What is change management?

The sweet spot where change and project management intersect is known as change management. When a company is facing change in any capacity, change management is how company leaders manage the processes, systems, structures, overall morale, and employee responsibilities during a time of transition.

Change is the only thing we know for sure will happen in life and business. Whether a company is planning for change via transformation or is unexpectedly presented with a challenge, having a protocol for change can help companies better adapt to solving problems in a shuffling dynamic.

Firms and companies have carefully created calculated principles for organizational change management to help navigate the rising challenges of transformation in the business landscape–which is unavoidable in today’s world.

Just how important is having a set of principles to use as a structured guideline? A Forbes Insights and PMI survey found that 85% of over 500 executive respondents said change management is critical to success in times of change of any kind, rather than expecting that workers will automatically react to change well in a competitive marketplace.

Compare this to Forbes Insights’ findings that more than one-third (38%) of respondents reported that their employees view change as a significant threat, and it is clear that fear of change is a problem that needs to be planned for and properly addressed.

“The key to change…is to let go of fear.” -Rosanne Cash

Fear of transition can be stifled while also setting up your company up for success by planning for change and creating your own change management plan using the following change management principles.

Six Change Management Principles

(1) Clearly identify the problem

Some change comes when we least expect it, and we must adapt accordingly. When a problem arises, it is crucial to flesh out why and how it came about and what needs to be done in order to solve it.

Some change is planned, like in the case of innovation. It might be the need for a new product, redefining a target audience, or addressing problems within a company dynamic. Whatever the problem, it must be identified and understood before it can be effectively tackled.

(2) Drive new direction with culture

Company culture is the script for how employees interact and work with one another. Change can disrupt the standard workflow and social status quo. Leaders must take culture into account to understand and overcome any resistance born in a time of transition.

Leading with culture also helps to maintain how employees connect and relate to one another, a crucial aspect to sustain during shifts so that everyone in the company is aligned.

(3) Unify top-level leadership

A company is only as reliable as the sum of all of its employees, starting from leadership. All upper-level executives and leaders must form a united front to clearly and effectively communicate the same information to lower-level employees so that the entire company is on the same page and acting congruently.

It is imperative that the corresponding information is shared throughout all levels to find success.

(4) Involve every level

Change shakes the foundation of an entire company; therefore, every employee is affected in some way. Involving mid-level employees as soon as possible opens the door for employees to express their concerns and share any logistical or technical holes they see from the start, working out any glitches.

It also serves as an opportunity for managers and leaders to consider the repercussions and effects the transformation will have on their teams and the customers at large.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Change Programs

We help leaders and teams thrive through change to fully unleash their potential through embedded learning experiences focused on facilitation, collaboration, psychological safety, and play.

Get It Now

(5) Utilize change agents

Change agents are informal leaders who can help organizational leaders drive and champion change. From influential employees with a reputation of leading by example and earning the trust of others to stakeholders or veteran employees, change agents help to drive the challenging task of getting all employees on board.

Once identified, leaders should incorporate these people as a coalition. Together, they can help spread the unified message, get their teams integrated, and put people at ease.

(6) Define critical behaviors

Even with a clear vision of the problem/change at the executive level, a unified leadership front, and a coalition to help spread the word and integrate new practices, employee behavior won’t automatically change overnight. It is helpful to provide employees with the “why,” “what,” and “how” of change, as well as defined critical behaviors for them to follow immediately–within the first few days of the change.

Old patterns and habits can be hard to break, and new practices must be instilled as soon as possible for a smooth transition. This may mean training and frequent smaller meetings with managers so that they are equipped to communicate details of change and new expectations to employees.

Benefits of Strong Change Management

“The rate of change is not going to slow down any time soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades,” John P. Kotter says in his book Leading Change.

Because change is the only constant, having a robust protocol to follow to ease any size of transition sets companies up for triumph in chaos. A smooth transition internally maintains company morale and efficiency and translates directly to the external business.

According to research from Towers Watson, companies with healthy change management practices are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their competition. Being prepared to face change before it even happens immediately gives businesses a leg up on their peers.

Here are a few ways how:

1. Change management reduces the risk of project failure: Projects are more likely to fail when there is a lack of preparation. If changes are made too quickly without a proper plan for transition, or if not everyone is on board with new changes, the project can fall into chaos. A carefully constructed plan already has in mind any potential risks and is accompanied by analyzed strategies to overcome them.
2. Change management helps to eliminate confusion: A change management plan helps to reduce any trouble that may arise in transition, as each step of the change management process is detailed and outlined from the top down before implementation. This simultaneously tackles the fear of change and eliminates uncertainty about new business protocols–everyone is on the same page and adequately prepared for a shift.
3. Change management aids in maintaining a budget: Whether planned or unexpected, change is expensive! Incorporate a budget as part of your change management plan so that you don’t blindly pay for it later. Assign a cost estimate to each stage of the process. Doing so will provide an overall assessment of the cost of change and help to keep a new project on budget as it evolves.

Embrace Change to Improve Business

When an organization has a solid plan for how to embrace change, it can be used strategically to its advantage in the workplace and industry. A change management protocol can be used as an outline to evaluate and fine-tune an organization’s goals or priorities as well as to analyze how employees can help the company grow; it can be a tool used to expand and improve business overall, a steady progression of forward momentum.

“Change has a bad reputation in our society. But it isn’t all bad–not by any means. In fact, change is necessary in life–to keep us moving, to keep us growing, to keep us interested. Imagine life without change. It will be static, boring, dull,” Dr. Dennis O’Grady says in his article, The Change Game.

Looking for help with change management in your organization?

Please reach out to Voltage Control at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post Best Practices for Organizational Change Management appeared first on Voltage Control.

Meetings are important. They are the yellow brick road to achievement; vital to company success. We need them. However, I think we can all agree that a good chunk of the meetings on our calendar is time-wasters and highly frustrating. One-third of the 11 million meetings that take place in the U.S. daily are unproductive, according to Business Insider. That translates to an estimated annual loss of $37 billion in unproductive meetings. That is insanity; insanity that can be prevented.

Significantly, it does feel like there is a change happening in corporate culture today; teams are starting to focus more on how to approach meetings in a new way to save time, provide more time for heads-down work, and improve morale. It’s important to recognize that when meetings are done right, they can take your business to the next level.

What does this look like? Doing the work in the meetings, not after. This is one of our meeting mantras at Voltage Control. It redefines the common perception of meetings altogether. Instead of actionless discussions, we view meetings as collaborative group work sessions, where there is a clear purpose, inclusivity, high engagement, productivity, and tangible outcomes.

Too many meetings are spent talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing it.

If you’ve noticed that your team or organization has fallen into bad meeting habits, here are tips to have more effective meetings.

Run Effective Meetings

1. Identify a clear purpose 

You must have an identified, tangible purpose to call your team together if you want it to be productive, something to work toward.

Last year at Control the Room, a summit we host for facilitators, the master facilitator Priya Parker spoke on the “Art of Gathering.” One of the many things I love about what she says in her book is how, before you plan anything, you have to dig deep to identify the real purpose of your meeting. Priya feels that when you have a good purpose for your gathering, it helps you make better decisions. Your purpose is your “bouncer.” It lets you know what is right and wrong for your particular event.

Next time you are planning a meeting, take more time to think about the purpose of your gathering and use that clear purpose to set your agenda, plan your activities, and outline your attendees.

2. Create an effective agenda 

When you’ve decided to hold a meeting, you need to outline your activities. 

Preparation is key to running a successful meeting. Once you have identified your meeting objective, create and share a meeting agenda of what needs to be discussed to achieve that goal. A meeting agenda serves as an outline of the essential topics to address. What will be talked through with your team and for how long? Intentionally construct the agenda–include only what is crucial and pertains to the objective–then send it to all attendees ahead of time so they know what to expect and are on the same page. Once you’re in the meeting, stick to the schedule. Respect everyone’s time; stay on track.

3. Hold a longer meeting 

While we’re all trying to cut down on our daily meetings, there may be moments when more in-depth conversations are needed, and longer meetings are necessary. In the Harvard Business Review article “A Step-by-Step Guide to Structuring Better Meetings” author Liane Davey talks about the power of what she calls strategic directions meetings: “Between two and six times per year, your leadership team needs to lift your eyes to the horizon and re-evaluate your strategy. This should be a lengthy meeting that provides ample time to meander.

So, while you’re taking the time to focus your day-to-day meetings (and getting rid of as many as you can!), don’t forget to schedule extra time for the big meetings that need to happen.

4. Bring a prototype 

Another one of our meeting mantras is “no prototype, no meeting.” That means if there is not a clear and tangible “prototype” or idea to flush out and explore, then there is no reason to have a meeting in the first place. If you want to jump-start your meeting and make it more engaging and useful, start bringing a prototype to your session.

“The reason for prototyping is experimentation — the act of creating forces you to ask questions and make choices. It also gives you something you can show to and talk about with other people.” — Tom and David Kelley

A prototype can take many forms. Some examples are a storyboard, mood board, written brief, sample pitch of an idea, or coding. The structure of a prototype sets your team up to do the work in the meeting. Your team is able to discuss it and collectively work on it DURING the meeting instead of saving the to-dos for when people return to their own work zones. 

Start our Design Thinking Foundations course today!

Learn and practice Design Thinking to help your team solve problems and seize opportunities.

Get Started

5. Debrief 

Allot time at the end of the meeting to debrief with the group. Remind team members of the major takeaways to help with retention and successfully transition them to pursue next steps. Summarize the discussed topics, obtained information, and the decisions or insights reached. Then, divvy out the tasks that need to be done to bring the discussed idea(s) to life, including when they must be completed by, and by whom. This is also part of doing the work in the meeting. Assign tasks to appropriate parties, communicate clear deadlines, then release everyone to tackle their responsibilities.

Good Meetings Require Good Facilitators

If your meetings lack organization, participant engagement, and diverse outcomes, expert facilitation can help. Here’s the thing: technically, anyone who runs a meeting–whether good or bad–is a facilitator. If you’re running a meeting, you’re facilitating. So how do you ensure you are facilitating meetings effectively?

A facilitator’s job is to actively guide teams through the decision-making process to reach goals and desired outcomes. They are unbiased leaders removed from emotion about office politics, which allows them to objectively lead with a clear vision of the sought-after goal. Their purpose is to ensure that a team meets its objectives, has fruitful conversations, and that the group gets what they need and want from the gathering. A good facilitator has the following qualities:

• Confidence: Able to control the room and keep participants interested and engaged.
• Humility: Knows the meeting is not about them and relishes that fact.
• Flexibility: Comfortable course-correcting during the meeting if things change, participants need something different, or the agenda needs to be amended on the fly.
• Curiosity: Interested in their team’s/client’s problems, insight, and challenges and is excited to learn more about them.

Facilitation is an art. Therefore, it is a continuous practice. That’s why we host a free weekly community facilitation practice at our Facilitation Lab, which is focused on helping facilitators hone their craft to help improve the quality of meetings. Join us to practice your facilitation approach, learn new skills, and connect with and learn from fellow facilitators. Let’s all be our best as facilitators so we can help make meetings exceptional.

Still need help building a better meeting? Bring in a professional facilitator from Voltage Control.

Voltage Control designs and facilitates innovation training, Design Sprints, and design thinking workshops. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

The post Top Tips for Running More Effective Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

Be honest. Do you dread or relish the thought of business meetings? If you’d prefer to put your head down and focus on your work instead of sitting through a seemingly-pointless meeting, you’re not alone. Most meetings are an immense waste of time and money, according to a recent, in-depth study conducted by Doodle–the online scheduling service.

In the study of 19 million meetings and over 6,500 interviews with working professionals across the U.S., U.K., and Germany, Doodle found that the majority of the meetings observed were poorly organized and came with a high cost. According to the report, inefficient meetings will cost businesses a projected total of $541 billion in the U.S. in 2019.

This is a massive blow to business efficiency and the well-being of employees, as the same report found that poorly organized meetings also meant negative consequences for attendees:

• 44% of respondents said ill-organized meetings led to insufficient time to complete the rest of their work
• 38% of respondents said poor organization leads to a loss of focus on projects
• 31% of respondents said that unnecessary attendees slowed the progress of the meeting

The good news is that meetings can be improved to be much more productive and lucrative. I’ve outlined five fixes that will help make your meetings better, more successful, and fruitful for your overall business as well as all meeting attendees.

The good news is that meetings can be improved to be much more productive and lucrative.

The following are five common obstacles that can prohibit effective meetings and how to combat them:

1. Unclear purpose

Clear objectives drive a successful meeting. When the goal is vague, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the objectives to be reached or solved. How can you arrive at your destination if you don’t know what it is?

Before planning your meeting outline, you must first ask yourself, “What is the purpose? Are we making decisions or developing new concepts or both? Are we seeking advice from the team or asking them to help with the decision?” The answers will produce different needs, and therefore, different meeting structures.

Identifying the best structure to achieve your goals will foster maximum productivity. Stay clear and focused on the purpose throughout for optimum efficiency.

2. Inadequate agenda

Outline your meetings with the overall outcomes in mind rather than just speaking to an aimless bullet point list of subjects. Most people fail to consider the overall arc or experience they are creating for attendees in a meeting.

When you are transparent about the outcome you would like to create, you can aim the meeting’s activities in service to the desired results. In other words, if you design the agenda toward the desired outcomes, you will know where you are headed, and if your roadmap is off track. You’ll also be able to measure the success of the meeting’s progression—is the conversation or activity producing the results that you need?

When you are transparent about the outcome you would like to create, you can aim the meeting’s activities in service to the desired results.

Identifying the purpose and sought-after outcomes of the meeting also allow you to outline and synchronize a timely flow. How long do you need to discuss each talking point? How much time do you need for open discussion? Setting times on the agenda will help keep you focused and on track, less wasted time, and irrelevant content!

It’s also important to note that when you are concentrated on outcomes, you’ll be more aware of when it’s safe to spend more time on a subject and when to be the time cop and stick to your plan.

Start our Magical Meetings course today!

Learn the methods to make your meetings magical.

Get Started

3. Cold start

Most of us run from meeting to meeting, barely finding enough time to make a pit stop in the bathroom, scarf down a sandwich, or gather ourselves before the next one begins, while some of us can stroll into meetings much more leisurely and focused.

The fact is, we aren’t always coming from the same space when we walk in the door. This can significantly affect the meeting’s overall flow and success, especially when the meeting immediately kicks off and dives into the topics at hand before establishing a more even playing field for attendees.

Reserve the first part of the meeting for a reflective moment, where everyone can reset and gear up for what’s ahead.

What can this look like? There may be a handful of people who are in a clearer or more available headspace who end up dominating the conversation while others idly sit back, unsure of what to say or when to say it. Allowing some “bootup time” before the conversation begins can be of great benefit. Reserve the first part of the meeting for a reflective moment, where everyone can reset and gear up for what’s ahead. This could even be in the form of a silent 5 to 10 minute group meditation.

According to one study, the inclusion of workplace mindfulness, including meditation, significantly reduced employee burnout and perceived stress, improved mindfulness, and individual well-being, and increased team environment and personal performance.

Another bootup option is to present the group with a provocative and relevant prompt, followed by quiet time to marinate on it and explore it alone before the meeting kicks off. This space of individual preparation can help everyone gear up and be more involved in the group discussion ahead.

4. Wrong attendees

Sometimes leaders equate inclusivity with productivity. This isn’t always the case. When you are intentional about who needs to be in a meeting, meetings then become leaner and more focused. At Voltage Control, we have a rule: “All meetings are OPTIONAL. DON’T ATTEND if you don’t think you can contribute to the meeting in a meaningful way, or the attending won’t improve your ability to do your job.”

That is to say, only include employees who will provide value and diverse insight to the topics at hand, rather than inviting people out of habit. This isn’t “exclusivity” but an honest strategy. At their core, lean meetings move faster and are more inclusive by design.

When you are intentional about who needs to be in a meeting, meetings then become leaner and more focused.

A useful tool to help establish who should attend specific meetings is a RACI chart. RACI stands for:

• Responsible: who should perform this activity or do the work?
• Accountability: who is primarily accountable and has the power to vote yes or no?
• Consulted: Who needs to provide feedback and contribute to the project or activity?
• Informed: Who needs to know of the decision or action decided upon?

A RACI chart, then, is used to assign all employees roles and responsibilities for each decision, project, or meeting. Below is an example provided by teamgantt: You can utilize a free RACI chart template to break down and identify your own needs and strategically decide who to include in specific meetings to make them more intentional and direct.

5. Outdated purpose

It’s crucial to take a look at your regularly scheduled meetings—daily, weekly, and monthly—and reevaluate their practicality. Have you already accomplished the purpose of these meetings, or are you continuing to host them out of habit or ritual? If it’s the latter, it’s a waste of precious time and resources. If you are still working to achieve individual goals, how can you restructure your meeting to be more productive?

Meetings are also a direct reflection of company culture. For example, what does it say about your company if regularly held meetings are irrelevant, unproductive, unpredictable in length or content, or don’t encourage employees to be and do their best? Each session, small and large, should have clear intention and purpose to foster overall success for company performance and culture. Trim the fat where needed.

Thoughtfully reflecting on the target, agenda, accessibility, and necessity of each planned meeting will significantly benefit the business and team. It will also help to preserve valuable company resources.

For more practical skills to get work done in meetings, check out this article on “Conducting Room Intelligence.”

The post 5 Reasons Meetings Go Poorly appeared first on Voltage Control.

Bringing people together to help them understand common objectives and how to solve them is a crucial component in resolving problems and achieving success. We rely on team members and leaders to carry out these actions and facilitate the process. Without the skill set and work required to guide group organization, meetings, and community events, vital factors to collaboration and achievement would not be productive and profitable.

Perfecting the art of facilitation is one of the most important and beneficial skill sets that make a successful leader.

Perfecting the art of facilitation is one of the most important and beneficial skill sets that make a successful leader. Where and how can you use them? Facilitation skills are crucial to exercise when planning and running meetings to make them as participative and productive as possible. After all, the act of facilitating is to make an operation or process easier. It’s imperative to company profit and culture to conduct successful meetings.

What makes a great facilitator?

A great facilitator fluidly guides the process of people working together to achieve set goals. They are a neutral supervisor that helps group members discover ideas and solutions, rather than an omniscient ruler who already has all of the answers; they don’t take sides.

An excellent facilitator’s focus is on how people participate in the learning and planning processes, and they serve as a conductor to help the group navigate reaching its goals. A significant component of being a proficient facilitator is knowing how to properly plan for the facilitation process, establishing and building a meeting’s structure and design.

Three Facilitation Skills for Facilitation Planning

The following skills are necessary for successfully outlining and initiating facilitation:

1. Ask questions to identify objectives
   Each meeting has a goal, and it is imperative to identify and understand it before the session begins. Ask questions to help you determine the meeting’s driving motivation as well as the needs and desires of the clients/attendees. What does everyone involved want? What are the goals, obstacles, and desired outcomes? Gather as much information as possible. The more you know, the more prepared you will be to lead.

2. Pick your process
Once you’ve determined the group’s needs and objectives, it’s time for a plan of action. The method of facilitation can look differently depending on the meeting’s goals. For example, one purpose may call for open discussion, while another may require more structure. Choose a process that will best aid the group to share viewpoints, evaluate issues, develop ideas, and reach conclusions. Always have the desired outcome in mind.

Two cognitive approaches can help lead discussion: convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is systematic and linear and narrows down various ideas into a single solution. It tends to be more focused, analytical and centered on what’s best. Conversely, divergent thinking is more open-ended and, like a web, flexible in its approach. It focuses on the connections between ideas. This wider, “think outside of the box” method is used to generate as many ideas as possible and encourages creative risks. The combination of both approaches can be an effective process to make decisions.

First, use divergent thinking to foster creativity and generate new ideas and solutions; here, the possibilities are endless. The underlying question is, “Why not?” Then, use convergent thinking to focus on the “why” and reel in focused ideas to reach a conclusion. The ebb and flow of these two approaches create a fluid, continuous work cycle–cast the net wide to brainstorm limitless possibilities, focus on ideas that stick, flush them out, identify solutions, repeat.

3. Outline an agenda
Ready, set, (almost) go! Now that you know the objective and have a process in mind to reach it, you need to set an agenda. How will you seamlessly weave the logistics of time (meeting duration, start and end times, breaks), group dynamics (number of people, type of group interaction), setting (location environment, seating arrangement, etc.), and meeting content (opening, transitions, closing)?

Create a detailed plan of action, set up your space to support your process, and remain in open communication with your client or your team to ensure everyone is on the same page, and all preparations go smoothly. As Alexander Graham Bell said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

Six Facilitation Skills for Facilitating a Better Meeting

You’re prepped and ready to rumble. Now it’s time to facilitate! The following are skills that will help you successfully lead the group meeting or workshop:

1. Encourage an inclusive environment
   Open communication is one of the most important aspects of having a successful meeting. Attendees need to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and expressing their views. Inspire fluid and respectful communication by including everyone.

This requires the facilitator to read the group, both verbally and non-verbally, and adjust to its needs throughout the meeting while keeping everyone focused and on task. It is also beneficial to paraphrase back to the group progress that is being made as you go and also to reflect back all conclusions reached.

2. Build and foster relationships and group synergy
Trust and empathy are essential components of building healthy and successful relationships within a group. The ability to identify the common goals and interests of a group and then steer everyone to the completion of found goals is what facilitation is all about.

Group synergy can be created by encouraging group members to share their ideas and points of view, and most importantly, respect the opinions and views of others. Doing so will help the group effectively brainstorm and later reach a consensus.

Start our Magical Meetings course today!

Learn the methods to make your meetings magical.

Get Started

3. Active Listening
According to a study analyzed by the Harvard Business Review, a good listener does the following: conducts active conversations where they periodically ask questions to the speaker to promote exploration and observation, creates a safe environment where speakers feel supported and heard, holds a cooperative two-sided conversation that is uncompetitive, and provides feedback and constructive suggestions on alternative paths to consider. A good listener serves as a mirror; they reflect to the group what is said and provide clarity on the content discussed as well as the meeting’s focus.

“While many of us have thought of being a good listener being like a sponge that accurately absorbs what the other person is saying, instead, what these findings show is that good listeners are like trampolines. They are someone you can bounce ideas off of — and rather than absorbing your ideas and energy, they amplify, energize, and clarify your thinking.”

4. Conflict Management
When conflict arises, it is important to immediately identify its cause or source to understand it before evaluating and discussing all possible solutions holistically. To healthily manage conflict, one must be able to empathize with other people’s viewpoints calmly and respectfully.

A good facilitator always has an eye for compromise and faces conflict head on to find common ground amongst all sides. They stimulate teamwork by encouraging shared goals of the group rather than highlighting disagreements, and they ensure each team member has a clearly defined role, outlining the distribution of responsibilities.

The facilitator can defuse tensions by injecting a dose of humor to redirect the group’s energy, initiate a well-timed break, or calm the room by maintaining composure and exposing alternative points of view to foster understanding.

5. Build Consensus
Because the main objective of a facilitator is to help a group find common ground among varying opinions to reach a conclusion that everyone accepts, a consensus must be reached among all group members. This does not necessarily mean that everyone will agree with the final decision(s) made, instead it is making sure that all group members have the opportunity to voice their opinions and that everyone understands how the conclusions were made. When everyone feels heard and also follows the process of how a decision was made, an amicable consensus can be reached.

6. Manage time and recordings
The method of brainstorming with various opinions can take detours that eat up significant amounts of time. Time is of the essence! Ensuring that the meeting flows as close to the planned agenda as possible is imperative for optimum efficiency and success. Be aware of the passing time and notify the group when they’re nearing the end of the time allotted for an activity or exercise to keep them on track.

A facilitator must know how to adapt and steer the group back on course if time runs long. At the same time, they are responsible for documented key messages the group identifies. This can be done visually by recording on a whiteboard, post-it notes, or another medium the group can see, audibly recording the conversation than going back to highlight key points, or keeping written documentation of conclusions. Documenting the most valuable insights will help the group later plan actions and tangibly carry out their conclusions.

“Staying neutral on content while being an expert on process.” -SessionLab

The more you exercise these facilitation skills, the better you will be at facilitating. It is not an exact science but rather an art form. The skills are flexible; they can be expanded, explored, and experimented with. Each group setting is different; thereby, you will acquire new insights and experiences that you can add to your tool kit. Above all else, remaining educated on the facilitation process as well as unbiased during facilitation will help you to be a lucrative coordinator in varying situations and find success.

Need help building a better meeting? Bring in a professional facilitator from Voltage Control.

Voltage Control designs and facilitates innovation training, Design Sprints, and design thinking workshops. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

The post The Facilitation Skills You Need to Lead Successful Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

At Voltage Control, we’ve done something that might be scandalous at other companies. We’ve made all meetings optional. If a team member doesn’t think they need to attend a meeting, they’re free to decline it. It’s a small gesture, but a reflection of our belief that many meetings just don’t need to happen. It leads to an increase in quick and direct conversations and, ultimately, to fewer meetings and more space and time for the things we want (and need) to do.

That’s because we’re on a personal mission to rid the world of shitty meetings. That’s something we can all rally around, correct? We all love to hate meetings, yet they keep popping up on our calendars and we keep accepting them. In January 2019, the meeting scheduling company Doodle released its The State of Meetings Report and estimated that “pointless meetings will cost companies $541 billion in 2019.” Wow.

I’m convinced this is why I see so many people energized and excited when they participate in a Design Sprints or innovation workshop: although you are technically “tied up” for five days, you are getting authentic work done. You’re making decisions. You’re progressing. You end the week with a touchable, tangible prototype. Things happened!

This is in stark contrast to people’s typical days. We’re calendar-bombed with tons of meetings that we don’t need to be in or have no context for. We show up without much attention to whether or not we can add value. Everyone ends up booked with back-to-back meetings, buffered only by a quick restroom break (whoops, now you’re late to your next meeting) and the time it takes to dial into your next phone call. When are you supposed to do the things you got assigned in your last meeting?

We’ve got things backward: we meet and then do “the work” after the meeting.

In a recent talk, I told the participants, “Do the real work in the meeting.” I felt everyone sit up in their chairs. It struck a chord. We’ve got things backward: we meet and then do “the work” after the meeting. We’re so busy talking about the work we need to do when we could be rolling up our sleeves and getting to work in the session itself.

Circular Conversations. Little Action.

What do meetings look like in your organization? Let’s talk about a couple of typical scenarios. Here’s the worst-case: Participants don’t know why you’re meeting. No one shows up with an agenda. Everyone starts talking haphazardly and conversations go in circles. No decisions get made. Everyone leaves the meeting with no idea about what happens next. Maybe they’re hoping someone else will take action.

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’”― Dave Barry

Now the best-case scenario, or maybe call it your standard, run-of-the-mill meeting: someone’s pulled together a meeting agenda and sent it out beforehand. You have a focused discussion. You conclude with a handful of action items and people have tasks they need to do after. But, even in this situation, I’ve seen the process go awry. Meetings aren’t always adequately documented. There’s misunderstanding after about the direction or next steps. People start working on items discussed in the meeting, but something gets lost in translation.

Let’s stop saving the work for when everyone disperses back to their desks.

Beyond an annoying 30 minutes in your day, what’s so bad about these scenarios? Work eventually gets done. It’s easier this way. We might be accustomed to it, but it’s not efficient, it’s not effective, and it’s certainly not an inspiring way to work. Let’s stop saving the work for when everyone disperses back to their desks. If you want to bring the spirit of innovation into your daily work, push yourself and others to start doing the work in the meeting. I think one of the best ways to do that is to bring a prototype to every meeting.

“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”– Thomas Sowell, American writer and economist

No Prototype. No Meeting.

This concept of “no prototype, no meeting” isn’t new. At the design consultancy IDEO, they’ve long talked about something called “Boyle’s Law.” Named for Dennis Boyle — an IDEO engineer with over 50 patents — the law states that you should “Never attend a meeting without a prototype.” Allan Chochinov, Chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design, also wrote about his hatred of meetings and even created a Chrome and Slack extension that automatically changes the word “meeting” to “review” when you try to book a meeting.

While the conversation about the importance of prototyping has been around for a while, I don’t think it’s taken deep root yet. There’s still a lot of room for the concept to spread in organizations and workplaces.

Scared of Prototyping?

Before we dig in further, I must talk about what I mean when I talk about prototypes. The term prototype can be daunting. Historically, prototypes were mock-ups of something physical — let’s say a new chair or piece of electronic hardware. Today, when we think about prototypes, we usually think of digital prototypes. With the explosion of prototyping tools, it’s incredibly easy to build true-to-life, clickable prototypes that give the look-and-feel of a digital interaction.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings” — Tom & David Kelley

However, it can be much more “low fidelity” than that. Prototypes take many shapes and formats. While you can certainly push yourself to learn a prototyping platform like Sketch or Figma, you don’t have to. Use the skills you currently have to make your prototype. Leverage the tools that are most comfortable for you. If you’re a product manager, strategist, or writer, you might write a brief, draft a storyboard, or create a sample pitch deck about the project you’re working on. If you’re a developer, maybe you code something quickly to get a sense of how an interaction will work. If you’re a designer, you could bring a wireframe or mood board.

The takeaway is: prototypes don’t have to be complicated. They can be quite simple. Test whether your new, two-pound product is too heavy by asking customers to carry around a two-pound weight for a couple of hours. Want to know if 3 x 5 inches is the best size for your new smartphone? Cut out a 3 x 5 piece of wood and carry it around in your pocket to see how it feels. The important thing is to focus on the question you are trying to answer or what abstract concept you need to make more tangible.

Why We Resist and Why We Shouldn’t

Saying we should bring prototypes to meetings sounds excellent, but I know that it can be scary for some. We resist putting things down on paper. We’re reluctant to get our ideas out there. We’re afraid to be judged. We’re afraid someone will think we’re a fraud. It’s hard to take the first step and make your thoughts visible for critique. It requires you to feel safe sharing something that isn’t fully formed. If your workplace doesn’t encourage that type of vulnerability, this is a fantastic way for you to start demonstrating the type of behavior and attitudes you want others to mirror.

And, when you force yourself to push through that fear, I think you’ll find your worries don’t come true. When you show up with a prototype, most people are delighted rather than critical. Because now, there’s something to rally around, to build off of, to shape, to make even better. Mostly, people are just appreciative that you brought something to the table and put a stake in the ground.

Challenge Yourself

When you start focusing on doing work in the meeting, not after the meeting, a couple of things happen.

• First, your meetings aren’t so dull. They turn into working sessions, not slogs. There are concrete things to talk about. Everyone’s excited and engaged.
• Second, more gets done. The prototype pushes things along just enough to get the ball rolling. It drives momentum and action.
• Third, there’s more clarity about where you’re going and why. There’s something to reference.
• Lastly, I find this way of working is more inclusive. If everyone is encouraged to bring a prototype, everyone can have a voice. Plus, others can use your prototype to build and co-create, which means that the ideas with the most merit emerge.

So, if you want to start doing more work in the meeting and less meeting and then working, consider a “no prototype, no meeting” rule. Take baby steps and tell your team that you’re trying it for single meeting or for a week. Or, start the habit yourself and you’ll likely see it spread like wildfire through your team.

The post Do the Work in the Meeting, Not After 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 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 Reagan Pugh.

“It’s a powerful thing when you’re able to gather together with people who speak your language. Facilitating is rewarding work, but it can be lonely sometimes when you move from client to client or team to team. Control the Room reminded us we’re not alone in the work we do, and being together served as a source of encouragement to keep doing the good work facilitators do: gathering folks together, guiding them toward clarity, and creating a sense of belonging.” — Reagan Pugh

In Reagan’s session, facilitators were run through the process and framework of “Creating a Storytelling Organization” workshop and walked away with techniques to use for any event where group storytelling might be useful.

Watch Reagan Pugh’s talk “Creating a Storytelling Organization”:

Read the Transcript:

Reagan Pugh: Thank you, guys. I am honored to be here. I don’t take your attention lightly. Let’s talk about how to use stories to create connections with one another. How about it?

So, if you’re anything like me, you have a birthday once a year. It’s Joey’s 40th birthday. Let’s give him a round of applause again. If you’re anything like my ex-girlfriend that you have something called a half-birthday where you got to find the dates, you do something, you know what I mean? I love birthdays. I love celebrating birthdays. I love what Priya said about not confusing the category with the purpose.

Every year for the last 10 years, I’ve had a gathering for my birthday. My birthday is in October. Anybody have an October birthday? That’s a good time to have a birthday. You meet someone that has your birthday month, and you like them better than other people, you know what I mean? October. It’s kind of cool outside. It’s not that cool in Texas in October. I remember one year I wanted to go as a mummy for Halloween, and so I wrapped it all up and I was in the gauze, and I sweat straight through the gauze. I wanted to go as a mummy, but I went to this Christian charter school and my father’s a pastor, and so my mom said I was allowed to wear the gauze but I couldn’t tell people I was a mummy. I had to tell them that I was Lazarus and Jesus had brought me back from the dead.

But anyway, October is a nice time for a birthday. Because it’s October, what I do is I have everyone bring a pumpkin for my birthday party. I say, “All I want for my birthday is I want you to bring a pumpkin and I want you to think about a story,” just like Priya said earlier, “of something that I don’t know about you that I would’ve never otherwise known. That’s the only gift that I want you to bring.” So, what people do is they bring these pumpkins and I say, “Okay, you’re going to use the pumpkin as a presentation tool.” We have all types of cutlery abounding and they cut into the pumpkin something that’s going to tell me a little bit, that’s going to be a presentation aid for their story.

One time, I had this woman who was a friend of mine who I did not know was not born in the United States. In her pumpkin, she’d just taken an icepick and poked holes all around the pumpkin. When she put the candle inside to tell her stories, we ran out, went around the circle. It was like starlight, the way that the light came out. When she told this story, she said that those holes, they represented chickenpox. She told me the story about a time that her grandmother nursed her back to health whenever she was in Bosnia and she couldn’t go to hospital when she had this case of chickenpox.

Then I remember another time, there was a girl who shaped with a T. She did a Texas Rangers T on her pumpkin, and she told me this story about how her and her father would go to these Rangers games, and they would eat hotdogs and they would drink a Coca-Cola. But then she finished her story by saying, “The last Rangers game I went to with my dad, we got home, and my dad and my mom, they sat me down. That’s when they told me that we were not going to be a family, a complete family anymore.” She said, “I don’t go to baseball games anymore.” As she was leaving, she grabbed me by the elbow and she told me, “I’ve heard about these storytelling birthdays of yours. I did not want to come to this thing, but I’m so glad that I did, and I’ll be back next year.”

There’s something about this power of stories, friends, to connect us. I thought, “Well, this can’t only be my birthday. There might be other applications for this.” So, I was a 10th grade English teacher, and I said, “What would it look like if I had my students” … I did Teach for America, and I went to go teach on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, population 400. I got P.O. box number four. That means someone died and I got it from them. So, my students started telling stories, and then we had a storytelling night where I told the parents that they could come to the storytelling night, but their ticket of admission was to think of a story about their family that their kids didn’t know and they had to tell that story from the stage.

Then like Priya said, at Thanksgiving, I started asking my family to tell stories of my family and what our family meant that we had never otherwise heard. Started doing trainings for MBAs coming into the consulting firm that I was working with. After lunch every day for a five-day training, we would tell stories to one another, because when we tell stories to one another, we show one another who we are. If you’ve ever taken a fiction writing class, they’ll tell you there’s a big difference between showing and telling when you’re writing. Don’t tell me. Show me through the story. We can tell each other what we think all day long. We can tell each other our opinions all day long, but when we tell stories, we show one another who we are because we drop ourselves and the listener into a scene, not here where we can see them behaving in such a way that they’re not tailoring their language to try to answer a particular question. They’re just showing us who it is that they are.

Robert McKee, the storytelling guru who wrote the tome on storytelling that’s this thick says, “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” This is the way that we trade meaning: stories with one another.

I have these stats about things like employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to perform better, and 96% of employees believe that showing empathy … We get that. That’s why we’re here. That’s why they’re here. So, I think let’s do a few … I want to walk you through a few conversations in storytelling that are game-changing, my friends, because when we use stories, we can guide our teams to respect one another’s unique perspectives because we’re not arguing about things. We’re telling stories. We can deepen relationships with coworkers, we can understand the similarities that we have with one another, and we can create a sense of safety amongst our people to help them want to make meaningful contributions. Because we listened to their story, we affirm them by our attention.

So, there’s three guided conversations that I really love to use to experience the power of story. We’re going to do one together and then I’m going going to run through the last two, but I just want to make sure that you have them. So, three conversations are, one, “Tell me a story, show me who you are.” Here’s that show-and-tell thing, a story I’m telling myself about work and the stories about our work. Conversation one is, “Tell me a story, show me who you are.”

Let’s find a partner. We’ve done the partner thing. I’m not going to complicate it and have us get up. Find someone that you can tell a story to at a table that you’re with. Here’s this wonderful wheel of emotions. Of course, I’m the guy that has the slide that says, “You probably can’t read this, but there’s this wheel of emotions.” It’s a powerful tool. Bottom line is I want you to think of a moment when you felt an extreme emotion. I want you to take a minute and I want you to think of a time that you felt excitement or anger or embarrassment or joy or fear or anticipation, a moment where the feeling was so intense that it came out of your pores. Judgment or hope or belonging or separation. Think of a moment, think of a story that when one of those words pops in your head, you say, “I got the very tale for you, Reagan.”

Okay, so with your partner now, here’s a little Mad Lib that we can use to tell a story because a lot of times when we work with groups, they’re not necessarily hip to this and it takes a while to warm people up, so we can follow along with this Mad Lib. You’re going to tell me story. You’re going to say, “So, I was” … “You know what? I was 11 years old, and I was playing soccer on the soccer team. Our team was the Turtles. Then all of a sudden, I tried to jump over this fence, this chain-link fence, and I had these mesh shorts. But then when I jumped over the fence, they caught on the fence. As I descended, my crotch, that gave way. The material, it split. Now my waist is up amongst my armpits and my little Batman underwear is showing. Because of that, I felt embarrassed and I didn’t feel like I belonged on the team, etc., etc. Now I continue to think” … What’s that?

Speaker 2: I avoid fences.

Reagan Pugh: “And now I avoid fences, or now I continue to worry about what other people think about me.” You get the idea. I want you to find a partner, and I want you to tell … Pick who’s going to tell the story first and just have one person tell a story to the other person. I’m going to give you two minutes. Find a partner. Tell me a story of an extreme emotion you felt. Use this script. Go.

Okay. Okay. Very good. This is a hard one to stop. Who enjoyed the story they were listening to? Oh, I love it. Feel the energy in the room. In one minute, in one minute, what I want the listener to do is provide one of these responses. “Now I understand blank about you that I never knew before,” or “I can totally relate to that part of your story when” … One minute. Go.

Okay. Oh, I love it. Can I hear a few folks share out, what did you notice? What happened? What did you notice? Go.

Speaker 3: Erica woke up.

Reagan Pugh: Erica woke up. She’s alive. I love it. What else? What happened? Let me tell you a quick story about the waking up. Whenever I used to teach 10th grade English students how to write thesis statements on a reservation whenever it was negative 20 and it got dark at three o’clock in the afternoon, when I learned to start my class with, “Let me tell you a story,” instead of, “Here’s what we’re going to learn today,” can you imagine the difference? What else did we see? Give me a couple more. Come on.

Joey: I had a warm feeling towards my partner being included in something new.

Reagan Pugh: Thank you for that comment, Joey. Happy birthday to you. One more. Thank you.

Speaker 5: We have similarities I didn’t know existed.

Reagan Pugh: “We have similarities I know existed.” I will Venmo you later. Thank you. We have, yes. We see ourselves in one another. Meryl Streep was brought up earlier in an example. She has this beautiful line where she says, “People do not go to the theater to see me. They go to the theater to see themselves.” That is why stories are powerful. I’ve never climbed Mount Everest, but I’ll go to watch a movie about Mount Everest and I’ll believe I can do anything because the stories call upon the greater parts of who we are. When we can share those with one another can, we dance with that.

Let’s run through two other quick activities that I want to show you that help with stories. I would use this after lunch breaks. If you’ve got a multiple-day thing, I’d use it every single day because then all of a sudden you get people leaving a three-day thing where they didn’t know one another be like, “Hey, you’re the Jell-O guy. I’m never going to forget that.” Stuff like that happens, okay?

So, the story that I’m telling myself about work, I basically stole this from Brené Brown and all the stuff that she does. When it comes to sitting down with people who you’re on a team with, this is for dedicated team most likely, but you want to say, “The story that I’m telling myself about the challenges I’m facing at work is this.” This is the loop that’s playing. We all know the tape. We’ve got the tape to place, or “A story that I’m telling myself about my capabilities and my potential is this,” because we do a great job of putting off a front. Whenever we can tell someone, “Actually, my story about what I’m doing is this,” that gives them an opportunity to either validate us in ways that we’ve been unable to validate ourselves, or that enables, if you’re talking with a leader, for that leader to say, “Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know that this was a mindset of my people. I didn’t know that my people went around feeling insecure about this thing. This might be a hole that we need to plug.” Then as you do this activity, your listener is going to say something like, “It sounds like you’re feeling blank. Do I have that right?” Of course, that’s an easy one.

Here’s what I love if you want to do the conversation one and two in tandem: “How does that story that you tell yourself about work connect with an earlier story about who you are?” Let’s multiply the effect here. Help me understand how your identity, who you are, a story in your life, is being brought into work so that I can better understand how to interact with you, how to lead you, how to support you, how to challenge you, and how to ask you questions. “Story that I’m telling myself about my work is” …

This next tool is our stories about our work, conversation number three. This looks eerily similar to a tool that John gave you earlier. I’m really excited to see the mashup here. So, [inaudible 00:14:13] together with a team, and you’re going to ask your people to drop you into the middle of a scene, no context, no explanation, simply begin, of a time that they don’t really awesome about the team and a time they felt really crappy about the team. All right? They can put it on a Post-it Note and give it a title. They’re going to say, “The moment the team performed exceptionally well” … This is just a Mad Lib of what we had earlier. “So, I was … and then I … and then I.”

So, you say, “So, we were about to launch that one product and things were going really well. The reason why that felt like it worked well is because it was all hands on deck. People across different roles showed up, and that mattered, and I felt validated.” Then we’re going to do one where we say, “Here’s where the team really missed the mark. Here’s where I feel like our communication channels broke down and everybody assumed that we knew what was going on. The next thing you know, up shit’s creek without a paddle.” Right?

Now what we do is we’re going to map these things. You’re going to draw me a timeline for whatever timeline that you want to have. On the positive side is the stories that were really great, that you’re proud of. On the negative side is those stories that you say, “Man, this is when we were at our worst and we need to fix things a little bit.” Then what we’re going to do is, on the backend, we’re going to talk about the goals that we’ve got for ourselves, for this period of time, for the quarter or for the year. The goals that we met, we’re going to have up on that positive side. The goals that we didn’t meet, we’re going to have on that negative side.

Imagine this is January through June of 2019. We’re going to put the stuff we wanted to happen up top, stuff that didn’t happen that we wanted to happen but didn’t down below. Then we’re going to go back through our stories and look at the similarities amongst the stories. We’re going to break it into three categories and say, “What behaviors or actions were present?” What behaviors or actions were present, what mindsets or beliefs existed, and what people in relationships contributed to those positive stories and to those negative stories. Then we’ve got a playbook. Then we’ve got a playbook for success when we look at the real stories of things that happened for how to continue creating stories like that, and we’ve got a playbook for disappointment where we say, “Well, it’s clear by the stories and the experiences of our people, we’ve got to be careful around this mindset or belief or this action or habit or these relationships or these people.” Oh, my gosh. I love doing this one with the team.

So, those are the three: tell me a story and showing me who you are, a story I’m telling myself about work, and stories about our work. When we tell stories, we create connection. The most beautiful moment in any interaction is, “I thought I was the only one. You telling me you too?” We retain wisdom. Remember that story about … It’s not just a number on the sheet, that, “Oh, yeah. Remember we were down in compliance.” No, I remember a story when someone told me that that didn’t work. We understand what matters to our people and to our customers because they show us. They don’t tell us.

Let’s talk about a whole other component for this. We create messaging and marketing language. These stories turn into blog posts and social media posts because we’ve got real language about the story of our organization and we understand the needs of our people. Stories do not equal entertainment. They do not equal engagement. Stories equal connection, and my goodness, what a powerful thing for us to be able to do this and tell our stories together. Let’s go do it. Thank you.

The post Creating a Storytelling Organization appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Cheryl Reed is an organizational psychologist turned innovation catalyst with a passion for people and human behavior. She started her organizational psychology career working in the US Air Force research labs. “As an organization whose strategy was to create game-changing innovation, it was my job to help individuals and teams grow to the next level of innovation.”

Cheryl’s journey with the Air Force gave her a background in leadership development, the dynamics of teamwork, and finding agile responses to challenges with numerous constraints. “Working in the Air Force for 21 years also teaches you how to learn about new organizations very quickly, because you move every two or three years.”

As an organizational development lead for the Air Force research labs, Cheryl focused on developing the organizational structures, people, and processes that enabled brilliant researchers to execute on innovation and outpace competitors. “That was the organizational strategy, so I had to figure out what that meant, what it looked like, and how to develop the people and the processes inside the organization to do it. We started by doing innovation assessments to figure out the innovation readiness for the organization, identify our barriers to innovation and how to get around them.”

Applying her organizational psychology lens in the field of innovation, Cheryl sees the practice as a human behavior puzzle to solve. “The things that keep us from seeing new opportunities are the cognitive biases that we’ve developed based on the muscles we’ve exercised.”

Cheryl believes that these cognitive biases are what prevent some of the best companies and teams from seeing innovative opportunities when they present themselves.

“The things that keep us from seeing new opportunities are the cognitive biases that we’ve developed based on the muscles we’ve exercised.”

In innovation, the things that made an organization successful in the past are rarely what makes that organization successful in the future. Those past experiences form a mindset that creates a barrier to becoming something new. “Human beings have biases that open up possibilities or shut them down. Helping us to recognize what our own biases are and reminding each other of what these biases are, turns us into seekers of new opportunity.”

Cheryl sees the work of detecting bias and busting assumptions as a necessity for innovative solutions. She characterizes a cognitive bias simply as a particular way of thinking shaped by habits and enduring belief. Those beliefs can be developed by data, and the more powerful the data, the harder the biases are to change. The key is in testing those biases.

“Say you’re a tennis player who’s won championships ten years in a row. If I tell you I’ve got this great new approach to tennis that’s going to help you become better, one of the thoughts that’s likely to go through your mind is that there’s no one in the world that knows tennis better than you do. You’re probably going to wonder how I can teach you anything.”

Evidence Mapping

To illustrate cognitive biases for teams, Cheryl relies on evidence mapping and activities that bring an individual’s attention to their cognitive biases. One activity Cheryl uses presents participants with three scenarios, each representing a different cognitive bias and asks them to answer questions based on what they see. “We use the tool as an attention-getter. When you’re working with really smart hard-working people, it’s hard to convince them that they don’t have the answers. If you can’t convince them that there are things out there they’re not seeing, it’s hard to get them out of pure execution mode.”

Overapplication of the term innovation creates unintended barriers to change, according to Cheryl. Attempting to equate innovation that creates new value and fulfills an unserved need with an adapted product that was updated to meet new compliance regulations, can halt an organization’s progress in innovation. “The fact that it means so many different things to so many different people makes it easy for people to say they are innovating and keeps them from getting outside of box one and into box three.”

Vijay Govindarajan’s three-box model

By box one, Cheryl is referring to a focus on execution. The verbiage comes from Vijay Govindarajan’s three-box model of innovation. For companies to succeed at innovation, Govindarajan believes they need to look at it from the three boxes:

1. Manage the present
2. Selectively forget the past
3. Create the future

The first box is the execution challenge. The execution engine is a critical anchor to providing the resources, and the ever-changing need to stay alive, vibrant, and healthy. “You’ve got to execute well. Inside that bin, you can be very innovative about productivity, inventory, and supply chain — what’s inside the execution engine delivering to your shareholders. The problem we run into is most companies put 99% of their efforts into box one.”

“The problem we run into is most companies put 99% of their efforts into box one.”

Box two is about forgetting the past. All the things that make an organization successful today get in the way of adopting new things that will keep them relevant tomorrow because they’re consuming so many resources. “If you can’t figure out and get rid of those things you’re doing today, or those beliefs you hold today that are getting in your way, then you’re not going to have the time, resources, and people to pursue and create in the future.”

Box three is non-linear thinking about creating a new future. “Balancing those three boxes is challenging when you’re a publicly-traded company that has to report out to your shareholders every quarter. The urgency becomes delivering on execution. The danger lies in not taking time to figure out what part of your past you need to forget about so that you can free up resources to create a future and then protecting the resources you’re putting into creating that future.

“The danger lies in not taking time to figure out what part of your past you need to forget about so that you can free up resources to create a future…”

Protecting innovation programs and resources is something that often relies on measurement. Cheryl believes the ultimate measurement for innovation is the quality of the relationships created with customers. “If my innovation is new value that customers care about, then it shows them that you care about their success.” How to go about measuring that quality is a work in progress that Cheryl continues to think through.

Measurement is something that evolves as the practice matures. In the early days, Cheryl focuses on activity metrics which she acknowledges are never very convincing. “Then, I think the outcome metrics have to focus on how much you’re learning, rather than how much revenue you’re generating today. One of the things that we need to know is a good inventory of what we’ve learned. If we could focus on understanding what we’ve learned, measuring what we’ve learned, and keeping those learnings readily available, then we become better positioned to take advantage of new opportunities.”

To demonstrate this idea, Cheryl offers the example of a Dover concept called the I-door, a refrigerator door with an embedded media player that could play advertisement videos. “Several customers absolutely loved it, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to use it and how they would pay for it.” The team that created the concept— having realized it could be done from an execution standpoint—patented it and shut down the project due to the lack of demand. Last year, a startup looking to create an advertisement marketplace approached Dover to partner on the product after learning of the patent. “We knew what we knew. We knew where that knowledge was. We knew how to use it. And we were able to then join this company in a new endeavor.” The product went live at the National Retail Federation supported by an advertising marketplace to place and pay for ads that will be displayed on cooler doors in supermarkets or convenience stores using sensors to measure real-time conversion rates for different types of advertising.

Metaprocess

Throughout her career, Cheryl has learned that successful innovation programs depend on identifying the problem the program is trying to solve. “Creating that problem definition must involve key leaders who communicate with each other with an attitude of curiosity and a willingness to learn. Sometimes this is contrary to the decisive, action-oriented style senior executives have had to learn to be successful in their jobs.”

With the problem defined, a hypothesis is created for solving it, and experiments are run to test those hypotheses. “It isn’t a linear process but, rather, a commitment to use your innovation processes on your problem. You use the results you get on each iteration to pivot and try again.”

For Cheryl, well-executed innovation is an inverted pyramid with an organization’s culture at the top, followed by strategy, infrastructure, processes, and tools. She believes getting all of these elements lined up and identifying a target through strategy enables organizations to make some great progress.

“If you’re a traditional company with a strategy to start becoming digital, your rollout roadmap might be to first work on digital internal operations, then digital customer front end, and then digital products for the next three years. If you can keep everyone focused on that, you can make some great progress as long as you know the kind of infrastructure and tools that are going to be most effective in that scenario.”

On the other hand, if the innovation program’s goal is to change how people think that gets “pretty darn squishy.” In this case, it’s even more important to get clear on what problem you’re trying to solve. “It’s challenging getting leaders to commit to a focus area, or to commit to a problem they want to solve. Because every time they get focused on a problem, they want to solve, something comes up that causes some rethinking and re-vectoring. It’s easy to lose focus.”

At Dover, Cheryl deconstructs the problem that an innovation program solves. “I ask myself if we are fixing the difficulties of adapting to the rapid pace of change? Are we fixing the challenges we are having keeping our customers engaged? Are we fixing the possibility that our product could become commoditized in an environment where people want experiences?”

Once the problem is identified and cleaned up into its more basic form, organizations can determine how innovation brings value. “You can’t just use these processes to solve the problems that your customers are bringing to you. You’ve got to use them on yourself.”

In innovation, there is no clear path from start to finish. In place of a silver bullet solution, Cheryl sees skills, attitudes, and practices that need to become part of innovation work. “Tools can help along the way by getting people engaged and establishing a common language, but if you let the tools define your program, you will fail in creating culture.”

“Tools can help along the way by getting people engaged and establishing a common language, but if you let the tools define your program, you will fail in creating culture.”

Open innovation

Cheryl’s favorite innovation success story began with the Department of Defense’s need to reclaim millions of dollars in fuel contaminated by flame-retardant foam following a fire. Civil engineers who looked at the problem decided it couldn’t be done, so the project was deprioritized and put out onto an open innovation platform with a tiny $10,000 budget.

“Within six months the ideation team had a prototype out in the field that was able to reclaim the fuel to a purity level that it could be used in jets. The total payout was $60,000.00 to the ideators. If we had hired a company to develop a solution, it would likely have taken years, because the whole process for putting out an RFP and developing the solution would have cost millions of dollars. Interestingly, the people who proposed the solution were not civil engineers; they were not Defense Department-type people; they were not American. We debunked a lot of different beliefs. People who participated in that became huge believers in open innovation.”

On the flip side of success, stories of failure often teach us the most. Most of the failure Cheryl has experienced has been around losing focus when there is an abundance of distractions or a lack of clarity on what outcomes to pursue. “I continually ask myself what leadership looks like under the current circumstances. How have others successfully navigated circumstances like those I am facing?”

One of the biggest challenges she’s explored is combining front-end processes with a team under pressure to execute. “Consistently, in our first year of operating, we had senior leaders present important efforts on which to execute and instruct us to do some due diligence thinking through it, deconstructing the problem, looking at options. And then they’d say we need to deliver this new capability to customers in six months. Those two pieces cannot peacefully coexist on the same team.”

Cheryl finds one of the biggest mistakes is trying to combine box one and box three activity into a single effort. “You don’t want teams to be experimenting when the house is on fire. You want to be experimenting when there’s some safety and where you can experiment without alienating customers, without interfering with your execution engine.”

Maturing innovation practices

Cheryl is excited when she hears or sees more consistent use and understanding of different processes, tools, and language around innovation. These are clues that lead her to conclude that the practice of innovation is maturing. “I think consistent use of language is what differentiates a nascent discipline from a maturing discipline. Some agreement about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve got to first anchor in a certain language so that when I say innovation vitality index and you say innovation vitality index, we’re talking about the same thing. I’m seeing more agreement than I have in the past.”

She sees this consistency in the literature that she reads in Harvard Business Review, LinkedIn blogs, and in conversation with other innovation leaders. One area she’d like to see this maturation expand is through the presence of more academic-style conversations on innovation at conferences built around the topic.

These academic conversations are better equipped to spread the learnings of organizations who seem to be getting innovation right. From the 50,000 foot view, Cheryl finds those to be the organizations who take the time to clearly define what they are trying to achieve, to align their organizations around a shared definition and approach, and stick with it through the ambiguity and uncertainty are the ones who produce valuable (though sometimes difficult to measure) results.

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

The post Organizational Psychology and Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

How can a company successfully oversee their internal ideas? It’s a fascinating question in the era of innovation. Terrence Metz, Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Training and Coaching, is a good guy to ask this gnarly question because he once helped a major division of 3M create a method for managing ideas.

Terrence is a leader in facilitation training who consults, coaches, and trains businesses worldwide. He’s taught over four hundred facilitation classes and three thousand students on five continents. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, and senior officers among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. He also writes a blog with articles on facilitation skills to help people lead faster, more productive meetings and workshops.

Terrence and I recently spoke and, since we share a passion for facilitation, I loved hearing his viewpoint. Read on for highlights from our conversation.

Defining Ideas

A division of 3M came to Terrence’s organization when they discovered they didn’t have enough new product ideas and it was causing them to fall behind. Consequently, Terrence helped them build a “Product Concept Management” process. In other words, they defined how to manage indefinite or unformed concepts or “fragments of ideas.”

He discovered that part of the problem of managing ideas is in definitions. What exactly constitutes a valid idea to pursue? If the team doesn’t agree on what an “idea” is, how can you vet them? As a group, they needed to have common language. They decided that “notions” are ideas in a more embryonic state, while concepts are “the conversion or confirmation of a fully articulated, qualified idea.”

Terrence shared: “The group came to say, ‘No, you don’t have an idea if you’re taking a shower. You have a notion.’ You have something that could become an idea, but it’s certainly not an idea while you’re drying off. It’s simply a notion.”

“Our thesis,” he explained, “was that ideas/notions and concepts need to be managed differently. You may have problem descriptions floating out there, and they needed to be analyzed relative to potential solutions. Fragments of ideas simply needed to be managed to a different fashion than a completely solid idea.”

“We strongly urge an idea management process to never end. Even ‘bad’ ideas may yield value at some point in the future… We don’t kill any ideas.”

When? Not If

As I do in all my interviews, I asked Terrence about wrong-headed things he’s seen in organizational innovation programs and he said: “The thought that ‘It can’t be done.’ From a future view, it’s not if, only when.” He went on to share a story that illustrated his point: “I was working with research folks from Motorola when the first iPhone was rumored. But, they discounted the ‘rumor’ because their engineering group had looked at some of the touted features and had already determined that it could not be done.”

“If it can be imagined it can be built. You have to relax typical constraints; you have to relax time; you have to relax budget. Then go back and evaluate if it’s worthwhile…”

For him, it’s important for companies to build solutions without any constraints: “If it can be imagined it can be built. You have to relax typical constraints; you have to relax time; you have to relax budget. Then go back and evaluate if it’s worthwhile or what components do we have to remove, substitute, or replace to make it practical.”

He also talked about the importance of focus in order to inspire a “can do” or “blue sky” attitude: “If you have the right people in the room, you can do anything—if you can get them to focus on the same thing at the same time. The hardest thing to do with a group of smart people is to get them to focus.”

“You have to have such a well-established methodology so there’s no time for their thoughts to drift.”

This is where his experience as a facilitator comes in: “You can’t get people to focus by telling them to focus, it doesn’t work. First, you need to remove and be alert for possible distractions. Second, you have to have a well-established methodology so there’s no time for their thoughts to drift.”

Innovation is a mindset

To Terrence, innovation is an attitude or mindset: “Innovation, much like Agile, should permeate every aspect of a business, especially those dependent on new sources of revenue. Innovation captures an attitude that ought to be pervasive within an organization, providing an ongoing commitment to newness.”

“Innovation might be viewed as a set of values that signifies a belief in seeing beyond present conditions…”

He described how he sees innovation defined at different levels of a company: “At the organizational level, it implies structural and cultural change. At the process level, it implies efficiency and effectiveness. At the product level, it implies new or changed technology, packaging, etc.”

“If we don’t aspire for what’s new, we’re going to be somebody else’s lunch.”

Terrence also stresses that innovation relies on a commitment to change: “We know our competitors are changing. My commitment [to change] is based on this idea that the greatest motivator in life is death, and if we don’t change we will die. To avoid death we need what’s new. We’ve got to be in a constantly changing, evolving process. If we don’t aspire for what’s new, we’re going to be somebody else’s lunch.”

“My commitment [to change] is based on this idea that the greatest motivator in life is death, and if we don’t change we will die.”

Ingredients of innovation

Terrence views the “Voice of the Market” as his innovation silver bullet. He doesn’t believe in only listening to the Voice of the Customer because he doesn’t think customers alone are the predictors of future needs.

Another important ingredient for innovation is people who “embrace diversity and stir up the pot.” He looks for people who, “don’t see obstacles, only opportunities. Those who have an attitude of embracing ‘newness’ are getting it both wrong and right. And since they persevere, they are getting it more right, and more frequently right, than others. Some say ‘fail fast.’ I prefer, ‘fail with a bow’ (i.e. fail with dignity).”

We also talked about measuring innovation. For Terrence, that can vary: “Typically they include time and money. Edison measured his quantity of failures. 3M uses revenue from SKUs released in the past five years. I doubt there is a universal measurement… Regardless of the appropriate measures for an organization or industry, the trend line may be more critical than the discrete performance of any given period.”

Do we need agreement?

As a facilitator, Terrence often brings people together to work on, and (hopefully) agree upon, a plan for the future. But he doesn’t believe in getting everyone to simply agree: “Agreement is everybody thinking the same. Agreement would be as if we all play the same notes on a piano. We’re not seeking agreement, that’s boring. What we’re seeking is harmony, and that’s where we’re able to play different instruments, we’re able to play different notes, but we’re able to pull together in the form of a composition that surpasses anything one individual can do.”

“What we’re seeking is harmony, and that’s where we’re able to play different instruments… but we’re able to pull together in the form of a composition that surpasses anything one individual can do.”

Instead of blanket agreement, Terrence looks for general consensus: “…find something robust, strong, and clear enough that everybody in the room can get behind it and support it. It may not be anybody’s favorite, but as a group, it becomes our favorite. Consensus also means you’re not going to lose any sleep over it. If you say one thing in this room, but you get home tonight and you toss and you turn, we really don’t have consensus.”

And, if a group truly cannot come to a consensus or resolve a major argument, Terrence sees termination as an option. “When all fails, which can happen, what we need to do is terminate. We need to leave the room, but not with everything hanging in the aether. We need to document clearly the nature of the argument, the reasons for contrasting positions and we need to get some help…”

Facilitative leadership

According to Terrence: “Facilitative leadership is perhaps one of the most important skills in the next 50 years.” With today’s complex work environments, no one person can know all the answers. “Why do we have so much wasted meeting time if we have smart subject matter experts? If they have the knowledge and they have the energy, then why is the meeting failing?”

He went on: “Why are we failing to come up with the right stuff? The answer is they don’t know how…The old command-and-control is dead. If you’ve got an answer, don’t have a meeting. If you need answers, if you need consensual solutions that entire groups can support and get behind, then what you need is not an “answer man,” you need a facilitative leader.”

“If you need consensual solutions that entire groups can support and get behind, then what you need is…a facilitative leader.”

Of course, Terrence notes his bias toward facilitation since he trains people in it. However, even without official training, people need facilitation skills: “What are those skills? Those skills are not public speaking. They’re not skills of style; they’re skills of substance. It’s not knowing the answer, it’s knowing the question. It’s a skill of being a good listener, not a good persuasive charismatic speaker.”

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

The post Why facilitation is one of the most important skills for the future appeared first on Voltage Control.

Keith will be speaking at our upcoming event — Control the Room: The 1st Annual Austin Facilitator Summit! Taking place at Austin’s Capital Factory on May 23, 2019, learn more and get your tickets here.

Keith McCandless spent the first 20 years of his career trying to transform healthcare. When a group of health, business, and academic leaders formed an institute to study complexity science, he started to hope and believe a more fundamental transformation was possible. After meeting, Henri Lipmanowicz, his business partner and founder of the Plexus Institute, the two transversed the globe applying the study of complexity to develop a series of tiny methods called Liberating Structures (LS). LS help groups and organizations solve a wide array of complex challenges.

Liberating Structures

Through their work with academic innovators and scientists, Keith and Henri realized that people were searching for a new way to explain phenomena, do research, and organize. The traditional practices of organizational development and process improvement were not enough, so Keith and Henri looked for a more distributed approach. Learning from their past experience, they made the decision to forego setting up a formal organization around LS.

“We wanted Liberating Structures to be in everybody’s hands for everyday use. We wanted it to have a creative commons — virtually free for anybody who cares.”

“Henri had just finished a long, very successful business career. I’m more of a methods-and-design guy than a organization-building guy. We wanted Liberating Structures to be in everybody’s hands for everyday use. We wanted it to have a creative commons — virtually free for anybody who cares.”

Despite many opportunities for exclusive rights to the approach, Keith and Henri were determined for LS to be accessible as a way for it to spread across disciplines. “The use of Liberating Structures is fully self-organized, person-to-person, and widely distributed. This seems to help dissolve boundaries across domains, disciplines, and geography.”

As the microstructures have been used by more organizations over the years, Keith has noticed that the lack of formal boundaries in LS is often paralleled in the breaking down of boundaries within the organizations where the methods are practiced.

“Within a company, there’ll be six different groups that are working on the development of people and innovation to move the company forward. When people start using Liberating Structures, they find that the boundaries between their functions start to disappear.”

“When they start using Liberating Structures they find that the boundaries between their functions start to disappear.”

The beauty of LS is that the ideas inherent in the structures themselves are also what help perpetuate and spread them throughout the world. “There’s no formal governance but us, people connected, who really know the repertoire and deeply understand how microstructure maintains the fidelity of reliably-surprising results.”

Keith refers to the loose structure of people promoting Liberating Structures as a core periphery network. That network consists of people who write, catalog, share, and facilitate the spread of the work through a social network. “A lot is going on where people find each other, develop material, and then distribute it to others. There are people who will pop in, get help, and share their experience. And then there is a smaller group of practitioners who are developing new LS for the repertoire.”

This approach to structure provides a contrast to a typical organization. “There’s no budgeting. There’s a little bit of a strategic plan to boost spread. Nobody has a formal position. No one is hired to do a single thing. Everybody is doing it because they’re interested in developing themselves or developing the body of work.”

Keith views LS as an innovation that spreads itself. “It has some attributes of a complex adaptive system, the way it grows and expands. It’s moving around person to person at a rapid rate, and it doesn’t require centralized control to do that.”

Letting go

Letting go of formal organizational structure and stale business practices is a key aspect of Liberating Structures. Through his consulting, Keith finds that much of the work in innovation today is blocked by the unwillingness or lack of focus on letting go to allow for new ideas to take shape.

“There is very little effort to let go of anything before adding something new. Many innovative ideas have no room to take root. Everyone’s plate is full. The discipline of individual and collective creative destruction is much neglected. While it may feel like heresy, LS employs a variety of seriously fun methods (e.g., TRIZ, Ecocycle, Talking with Pixies) to help people productively let go.”

“Liberating Structures employ a variety of seriously fun methods to help people productively let go.”

Many organizations seeking to innovate fall for the myth that a better idea is what’s needed and making space for it will be the natural next step. In Keith’s experience, the opposite happens. As soon as there is space made and room to breathe, innovative solutions rush in.

Distributed capabilities

“That capability to stop doing things should be fully distributed throughout the organization. It’s not a managerial or a leadership task. It’s everybody’s work. Because the TRIZ and Eco-Cycle are pretty simple, everybody can do it. That’s part of cultural change.”

As the pace of change and the need to adapt increases, Keith sees the distribution of capabilities to be a key distinction in an organization’s ability to remain competitive and nimble.

“A bunch of very large organization’s innovation work hangs by a string. It’s not at the center. They talk as though it’s the center of what they’re doing, but it’s a relatively small group of expert innovators. Their skillfulness in design and innovation is not distributed across the organization. It’s not working fast or deep enough because it isn’t part of everyday work.”

“Every person in the organization should be involved and can be involved in shaping what happens next. That includes stopping things and starting things.”

One way to identify opportunities to stop and start certain activities is through Ecocycle Planning.

Through this LS, participants identify the activities they perform in their job individually and then prioritize them in groups based on four developmental stages: birth, maturity, creative destruction, and renewal.

Involving everyone in this activity allows individuals to understand where their contributions have an impact in the larger context of company operations while also identifying ways to remove bottlenecks and reinvigorate team performance. Ecocycle also encourages leaders to focus on activities no longer serving the company purpose so they can be stopped to free up space to birth new ideas.

“I have a hypothesis: the velocity at which you move your products and services around the Ecocycle — in comparison to your competitors — is linked to your performance in the marketplace.”

In addition to benefiting the company planning process, going through the Ecocycle on an individual basis creates opportunities for innovation to fill the gaps left by creative destruction.

In Keith’s experience, many companies are supporting “a lot of old clunky stuff” that they aren’t ready to release. The unwillingness to let go results in a thin pipeline of offerings and ties up resources so they’re unable to invest quickly in new ideas.

Metrics focused on challenges and possibilities explored

In the face of limited resources, reliance on metrics and measurement to ensure a good ROI on investments is common for many innovation programs. Keith suggests two measures: The number of worthy-yet-elusive challenges explored, and, as challenges are tackled, the frequency of participants asking, “What is possible now?”

“These measures generate multiple options and a continuous exploration of the adjacent possible. Each experiment opens a neighboring door and another adjacent door. Most combinations fail, but they reveal the next possibility. And, a few of the new ideas will astonish and delight.”

With clients, Keith looks for the internal group that’s poised to invent an entirely new operating model… to ensure the organization can serve its purpose in the future. “You need an internal group that’s developing multiple new models to serve the purpose of the organization. It may have nothing to do with the current way that you’re operating or be so different that it’s hard to even imagine that it still serves the same purpose.”

That group needs leadership, longer term commitments, and incremental check-ins centered around his suggested metrics of challenges and new possibilities explored.

Formalizing innovation programs: Dont.

“Don’t make innovation a program. Surely, that will kill it. Innovation can and should be infused into routine work. Shifting from over and under controlling conventional patterns to liberating every voice is practical with Liberating Structures. Introducing LS from top to bottom in an organization infuses inventiveness, empathy, and more vitality into everyday work.”

“Innovation can and should be infused into routine work.”

When I asked Keith what it was that made programs fail, he shared that it’s often the areas that you’d assume would fully support improvements and increased capability.

“Early on we were trying to take the LS work directly to people who’d put it into play with their customers immediately. And the people that were hard to change were the head of marketing or the head of sales. If you went right to salespeople or closer to the customers, they were enthusiastically onboard. But the marketing people wanted to tell the salespeople what to do and would regularly underestimate them. There were power relations that totally slowed things down and diminished people.”

Developing people through purpose

For Keith, the innovation silver bullet lies in maintaining a focus on the development, purposefulness, and inventiveness of each person.

“LS have fractal qualities: shifting patterns and behaviors in an individual can repeat at multiple scales across teams, units, and entire organizations. Additionally, there are a small number of people who are very skilled in including and inspiring others. I offer them as much coaching and consulting support as possible.”

Specifically, purpose is a focus that can have ripple effects from the individual to the team and beyond. Keith encourages individuals to explore purpose and come up with a nine-word purpose statement.

“We want you to start with the thing that you want to stop or put an end to in the world. I don’t want to hear anything about the good you’re going to do or the beautiful thing. Tell me about the bad thing that you’re going to stop. For me with Liberating Structures, I’m going to stop the unwitting over control, stifling, and exclusion of people.”

Getting down to the core purpose and uncovering what each individual wants to stop from happening creates a drive that is palpable. Or in Keith’s words it “unleashes a beautiful wave that seems to influence everyone around you.”

Keith continues to be excited by the process of developing new LS. Currently, he is exploring ways to liberate more effective approaches to myth busting, grieving a loss, and distributing control.

• See Keith speak at Control the Room: The 1st Annual Austin Facilitator Summit on May 23, 2019. Get your tickets here.
• Check out Keith’s book, The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation.
• If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post How to Create an Innovation Program: Don’t. appeared first on Voltage Control.