I co-hosted a session at the CLOC 2019 conference (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) where we showed a group of lawyers how Design Sprints can help them in more ways than they realized.

I spoke with the help of Jeff Marple, Innovation Director — Corporate Legal at Liberty Mutual, at the CLOC 2019 conference, which gathers legal operations professionals and other corporate legal industry players to optimize the legal service delivery models needed to support the needs of small, medium and large legal departments.

Our challenge was to break down the Design Sprint process into a 50-minute session that would allow them to walk away with some new ideas and solutions for approaching problems.

“Liberty Mutual and Voltage Control organized one of the most interesting and impactful session at recent national gathering of legal ops leaders. The session was unique in the way it engaged participants and facilitated creative problem solving. The session has helped me think about innovative ways to involve in-house legal teams in improvement opportunities.”

— Jason Winmill, Partner, Argopoint

We wanted to give the attendees a set of tools they could use and implement once they were back in their offices. We needed them to walk away with ways they could better achieve Leading Metrics and KPI’s.

For readers not versed in the concept, design thinking is a method long used by the tech industry to quickly identify a goal for a team, solicit a large quantity of ideas about the goal, empathize with and gain insights from key stakeholders, and systematically vet the ideas in a “trust-tree”, no judgement environment.

— Kevin Bielawski, Director of Legal Project Management & Strategic Pricing, Husch Blackwell

We began the talk by explaining what a Design Sprint is so everyone understood how it works, why it works, and what it can do for them. We then dove into the activities to show them what they each accomplish.

Because we were short on time, we came up with an activity that got everyone involved and talking, brainstorming ideas and solutions. We want everyone to have a voice and the customized activity we designed showed them how a Sprint worked. We called it 1–2–4–8-ALL, based on this Liberating Structure.

What important Legal Operations challenge should we focus on today?

Often, I like to pose a question to a team to get them thinking. We started by asking this to the room: “What important Legal Operations challenge should we focus on today?”

Because I don’t come from a legal background, I wanted the specific problem we focused on in the session to come from the participants. Each attendee came up with a short list of responses by thinking about the challenges they face every day. This was the “1” in our 1–2–4–8-ALL model.

Working together

The next step was to pair into groups of two. At this point, we asked the two-person groups to share their lists, vet the ideas, and agree on the one challenge they felt was most important. We gave them ample time to work through their thoughts and talk through them. This was the 2 in our 1–2–4–8-ALL model.

Once the groups of two were able to whittle their lists down to one challenge, we paired each into groups of four and asked them to repeat the same process. By this time, the group of four now had two ideas to choose from. I saw so much excitement once we started getting into bigger groups because they were sharing some important insights.

Once the team of four had chosen one idea, we brought them together in groups of eight. Once they had completed this task and had come up with one challenge, we had a final list of 8 total challenges to work with, which the teams presented to us while I wrote them out on a flip chart.

“This was hands down my favorite and, for me, the most valuable session of the conference. I love interactive learning. Rather than simply describe what happens in a Design Sprint, the presenters had us participate in an actual sprint where we identified a problem and began working on a solution.“

— Leslie F. Brown, Director of Legal Process Innovation, Greenberg Traurig, LLP

The Big Ideas

Now that we had our eight challenges, it was time to get them thinking even more. We asked everyone to vote on their top challenge and then to come up with one idea that would address it.

Once everyone had their original concept written down, the time came to let the entire group pass judgment. We asked them to get up and move around the room and exchange their card with someone else. The result was that every person ended up with a card that was different from their own.

“I recently attended the 2019 CLOC Vegas Institute where the rapid nature of sprints encourages teams to think quickly and that all ideas are welcome. Sprints also eliminate hand-wringing and lengthy debates. Attending the session provided the first-hand experience to see if I would be able to use the concept with our Legal Department. The answer is Yes!”
 — Cathy Davis, AVP, Legal Operations, University of Phoenix

5 Rounds to Score

To find the best ideas in the group, we asked each person to stand up and read their idea to the group and give it a score from 1–5 with five being the highest.

After each round, we allowed the group to exchange their idea card with someone else once again, read the ideas out loud and score it from 1–5. This gave every idea the chance to earn 25 points to rank as the best of the best. While we did not end up with any 25 point ideas, but we had a 23, several 22s and a couple of 21s.

“It was a fun challenge to come up with a solution for lawyers to quantify their value to the broader organization. I think about this issue a lot, because we’re seeing a dramatic shift in the legal landscape, where in-house legal professionals are being seen as innovation leaders and are increasingly advocating for the adoption of technologies such as AI.” — Kelsea Carlson, Product Counsel, Text IQ

“Some really great ideas came out of this session and I’m not at all surprised that focusing on metrics/KPIs for reporting on the law department was the lead challenge or problem for the Sprint. Unfortunately, it’s no longer sufficient in any organization, or in any function, to declare that the work we do is really special and unique and can’t be measured. “— JoAnne Wakeford, Chief Client Officer, Nextlaw In-House Solutions

We were curious to see what words and themes surfaced when looking at all of the ideas generated, so we created a word cloud. I found it interesting how many focused on being actionable and measurable.

At the end of our session, a group of lawyers who knew almost nothing about Design Sprints left with a list of ideas that could potentially solve a problem for them and with the skills needed to use the process in the future.

“Lawyers are super-smart, but as expertise-focused professionals, they often operate like ‘lone wolves’: collaboration, consensus-building, and design-thinking are often absent from their training and from their daily work environment. They’re good at picking apart ideas, but often horrible about ideating, or looking for ways to change and improve their game. That’s a critical skill set for lawyers to not only learn but exercise if they’re going to prepare themselves for practice in the future.”

— Susan Hackett, CEO, Legal Executive Leadership

The post How to Get a Room Full of Lawyers to Think Differently. appeared first on Voltage Control.

I recently had the opportunity to speak at SOLID West. SOLID West is a conference run by David Cowen of the Cowen Group. At SOLID West, leaders in the legal profession come together to discuss how they are bringing innovation into their businesses in Ted Talk-style sessions followed by round tables, facilitated conversations, panels, and town hall conversations where participants can interact with peers to discuss what they’ve learned and how they can apply it in their own businesses.

“You were a jolt of energy much needed after a long day.”

After a day of talks about corporate legal innovation and the business of law, I end the day with something completely different. My talk was a seven-minute overview of Design Sprints and how they can extract major value in a super short amount of time. One of the attendees said, “You were a jolt of energy much needed after a long day.”

My talk was a seven-minute overview of Design Sprints and how they can extract major value in a super short amount of time.

In the talk, I discussed work we did with the Liberty Mutual legal team who were seeking to partner with another company in the market to create a more valuable solution than either company could create independently. Voltage Control was brought in to facilitate the interaction to ensure each organization came into the partnership on a level playing field and got the most value possible through a Design Sprint.

Designs Sprints are a 5-day process developed at Google Ventures where a team comes together to map out a problem and brainstorm solutions in a way that brings individualized thought into the problem space and limits the natural tendency toward groupthink.

After introducing diversity of thought and rooting out assumptions, teams come together to decide on a solution that is prototyped and tested with fice people. This all happens within five days, giving teams a clear path forward in solving impactful problems and answering key questions.

For those of you who couldn’t be at this event, read below for the transcript from my talk.

Transcript from my Design Sprint overview for SOLID West

Douglas: My name is Douglas Ferguson, and I’m the founder and president of Voltage Control, a workshop agency specializing in design sprints and innovation workshops. We help companies solve tough problems using integrated decision-making techniques, and all of our workshops are predicated on a philosophy that nobody is as smart as everybody, layering a diverse set of tools and methodology such as lean, agile, design sprints, thinking wrong, and liberating structures. We guide companies through complex operating environments and equip them with the tools required and critical for innovation transformation.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. Do you have a presentation you want to show us?

Douglas: I do.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. It’s all yours.

Douglas: Excellent. So I talked a little bit about Voltage Control, and today I’m going to share a tool that we use, it’s one of the arrows in our quiver, and the impetus for me coming today was a project that we did for Liberty Mutual, and they approached me because they were wanting to kick off a project with another company in the market that they felt if they were to bring together the capabilities of their company and match them with the capabilities of this other company, that they would have this combination that would be much more valuable than either of them could create alone.

But there was a problem. Who was going to facilitate this gathering, and how would they make sure they got the most of their time together so that one company wasn’t positioned above the other one with respect to authority in the room. And so I worked with them to design a workshop that was modeled very closely to a design sprint, and so that’s what I’m going to tell you about today.

It’s a five-day process developed at Google Ventures, and we started off on Monday mapping out our problem space and then moved to Tuesday where we’re going to individually sketch solutions, followed by Wednesday where we’re going to decide from those solutions which solution has the most promise, we’re going to prototype on Thursday, and then Friday we test that prototype with five users.

Now, if there’s nothing else that you take away from my talk today, I want to really drive home that sketching happens individually. So what that creates is this divergent nature. So we’re all individually putting out our ideas on paper, which is also important that we don’t encourage this groupthink, or allowing the loudest person in the room to have all the authority, we’re going to individually explore our ideas.

So we diverge, and then the following day we converge. We decide together. And that’s something that you can lift and move into any meeting that you have. It’s a very powerful technique. You can split your meeting in half, do some individual work followed by some group work to analyze everyone’s thoughts. Because some people require a little more time to think through their emotions or what they’d like to present. So definitely think about the individual paired with group work is very powerful.
So I’m going to dive into the Monday activities.

What we do, is we start with our long term goal. It’s very important to orient. We want to understand the purpose, why we’re here, and ideally how we’re going to measure the success. And then we’ll start to question that goal, and get pessimistic. This is a very powerful tool because we can put all that pessimism behind us. We get it out of the way very early on Monday. Also, we can convert those pessimistic questions into valuable metrics. Like, these are binary questions. Can we achieve this, yes or no? Is this thing really going to get in our way? Were we able to get past this hurdle?

And then we start to map out our problem space. There’s many kinds of maps we could create, but ultimately we want to visualize the problem space so we can have some shared understanding and alignment across what we’re dealing with. We’ll bring in experts. Sometimes these are team members that we can’t fit into the workshop because it would be too many people, but we want to get really curious about what we don’t know and bust our assumptions.

And then during those interviews we’re going to use a framework called How Might We’s, where we just focus everyone’s note taking in a consistent format, which makes it easier to sort, and we can make sure that they’re all optimistic and focused on positive outcomes. And then we select our target at the end of the day.

So as I mentioned, sketching is going to be individual. We start off with some lightening demos so that we can get inspired by other analogous inspirations that might be out in the marketplace. We’ll use a four-step sketch process to sketch our ideas including a crazy eight exercise that unleashes and creates rapid variations, which is exciting, and then our sketches will be … Let’s look at this.

It’s not super artistic, but it’s very clear. Our ideas are crystallized in a way that everyone can understand each other’s ideas without the author selling it. And so what we’re going to do to decide on the next day is that we’re going to hang all these solutions on the ceiling. Sorry, we’re not going to hang them on the ceiling, we’re going to hang them on the wall in a gallery, and we’ll do a walk around to view and place some dots on the areas that look the most compelling, or this is a really great idea. So we do this quietly. There’s no group thing, there’s no talk, and then we quickly critique all of them, using those dots as heat, so we know exactly what to talk about. Like, what’s drawing out the most compelling pieces of these sketches.

And then we storyboard a winning idea based on the votes. So we really lock in what we intend to build so that on Thursday we can move very fast and build a lot in one day. So I’m going to show you some prototypes that have been built through design sprints. This is a packaging for Blue Bottle Coffee as they were thinking about new distribution mechanisms, you know, how do we actually send this out through the mail, and what does this look like, and what’s this experience we want to create?

Also, another prototype was a new, kind of exciting innovative type of health care solution and this was the office that people would walk into and experience. So this prototype was a script, and actors actually acted out the interactions that the users would have when they were in the office.

And then on Friday, we test it with five users. These are one on one interviews where we explore reactions to what we’ve created. So it’s not really a usability test, it’s not a focus group, we’re really trying to say, “What do those people understand about what they built? How are they interpreting what we tried to communicate?” And the interesting story of Blue Bottle Coffee is their users talked about coffee much like people talk about wine. They didn’t use this provenance-type language that typical coffee manufacturers will use, so they changed it all to match their customer and it had a profound impact on the way it resonated.

So we’ll, of course, revisit our questions, and then at the end, we’ll know what to do. Often we might want to repeat parts of the sprint, we might want to use this prototype as a reflection around how we start to build upon our lessons and apply those insights.

So thanks a bunch, hopefully, you can apply some of this in your work.

The post Using Design Sprints to Facilitate Innovation in the Legal Profession appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Jeff Marple’s story is one of a bartender-turned-innovation professional. “I was bartending full time and my wife was working as a banker. I was coming home at 3:00 in the morning, she was going to work at 6:00 am, so we were missing each other.” Ready for a change, he inquired about open positions with some of his regular customers and landed a job at Liberty Mutual Insurance. Jeff started in customer support answering phones and resetting passwords and grew his role into much more. “14 years later, I owned the whole platform and did all of our strategic development as well as managing production support.”

When the Liberty claims department started an innovation group, Jeff and the manager met, hit it off, and a month later Jeff had his first job managing innovation. A couple of years later when the legal team at Liberty decided to explore innovation, Jeff was brought in as their first Innovation Director. In addition to investigating and testing new technology, processes, and business models impacting the work of legal professionals, Jeff promotes a culture of innovation and helps shepherd innovative projects for Liberty Legal.

Giant leaps forward are the result of iteration

Jeff’s work leading innovation in a field not typically associated with cutting- edge technology has resulted in some valuable insights for the innovation space at large. Foremost is the understanding that giant leaps forward in innovation are the result of a multitude of smaller actions, experiments, and tests. Going for the moonshot from the very beginning isn’t how innovation really happens.

“The thing that gets most people in trouble is going for moonshots or 10x products. I don’t think you can set out to do those things. Huge disruptive products only become apparent when you have come up close to them or adjacent to them.”

Jeff is a big believer in the foundation that teams can put in place through iteration. He likens the practice to climbing foothills in order to see the larger mountains off in the distance.

There’s nothing wrong with moonshot thinking. But the fanfare of the “big moment” in innovation can mislead people into thinking that the end product was the goal from the very beginning. “I don’t have a problem with iterative innovation. I don’t have a problem with 10x innovation, or whatever Google is calling it these days. But I don’t believe that it really happens that way. I think that it’s always iterative. It’s just a question of what you’re seeing or what you remember, versus what’s actually occurring.”

Take the iPhone as an example. Around the time of its release, there were other smartphones available. And those adjacent products had an impact on the innovation of the iPhone. “There was a lot that came together at the right time. It was a ton of iterative innovation that was happening in multiple disciplines coming together at the same time.”

The difference for Apple was they had all the right factors to take an invention and support it with the ecosystem necessary for innovation. “It’s really about product development and less about innovations. There were innovative technology breakthroughs that coalesced into a fantastic product, and that was what sort of jump-started the adoption.”

While an innovation may not always take off, the invention is still there waiting for the right application for a successful market launch. “Blockchain is an interesting invention. Bitcoin is an interesting innovation at using that model.” And there is still more innovation ahead for blockchain both in the currency arena and beyond.

There’s also more to innovation than a single product or service itself. The iPhone may not have changed much since it debuted, but it has had a huge impact on the way we do work. “There was the innovation of the hardware, but maybe one of the biggest innovations within that ecosystem was the app store itself and the software that couldn’t have been imagined prior.”

Overcoming resistance to change

Measurement at its essence is about tracking change. How do companies that want to innovate combat resistance to change? Jeff’s advice is to, first, understand your audience. “I work in the legal department at a 100-year-old insurance company. We have people who are literally trained to spot risk and avoid it in a company that is also trained to spot risk and avoid it.”

“You can put something in somebody’s hands, and they go from naysayers to feature-requestors so fast.”

Instead of telling people about changes to the way they work, Jeff suggests just showing them. “The number one thing I could do is try not to tell them about things, but let them use things. You can put something in somebody’s hands, and they go from naysayers to feature-requestors so fast. If I can put something in their hands or on their screen where they can click through, it’s a much different experience, especially for a lawyer who’s going to tell you all the reasons that something’s going to fail.”

By showing instead of telling, there’s less emphasis on the implementation details because people are getting excited about the possibilities. As a result of knowing his audience, Jeff understands the value of communicating frequently. “We communicate early and often that we’re not the first in this space, because we usually aren’t. Lawyers are looking for precedent, so that makes them feel better. We try to limit the blast radius.”

As the comfort level of his audience increases, Jeff builds on those wins. “We start with very small, low-risk areas and then expand out from that using that same tech in different places. If I’m doing automated form creation, I might start in NDAs, which are very low risk. But maybe I can move into other types of legal documents just by showing someone how they can use the NDA.”

“We start with very small, low-risk areas and then expand out from that.”

In order to push innovation further, Jeff encourages sharing. “Getting people to talk about things is hard to do because attorneys have to, by law, keep a lot of secrets. I think they’re used to not sharing anything because that’s easier. So we try to get people to talk more about what they’re doing and show them that it’s okay to share.”

A reticence to share for fear of discoverability is something Jeff encounters in his work. He responds to these concerns with a cost-benefit analysis. “Eventually there’s risk calculation that has to happen. Maybe it is eventually discoverable, but what kind of benefit do you get by sharing it versus what’s the downside of it being discoverable? You’re supposed to be a good partner with the business and help them mitigate risk and loss. There are different ways to do that. While you have to respect the litigation process, maybe you’re not always protecting against every edge case because the probability of those things happening is pretty slim.”

Jeff’s advice for new innovation programs is: begin with the realization that everyone needs to be on board.

“All members of the organization will be involved in one way or another. Buy-in from senior leadership is essential, but so is the buy-in from the front lines.”

In order to gain wide buy-in, it’s important to understand your business context and how that impacts your product. “I’m a big fan of user-centered design and that’s different than customer-centered design. In enterprise software, the customer and the user are very different people. You can use the carrot or you can use the stick. I prefer to use the carrot. I want my users happy that I gave them a new tool, not some terrible form to fill out because we need the data.”

While it may not be possible to control buy-in from the top, by meeting your users’ needs effectively you can garner buy-in from the front lines and expand your focus to the middle. “If the top’s happy and the bottom’s happy, the middle eventually has to get there. Which, by the way, they’re the guys that usually can kill you. But buy-in from the bottom is definitely within your control, and you should always be thinking about the user. You always want to be giving them something that is better than what they had before in their eyes.”

The experimental nature of innovation means that some projects get nixed, which can lead to burnout for teams. Setting expectations up front is one way to combat this. Acknowledging that the work is uncharted territory without an obvious, predetermined outcome is a good place to start. Jeff’s message to teams addresses potential negative outcomes from the start. “We know we’re all going to learn something along the way and we just want to do what’s right for everyone. So if we have to kill this, there’s a good reason for it.”

Once you’ve gained buy-in across the company, Jeff believes communication is the key to maintaining it. Jeff and his team communicate through articles, videos, and face-to-face contact. “I will do drop-ins. I usually coordinate with the manager. It’s not a complete random fly-by, but they’re always looking for a little content to spice up their meetings or their stand-ups. We have an internal social media site that we populate a lot of information on. The best is just running into people and having a chat. You don’t want people to not ever have a conversation with you, because then they really won’t trust you.”

Just start…small

When it comes to getting started on a new initiative Jeff’s advice is straightforward. “The best way to get started is just to start! Find something and do it…preferably something small.” He believes the starting point of an innovation initiative is “when you say you are going to do this and not just work off the side of your desk on new projects in your spare time.”

Just starting means trying things and learning rather than prolonged thinking and planning. “At the end of the day, truly, you’ve got to get experience. You’re not going to get better at doing this stuff until you do it. You’ve got to get some hours. You can’t just pontificate. There are things that you’re going to learn that are logically obvious to you, but emotionally you hadn’t felt it yet. You didn’t understand the emotional tug of whatever it is that is a huge economic driver for the behavior of the problem that you’re trying to solve.”

“If it doesn’t go well, shout it in the town square and explain why and what you’ve learned from it so that everybody understands…”

As with any experimental process, there will be failures. Jeff thinks it’s important not to hide them. “That’s a huge part of gaining trust. You need to own whatever it is that went down, good or bad. And if it doesn’t go well, shout it in the town square and explain why and what you’ve learned from it so that everybody understands those insights as painful as it is.”

As for when an innovation program ends, that depends on the organization. “It’s possible that the need for innovation professionals diminishes if the organization starts to be able to innovate without you.” As the grassroots efforts of innovation programs take hold and successfully build a culture of innovation, the organization may no longer need a centralized source.

Tenacious consistency around experimentation

Jeff’s innovation silver bullet is what he calls the monkey in space technique. “Start small, run a lot of tests. Put a monkey in space to see if your rocket works before you put a human in space.” His approach ics to have a tenacious consistency around experimentation. “There’s a need for research and planning, but if you’re not out there trying things and taking some big (or new) steps, what are you doing?”

But in order for a product to truly be innovative, the tenacity of the experiment phase has to carry through to the product’s implementation. “Many great technologies backfire because of last mile issues. Meaning, the base technology may be sound and even amazing, but the UI, the workflows, how it is used, implemented or communicated was not, so the product dies on the vine.”

The focus on details during implementation is equally important when it comes to scalability. “Sometimes things work well at small scale, but as soon as you try to scale up, whatever it’s built on can become brittle. The idea is right, but we haven’t figured out the right implementation yet. That becomes a harder thing to solve.”

“You continue to grind away and figure out how to test our work sooner, how to test it smarter…”

Through his experience in roles that span the product development lifecycle, Jeff knows just how important it is to focus on the details of implementation. Recounting some memorable projects where missed requirements resulted in a lot of rework, Jeff shared that there is no silver bullet fix to those mistakes. “You just get better at it. You get better at your quality checks going in and going out. You get better working with your IT partners. There’s just so many details that things are always going to slip through. The best software companies in the world still have bugs. You continue to grind away and figure out how to test our work sooner, how to test it smarter, how to limit the blast radius by moving things upstream in the cycle.”

For Jeff, Tesla exemplifies how important it is for that tenacity to carry through from start to finish including having a lofty mission and solid vision. “Tesla is a great example of how the tech was all there, but nobody had really made a product yet or marketed it the right way. Musk nailed that. It was the right time, right place, but also great product design. But what I really like about that is that all of these things that he’s working on are all amazing products in and of themselves and what they’ve been able to accomplish. SpaceX just blows me away when I see that rocket land on the barge. But he’s trying to save the earth with this stuff, right? So he creates a car company, a spaceship company, a solar panel company, and a tunnel company to save the earth.”

In addition to Elon Musk, Jeff thinks products like Amazon’s Echo and the electric scooter are getting innovation right. What these two products have in common is devising interesting ways at “leveraging technology to solve problems that people didn’t even necessarily know they had.”

These products aren’t without their flaws, but the approach to problem- solving has captured Jeff’s interest. “I think the scooter is so funny and just novel and interesting. I’ve tried them out now, and I think it definitely solves a problem in a way that I never would have imagined somebody would solve it. Now, they’ve got a serious issue, what I would call a network issue because streets aren’t really ready for them. But it’s pretty interesting what they’re doing.”

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

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