This is part of my workshop recipe series where I’ll be sharing methods for facilitating successful workshops. I’ll break down the essentials of a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Leadership Retreats, Executive Summits, and more. Check out the others here.

Today, many companies have a need for significant digital transformation — whether it’s a long-standing institution looking to revamp legacy products or to create an entirely new digital experience. For companies struggling through digital transformation, some are finding success in co-creation practices.

Co-creation is not a cure-all, but it is a powerful tool that will supplement a solid innovation strategy. The problems that companies face right now often require that diverse business units and organizations work together to deliver the most viable solutions.

A lesson from The Beatles

I’ve always been a fan of how John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaborated so effectively as musicians. Paul may have had the beginning of an idea that inspired John who further inspired Paul and so on. It’s remarkable how out of all the times they got together they never walked away without a song.

In business, we often talk about collaboration and how critical is for our teams to succeed. It’s important, but it’s also challenging to foster the trust and understanding required for collaboration. (Additionally, the difficulty increases with the number of participants.) This is why facilitation and collaboration methods such as Design Thinking, Thinking Wrong, and Game Storming have become so popular.

Co-creation is critical to including everyone’s thoughts, visions, and ideas while ensuring that we can develop mutual value…The key is that the outcome is jointly created and mutually valuable.

Most business problems require that multiple departments and divisions work together effectively. Additionally, we may have to connect internal and external teams. This means we can’t rely only on team-based collaboration techniques: we must explore methods suited to heterogeneous groups. That’s where co-creation comes in.

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Co-creation gathers everyone’s thoughts, visions, and ideas; it also ensures that we can develop mutual value. It can include anyone in a company’s ecosystem — customers, other companies, experts, communities, and even internal teams that don’t normally create together. The key is that the outcome is jointly created and mutually valuable.

3 Powerful Elements of Co-Creation:

1. Requisite Diversity

Co-creation allows us to accommodate the diversity required to succeed in today’s complex environments. It accommodates everyone’s perspectives and backgrounds and ensures that you surface assumptions and make informed decisions based on all the criteria.

2. Advocacy

Co-creation also allows for true buy-in across this diverse set of stakeholders. Through the process, everyone understands the tradeoffs and why decisions where made. Therefore, when the co-creation sessions are over, the entire stakeholder group will be true believers who will advocate for the plan with their constituents.

3. Mutual Value

When we focus on a solution that is mutually beneficial to all the parties involved, it’s not about negotiation. Co-creation means we are amplifying and distributing value as equitability as possible. A common misconception is to view this as democratic and therefore problematic because not everyone has the context to make the proper decisions.

This is not a surrogate for understanding viability, considering logistics, and determining the likelihood for success. Instead, this work is about creating alignment and understanding across a team, building trust, growing capacity to make decisions together, and fully supporting the decisions made.

Once teams build their capacity to make sticky decisions, they can more effectively execute on their decisions. This means faster learnings which allows them to iterate much more quickly. Even when they make a poor decision, they own it together and learn quickly because they are executing more quickly.

When I encounter teams that are struggling to get the results they need, I explore if co-creation tools can help them get where they need to go.

If you think co-creation might help your team or project, I suggest you start with a simple method — called the “9 Whys” — for exploring and illuminating your shared purpose.

Using 9 Whys for Co-Creation Sessions

9 Whys is a technique from Liberating Structures, which is a menu of 33 activities or “microstructures” that you can use in meetings or workshops. This particular activity can help you quickly reveal a compelling purpose and move forward with clarity.

Method Steps

1. Craft an opening question using the template “What do you do when working on ____” or something custom.
2. Break the group into pairs.
3. Each pair selects one person to be the interviewer.
4. First, the interviewer asks the opening question.
5. Next, the interviewer seeks a deeper answer by repeating versions of the question: “Why is that important to you?” 5 min
6. After 5 minutes, switch roles and repeat the previous step.
7. Each pair shares the experience and insights with another pair in a foursome. 5 min
8. Invite the whole group to reflect by asking, “How do our purposes influence the next steps we take?” 5 min

If you are interested in learning more about co-creation or would like to chat about how it may benefit your organization or project, please let us know. We’ve seen these tools breathe fresh air into countless projects.

The post Co-Creation is a Powerful Tool for Digital Transformation 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!

The post No Failure in Innovation — appeared first on Voltage Control.

I met Douglas in the mid 1990’s when our shared interests were primarily music. Our paths diverged, as friendships made in your late teen years often do, but I always thought fondly of my principled, punk friend. Independently, each of us established digital-centered careers in the dotcom-heyday of the late 90’s and early 00’s.

In the 2010’s, music brought us together again. This time it was music + technology at the SXSW Interactive, Film, and Music Festivals. It was refreshing to catch-up and talk about how our careers evolved. My career evolved into consumer strategy and production for digital projects; Douglas’ career evolved into technology leadership and strategy for digital products.

Digital Entrepreneurship

The late 90’s and early 00’s were exciting for early tinkerers in the digital world. Because we were working in a new medium, everything was unprecedented. Those who worked in the digital world in those early years have entrepreneurship in their veins; they’re always looking for new ways to solve problems with likeminded folks. As we conversed over avocado margaritas in 2013, we realized our disparate backgrounds would make us great teammates. We just needed a project.

A Project Emerges

In 2014, we got the chance to tackle a project together. I was assembling a team of digital professionals to build a digital team within the Philadelphia Water Department. I needed team members who could consult, guide, and build team skills on the newly developing team within the city. I asked Douglas to join the team because of his extensive knowledge of AWS best practices.

The Role Expands

We expanded his role on the team once we discovered his superb tech leadership skills. It was clear his ability to rally the team and organize processes to improve our focus would breath more life into the project. In the first meeting, Douglas identified $2,000 a month in savings based on extraneous AWS instance allocations. His recommendations helped us increase security across all digital properties, consistency in the work created by the internal team and contractor, and visibility and control over the work being completed by 3rd party developers. Teammates, from all levels, have found Douglas to be a great collaborator, great leader, and a reliable team member. Douglas’ AWS-role expanded to a broader fractional CTO consultant for the PWD digital team.

We are still doing great work for our shared client. With his leadership, we have established a plan for growing the technical skills of the digital team, a timeline to execute on, and clear standards that all consulting partners use (which allows our small team to have a larger impact).

Conclusion

I am consistently impressed with Douglas’ technical solution design, process optimization, agile project management, and requirements analysis abilities. We knew Douglas would provide tremendous value as an AWS consultant for our client, but as we worked with him we found something much more valuable. As a Fractional CTO, Douglas guides us through the technical landscape with an unfettered vision, providing tremendous value to our team in about 2–3 hours per week. We enjoy working with him and will keep him on the project as long as we have a contract with this city agency.

The post Looking for a consultant; found a CTO. appeared first on Voltage Control.