Have you ever thought about how brain chemistry affects your workplace and performance across your teams? Of course the way our minds work impacts our effectiveness and ability to work with others. How could it not? Everyone’s brain is different. We all have unique experiences, thereby we respond to stimuli differently. We could experience the same event, yet our perception and response to it could be drastically divergent based on our unique neurological makeup.

“There are deep-seated, neurologically-based differences in our perceptions, assumptions, and selection of which stimuli we act upon and which ones we overlook.” – Karen Gordon, the CEO Magazine

This is an extremely important concept to keep in mind when it comes to working effectively with others. In order to get the best performance from each individual in a team, we must first understand that no one mind thinks alike. Secondly, it is critical to understand what drives our own impulses as well as the impulses of others in order to work cooperatively.

“When collaborating with coworkers, we must remember that people at all levels work in different capacities on different tasks, and it’s less about strengths and weaknesses than it is about identifying the areas an individual has the most energy for. This is where productive collaboration can improve, particularly in how you manage a team and build culture. By pinpointing the areas in which you and your team, staff, or managers can easily complete tasks or work together on projects (but still feel fulfilled and challenged), you can create a team environment that avoids burnout, fosters positivity and success, and offers pathways for communication between colleagues that were previously unknown.” – Karen Gordon

How does the cocktail of various brain chemicals impact how we get work done? When you have a better understanding of how the brain works, you are more skillfully equipped to design meetings that get the most out of their attendees. 

Utilize Brain Science To Increase Team Collaboration 

Be Inclusive

While you can’t control the way people think, there are scientifically proven ways to create the conditions necessary to foster collaboration and optimal team performance. 

Brain science tells us that inclusion brings out the best in people. Being included drives trust, productivity, and collaboration with others. “Humans have a fundamental need to belong,” said Dr. Nathan DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. “Just as we have needs for food and water, we also have needs for positive and lasting relationships. This need is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history.” 

Multiple peer-reviewed studies have found that the brain registers exclusion the same as it registers physical pain. “Being excluded is painful because it threatens fundamental human needs, such as belonging and self-esteem. Again and again, research has found that strong, harmful reactions are possible even when ostracized by a stranger for a short amount of time.” -Dr. Kipling Williams, Purdue University psychologist 

To make your team feel included, offer ample opportunities for group cohesion, skill-building, and team development. To increase inclusion in meetings, allow all participants an equal opportunity to participate and contribute. Create a safe environment where everyone feels comfortable to speak and be heard. 

Pro tip: Use our Workshop Design Template for MURAL and Miro to consider everyone’s needs and maximize participant potential during your meetings.  

Avoid Information Overload

Too much information delivered all at once can cause cognitive overload. Don’t overwhelm participants with too much information, too quickly. People need time to process and digest information if they are going to properly retain it. Serve meeting attendees bite-sized information. Contextualize it with a hands-on activity that allows for engaged learning and personal connections. Always be sure to debrief during and especially at the end of a meeting to make sure that everyone is on track and nobody needs further clarification. 

Increase Productivity: Trigger Brain Chemicals

“Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are the quartet responsible for our happiness. Many events can trigger these neurotransmitters, but rather than being in the passenger seat, there are ways we can intentionally cause them to flow.” –Thai Nguyen, Huffpost 

Make brain chemicals work for you by intentionally stimulating them. Low dopamine levels are linked to low motivation. Increase dopamine levels in your meeting by incorporating an energizer or icebreaker for a fun blast of energy. Play uplifting music during group work sessions. Research shows that listening to music can reduce stress, increase feelings of pleasure, and improve mood.

Pro tip: JQBX is one of our favorite remote working tools at Voltage Control. It’s like a team jukebox that allows you to listen to music together with your team while working apart. Also, check out our comprehensive Design Sprint playlist to listen to while you work.  

High serotonin levels are associated with confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of purpose. They’re also crucial to combatting the stress hormone cortisol. Spike serotonin levels amongst your team by acknowledging team members’ good work. Recognition of achievement is key to creating serotonin in the body. Simply thanking your team for their work and commitment does wonders for getting the juices flowing. 

Oxytocin is correlated to trust and bonding, and it reduces stress levels as well, which leads to feelings of contentment and security. Bring your team together and start your meeting with a moment of gratitude, wherein everyone shares something they’re grateful for–work-related or not. Check-in with your team during and after the meeting to see how everyone is doing. Even if no one needs anything, they’ll feel seen and taken care of knowing you’re concerned for their wellbeing. 

Create Psychological Safety

Fear and anxiety can shut down the brain as people enter into fight or flight mode. Keep this in mind as you are designing your meetings. If people feel closed off, they are unable to perform at their best. In order to get all attendees optimal performance, it is crucial that they feel completely comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings in a group setting. Set ground rules at the start of a meeting to encourage a healthy environment. Let participants know that their ideas are not only welcome but essential. If an individual is speaking over other participants, gracefully remind them that the group would like to hear from everyone or simply ask “who haven’t we heard from?” Instead of putting quiet attendees on the spot by demanding their participation, invite them to join an open discussion. It can also be helpful to prompt the group with a question to consider quietly before anyone speaks, giving individuals time to think through their responses. 

Intentional planning is the easiest way for you to make an immediate difference in the impact of your meeting outcomes and the experiences you deliver to your meeting participants. The use of science-backed methods will help you cater to individuals’ neurology and ultimately tease out your peak meeting performance. The more productive your meetings are, the better your team and overall business will be.

The post Neurology of Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.” -Albert Einstein

We are in a time of great uncertainty but also of profound opportunity. The world is changing as we know it. But this opens up a stage for entrepreneurs to shine. There is a chance to deliver real value to the world in the face of chaos. How can we serve? How can we adapt current companies to fit the new business landscape? What new ideas can we create to address peoples’ wants and needs? Entrepreneurs have the chance to lead the way in this grand shift of physical, economic, and sociological dynamics. The key to successfully do so is design thinking.

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process. The core of the methodology is human-centric and asks the question, “What’s the human need behind a product/method/process/service?” It’s central to entrepreneurs who want to generate bold and innovative ideas. After all, authentically understanding people and how to best serve them is at the heart of every successful business. The design thinking process allows you to see your business through the eyes of the customer. It helps you to identify the customer’s desires and needs and how to productively create ideas to address them. What better time than now to think about people and how to serve them in ways others have yet to discover or overlooked?

Historically, peculiar times tend to breed excellent ideas. “America’s financial panics have often been the periods of its most interesting commercial and logistical innovations,” history professor and author Scott Reynolds Nelson wrote in a New York Times article. “Some of our most storied brands today were born in depressions a century or more ago.” 

Many major companies and brands that are now household names were born out of recessions and hard times, led by entrepreneurs that leaned into obstacles and found and pursued opportunities. For example, Disney, CNN, Microsoft, Burger King and FedEx were all created during recessions. A similar opportunity to make a creative splash exists right now. What businesses will be born? Take your innovative idea and turn it into a success using the design thinking process.

“Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow’s distinction, today.” – Onyi Anyado

The design thinking process

There are five essential steps to the design thinking process. It combines creative thinking, logical reasoning and testing as a strategy for innovation. The main goal of the process is to create a final product or service that fulfills end-users’ needs. Integrate the following steps to better connect with customers, refine the focus of your offerings and grow your business. 

1. Observe & empathize

At the center of the design thinking process is curiosity. Creating successful ideas starts with observing people and their wants and needs. Why do people behave as they do? Why are things the way that they are? What is working well, what is not working well and why? Asking these questions with an open and inquisitive perspective will help you to better understand the world around you and how you can successfully contribute to it. You will then have the ability to see the finite details and opportunities that exist within them to creatively solve problems.

Seek to understand what you don’t know about your customers and the problems they face by viewing the world through their eyes.

This creates empathy, a key ingredient in the design thinking process. Empathy will help you identify the best ideas for products and services to address your customers’ needs. Observe as much as possible during this phase. Everything you gather is useful information that will inform the future work you create.

2. Define the problem

Reflect on the information gathered from your observations. Doing so will help you gain clarity about the tangible problem you’re trying to solve. Group and cluster ideas together until you find the prominent themes. Then synthesize the information to help you pinpoint the most significant problem that needs to be addressed. You can’t solve all customer problems. Concentrate on the most significant or impactful issue as your central focus to move forward with. This step is crucial because it centers your energy and instructs your future designs. The end goal is to convert the defined problem into a tangible, human-centered statement, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns, or specifics of a product. 

3. Ideate solutions 

“There’s a way to do it better—find it.” –Thomas Edison

Now that you better understand the target audience and the ins and outs of the problem, it’s time to generate ideas to solve it. Think broadly to create different solutions. Brainstorm! Get creative. There are no wrong ideas; the more possible answers to the identified problem, the better. This is usually a very creative and freeing phase because you have permission to think of out-of-the-box ideas before deciding which ones to prototype later. This is the phase that everyone typically loves because it has bottomless potential. 

4. Prototype

Phase four of the design thinking process is creating a prototype. Take your top idea(s) and create a simulation of the design so you can show it to people and get feedback. It is usually a scaled-down version of the product or system in question. This is a huge step in the evolution of your idea because it moves you beyond talking and ideation into the material realm of reality. Create a physical or digital prototype of some aspect of your product, service, or experience that you can show to users in your target market. Through trial-and-error, you will identify which of the possible solutions is best suited to solve the problem. 

“What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.” – Simon Sinek

5. Test

All of your work combines together to test the product in the final stage. This is the time to share your prototype with consumers to get their feedback. Therefore, this is still an interactive stage. Testing a product often leads to tweaking and redefining problems and solutions as you gain a better understanding of the consumer. It is an essential opportunity to make sure that everything about your idea is centered around the people who will be using it. You want to know what they think, both positive and negative thoughts. Use the information to flush out all details of your design and refine it. That is how you build the best product possible and prepare it to launch. 

“It is about them and for them. The closer the end-users’ needs are analyzed and answered, the more successful the adoption or purchase of a solution. You iterate until you get it right from a customer perspective. This the power of HCD (human-centered design).” – Olivier Delarue

The world needs the next great ideas and design thinking can help create effective and opportune solutions. Put people first and incorporate the design thinking process in your entrepreneurial endeavors.

Looking for training in the Design Thinking methodology?

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training, design sprints, and design thinking facilitation. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

The post The Design Thinking Process in Entrepreneurship appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of the 2019 Control The Room speaker video series.

Control the Room 2019 was Austin’s 1st Annual Facilitator Summit with the goal of bringing together facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together.

The conference opened with a talk by Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering.” After that, we moved onto 15 quick-and-powerful presentations by facilitators of all kinds.

Within that group of amazing speakers, we were lucky enough to have Greg Galle. Greg Galle is an author, entrepreneur, and instigator. His book Think Wrong: How to Do Work That Matters has become a handbook for people who want to invent what’s next for their organizations, communities, and countries.

Greg talked about the predictable path and how most people default to thinking and designing with only this in mind. Using a Solutions vs. Challenges 2×2 matrix, he illustrated that if you are exploring solutions and challenges that are both certain or well-known, you are considering the predictable path. He encouraged us to explore the uncertain and welcome the unexpected.

Watch Greg Galle’s talk “Think Wrong to Solve Next”:

Read the Transcript

Greg Galle: Thank you. Anything I … Yeah. There we go. Forward and backward. Hi. Everybody doing all right?

Speaker 1: Yep.

Greg Galle: Still with us? All right. That was the title of the slide. So here we go. We’re going to talk about three different frameworks that you can use. This morning we started having a little bit of an introduction about dialogue and encouraging dialogue. And I want to introduce these frameworks as a way of engaging people in a meaningful conversation and dialogue about the nature of the work that you’re trying to accomplish with them, that you’re trying to help them achieve.

Greg Galle: So the first idea to have in your head is this notion of a predictable path. That is that we are walking on a predictable path. We had this expression of, “We’ve seen that movie and we know how it ends.” You’ve all kind of used some version of that. The predictable path is, if nothing changes, we can be pretty certain what the future’s going to be like. It’s going to look a lot like it did today. And today looks a lot like it did yesterday. So the predictable path. Now, many of you in the room actually try to lead organizations, and communities, and individuals on some departure from that predictable path.

Greg Galle: So how do we forge a bold path? How do we escape the sort of gravitational pull of the status quo, and lead and create change? Anybody in the room tried to create change? Yeah? Some of you? Help groups create change? Drive positive change in the world? Easy, right? Never run into any problems, right? Okay. So what’s going on there is that whenever we try to depart from the norm, whenever we try to depart from the predictable path, we start to experience some kind of resistance, some kind of friction. It gets expressed in many different ways, and in many different forms. I want to just do a little bit of an exercise with you. This is actually my draft slide deck. So we’re missing the exercise.

Speaker 2: It’s my fault.

Greg Galle: But I don’t need prompts for it. So here it goes. I’m was going to do a pop quiz before I showed this slide that reveals everything to you, right? And makes sense of everything. Here’s the pop quiz. I’m going to ask you for an answer to a question. As soon as you have the answer, I want you to stand up. Okay? As soon as it’s in your head, I want you to stand up. It’s a very complex question, so follow with me. What is one half of 13? What is one half of 13? When do you have the answer in your head, stand up. Okay. One half of 13. Some people are still working on it. I can see you’re sitting down. All right. If the answer that you have in your head is 6.5 or six and one half, sit down. All right.

Speaker 3: One.

Greg Galle: One.

Speaker 4: T-H-I-R.

Greg Galle: THIR. T-H-I-R.

Speaker 2: Three.

Greg Galle: Three.

Speaker 5: 13 halves.

Greg Galle: 13 halves. Okay. Very good. So and here we go.

Speaker 6: Seven.

Greg Galle: Seven. Okay. Interesting. Rounding up.

Speaker 6: No.

Greg Galle: No? Tell us how.

Speaker 6: If you write 13 in Roman numerals and then you cut it half, you actually get seven on the top half.

Greg Galle: You actually get seven on top half. And that in fact, if you count all three of the ones, you get eight. But I love it because you took the pattern in you and you bifurcated it. You split it.

Speaker 6: [inaudible 00:04:01].

Greg Galle: Your math skills in Roman are sort of suspect, right? That’s okay. So what happened is we stood … I asked you the question, I put some time pressure on you. And you stood up and you answered the question. The predictable answer to that question is 6.5, is six and one half. Why? Any thoughts on why we thought six and a half?

Speaker 7: It’s arithmetic [inaudible 00:04:26].

Greg Galle: Arithmetic. We assumed it was a math question. So we made an assumption that it was a math question. We have made a set of synaptic connections in our head because we’ve been taught math. That says, “Ping, ping, ping. I know how to solve math problems.” So I asked the question, but I didn’t give you any context. What if it was a philosophical question? 6.5 would be the least interesting answer to the philosophical question of what is one half of 13.

Greg Galle: You might’ve said, “Well, why 13?” Or, “What are numbers,” right? Would have been a more interesting thing. So I had somebody give me an answer, which it’s sort of, “What’s left after your hungry friend gets the donuts/” right? Baker’s dozen, 13. One half, six and a half doughnuts. So it’s sort of, what’s the context? What’s the thing that we’re trying to solve? What’s going on here on the predictable path is that as we learn things, we create synaptic connections, and a set of neuro pathways get established in our brain. Has anybody in the room ever had that experience of going from work to home, driving from work to home, pulling up in your driveway and thinking, “Huh, I don’t really remember driving home,” right? Yeah. “I became an autonomous vehicle because I was distracted.” What was going on when you did that? What was going on in your head?

Speaker 7: Listening to music.

Greg Galle: Listening to music, getting carried away. You didn’t really have to think about, “How do I get home?” Because again, the synaptic connections are made. So many synaptic connections that you have a neuro pathway in your head that can take you home without thinking about it. So that’s great. How many people in the room … We’ll just do this. We’ll do a stand, just because everybody needs a little more stretching. If you brushed your teeth this morning, stand up. All right. I didn’t get half of you to stand up. That’s good. I’m glad to know that only a 100% percent of your brushed your teeth. If you Googled, “How to brush my teeth,” this morning, just so you know how to do it, sit down. So nobody Googled how to do that.

Greg Galle: You didn’t have to. You may sit down. You didn’t have to do that. You learned how to brush your teeth. You do it without thinking. Every now and then you have one of those weird brain things happen where maybe you put shaving cream on your toothbrush. But generally, you can do it without thinking. Right? So that’s great that our brain works that way. We don’t have to relearn things. Is that a good thing when we’re trying to solve a problem in a new way? No. It gets in the way. So part of our job as facilitators, or as we say, instigators is to get people to break some of those synaptic connections and consider to start solving from a new place. How do I start solving from somewhere different, rather than where I usually begin? So that’s biology. When you’re meeting resistance as you’re trying to depart from the predictable path and get on the bold path, when you’re meeting friction and resistance, it’s easy for it to be … For us to think about that as an antagonistic relationship.

Greg Galle: “I’m the protagonist trying to lead change. There’s an antagonist trying to stop me from making that happen.” We have to step back and let go and say, “You know what? Part of it’s just biology.” It’s part of how our brains work. And people aren’t doing that to us on purpose. It’s how our brains function. We’re actually competing against a whole bunch of neuro-pathways that has started to track the way problems are solved. The next thing that gets in our way is this. I’m going to ask, what do you see when you see this picture? Shout it out.

Speaker 7: [inaudible 00:08:26].

Greg Galle: Kids.

Speaker 6: Peace sign.

Greg Galle: Peace sign.

Speaker 3: Friends.

Greg Galle: Friends.

Speaker 4: Innocence.

Greg Galle: Innocence. Give me some other adjectives.

Speaker 5: Cuteness.

Greg Galle: Cuteness. Happy.

Speaker 1: Chilly.

Greg Galle: Chilly?

Speaker 1: Cold.

Greg Galle: Cold. Oh, yeah. Because they’re wearing … Nice. Okay. So some people when they see this picture think terrorists. These are Syrian refugees, Syrian immigrants. So there’s a cultural response to these kids. An unknowing cultural response to … These are kids, Syrian refugees. So this morning when the immigrants were asked to stand up, I wanted to get up and clap as a celebration of what an immigrant means, and what an immigrant brings to us. But you understand that … Whoa. An issue like immigration can be polarizing in America. In the American context right now, we have camps, pro-immigration, anti-immigration. So that’s a cultural response. So again, when we’re trying to depart from the predictable path and forge a bold path, we’re not only dealing with an issue of how our brain functions. But we’re also dealing with the issue of how a whole bunch of brains that function that way together start to act.

Greg Galle: And the thing about culture is, most of what makes cultures operate is our assumptions and orthodoxies, and biases. They’re stories that we pass on. They’re lore that we pass on. They’re not fact bases, right? It’s a belief system that we pass on. So I said it’s great that our brain works the way it does. It does. We don’t have to relearn things. It’s also great that culture works the way that it does. So cultures that are healthy and productive, and working in our favor, they actually work to keep themselves safe. They protect themselves, they defend themselves from threat. The problem is, because culture works that way they can lock in things that are toxic. They can lock in things that are not in our best interest. They can perpetuate bad societal behavior and make it seem normal.

Greg Galle: I like to ask people when they’re looking at that predictable path and bold path line, you can think of different people. I used to use Elon Musk as an example, but he’s confusing the story with his Twitter account. So I’m going to use Malala instead. And I’m going to introduce this. And I want … I am going to ask you please to believe me that I’m trying not to introduce this idea with any prejudice, right? I’m just wanting to use it for illustrative purposes. Do you guys know who Malala is? Mostly. Okay. So Malala is a young woman in the Middle-East who stood up and said that young women, and women of all kinds have the right to be educated. All right? She did that within the context of her culture. And within the very specific context of her culture, that got her labeled a heretic. All right? So thinking about it. Predictable path, that’s the cultural norm. Malala, bold path, women should be educated. A natural cultural reaction to her was, “What she’s proclaiming is not okay. It’s outside of the norm for our culture.” Right? “It’s heretical.”

Greg Galle: So we know what happened to Malala. She’s shot in the head. Within the context of her culture, that was an acceptable act. Now there was another cultural response to her, which was not the culture she was born into. And that cultural response was, “She’s heroic. She’s brave. She’s courageous.” And she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because of her position. Two extreme examples of a cultural response to the same person. So when you think about culture and how it affects our ability to help, lead, facilitate, create change. It’s important to understand that we are dealing both with biological forces and cultural forces. People are not trying to sabotage you. We do it without thinking.

Greg Galle: It’s human behavior. It’s neurological, it’s social. It’s how we as creatures act. So it’s really important that you be able to have that conversation, that you’d be able to use that framework. So when somebody is engaging you, it’s okay to say, “Are we working on something that’s about improving the predictable path? Or are we working on something where we’re trying to actually create bold change? And are the conditions in the ways that we’re reacting coming from what’s required to sustain the predictable path? Or are they in fact conditions that are going to be conducive to creating that change?” Next framework, this space, a fairly simple space. Where we’re going from, “What’s the problem or the challenge that we’re working on? What’s the solution?” And we’re dealing with uncertainty. We start from a place of uncertainty, and we’re trying to move towards greater certainty.

Greg Galle: This is another important framework for having a dialogue with somebody, which is, “Where are we starting from Where’s the problem live that we’re dealing with?” Up here in this corner where we understand what the problem is and we understand what the solution is, there’s a set of what we call think right practices. There are language that you’re going to be very familiar with, which is people are going to talk about things like, “How do we drive costs out of this? How do we improve productivity? How do we increase our margins?” People start to worry about things like ROI.

Greg Galle: So all of that language is familiar to you, whether you’re in a corporation or a non-profit, or a foundation, or coming out of the defense space. This is the dominant language that’s used to frame how we’re going to think about and measure success. And that’s fine if you know what the problem is and you know what the solution is. I want predict … So the labels of predictable path and bold path sound a little pejorative. They’re not. The people who flew here, again raise your hands. Those who flew here. You wanted predictability. You wanted to get on a plane, have the plane fly. Take off, fly, land safely. Number one, predictable criteria for air travel is safety. What you didn’t want was the pilot coming on and saying, “I’ve got a great idea.”

Greg Galle: You’re with me? All right? “And you are with me. You’re in the plane. I’m going to try something today I’ve never tried.” You don’t want that. When it comes to the known problem and the known solution, I want you to optimize the heck out of that one. And for air travel, I want you to optimize the heck out of safety. The problem is that that set of language and that way of framing things doesn’t work when we’re in that arena of uncertainty. We’re uncertain about that. And we think we know what the problem is, but we’re open to the idea that we’re wrong. That we might do something that reveals in fact that, “Hey, our assumption about the problem was actually an observation of a symptom. And there’s something else deeper going on here.” And we’re going to learn that. “Our assumption about the solution was incorrect.” We did some work last October with NATO, a whole conference on AI. They knew what the solution was. It’s AI. I don’t care what the problem is. If you’re in the military right now, the answer is AI. I don’t know.

Greg Galle: Probably not. I mean, I’ve tried to use Siri and it gets me lost. It doesn’t recognize what I’m saying. It calls people I don’t mean to call. So I’m not really sure I’m willing to pin my hope of freedom in the future on AI just yet. It has a role. But what’s the problem we’re solving? Are we applying it appropriately? So again, this diagram is a way of entry into a conversation. What kind of problem are we working at? Where does that live? How certain are we about the problem, the nature of the challenge? How certain are we about the solution? And are we able to do something quickly that’s going to make us more confident? Not get to the answer, but get to a greater level of certainty. So part of our role, part of what we’re doing is saying we’ve got to try different practices.

Greg Galle: So here you see increase exploration, generate hypotheses, create option value, embrace experiments, pursue discovery, welcome the unexpected. And the measurement here instead of return on investment, which you’ve all been asked, “What’s the return on investment of having you come in and do blah, blah, blah?” If you’re dealing with the uncertain, if you’re in the nine squares of this … I mean, the eight squares of this diagram that aren’t up in that upper right-hand corner. The honest answer to, “What’s ROI,” is, “I have no idea. It’s too early. There’s too many assumptions. We can’t tell you.” LFI is our response to that. LFI is Learning From Investment. So rather than what’s the return on investment, what’s the learning from investment? “What do we now know because we did this thing that we didn’t know before? And what’s the value? How much certainty does that create?”

Greg Galle: So I’ve just introduced two frameworks, which means I’m not going to get to the third. But I’m going to go through it real fast here in the last 40 seconds. So in think wrong, we’ve looked at six practices of thinking wrong. The six practices actually correspond to a moment in the problem-solving journey where a certain thing, a certain action is going to produce the most value. Are our aspirations clear? Is our inspiration sound? Do we have new, fresh ideas? Have we actually started to model and prototype, and bring the idea to life? Are we making small bets to increase certainty rather than blowing our whole budget and putting all of our capital at risk? And finally, are we leaning into the people that we convened and brought in the room and their wisdom, and using that to accelerate our progress? So I can share that in more than 40 seconds if you want. That’s what I had. So, all right. Thanks, you guys.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2020, which will be held Feb. 5–7, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

The post Think Wrong to Solve Next appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Claudia Reuter is a managing director at Techstars, an accelerator network designed to help entrepreneurs succeed. She’s familiar with the startup world and innovation by way of starting her own company back in 2006. She successfully led multiple rounds of investment to further the growth of her startup until it was acquired in 2014.

In recent years, Claudia has spent her time working with early-stage startups in partnership with Techstars + Stanley Black & Decker. Claudia has finessed how she brings others into the conversation around innovation, from large corporations to the founder-only startup. She believes that conquering fears around innovation and change is a conversation worth having.

Afraid of Heights

A fear of heights is one of the most common phobias, and for many, the closest they come to conquering their fear is climbing a ladder or a tree, or for the brave few, taking the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Claudia took a very different approach to conquering her fear — she took flying lessons.

Motivated by setting a good example for her children and the idea of skipping lines at the airport, she started taking private lessons. Claudia learned how to stall the plane, take off, and fly for periods of time. Around the same time, her company was acquired, and she moved from where she was taking lessons. “It’s something I did enough to conquer my fear of heights, but not enough to pick you up in a plane,” Claudia says.

“I think most fears are irrational, and most fears are in your head…I thought it would help me realize how this was something that is just part of our lives and something that could be fun versus something scary, and so just getting up way above the clouds and having a different perspective of the world from up there helped me.”

Claudia also believes that these irrational fears don’t just keep us on the ground; they can keep our businesses in safe zones avoiding the potential for new ideas and significant revenue, all because we’re afraid of change.

Claudia referred to these as the “corporate antibodies” where new ideas are treated with resistance because they represent a threat to something incredibly valuable. People are afraid of spiders because they might have a poisonous bite, they’re afraid of public speaking because they might embarrass themselves and hurt their reputation. So they’re afraid of innovation because it similarly threatens the system in place that’s already working.

If this fear is similarly irrational to the fear of heights, spiders, and public speaking, how do you get people comfortable with the idea of change and let them feel in control of it? For Claudia, she wanted to sit in the pilot seat and familiarize herself with the ascending and descending. So what does it look like to put other people in their own pilot seats?

“It’s really important for people who are doing a good job in managing an existing business to make sure that they understand that everyone appreciates the value in that and it’s not something to be thrown away.”

The first step to help people overcome their fear of innovation and change is to acknowledge and appreciate the systems that have gotten us this far, “It’s really important for people who are doing a good job in managing an existing business to make sure that they understand that everyone appreciates the value in that and it’s not something to be thrown away,” Claudia says.

In acknowledging how vital the systems are that are already in place, innovators can slowly start to introduce new concepts and then balance them with what’s already in place. This balance is a masterful skill of seeing what’s necessary for the day to day and the vision for the future.

Horse and Buggy Innovation

Claudia shared this example, “In 1900, the horse and buggy were still the predominant means of transportation in New York City, and it was only about 13 years later that the entire city was transformed with cars. So it’s really easy, however many years later to say, ‘Oh, that was such a quick change,’ but 13 years is a very long time to anyone who’s working in a corporate job. Right?”

The potential for disruption could appear very fast in a hundred years for now, but in our day-to-day happens rather incrementally. Helping people be a part of that change can look like giving them a platform to be heard or share their ideas on either incremental innovations or truly disruptive opportunities. So while they’re managing the existing business that keeps payroll going, they feel they have a say and are part of the innovation process. Waiting for the transition from the horse and buggy can feel like a slow, frustrating process, but by being included in the transformation, it’s much more exciting.

“Not only are we looking for founders that are all the things you would expect, like incredibly smart and motivated, and entrepreneurial, but are they also coachable? Are they also open to feedback?”

People Behind the Innovation

A big part of bringing forth innovation is being sure you’re working with the right people. Claudia explains, “With the startups who come into Techstars, we’re looking at the quality of the team as part of our application process. Not only are we looking for founders that are all the things you would expect, like incredibly smart and motivated, and entrepreneurial, but are they also coachable? Are they also open to feedback? Are they open to looking at data and making different decisions based on that?”

While there might be a few people named as responsible for innovation, “Innovation doesn’t happen in a bubble,” Claudia says. There needs to be buy-in across the organization. This widespread teamwork enlightens the innovators to new perspectives and creates space for everyone to be heard.

Bringing forward innovation in any big organization requires continued support from C-level folks. These conversations of innovation start at the higher level first, making sure you have that support, and then you can engage throughout the organization.

By including more people in the innovation process, you’re able to leverage assets and resources within the broader company. Claudia explained, “It’s just a matter of making sure that, again, you’re not acting within a bubble, or you’re not isolating yourself, that if there is a communications department, that you’re meeting with that communications department and saying, ‘How can you guys help me get this message across, or how could I be saying this in a better way?’”

It’s not just communication, but resources like finance, legal, sales, and other functions, so you’re not just hoping you come up with something great on your own — you’re working with a full team to build something new.

The surprising thing about the people in innovation is that the perspectives shared have the opportunity to turn a perceived failure into a different kind of success. Claudia shared her favorite story of this, the story of the Post-It note.

The creator of the Post-It note was someone working on an adhesive, and the first thing they thought was, “This isn’t working because it’s not sticking forever,” and someone else was able to look at it and say, “Well, actually, there are cases where I don’t want something to stick forever.” So while the creator had a different use in mind and thought the project a complete failure, someone else in the organization was able to look at it and say, “Hey, this is something I can use to make my life better,” and someone paid enough attention to that to actually have become Post-it notes.

Decide What You Want

With so many opportunities and directions for innovation to take us, how do we know which is the right way to go and where to focus? Claudia’s answer is simple: Depends on what you want and what you’re trying to do.

The opportunities are endless at Techstars, where Claudia is currently the managing director. The worldwide network is tapped into thousands of companies with thousands of founders and mentors who are working on innovation and new ideas. They measure all sorts of metrics for the businesses they work with: internal corporate metrics, the number of founders they gain access to, or even the amount of relationships made as a result. Every company, startup, or big corporation needs to ask themselves what they want from innovation efforts.

“If our real goal is we want to sell 20% more of this certain product, then we know we need to be more innovative about that product. Then that’s what you’re going to measure on. However, if you’re investing to say, ‘We believe there’s a potential for an existing line to be disrupted, can we come up with some ten ideas or 20 ideas that allow us to build a foundation?’ That answer depends on what the goal is, but whatever your goal is, it’s important that you have an understanding with the right stakeholders and that then you take steps to make sure that things are measurable.”

Claudia suggested that some of the best innovation efforts come from innovating from a solution that’s already sold to customers. To find these innovations, Claudia asks, “How are customers using the product now? Are they using it the way we thought they were or did they find a new use we haven’t thought of? How can we make that better?” This is innovation at work.

Fly Your Own Plane

Claudia first joined Techstars in Hartford to provide startups with counsel because she remembered what it was like when she started her company. She had little to no resources or support, and the idea that she could be part of that and help earlier stage companies was a great opportunity. She’s seen first hand in her startup as well as in big corporations how tricky integrating innovation can be. She emphasizes first addressing the irrational fear, and ask, “What does it look like to conquer our irrational fears of change or innovation in our work and lives and then lead others along in that process?”

Next, how do we include everyone in the process of innovation, making sure they are heard, and as a result, our ideas and perspectives are strengthened and grown? Through this, maybe we’ll even change a perceived failure into a huge success like Post-It notes.

It all starts with conquering our fears and inviting other people into the process. How will you get in the pilot’s seat today? What innovation can you bring forward?

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

The post Conquering Fears in Innovation and Change appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

If you remember the early days of the internet, you probably have fond memories of one of Barry O’Reilly’s first employers—Citysearch. Barry was coding HTML for the site in the late 90s: “I always joke that my greatest gift to the technology industry was when I stopped writing code. 20% of the time I’d go home feeling buzzed and energized; the other 80%, I would feel frustrated and angry.” Since then, Barry has found what truly energizes him—working with business leaders and teams to “invent the future, not fear it.”

Barry expanded on his shift from coding to advising and consulting: “As I was working in startups, I found that I loved technology, but I didn’t love the coding as much. I gravitated to product management and figuring out ‘should we build it’ rather than ‘can we build it?’ That sparked my curiosity more and took me down the path of leading product development teams.”

In his current work as a consultant, entrepreneur, and author, Barry has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer, and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Barry hosts the Unlearn Podcast and is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe. He also sits on the advisory boards of Just3Things and AgileCraft, recently acquired by Atlassian.

It starts with alignment

Barry and I began our conversation talking about how important it is for a company’s innovation strategy to be linked to their corporate strategy and objectives. Issues arise when there is a mismatch: when technologists find a technology first and then look for ways to apply it, or when strategists go after solving a business problem, but it’s the wrong direction.

“It’s about building interesting solutions to solve interesting problems. When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation. If anyone is operating in a silo, if there’s no coordination between what both sides are doing, if both aren’t actively exploring their problem spaces, then you’re not going to get interesting innovation happening.” Once you have that alignment, you can move into building your product and testing it with users.

“When you have problem and solution definition, there is alignment and clarity on what to focus on — and that leads to better innovation.”

Information is currency

Barry defines innovation as, “Breakthroughs prompted by new information that impact understanding, mindset, and behavior.” The notion of information is one of the keywords in this definition as Barry believes that “the currency of pure innovation is information.”

“The currency of pure innovation is information.”

Your customer testing provides the signal or feedback that your innovation is working or not. “Through customer testing, you get new information. As you’re going through that cycle, your currency is information based on your experiments. This information gives you a signal to either keep investing, stop investing, or do something else.”

He continued: “If you go through that cycle enough times, eventually you end up with a product that could generate value [other than information.] One value might be revenue. Up until that point, you’re paying for information as to whether you should keep investing. I think people lose sight of that. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback, or performing desired behavior by customers, is a leading indicator.”

“Revenue is a lagging indicator. Feedback from customers is a leading indicator of their intent to buy something later.”

In the beginning stages of a project, your indicators of success are in stories and information: “When you’re doing innovation, you’re investing in information. You’re paying for information; you do experiments to gather information, to test your hypothesis. And then you use that information and to make more investment decisions.”

Throughout this cycle of testing, learning, and iteration, Barry stresses the importance of capturing what’s been learned. He calls this an after-action report or learning review: “We sit down and see what people have discovered as a result of trying a new behavior. What worked, what didn’t, what happened as they expected, what was different? Where is the new information? All of this is about discoveries.”

Barry encourages companies to formally capture and process the feedback they’re getting from customers or users to guide them forward: “What were the effects that you observed when you performed the experiment? What led to the desired outcomes you wanted? What unintended consequences did you discover? That leads you to the final step: what are you going to do differently? What actions are you going to take? How are you going to scale out, scale back, or iterate your next action or behavior?”

ExecCamp

Barry has created a program called ExecCamp to help companies innovate in a way that is slightly different than the typical transformation approach. In a previous job—running transformation for a global HR company— Barry observed that innovation initiatives were happening on the “edge of the organization.”

He explained: “We were having interesting successes and failures building new products or services, but they only drove a tiny bit of innovation in the company. It was innovation on the edge of the organization. It wasn’t changing the system. We had nodes of the company that would innovate, but the company as a whole wasn’t innovating.”

“Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

This led him to think about new ways that he could inspire innovation at a systemic level. He decided that he needed to inspire innovation at the leadership level: “If the leadership team is demonstrating and trying new behaviors, it can have a systemic network effect on the whole company. Every one models the behaviors that they see in leadership. I thought that maybe the [typical transformation approach] was wrong. Instead of leaders telling their teams to start acting differently, leaders are the ones that start acting differently.”

Barry explains his vision for ExecCamp. “We create an experience where leaders go outside their comfort zone. They not only build and learn new skills but go through a personal innovation process. They actually transform through that process. They go back to be coaches in their company to help other innovation initiatives succeed.”

Barry now runs these programs regularly: “It’s essentially an immersion experience for leadership teams to learn by doing; to get comfortable with being uncomfortable; to try new behaviors and build new products and services. Also, it’s about unlearning their existing behavior.”

He shared how ExecCamp worked for one company. He convinced eight leaders from the International Airlines Group to leave the business for two months to launch new businesses designed to disrupt the airline industry. While a huge commitment for the leaders, the payback was huge as well: “Great innovations came out of that: they created the first identity management tool for blockchain. They launched a venture capital firm Hangar 51, which is the first venture capital firm in the airline industry; they made all their APIs and assets available to startups to build new products and services. It’s unleashed a whole raft of products. But the biggest impact has been the shift in leadership mindset from going through that program.”

Out of the comfort zone

We talked about how Barry approaches getting execs out of their comfort zone. He always wants to do it in a way that makes them feel safe, even while pushing them. “There’s always a tension between being uncomfortable, but not feeling so stretched that they’re in danger. There are high levels of safety. I always say ‘Think big. Start small. Learn fast.’ You need to think big and be audacious about your aspirations or outcomes. But you start small to get there so you can learn fast. By starting small, you’re safe to fail.”

One way he pushes leaders out of their comfort zone is to have them get closer to their customer’s point of few. For example, he once asked a leadership team from a phone company to go out and sign up for a new phone service in two hours. That shift in point-of-view can be radical for executives: “Those unlearning moments are invaluable if they’re behaving differently. It shifts their perspective and ultimately shift their mindset and encourages them to continue to shift their behavior.”

“You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently.”

This is what Barry describes as “unlearning,” which he wrote a whole book about. “You have to start acting differently to experience the world differently, to get new information to change the way you think about the world, shift your mindset, and then keep changing your behaviors. That’s the power of this whole system of unlearning that I’ve been coaching people with.”

Downstream effects

Today, one of the dangers of innovation that Barry identifies is that we don’t necessarily know how products are going to be used by customers in the future. “People are building products and they’re being used in ways that they hadn’t even thought of or anticipated. The behavior of the system is emergent; and, the behaviors of the system’s users are also emergent. It means people might use your product in ways you hadn’t thought of. A simple example is Facebook. Political entities are leveraging that platform to influence people, but in ways that the people who designed Facebook probably didn’t intend or think about.”

As we build more complex systems, Barry anticipates that these unexpected, emergent behaviors will continue to challenge us: “It’s important that you build-in mechanisms to understand how people are using your products and services. Are they using it in ways that you intended? If they are using it in unintended ways, is that aligned to the values of the product and service you’re trying to build? I think good product management now means that you need to think about both of those sides of the equation.”

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

The post Information is Currency appeared first on Voltage Control.

We’re hosting Greg for an upcoming Cascades Workshop on November 21, 2019 in Austin. Please join us.

Instigating impactful change—either altering the entire world or your corner of it—can seem daunting and impossible, especially if you’re not in a place of charismatic leadership or have a persuasive marketing plan for a million-dollar idea. However, the true power of change is actually in the collaboration of multiple networks, according to writer, speaker, and innovative adviser Greg Satell. After a life- and career-changing experience that led to fifteen years of research studying how to create change, Greg has discovered a method of specific cascades that have the ability to allow real change to form, from renewing a company, disrupting an industry, or reshaping an entire society.

Kiev, Ukraine, 2004 during The Orange Revolution: This is where Greg received the first spark of inspiration to investigate and study how to create transformational change. As the leader of a major news organization in Kiev at the time, Greg was intrigued by the self-organizing collective action of the millions of Ukrainians who gathered to protest Ukraine’s presidency, known as the “orange revolution.”

On the evening of November 22, 2004, hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a sea of orange apparel and flags in an effort to stop the ruling elite from falsifying the election in Kiev’s Independence Square, chanting, “Together we are many! We cannot be defeated!” This would lead to 17 days of collaborative peaceful protest efforts of millions nationwide, and the revolution would come to be a victory for “people power.” The successful efforts created from an alliance of a powerful civic movement, a masterful political opposition group, and a determined middle class made the uprising a significant new landmark in eastern European post-communist history.

“I found it amazing how thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing very different things would all of a sudden stop what they were doing and start doing the same thing all at once in almost complete unison,” Greg said of the construction of mass protests around the country.

Intrigued by the miraculous process he witnessed to create powerful unity, Greg started to contemplate and analyze the workings of such collective power to make change. Looking at the Ukrainian community as well as the hundreds of employees he personally oversaw in his business at the time, Greg questioned if there was a calculated method to get people to unify and embrace common initiatives. A couple of years later in Silicon Valley, he used the resources of his digital business at his disposal as well as new-learned knowledge of social networks to begin researching network theory. What he discovered was a nearly complete mathematical explanation for the workings of The Orange Revolution, why and how the successful unification of millions was possible. Greg was hooked, and he spent the next 15 years studying how to create change.

“When somebody is trying to do something like a digital transformation or a corporate turnaround like IBM, Gandhi isn’t the first thing you think about, or Martin Luther King,”

Greg articulates these findings in his recent book, Cascades, a systematic guide to driving transformational change. He draws upon the wisdom of past and present movements to showcase the shortcomings and successes of change. Most people wouldn’t think to look at the teachings of historical or social movements to learn how to be successful in business. “When somebody is trying to do something like a digital transformation or a corporate turnaround like IBM, Gandhi isn’t the first thing you think about, or Martin Luther King,” Greg said. “But one of the nice things about social and political movements is that they’re so well documented. With corporate and industrial transformations, we usually only find out about them, first, when they’re successful. We hardly ever hear about the failures, unless it’s some absolutely tragic failure.”

By studying the failures and triumphs of past movements, the structure of any mass change can be calculated, according to Greg. He found that societies have three different “buckets” of creating change, of which they treat as completely separate entities: political activism, social movements, and organization, and industrial transformation. However, combining the concepts and drawing from the wisdom of lessons learned from the various institutions can make the most effective change, he says.

“What I found in my research is [political activism, social movements, and industrial transformation] are actually very, very similar. And we can learn a lot from looking at social and political movements about how to create transformations in business,” Greg said.

Lessons Learned from Social and Political Movements

So, what can social and political movements teach us about creating change in business? A lot, according to Greg. He found numerous parallels between successful industrial or organizational transformations and social or political movements, which he outlines in his book. The following are what he identifies as the crucial components of creating and maintaining transformational change:

1. Identify a Keystone Change: start with a clear and tangible goal that involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change.
2. Understand and anticipate your opposition: one of the most overlooked aspects of creating significant change that often blindsides companies, according to Greg, and one of the most important factors to actively consider.
3. Network the movement: identify and implement how to best connect groups of people with a shared intersectional purpose.
4. Indoctrinate a genome of values: build a foundation of trust and shared purpose that common values foster.
5. Build platforms for participation, mobilization and connection: create the environment for change and spread the word!
6. Surviving victory: how to maintain the change and avoid backlash/movement decline.

Identifying Keystone Change in Business

Let’s look at a real-world example of keystone change—one of the most important but most difficult tasks of creating change, Greg says. A keystone change is the movement and transformation of the foundation of a policy, system, society, business, etc. Altering a long-standing, powerful system takes some serious work, hence the difficulty to pull it off. The Women’s Movement of the 19th Century and the LGBT Movement, for example, both took decades to arrive at keystone change. But (in light of keystone change) due to the tireless efforts of millions and the radically affluent appeal to each movement’s shared values of equality and human rights, both movements took flight and gained wins.

Greg has found this concept of keystone change in every single successful industrial or organizational transformation he studied, even though nearly all of the organizations did not recognize it as such at the time, he says. Take the cloud transformation at Experian: a new CIO, Barry Libenson, was tasked to answer the request of customers to have real-time access to data in 2015. In order to do that, Barry identified the company would need to completely change its technology infrastructure from a traditional architecture to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This raised major concern for opposition. One of the largest credit bureaus in the world with important and sensitive information in a highly regulated industry changing its entire infrastructure brought up questions of security and losing control of its business model. How did he pull it off? Barry first identified the keystone change as internal APIs, which weren’t as threatening as a direct transfer to the cloud at the time. He rallied popular opinion around the idea, growing a cadre of people already on-board and excited to implement an agile development approach needed for the cloud versus a more traditional waterfall development approach. When the use of internal APIs was successful and people were able to see the idea work in action, he found it much easier to then gain the support to transition to a more comprehensive cloud approach with external APIs.

“You have to attract people, you can’t coerce. You can’t bribe or coerce transformation.”

“You have to attract people, you can’t coerce. You can’t bribe or coerce transformation,” Greg says. “People really have to believe in change, and you need to change minds. And you do that by building up local majorities. People will tend to adopt the opinions and ideas of people around them.”

How to Implement Change In Your Business

All of Greg’s research and findings can be applied to any business. In fact, Greg travels around the country advising companies on innovation and hosting workshops to show companies exactly how, based on the premises of Cascades.

Want to learn more? Join Greg and Voltage Control for a “Cascades” Workshop

You can join us for the Cascades Workshop on November 21, 2019 here in Austin, where Greg will teach a full day of how to navigate and drive change in today’s “era of disruption.” You will learn the specific strategy–each step in the Cascades’ process–to create a movement that drives transformational change, and then put the ideas to work during hands-on activities. Greg will also share stories from his research; learn how dozens of people and organizations have created truly historic impact. Join us, and learn the skills necessary for transformation.

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

The post How to Create Transformational Change in Business appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Alan Klement is a researcher and entrepreneur who has successfully applied the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory in his own business and now works with other companies to do the same.

“I got into JTBD after an experience I had as a product manager. I did everything that I thought a Product Manager was supposed to do. I released a new version of the software product. It took us a year of development and our customers were very happy, but revenue did not go up. I’d spent half a million euros of my boss’s money to improve the product but did not move the revenue needle. So that’s when I realized I needed a different way to think about building products.”

Customers don’t have needs

Alan’s experience as Product Manager highlights a common belief in product development that all one has to do to build a successful product is uncover your customer’s needs and build a solution to meet those needs. But Alan believes this idea takes for granted that customers have needs and that they know what they want. “The concept of a ‘need’ is that of a necessity precondition. A combustion car needs gas to run. A fish needs water to breathe.”

Alan believes that when it comes to product and services consumers don’t really need anything. “We can prove this because people make tradeoffs all the time. Do I need a shower or the ability to clean myself while I stay at a hotel? Well, maybe you’re offering me a free trip to Mt. Everest, and along the way, there’s only one hotel that doesn’t have any bath. In that case, I’d be willing to give up that ‘need.’”

While it may be true that customers know what they want, Alan points out that those desires can also change over time. “There’s this concept in game theory and economics called ‘perfect information.’ In such a system, there’s nothing for anyone to learn, because they know everything. But that isn’t the case with humans. We only know what we’ve experienced or learned in the past, and we use that to project into the future. As we learn and experience new things, our opinions change.”

To illustrate, Alan offers the example of the Blackberry. “Blackberry owners assumed that they needed a keyboard to type with. When they saw the iPhone, they utterly rejected the idea of a digital keyboard. They saw it as a step backward. However, when they actually tried it — and used the rest of the phone — they thought the digital keyboard was just as good. Or even if they thought it wasn’t as good, because the iPhone was great in other ways, they were willing to give up a better keyboard for, say, access to apps.”

“It’s almost a Neanderthal way of thinking about building products. Instead of just going and jumping into what you believe customer needs might be, let’s step back and understand that relationship between demand and supply within a market.”

In the JTBD theory, Alan saw the wisdom in studying why people buy products and what they consider to be competition for the products they use. “Through studying how people think about products you deduce what we call Jobs To Be Done, or the positive change that people are trying to make in their lives as a result of building some product, using some product, or consuming some product.”

As he points out in his article Progress: The Core of Jobs to be Done, Alan views JTBD as a better alternative to the notion of customer needs because it embraces progress. “As you make progress, new desires arise and new constraints arise. When you study progress and think about the desired change that people want, you realize what they want changes. And what’s preventing them from achieving what they want can change. Instead of just this idea of a list of needs, it’s about what inhibits progress.”

In placing a singular focus on the need itself, the customer needs approach misses the context of the customer experience — what they’re going through, why they’re going through it, and what their motivation is.

“…the need is when I have a desire and there’s a constraint blocking me from achieving that desire.”

Instead, effective solutions can focus on the constraints preventing customers from achieving their desires, or as Everett Rogers describes it, the gap that exists when a person’s actuality doesn’t match their desired capability. “If you take customer need within the context of progress, I would say that the need is when I have a desire and there’s a constraint blocking me from achieving that desire. I need something to overcome that constraint and realize that desire.”

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Find Your Alignment

Determine how your idea can be shifted or re-positioned to connect with and support business objectives.

Get It Now

Demand Profile

To visualize JTBD, Alan uses a tool of his own creation called a Demand Profile. When building the Demand Profile, Alan focuses on the desires, constraints, catalysts, and supply in the context of a customer’s experience. “The job that they’re trying to get done, is a combination of desires and a combination of constraints. The catalysts are the things that accelerate the demand by making the desires more important to me or the constraints worse to me. Then, we have the supply items. Those are things that I could consider to hire to help overcome the constraint and realize the desire.”

In creating the Demand Profile, Alan incorporated research from psychologists and economists like Manfred Max Neef who focus on the qualities that motivate people to take actions as the basis for describing the job to be done. He categorizes the JTBD based on Manfred Max Neef’s fundamental human needs matrix.

A theory, not a method

Rather than a silver bullet in innovation, Jobs to be Done is a theory. “It’s about explaining why people are buying products and it helps you define markets. So if you want to get started, start there. Appreciate that it’s a theory. It’s telling you how to think about supply and demand and that it’s an investigation of supply and demand and how that works within a market.”

While the JTBD theory resonates with a lot of innovators, it’s not always easy to apply in practice. “I think it goes back to the classic Western style of management. MBAs are basically cranked out. Everyone’s taught methods. And so they think in terms of everything as methods. And so when they hear Jobs To Be Done, they assume it’s a method. Something you do. It’s actually a theory about markets, demand generation, relationships between supply and demand, and why people are buying things. And that knowledge together is what should inform marketing and sales.”

Multiple strategies for growth in innovation

In addition to a blinding focus on customer needs, Alan believes that innovation can go astray when organizations fail to recognize that there are different strategies for growth in innovation. “There just seems to be this belief that if we improve the usability of our product or if we make the product better, more people will buy it. That’s just some assumption. There’s no theory behind that. There’s not really thought put into whether that is true or not.”

Alan sees three different approaches to innovation. One approach involves making adjustments or adding features to a product to capture customers with specific needs who are interested but forced to look elsewhere. “But you need to have a plan to go out into the market and find out why people are not buying your product, and then change it specifically to capture that group of people.”

Products can also be changed to entice existing customers to buy more of it. “An hour ago, I upgraded my Google G-Suite from the Basic to the Enterprise version. And I did that because I wanted to record my Google Meets. So that’s a way that Google is extracting more revenue from me. They’re offering add-ons or they’re offering me things that an existing consumer will pay more for.”

The third option is to create something entirely new to bring in new customers, sell to your existing customers, or both. “I think that those three different strategies for increasing your revenue all require a different research process and a different design process.”

You can’t measure innovation

According to Alan, innovation isn’t something that can be measured. “It’s a concept. Just like love or friendship. You can’t measure concepts — or anything else that lives in our heads.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to measure innovation.”

Measurement belongs in the realm of observable phenomena and physical things. “I don’t understand why you’d want to measure innovation. Who cares about that? In a free-market economy, the only thing a private company cares about is revenue. Because without it, it wouldn’t exist. I suppose you could say revenue is a ‘need.’”

“Numbers only tell you the effects of the system, but don’t tell you anything about the system itself.”

The emphasis on measurement in innovation is something Alan believes speaks to a problem with how we approach business management in the West. “Part of the problem with a lot of Western styles of management is they want to look at numbers. And they think numbers tell them things, tell them facts. If there’s no number, then I can’t make a decision on something. But that’s a fault in management because you can make up a number for anything. Numbers only tell you the effects of the system, but don’t tell you anything about the system itself.”

Start with supply and demand

More important than measurement is that innovation programs begin with a strong understanding of the market. “First off, I believe it starts with understanding existing markets — what supply and demand looks like today. What are consumers buying and why are they buying it? Because even if you are trying to advance the market, change the market, you still have to know where you are so you can begin changing it.”

The next step is implementing a process around imagining how things could be in the future. “If I were at a company, I would pull in people who were excited about designing new things for the organization, who had different experiences — people from marketing and sales background or people from a product or engineering, customer support. Bring these people together because they’re going to have different experiences of interacting with consumers and market behaviors that they can bring to the process. That helps you imagine how the system could be in the future.”

The final piece is establishing a process to experiment, learn, and test hypotheses. “Start testing with consumers and see if it gets them excited. See if it gets them wanting to change how they do things now to adopt our view of the future.”

Alan believes forming innovation programs should start with someone in a position of authority who believes there’s a revenue opportunity. “Some ultimate decision maker should pull together a team that can focus on discovering and flushing out this opportunity and thinking about solutions or things that can sell to fit into this opportunity.”

From a tactical perspective, team formation based on the principles of group dynamics involves multiple small, cross-functional groups. “You don’t want to have 20 people in a room. I don’t know how you would manage that. Two people or one person might not be enough to bounce off ideas. So it’s whatever produces a good mix of intimate setting, but also different people with different backgrounds who can comment and challenge ideas.”

Each team develops product ideas separately and then all teams come together to share their ideas. “That way you get the focus and quickness off a small team, while also getting the shared, collective knowledge of a large group of people.”

Once a solution is determined, Alan believes that sharing with the larger organization is most powerful for achieving buy-in when teams share the story of how the solution came to fruition. “This is straightforward research sharing. Here was our objective. We believed that there was a growth opportunity, revenue opportunity in this area. Here’s how we went out and did the research. Here is the data. Here are the concepts that we created based upon those data. We tested those concepts. Here were the results. And therefore, we are choosing concept C because that was the one that people responded most favorably to and expressed a willingness to pay for, more than anything else.”

A flaw in the theory of disruption

The story of the iPhone is a favorite innovation success of Alan’s for its unconventional approach to innovation. “They did everything right by going against, even today, all of the beliefs of how innovation should be done. Again, they didn’t go out and study customer needs.”

Steve Jobs looked at the existing market of smartphones and thought taking up half of the screen real estate with a keyboard ruined the customer experience. “Blackberry owners thought no keyboard, no way. Go back and just read all the pundits. But actually, Apple became the most successful company of all time with the most successful product of all time. And Nokia went bankrupt.”

Alan views the iPhone as a prime example of the flaw in Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption. “If you go back and look at Clay’s research, he’s doing everything by product category. He said PCs disrupted mainframes. That’s completely wrong. PCs and mainframes never competed. Actually, mainframes are still alive and well today.”

Due to his focus on the product category, Christensen saw the iPhone as a premium smartphone. “But he didn’t recognize, actually, it’s an alternative to a TV, to my laptop, to reading a newspaper, to staring at the wall while I’m at the doctor’s office or the magazines in the doctor’s office. I mean, that’s what it competes with.”

Alan views product categories as more of an indicator or lens through which to view innovation.“Maybe when you think about introducing a new supply option for some demand, you instead consider if this new supply is going to make product categories obsolete.”

Even Clayton Christensen himself seems to have abandoned the notion of innovating within product categories. “Clay wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. It was a huge success. And then, of course, he’s like, I have to do a follow-up. I discussed a problem. I should probably offer some solution to that problem.”

That solution materialized after he met Rick Pedi and Bob Moesta. When Christensen heard the idea of Jobs to be Done, he thought it might be the answer to The Innovator’s Dilemma. “It was the idea of not focusing on a product category, but focusing on what the product does for the person. Snickers is not a candy bar. It’s not about the chocolate and peanuts. It’s about satisfying my hunger on the go. And he felt that phrasing, that re-contextualization of markets, was what would solve the innovator’s dilemma.”

The story of the iPhone is a perfect example of why Alan doesn’t ascribe to the customer needs approach. “Supply is not created to fit demand. Supply actually creates demand. So don’t think that demand is something out there, that you create something to fit that demand. No, if it’s really something new, you introduce something into the market, and that creates demand for it. Because there has to be something out there. In order for me to want something, it has to exist.”

Simulated shopping

Alan’s advice for studying the market when a product is entirely new uses an approach he calls simulated shopping through which he tries to uncover if people will want a new product and, more importantly, if they’ll be willing to pay for it.

“In an interview with someone, we try to recreate how they would shop. One way that we do it is we create fake Amazon pages for the product that doesn’t exist yet. Then we show this to the person in an interview or through Zoom and watch them browsing.” Talking through their decision making process and learning what product the interviewee would ultimately buy is a low-risk approach to finding a revenue opportunity for a new market solution that can help predict whether or not it will sell before the costly work of building the solution occurs.

For more information on Jobs to be Done and how other entrepreneurs have applied it to create successful products, check out Alan’s book When Coffee and Kale Compete.

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

The post Consumers Don’t ‘Need’ Anything appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

In the fast-paced world of technology where sprints are the norm, Karen Holst prefers the marathon. After starting to do triathlons in her twenties, Karen learned that switching focus multiple times in the middle of a lengthy goal wasn’t for her. Instead, she found satisfaction through a focus on one sport for the long haul. “It gave me the opportunity to really tune into new parts of my brain. It makes things turn off and other things turn on.”

“A lot of people that approach innovation are trying to fix a problem versus leaning into learn mode.”

What Karen learned through running marathons also has applications to her work in innovation. “A lot of people that approach innovation are trying to fix a problem versus leaning into learn mode. One of the components that really works for me is the ability to have time to reflect, ruminate, and connect the dots between different things.”

Karen’s career started her junior year of college when she co-founded MyEdu (formerly Pick-a-Prof), a site that compiles information from universities to help students plan college courses and compare credit requirements across different universities. After MyEdu was acquired by Blackboard in 2014, Karen moved on to Fuse Corps where she worked with the California Department of Education to design innovative educational technology programs for students in the California school system.

“That was my moment where I realized I didn’t have to own a company to find fulfillment, purpose, and autonomy.”

“That was my moment where I realized I didn’t have to own a company to find fulfillment, purpose, and autonomy — the things that really drove me. It was more about finding a problem that I care about and trying to solve that in a new and innovative way.” At the end of her year-long fellowship, Karen moved to IDEO where she helped launch their online learning platform for design thinking and creative problem-solving skills. Now Karen spends her time advising companies, teaching a product innovation course on LinkedIn, and mentoring at TechStars and SLEI while also working on a book about problem-solving in the innovation space.

Doers vs innovators

One pattern that Karen has noticed through her research is the concept of thinking of individuals as “doers” versus “innovators.” Rather than viewing people in binary categories — innovative or not innovative — Karen views innovation as a mode of work.

“The word innovation can be exclusive and has a lot of baggage with it.”

“There are modes where you need to be heads-down and get work done. But there are moments when you pop up and have opportunities to innovate — you have a great idea, you have an insight. If you segregate people as innovators and doers, then you’re really missing out on the diversifying of ideas.”

By creating confined categories or designating specific teams as “doing innovation,” ideas are limited to a small subset of individuals. “That is to the disadvantage of innovation and it’s how companies can stall out.” This idea inspired her to start writing her book, which focuses on enabling the doers in an organization to participate in innovation at all levels.

“Doers can launch new things, but are probably early in their career, haven’t done that kind of work, and are looking for purpose. It’s that group that can be left behind…”

To combat this, Karen suggests first acknowledging that everyone possesses the ability to innovate. “It’s not an innate skill that’s only within a select few visionaries [like] Elon Musk and beyond.” Begin by letting go of old mindsets that a job title defines who can be innovative. Then learn the concrete steps to move forward with an idea.

“It’s quite daunting. You hear this over and over from the people who are trying to innovate within large organizations. It feels lonely. It feels like you’re the only person in the world trying to do something this hard.” Opening innovation up to everyone creates opportunities for conversations and problem solving to make an enormous task more manageable.

“You hear this over and over from the people that are trying to innovate within large organizations. It feels lonely. It feels like you’re the only person in the world trying to do something this hard.”

Start where you are

Simple brainstorming exercises can often highlight the other mindset shifts that are needed for innovation to thrive. Karen related her experience introducing a brainstorming activity in one of her previous engagements. The goal was to acquaint participants with the idea of design thinking as a process for bringing innovation into classrooms. “It was a really simple brainstorm session of just coming up with a name of one of the products that they already provide.” No matter what name was suggested, the idea was immediately shot down for various reasons.

The story highlights two strategies Karen believes to be critical to success in innovation:

1. Start where you are
2. Avoid perfectionism

For a team with limited brainstorming experience, starting where they were led Karen to acknowledge the importance of having a devil’s advocate and multiple perspectives. In contrast, avoiding perfectionism meant challenging the team to evolve and try a different way of doing things — to freethink and gather ideas while postponing the filtering process so as not to slow down idea generation.

The innovation repository

One tool Karen uses to help teams start where they are is to create what she calls an innovation repository: “You have all these pictures of the people that work at the company an d you have places where there’s a process or where there isn’t a process. Capture it in some sort of written form, even if it’s just a four-slide deck of where you’re at today and where you want to be. Getting started is literally just getting as much [initial info] as you can, having a bulleted framework you might follow and continuing to iterate as you go forward.”

Feeling the need to have the perfect process and the perfect answer can cripple an initiative before it even begins. An innovation repository not only establishes a clear purpose to organize around, it also provides a means to measure current value.

“Often the problem with metrics is there isn’t buy-in that the metrics are of value.”

Visionary leaders who pull teams in too many different directions can be another source that slows a team’s momentum. A clear purpose coupled with metrics is a good strategy for focusing innovation efforts. “Often the problem with metrics is there isn’t buy-in that the metrics are of value.” She suggests a balance of qualitative and quantitative metrics so stakeholders focused on behavioral and cultural change are satisfied, as well as those who are focused on the bottom line. The ultimate goal of measurement is to create a long enough runway for teams to do the work that innovation requires. “It’s about extending that runway as long as you can and having belief and support that it’s leading to something.”

A tale of two companies

Southwest Airlines is one company Karen admires for their innovative ideas and start-where-you-are attitude. For example, in an effort to keep the same number of flights using fewer planes, they cut boarding time. The boarding process that resulted was faster and easily understood by passengers. “I think the reason that it stands out to me is a lot of people are focused on big innovation, radical change that’s going to bring in billions of dollars or change this big thing. Those are important, but it’s sometimes small tweaks that can make a big change and create ripples.”

In contrast, confused consumers can tank even the most clever ideas. Karen’s favorite example of this is Febreze Scentstories, a product that looked like a compact disc (CD) player and allowed consumers to experience a variety of scent “tracks” over 30 minutes. The product sought to solve the problem of habituation — our noses get used to certain smells with continual exposure. The problem was that customers didn’t understand it; many thought it was a conventional CD player. “Scentstories is interesting because it is so not human-centered. Kudos for taking a big leap, but to get it all the way to market and have it be such an utter failure is an example of not engaging with the human side of things.”

“To get it all the way to market and have it be such an utter failure is an example of not engaging with the human side of things.”

As a long distance runner, Karen has experienced the runner’s high, the moment when the work shifts from being difficult and painful to an easier state of flow. She sees that existing in innovation as well: “Once you get past ‘I’m trying to do something really difficult’ and get into the thinking high, that’s where there’s a real opportunity for innovation.”

Organizations that can think creatively to establish longer runways for innovation work, diversify the makeup of teams, and agree on balanced metrics are positioned to overcome the difficult nature of innovation allowing it to flow freely and carry them into the future.

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

The post Innovation is a Marathon, Not a Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Brant Cooper wishes people would stop saying innovation and start saying what they mean. He urges businesses to define what they are truly aiming for when they say this word. The definition can shift dramatically depending on the organization using it — does it mean growth, culture, new technologies, or something else entirely?

Brant is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of the consultancy Moves the Needle. With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends design thinking and lean methodology to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations.

Define the “why”

Let’s return to Brant’s thoughts on innovation and why the term can be problematic: “In my keynotes, I stand up and tell people to stop using the word innovation. Don’t use the word, if you’re not going to define it. Once everybody agrees on what is meant by innovation inside of an organization, use it to your heart’s content.”

“I stand up and tell people to stop using the word innovation. Don’t use the word, if you’re not going to define it.”

The reason he pushes for a concrete definition is that there are so many different ways to look at innovation: “It’s about technology, or having a good culture where young people want to come and work. Or, it could be a marketing factor, or it’s a new business model. It’s all over the map. We have to define what it means, and then we have to define how we are going to apply it in the organization to reach our strategic priorities.” When people know if they are talking about creating new products, values, or even listening to their customers more, they can set their sights on exactly what they are going to do to get there.

Innovation labs aren’t startups

One of the things that I always ask the folks I interview is about the pitfalls they identify in innovation, especially in how it happens inside large companies. Brant talked about how companies often wrongly compare themselves to startups: “I think a lot of senior management look to the startup community and say: ‘Look at the startups like Uber and Airbnb; they’re creating these billion dollar markets, why can’t we do the same thing? We need to be more entrepreneurial.’”

The result is often internal labs, accelerators, or innovation teams. However, by comparing themselves to startups, companies run into several issues. The first is the probability of success: “Number one: there are thousands of startups out there and in maybe one out of a thousand you get a unicorn. Yet companies are hoping they’re going to get the same thing by putting five teams in their lab.”

“I don’t think breakthrough innovation comes from people sitting down and saying, ‘Okay, what are going to do that’s breakthrough?’”

The second issue Brant sees is the difference between the motivations of startup founders and an innovation group. “I don’t think breakthrough innovation comes from people sitting down and saying, ‘Okay, what are going to do that’s breakthrough?’ People tend to work on ideas that they’re passionate about, or an inspiration that has come to them or they’re solving their own problems…”

Lastly, he talked about timelines: “Often, the people setting up these [innovation] labs are not given a realistic timeline. You’re not going get the return on investment in one, two, or three years if you’re trying to do breakthrough innovation. It’s not that the people inside the labs can’t. It’s just that they’re not being set up for success.”

“It’s not that the people inside the labs can’t. It’s just that they’re not being set up for success.”

Horizon Models

Brant also talked about his distaste for businesses applying innovation to the classic three horizons of growth framework. As described by McKinsey&Company, this framework “…offers a way to concurrently manage both current and future opportunities for growth.”

Traditionally, horizon one is defined as what companies need to work on today in order to achieve growth objectives this year and next. Horizon two is what they need to work on today to lay the foundation for growth in two, three, or four years. Horizon three is what they need to be working on to ensure growth in five-plus years.

Brant said: “I’m not sure when it was decided that we should attach the level of innovation to these, whereby H1 is continuous improvement, H2 is incremental innovation, and H3 is breakthrough or disruptive innovation. You can’t lay the plans to create disruptive innovation versus incremental innovation. People are going to work on solving problems and some of them are going to take three years, some will take five years, and some are going to take seven years.”

He continued: “There are tons of things that we can’t predict. But somehow this horizon model has been co-opted by this innovation version and it doesn’t make any sense. I try to get people to reframe it back into growth because that’s what the objective is anyway. We’re not doing innovation just for innovation’s sake. We’ve got strategic priorities that we’re trying to achieve and it’s usually based upon revenue or growth.”

“By adding innovation to the horizon model, we screw up our portfolio management and how we’re going to allocate capital and resources across those time horizons.”

Stealth mode vs. open innovation

Another trope of the innovation and startup spaces that Brant questions is the idea of “stealth mode.” He talked about the birth of Silicon Valley and how it was a champion of open innovation before anybody even called it that: “The companies that were working to develop electronic warfare detection and electronic warfare equipment were working together under government contracts. But they were working together in order to come up with solutions. It wasn’t about being in stealth mode and hiding everything.”

“What you need is openness, inclusiveness, and diversity. It’s what actually leads to innovation.”

The emphasis on secrecy in today’s Silicon Valley might not allow for serendipity and discovery. It’s a lesson that’s relevant to current innovation teams. “I think we’re less likely to come across accidents and recognize those accidents because we tend to form innovation teams that are parochial and inside the building. What you need is openness, inclusiveness, and diversity. It’s what actually leads to innovation.”

Listen to the market

This idea of openness relates to one of Brant’s favorite anecdotes, which is that Steve Jobs was initially against opening up the app store to third-party developers. “I think the iPhone became breakthrough when it became a platform. And it became a platform when they opened up the app store to third-party developers. In the first year, it was not open to third-party developers because Steve Jobs wanted to maintain control. But, what made it revolutionary was when everybody could develop free and 99 cent apps. That’s what changed the industry overnight.”

Brant continued: “To Jobs’ credit, a year later he did open it up. To me, that’s more of what a visionary does. A visionary says, ‘The market is actually telling me something. I’m gonna change my tune.’”

“Listening to the market isn’t simply asking your customers what they want and doing what they say. There are all sorts of ways to listen to your market.”

The Three E’s

Brant is currently working on a new book and the concept is based on his belief that established companies must change the way they operate in order to survive.

“The very structure of our companies, in terms of the way we structure departments and hierarchies, is derived from an assembly line.”

He explained: “The very structure of our companies, in terms of the way we structure departments and hierarchies, is derived from an assembly line. It’s all based in the industrial age. I think the depression of 2007/08 marked the end of the industrial age. We’re in a new time and we’re going to find that companies have to be structured and operate differently.”

Specifically, this massive change means that: “Everybody inside a company needs to know how to act entrepreneurially, at some level. It doesn’t mean that we’re a startup. It doesn’t mean that everybody is acting like entrepreneurs all the time.”

“You have to define what it means to be an entrepreneur inside your organization, in your culture, in your market, in your industry. What does it mean to operate in this new way? Who are going to be the champions? Who are going to be the people leading the effort?”

But, it does mean that this new workforce, according to Brant, is going to have to know what he calls the Three Es of Lean Innovation — Empathy, Experiments, and Evidence-informed decision making. “Everybody needs to learn how to do those things and apply them wherever there’s uncertainty in the organization.”

I’m looking forward to reading Brant’s book when it comes out and learning more about the three E’s. In the meantime, I will be keeping up with him at his blog. I hope everyone enjoyed this preview.

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

The post Stop Saying Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

My AI Readiness Canvas and Workshop was inspired by the many conversations I’ve had with CEOs who are excited about the potential of AI. Sometimes, I leave these moments feeling like I’ve just witnessed something I call “technology FOMO.” No one wants to be left behind if they don’t jump on the AI bandwagon. But, just because there is some overexcitement around AI, doesn’t mean it is completely unwarranted.

Often there is a real need underneath the excitement. My goal was to build a tool that would allow teams to discover genuine opportunities and to move forward quickly, without endless debate and circular conversations.

For those who are new to the concept, a canvas is essentially a strategic worksheet. Our AI Readiness Canvas is based on a basic canvas model but includes AI and Machine Learning criteria as well as business sections. (Never fear, though, I’ve removed AI jargon to make it accessible to anyone in the organization.) The intention is that cross-functional teams use this worksheet in a structured workshop to have a time-boxed conversation that allows them to align their thinking and make rapid decisions.

The Canvas

You can download the AI Readiness Canvas here. Before you do, I recommend that you read the instructions below so you know how to incorporate it into a productive working session.

Planning Your AI Readiness Workshop

For this Canvas to “work,” you have to workshop it! Set aside the time to get the right stakeholders in the room together. This takes some planning. I’ve written extensively about planning workshops, so definitely check out some of those articles. But, in addition to my standard recommendations, there are a few specifics to consider.

The current state

First, make sure you’ve done some upfront research into where the team is headed and what they’ve already done. Don’t drill in so much that you could fill in the worksheet for them, but you want to understand the general direction they are headed. This will allow you to double check the attendees and make sure that you’ve got the requisite diversity.

Understand the problem space

It’s also helpful to do a bit of research around the problem space. Are there any existing AI solutions in the space or adjacent to the problem? These analogous problems and solutions are extremely inspiring and will be helpful when you kick off the workshop.

Who should be there

Based on what you’ve learned, make sure all the stakeholders are in the room for the workshop. You may want to consider doing a quick stakeholder mapping exercise to identify anyone who should be there.

Decision-making style

Lastly, decide what style of decision-making is best for your group. Some tools are better suited for smaller groups and others for larger groups. Two of my favorites are “Note and Vote” and “1–2–4-all.” I recommend “Note and Vote” for groups of 10 or less. For larger groups, consider “1–2–4–all.”

Running the workshop

Setup the conversation

To get started, it is important to set some context. Share a few stories around what is possible with AI. If you’ve done some research into analogous inspiration, share these finding now.

There’s a lot of confusion around the term AI. (As you’re likely aware, we haven’t achieved Artificial General Intelligence, or something akin to a sentient being.) As most commonly used, AI refers to a broad range of intelligent algorithms and mathematical approaches to problem-solving.

Given the fuzziness around the space and a general lack of understanding, try to avoid jargon. Instead, talk about a few things that AI can do for us, while making sure you don’t get into the weeds around solutions or algorithms. With all the excitement and hype about AI that’s “just around the corner” — self-driving cars, instant machine translation, etc. — it can be difficult to see how AI is affecting the lives of regular people from moment to moment.

To simplify the discussion, think of AI as the broader goal of autonomous machine intelligence, and machine learning as the specific scientific methods currently in vogue for building AI. All machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning.

What are examples of artificial intelligence that people are already using? Here are a few of my favorites: song recommendations on Spotify or Pandora, banks detecting anomalies in behavior and spending patterns, Siri and Alexa voice commands, Chatbots for automated conversations, Uber’s ETA for rides, and Facebook auto-tagging photos. (I’m sure there are many more you can think of!)

Pro-Tip: Don’t forget about Augmented Intelligence — you don’t have to always build fully autonomous systems. Many AIs are built to improve human capabilities. My favorite story is Fin.com They have built AI tools to make the humans executive assistants more efficient and more effective. Similarly, early medical diagnostic AIs will likely require doctors to relay the results as it may take a while before humans want to accept a diagnosis from a machine.

Use the Canvas

After introductions and getting the group in the AI “headspace,” it’s time to dive into using the Canvas. Each square of the worksheet represents a collaborative discussion topic for the team.

1. Business Problem

Start with your business challenge. How is the company or division currently focused? It is important to stay strategic and high level at this point. Engineers are especially tempted to dive straight to a solution here; if you already have a solution in mind, bubble up to a higher perspective. Also, don’t limit yourself to thinking about AI strategy — stay general. If your company isn’t already using OKRs, SMART goals, or EOS, these are good frameworks for thinking about objectives. If you are already using one of these frameworks, think about the objective or goal that is most likely to benefit from AI.

While it is not critical, some teams already have KPIs in mind or are interested in discussing KPIs at this point. If this happens, I encourage them to keep the conversation brief as you will go deeper on benefits and KPIs once you’ve selected a concept to pursue.

PRO-TIP: If you already have a solution in mind, take a step back and define your problem or challenge more broadly, to provide more room for exploration and other potential solutions

2. Challenges

Once you identify the problem you are solving, articulate it in a way that everyone understands, you are set up to begin crafting a solution. The first step is to outline the obstacles, uncertainties, and fears that are holding you back today. This can include siloed data, resources, capital constraints, lack of tooling, political constraints, lack of trust, etc.

3. Phenomenon

In this portion of the Canvas, answer this question: What thing does the AI need to understand and/or predict to help us solve our business problem? Encourage the team to think both broadly and narrowly to explore different ways to frame the focus. Zoom in and zoom out. Exploring different perspectives exposes new areas of experimentation during the proof of concept.

4. Detection

Now that we have determined the phenomenon that we are interested in building a solution around, explore your current experience with detecting that phenomenon. Do you just have a general hunch that it is happening? Have you randomly observed it on occasion? Do you have a business analyst spending weeks to assemble SQL queries and spreadsheets by hand? Is there an automated report? Or, a real-time alert system that is detecting it? Encourage the team to think about who is involved in this process, what manual steps are involved, and what is automated.

5. Data

Next, begin to list out all the data needed to understand the problem. Imagine you put together a task force to better understand the phenomenon. What data would they need to become experts in the phenomenon? How would they learn about historic behaviors? What systems and data would they need to observe the phenomenon in real time? Who are the current experts and the best sources of detail on the phenomenon?

Data Worksheet

Before moving to Step 6 of the AI Readiness Canvas, complete a Data Worksheet for each item in the Data section.

The Data Worksheet is intended to help you discover gaps, identify stakeholders, and locate sources of data that might inspire new ideas and context for your proof of concept.

Some teams want to divide and conquer. Some even adjourn so team members can investigate and research worksheet answers. I’m usually running the workshop as a group and believe that you can simply identify the gaps and save the research as a follow-on activity. Having the partially filled-in worksheets provides a foundation to build from, which will create momentum for your project.

PRO-TIP: Make sure your workshop includes at least one person with deep understanding of your data model and various sources of data. If you have various 3rd party data systems, you may need to include the owner or administrator of these systems.

6. Gaps

Now that you’ve done your Data Worksheets, you’re ready to dive back in. Start by copying over any gaps that you identified during the Data Worksheet exercise. Think about your problem, challenges, and existing gaps. What else may need to be addressed before you can start building the solutions? Perhaps you haven’t been able to manually detect the phenomenon yet? Maybe you don’t have a data pipeline in place or haven’t signed a partnership with a critical source of data? Sometimes it’s a simple as knowing that your data needs to be enriched.

PRO-TIP: Don’t forget that some data will have multiple sources and may need to be deduplicated or disambiguated. You may also need to determine which data source is more robust and/or more reliable.

7. Risk

In all the excitement that develops as a result of pursuing adventurous and innovative technology, it can be easy to lose sight of the pitfalls or risk of implementing the solution. Explore the potential negative consequences of the project. Think through assumptions and what might go wrong if any of them are incorrect. What biases are not accounted for? Are you potentially displacing jobs? Will the user trust this system?

8. Proof of Concept

Now it’s time to think about solutions. With a focus on crawling before running, explore small solutions that can help address gaps and mitigate risk. It is important to create an early win on a project and establish a rapid and reliable learning loop. Think through and develop a simple plan for that next step to move the project forward.

PRO-TIP: Your POC should be no longer than 3 months. The smaller the better! Can you build a spreadsheet model tomorrow to learn more about the phenomenon? Start there!

9. Stakeholders

Now that you’ve explored the problem space, the data, and next steps, it’s highly likely that the stakeholder list has grown. Take a moment to list out everyone that might be impacted by this work. Review your challenges, gaps, and Data Worksheets to see who needs to be involved going forward. Who is critical to success and should be part of the core team? Who needs to have regular updates so they can adapt to changing requirements? Who owns critical data or systems and will be needed at certain stages of the project?

PRO-TIP: Don’t forget about your external stakeholders!

10. Benefits

Finally, reflect on the business problem, the proof of concept, and where it might lead the organization. What are the outcomes for the organization as a whole? How might you sell this to other decision-makers? Consider your stakeholder list and what is important for them to know or how might they personally benefit if this project is successful. Begin to distill your thoughts into a list of ways this project will benefit the organization and the unique value proposition.

PRO-TIP: Consider KPIs to track and measure these benefits.

I hope you find our AI Readiness Canvas a helpful tool for your team. Please download it here.

If you are interested in having a facilitator lead you through an AI Readiness Workshop, please reach out at douglas@voltagecontrol.co! Read on for testimonials from clients we’ve worked with…

Testimonials

“The AI Canvas works! I’ve seen Douglas use it to lead a room of 100 CTOs through the challenge of matching their business needs with the possibilities that the new world of AI presents to their companies.”—Etienne de Bruin, CEO, 7CTOs

“Voltage Control’s AI Readiness Canvas and Workshop provides us with a rigorous and transparent process and framework to discuss how to infuse our solutions with AI and machine learning for decision advantage.” — Dr. Kuan Collins, VP Solutions, Analytics and Simulation, SAIC

“After working with Voltage Control’s AI Canvas, I realized that the only question left was, ‘Why have I not done this already?!?’ — Ken Cone, CTO, Radeus Labs

The post The AI Readiness Canvas and Workshop appeared first on Voltage Control.