and become comfortable with uncertainty.”

Companies that want to dramatically grow their top line have to abandon the processes they use to find optimization because they don’t work for disruptive innovation. “At GE Appliances, they apply the NPI (New Product Introductions) process to a new innovative product. It turns out that it fails dramatically for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is because they look at that as a massive launch and think about how they’re going to invest in it the way that they would invest in one of their major platforms. The projects end up very costly and time-consuming. And they don’t really learn anything about it until the very end.”

As an alternative, Taylor suggests re-tooling your playbook and operating like a startup in order to start getting feedback from paying customers as early as possible. “We’ve styled our playbook along the lines of building a startup. We start small, we’re very open, and we talk to customers very, very early on and all the way through the process. We focus on getting an early version of a product into the hands of real paying customers.”

Taylor likens the process of innovation to panning for gold. It’s a long-term, continuous process in which you find a shiny gold nugget every once in a while. “We like to think that the rules of optimization have their place. Probably 99% of the people in a major corporation are going to use those same rules, the ones they’re comfortable with, to continue the trajectory of the existing company and keep squeezing value out of the existing business model. And then 1% of the people in your company who can be comfortable with uncertainty, who are interested in learning new things and finding new value are going to spend their time panning for gold, looking for the hidden gems that could become the thing that replaces the existing company.”

When it comes to building and funding teams, Taylor finds that a long-term pursuit like innovation benefits greatly from shorter-term goals and investment timeframes. One of his recent ventures involved a team of eight people who, for a time, were struggling with a product that wasn’t bringing in revenue. “Fortunately after about six to eight months of beating our heads against the wall and not being very successful, we found a product that we could offer, that can lead us to being cashflow positive in the coming quarter. But before then, it’s like staring down the barrel of a shotgun.”

Taking away some difficult lessons from that experience, Taylor sees value in building smaller teams with short-term milestones. “The best practice I’ve heard is to fund three to four people full time for three months. Don’t expect they’re going to start something. Expect that their job is discovery. Give them three months to discover if they think there’s something there. If they’ve proved to you that there’s credibly something there, give them three more months to get their first customer. And if they can get their first customer, keep them going. If not, let them move on to the next thing or rotate back into their regular job.”

Innovation Accounting

In order to discern progress in short timeframes, Taylor has adopted Eric Ries’ Innovation Accounting approach to measurement. “The basic idea is that you are looking for lead measures of success that are tied directly to future financial performance. Once you understand which critical attributes yield success, you establish a disciplined rhythm of hypothesizing, testing, and evaluating against a previous benchmark.” The results of the first iteration should then drive subsequent iterations. Taylor doesn’t view this approach as revolutionary per se but does point out that applying learnings to future work in a rigorous way is often a rare practice.

On a recent marketing project, Taylor describes shortening experiments and sprint timeframes to collect more data points. “We launch the sprint on Tuesday morning, running it on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then look at the data on Thursday. By Friday morning we’ve launched another sprint and we start the process again on Monday. We do that for six weeks in a row, so we have about 12 data points. And we’re able to see exactly what’s happened every single time we did it.”

The key to identifying the right metrics is having an idea of what the solution looks like. “For the project, we’re working on now it’s pretty simple, but for the project, we were working on when we first started six or twelve months ago we had no idea. We understood that there was a need in the marketplace, but we didn’t know what the solution looked like. And when you don’t know what the solution looks like yet, you don’t really know how to measure your effectiveness at that solution. That’s a really frustrating problem and it’s a problem that almost all startups go through.”

When structuring innovation programs, Taylor has found that it’s important to acknowledge reality, consider the right team allocation, and ensure your data is truly validated. “Any innovation program that you’re running, if you’re really good, you’re gonna probably have 20% of the things you work on actually get to the next step. Almost everything falls flat.” With this reality in mind, he suggests holding off on adding more people to the team until there’s traction. “It’s rare to find something that performs better than what you’re currently doing. So in that world, you have to make sure that you’re not putting too many resources behind any one thing before you’ve got some traction.”

In order to validate that an idea has traction, get a commitment from actual customers. The three ways customers can show you they’re getting value involve time, money, and social currency. “Time means they’re willing to spend some time talking about it. Social currency means they’re willing to tell their friends about it. Whenever we call something validated, we’re making sure that a customer has actually shown that they value the product. The best form of value that they can give back is, of course, money.”

Make your employees heroes

Once the team is in place and experiments are running, Taylor believes a leader’s role is empowering and mentoring the team and then getting out of their way. “It’s actually based on this idea in a book by Donald Miller called Building a StoryBrand. He says that the hero’s journey can be applied to your company’s brand. You want to turn the customer who buys your product into the hero, and you’re the guide who takes them through the end of their journey and solves their problem.”

Taylor has adapted this concept, replacing the role of the customer with the role of employee. “I think this should apply to the way you think as a manager or boss. You should see yourself as a guide who turns your employees into heroes. If you can put your employees in a position where they can go through a journey that changes them, that actually fundamentally helps them get over a challenge or fear, jump over a hurdle that they’ve always seen in front of them, they will be loyal and hardworking. It will be an enriching experience for them, and they’ll perform for you. That’s the experience that I had with my former boss. And it’s the type of experience that I try and create for the people that I work with now.”

As customer feedback starts coming in, Taylor encourages teams to value data and devalue opinions. “Create a structure and a culture that allows for rapid and low-cost evaluation of new ideas. This can be very uncomfortable as people in the corporate environment are used to conforming to the opinions of leadership, and leaders are used to expressing their opinions.”

During his time launching products for GE Appliances, Taylor found that one of the damaging parts of the process was the requirement to run the idea all the way up to the top. “If there’s a person who is perceived as the smart guy or gal in the room who says ‘that’s a stupid idea,’ the thing gets shot down. What does and doesn’t get launched is subject to the whims of the people who are considered to be the smartest people in the room.”

As proof that hierarchy does not determine one’s ability to predict success, Taylor recalls an experiment. The product was an ice maker with a $500 MSRP that would be crowdfunded for a price of $400 — still four times the cost of a typical ice maker. Guesses were collected on how much the crowdfunding campaign would receive from people all over the company. The answers ranged from $300,000 to $3 million. By the end of the campaign, the funding totaled at $3 million.

“The only way of knowing what product is going to hit is getting it into the market and letting the markets tell you.”

“The person who guessed $3 million was the custodian and the person who guessed $300,000 was the CTO. There was a perfectly indirect correlation between your salary and your ability to guess the market for a product. And it validated exactly what we were trying to do. Because we were trying to prove that people aren’t very good at guessing. No matter how well educated you are, no matter how much experience you have, people aren’t very good at guessing what product is going to hit. The only way of knowing what product is going to hit is getting it into the market and letting the markets tell you.”

A lesson on fear and perception

One of the biggest lessons Taylor has learned in his career is that fear and perception can limit one’s potential. He attributes this lesson to an early experience at FirstBuild. As an engineer who mostly interacted with other engineers, Taylor was eager to get out into the world and talk to people. When the opportunity arose to talk to an online publication he jumped at the chance.

“I spoke to them and I didn’t tell them anything confidential, but the story came out the next day and my boss called me up.” He later learned that GE has a policy that any conversations with the media about GE business had to be pre-approved. In response the head of communications sent out a company-wide email to ensure everyone was aware of the media policy. Taylor initially found this experience to be incredibly embarrassing as those he worked with knew that he was the reason for the email.

Looking back, Taylor sees the experience as one of the best things that happened to him. “It gave me this perspective on what is important and what is unimportant, what the worst case scenario looks like. And it turns out that the only thing that made that a worst case scenario for me was my perception of the event, not the actual outcome of the event. Most people continue to be constrained by things and make decisions based on the fears that they have about what’s going to happen. I’ve been able to, over time, become much more independent from the fears of what’s going to happen by running through the very quick exercise of what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen here? If the worst thing that happens is people might perceive me differently, that’s probably not a really big deal.”

Innovation in the cornhusker state

When I asked Taylor who he thought was getting innovation right, his response came from a place many people wouldn’t consider a hotbed for innovation: Lincoln, Nebraska. He applauds the work of NelNet and their internal incubator as a program worthy of attention.

“They let their employees come up with a pitch and if it sounds like a good idea they’ll give them a very short leash to run on. So, it’s this three-month long discovery exercise. They are not expected to have dollars by the end of it, but they are expected to come back and have learned something significant that proves their hypothesis that there’s really a market. It’s not costly, but it’s really hard for companies to get right because management has a tendency to want to get heavily involved and call the shots.”

Taylor also appreciates P&G’s efforts on launching Tide Spin, an on-demand laundry service. A P&G brand manager, David VanHimbergen, initially pitched the idea to his VP. David asked for six months and two or three people to launch an on-demand laundry service branded with the Tide name. “And I think that within three months they got the business up and running. They rented a warehouse, and within two years they had a comparable company. They recently acquired a local laundry service and they’ve actually doubled or tripled their market with that acquisition.”

Getting comfortable with uncertainty and realizing the importance of people over processes are two ways Taylor believes companies can set themselves up for finding success in unexpected places. Relying on rigorous data collection and application, even teams with limited resources can turn uncertainty into valuable learning opportunities that inform product decisions so they’re more closely aligned with consumer needs.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Valuing Data and Devaluing Opinions in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is the first in a new series of articles on thought leaders in the innovation space.

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“We can choose to embrace life as a curious learner-innovator. A learner-innovator outlook, one in which we are willing to ‘leap into the unknowable’, encourages us to at least consider how we might live and lead others differently…”
 — Kellee M. Franklin, PhD. From “Leap into the Unknowable”

Kellee M. Franklin is a strategic innovation leader, human-centered design expert and executive advisor who focuses on business and digital transformation. She’s a leadership coach, advisor and fellow for several medical organizations, and runs the consulting firm Mindful Innovation Labs, which helps clients “align innovation, mindfulness, and technology with purpose-driven business practices in the digital age.”

Kellee comes with an impressive list of innovation projects that she’s been part of, including rolling out a first-of-its-kind learning platform with the US Army National Guard and helping to launch the nation’s first web-based cyber security identification system. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I had the chance to interview her. We talked about what’s working (and not) in the innovation space today; here’s three big ideas I took away from our discussion.

1. Innovation Shouldn’t Be Exclusive

One of the first questions I posed to Kellee was: what approaches to innovation do you find to be wrong-headed? So often, we only pay attention to the successes — the “unicorns”, the Ubers, the Apples. Without naming-names, Kellee quickly pointed to in-house innovation labs that are exclusive and accessible only to the innovation group. She’s seen companies that stand-up an innovation lab, but who don’t invite the wider organization in to reap the benefits. “Limiting the accessibility to ‘innovation’ is really not at the spirit of innovation,” she said. In contrast, she’s seen the most success in companies that work across disciplines and break down silos. “Multidisciplinary and collaborative efforts is where I see the best products getting produced.”

“Limiting the accessibility to ‘innovation’ is really not at the spirit of innovation.” — Kellee M. Franklin

2. Education & Mindset

Closing off innovation is one good way to stifle innovation, but Kellee also spoke about some of the ingredients for successful innovation — namely education and the right mindset. She spoke about the importance of educating everyone within organizations about why innovation and human-centered design matters. “They know enough to know that they should be doing it but they still don’t understand the process of why it’s important and how to get there.” She stressed the need for companies to educate their people on more than “we should do this,” and talk about how it can lead to better business outcomes.

Kellee also described how an open mind is essential to good innovation. In fact, you might describe that as her innovation superpower. When I asked her to tell me her innovation “silver bullet”, she replied that it’s: “an inner belief that all-things are possible — and, helping others discover this within themselves.”

“How do we help people change their mindset so that they’re more open, reflective and contemplative and can allow ideas to come to them, see things differently and not be blocked by a fixed mindset?”
– Kellee M. Franklin

3. There’s No Failure in Innovation

One of the ideas that Kellee spoke about that I found particularly fascinating was her comment that: “innovation falls on a continuum.” In today’s start-up culture, we often think of innovation as something completely new, radical or disruptive. Not so, according to Kellee: “It is not always bright-shiny objects. It can be simply bringing new ideas and concepts into antiquated domains — shifting viewpoints and mindsets to allow fresh thinking to flourish.”

In fact, for Kellee, mistakes and so-called “failures” have an important place in innovation: “I really think around innovation that you have to look at anything that you try and it doesn’t succeed as an opportunity to learn….I do not embrace failure, especially when it comes to innovation.”

“I do not embrace failure, especially when it comes to innovation.” — Kellee M. Franklin

I enjoyed chatting with Kellee immensely and hope you enjoyed reading some highlights from our interview. Stay tuned for more articles about innovation experts and let me know if you have a recommendation of who I should talk to!

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