You facilitated an amazing meeting. The job is done, right? Not so fast…

The idiom “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and perception. When speaking about meeting culture, we like to remix that line: “If an awesome meeting occurred and nobody else at the company knows about it, did it actually happen?” In most cases, the answer is no. A magical meeting leads to some kind of new progress and change, and those not in attendance need to be brought up to speed somehow.

Not everyone can (or should!) attend your meeting, so how do you inform those who were not in attendance about the progress that was made? Enter the Magical Meetings Story Spine.

The Magical Meetings Story Spine

After your meeting, you need to share a narrative for others to understand the meeting’s effectiveness as well as its outcomes. This way, you can keep up momentum and avoid project slumps. At the heart of an amazing narrative is the story spine.

The story spine is a technique from improvisational theater created by playwright Kenn Adams, author of How to Improvise a Full-Length Play: The Art of Spontaneous Theater. It was popularized for storytelling by Pixar Story Artist Emma Coats’ after her Twitter series Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling.

The story spine follows a very structured formula so you can focus on the details. It is a madlib design that can help anyone tell a better story. Think of each step as a sentence starter to help you rough out your story.

We love the idea of a user-friendly Madlib template that you can use to tell a powerful story, but the original story spine isn’t quite specific enough for magical meetings. Fortunately, we have remixed it a bit. We call it the Magical Meeting Story Spine:

Before our meeting, there was [ a problem or opportunity ].

So, we had a meeting/workshop to [ drive an outcome for that problem or opportunity ].

As a team we, [ did these activities ].

Because of that, we made [ these decisions ].

Because of that, we now have [ this potential ].

If you want to look over our work, you can review our artifacts [ in this archive ].

Moving forward, we are focused on [ this momentum ].

If you have questions or concerns, you can contact [ the decider or facilitator ].

Use this magical meeting story template as the starting point for sharing the purpose, outcomes, and next steps that are now in motion thanks to your meeting. Make it easy and engaging to consume

The following sections will help you fill in the brackets with confidence.

Curate The Highlight Reel

If you’re running a magical meeting, you are capturing the room intelligence of any decisions that were made by the group in real-time. This could be on a whiteboard or a digital design board tool like MURAL. The output of your meeting needs to be highly visual. If you did good work in the meeting, you will have something to show for it.

It is now time to make your highlight reel of the meeting, much like ESPN. The rest of your team or company doesn’t have time to watch a full replay of the meeting, but you can curate the key moments worth highlighting. Show them the touchdowns, a few of the amazing plays, and the final score breakdown. This is essential for creating a shared language across your organization so that you don’t lose momentum.

Make a short recap video that highlights the moments you are proud of as the facilitator. What visuals did the team create that best summarizes the amazing work that was done in the meeting? Capture them with your smartphone or screen recording tool of choice (we love Loom).

Make compelling media of what you captured. In the video, you can demonstrate the artifacts that were created and explain why they matter. 

This video should especially speak to these sections of the Magical Meetings Story Spine:

As a team we, [ did these activities ].

Because of that, [ we have made these decisions ].

Explain how these decisions were made and the key commitments moving forward. Show rather than tell. Don’t make your highlight reel just an email with bullet points that no one will read. Make it visual and have fun with it. 

Share Your Highlights Archive

Next we’ll be taking a look at this section of the Magical Meetings Story Spine:

If you want to look over our work you can review our artifacts [here].

In all of your meeting follow-ups, you need to link out to the documentation of the meeting’s key artifacts. If you don’t have any artifacts to show, you didn’t have a magical meeting. 

We have found that if you are consistent in sharing the artifacts from meetings, you can help alleviate one of the biggest problems in meeting culture: people attending meetings because of FOMO (fear of missing out) rather than because they have something to contribute. Once outsiders are able to easily appreciate and access the work that was done in the meeting, they can feel less stressed out about not being involved in every meeting.  

Even with in-person meetings, we like to incorporate digital tools that will provide these artifacts as activities are completed. You can work with analog tools and materials, but digitize the main artifacts and findings inside of a digital whiteboard or drive. This is important because the physical room you are in will likely need to be cleaned out immediately after your meeting. 

If you’re digitizing analog work, be sure to make sense of them in some kind of meaningful layout or design. The idea is that you are archiving your meeting room, allowing all participants and others who the work is shared with to remember, share, and/or experience the magical work that was done. Handfuls of pictures of random sticky notes do not tell a story.

With this, you can build a magical meeting archive. With an ongoing archive of digital meeting boards, you can empower other meeting-holders to share the work that was done in their meetings asynchronously. These interactive design boards not only tell the story of the great work done in the meeting, but they also showcase a visual for what a magical meeting looks like. It helps remind others that a solid meeting is much more than just an agenda or a list of talking points. 

As a facilitator, the Magical Meeting Story Spine not only helps clue in stakeholders to what was done in the meeting, it empowers all of your participants to become guardians of change within the company. Begin building a library of artifacts that have a positive, compounding effect on your meeting culture.

Want to learn more about how to have Magical Meetings?

Check out Douglas Ferguson and John Fitch’s upcoming book, The Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings (No Matter Who is in the Room).

The post Sharing The Meeting Story 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. Check out the other articles here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lean Into What’s There

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

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

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

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

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

Starting Small

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

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

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

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

Priorities & Storytelling

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

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

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

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

Meet the World Where it Is

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

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

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

Technology for Human Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cam Houser is obsessed with helping people unlock entrepreneurial potential. Working with companies like the LIVESTRONG Foundation, The Onion, and Despair, Inc. quickly indoctrinated Cam into the realm of rapid growth startups and led him to pursue an MBA at the University of Texas. Frustrated by entrepreneurship courses focused on theory, textbooks, and essays, Cam and his cofounders were inspired to create 3 Day Startup (3DS), an organization that runs immersive, cross-disciplinary innovation programs to activate entrepreneurial potential in audiences ranging from MIT students to Dell employees through hands-on experience.

Be Action-Oriented

In order to move the needle on innovation, Cam believes organizations have to move away from fixation on ideas as currency in favor of an action-oriented approach.

“As an entrepreneur your ideas are far less important than your ability to execute.”

As an alternative, he suggests that organizations place more focus on the process, culture, and execution of ideas as the true source of innovation.

Focus on execution not judgement

Venture capitalists provide an analogy that exemplifies this concept. VCs are in the business of ideas — for every ten companies they invest in, only one needs to be a huge hit to pay for the other nine. The ratio of investment to success is low because picking good ideas every time is difficult even for people whose livelihood depends on it. This is further complicated by the reality that many good ideas don’t look good when they are first discussed.

When the founder of FedEx presented the idea of next day shipping it was met with disbelief that anyone would ever need a package delivered the next day. The same is true for the well known history of the personal computer — upon its debut, there was disbelief from experts that a larger market for PCs existed. These examples and his personal experience have taught Cam that “getting away from value judgment around ideas [and focusing on] process and execution tends to deliver innovation.”

Shake up your routines

While expertise is usually valued in the market, it isn’t always an asset in the context of innovation. Expertise can bias individuals toward routine thought processes instead of new approaches.

“If you’re recognized as an expert in an industry it probably means you’re an expert on what that industry was ten years ago.”

To shake up routines, Cam likes to work with teams in an atypical environment. “When we run our innovation programs we will do them at the home office, but we always prefer to do them at a coworking space or startup accelerator — some place where the professionals in that organization are getting outside of their standard operating zone so they can see things in a new way.”

Getting outside of the building is about altering human behaviors to be more open to change. The separateness of a new setting gives our brains permission to think outside our normal patterns without the constant reminder that there are emails and to do lists waiting at a desk fifty yards away.

The power of process

“If you’re following a good process something of value will emerge.”

According to Cam the core of any innovation program is all about process. When Cam and his team at 3DS work with corporations their coaching focuses on adapting their processes to be more similar to startups. He contrasts the two approaches: While corporations are often trying to get from point A to point B, then reevaluating, startups are trying to go from point A to something of value asking questions and evaluating progress continually along the way.

Through this approach, startups outperform corporations by realizing as early as possible when they are headed in the wrong direction and can pivot quickly in the direction of greater value.

Demonstrating value

The nature of innovation is that it’s new and the future is often unclear, so measurement early in the process is something that Cam typically tries to avoid. Working within these natural constraints, Cam evaluates whether value has been created as a signal to keep going or pivot. He’s found that demonstrating value can also help in gaining buy-in for innovation efforts within an organization. “If we can get a win pretty early on [through] projects that show some promise of driving value to the organization, trust gets brought in. Then you have a lot more latitude to truly innovate.”

For organizations at the beginning of their innovation journey, Cam recommends they “try a lot of very cheap experiments that do not require much social or financial capital — [Identify] low hanging fruit then get yourself some wins and figure out what’s working.” He suggests this approach over announcing innovation initiatives with a lot of fanfare for two reasons. The first is that successful outcomes are difficult to define in the beginning of an initiative when the future is less clear. The second is that getting started with experiments right away provides opportunities for the early wins that garner buy-in within the organization. The early results of cheap experiments provide insights on where an organization can invest more and increase value.

Knowledge sharing

In lieu of traditional styles of measurements, Cam advocates regular checkins to evaluate the direction of an initiative and what a team is learning. These checkins also serve the dual purpose of institutional knowledge sharing where teams can learn from prior attempts of a particular initiative.

In the process of knowledge sharing it can be helpful to have such conversations facilitated so ideas that have been tried before have a chance to be explored for learning opportunities rather than shot down simply due to a failed prior attempt.

This point is well illustrated by the success of existing companies. Cam astutely pointed out that Google was not the first search engine (actually the 13th) and Facebook was not the first social network.

“There’s a lot of examples in the world that prove that ‘we’ve done it before’ is not an appropriate rebuttal.”

Storytelling

The examples above also illustrate another of Cam’s insights: Ideas are only as powerful as how well they are communicated. Cam believes that good communication is “the story you tell about that idea” and it’s “the difference between getting stakeholder buy-in and sponsorship” or not. Rather than being a “function of sitting in your desk and thinking harder about how to communicate the idea”, good communication is about sharing “the idea with tons of people and having them give you feedback.” The reaction of an audience is one of the quickest ways to learn. “If they have a deer in headlights look when you explain [an idea] you know it’s too complicated or boring.”

“If they have a deer in headlights look when you explain [an idea] you know it’s too complicated or boring.”

For anyone who ascribes to the epistemological perspective that there’s nothing new under the sun, the importance of communication or expression of an idea is all the more clear. Cam shared that human beings are full of biases and unique perspectives that cause them to see things through a distorted lens. This distortion is the context in which innovation works and often means good ideas are not always immediately recognized. “In order to win over our teams on ideas, the communication piece matters so much.”

“In order to win over our teams on ideas, the communication piece matters so much.”

Action not just ideas

Consistent with his preference for action over ideas, Cam finds approaches that place too much emphasis on idea banks or platforms — repositories where people submit ideas for future consideration — incentivize the wrong behaviors.

“Submitting an idea to a platform does not sound like a triumphant moment. That does not sound like an aha ‘Eureka’ insight into the nature of how the world works or how you’re going to apply it to be better at what you do and increase your impact on the world. That’s why we want a participatory action- based approach to innovation. Submitting a form to an idea platform and waiting is the least innovative thing I’ve heard.”

Practices like idea banks can also inhibit innovation by creating the notion that there’s a specific team or department responsible for innovation within an organization. Cam has observed this phenomenon in corporate structures where importance is placed on defining titles and departments. Cam cautions against creating unnecessary silos and instead focusing on creating evangelists and diplomats who help “permeate a literacy of innovation” throughout the organization.

A culture of entrepreneurship

By establishing a culture of entrepreneurship and emphasizing that anyone can be part of an innovation initiative, companies benefit from the knowledge employees gain through direct customer contact. Oftentimes these employees that work on the front lines “have the best insights on how the company needs to innovate going forward.

Involving people at all levels of the organization has demonstrated to Cam that, rather than requiring a certain skillset, innovation is often just about giving people permission.

“A lot of people just need to know that if they have an idea something can happen out of it, and all of that goes to how you manage the communication.”

Instead of submitting an idea to a platform and waiting, Cam encourages organizations to give employees the flexibility to suggest an idea and see it through execution.

“We don’t really like handing [an idea] off and losing the nuance of the perspective of the person who came up with the idea. It’s a tricky thing to do because, again, there are structure to maintain. But a lot of times it just tends to generate better outcomes.”

The Microsoft example

Steve Balmer of Microsoft is someone who Cam believes had an interesting, while maybe not the most cost effective, approach to innovation. In the 2000s when Microsoft was awash with success from decades of Windows licensing, Steve Balmer would task two or three teams with building a product for a new domain he wanted to explore. Each team would work on the same problem and then pitch the result to Balmer who cherry picked the things that worked best from each.

While it was incredibly inefficient having three teams building three different versions of the same product, the process drove some interesting innovations at Microsoft. “What I like about it is how it’s execution focused which is very startup-like. What I can’t relate to is it’s a very expensive way of doing it which is not very startup-like.”

Quick pitching

One tool Cam uses when coaching organizations to develop startup-like habits is quick pitching, a process whereby up to 50 people have one minute to pitch an idea followed by instant, time boxed feedback from the pitch group that serves to evolve and develop the idea. “What’s really powerful is when peers, the people in the company who know the domain, give rapid feedback about why this would or wouldn’t work.” Cam is a proponent of including sponsors and leadership into the quick pitch process as a way to generate excitement and gain buy-in.

“Trying to impress stakeholders and sponsors needs to happen for them to get to know you [and] fund these things. So, again, there’s value in generating good ideas, but it’s also communicating the innovation narratives to the rest of the organization in a really powerful way.”

Ideas that have already been attempted can benefit from the quick pitch process as well. Through the process of feedback, for example, people may realize that there’s a kernel of an idea someone else caught that they missed. Discussion can cause ideas to be reframed or expressed in a new way that reveals hidden potential. To demonstrate this point, Cam shared the story of the Post-it by 3M. “That product was kicked around for so long before it made it out they almost put the guy who submitted it in a closet. That was an idea that took a while to weave its way through the company and different ways of expressing it until it finally happened.”

Just as it’s important to have planned idea pitching and discussion sessions, it’s also advantageous to allow slack time for more informal discussions. When Cam takes teams through the quick pitch process he includes a ten minute beak in the middle. “Getting a break means that people can go talk more about these ideas informally. We’re creating an environment where collisions can happen, where chemical reactions can happen, and giving a break in the middle allows that to happen.”

Throughout the quick pitch process Cam advocates having someone serve as facilitator to keep the process moving. When questions move away from the concept toward more superficial discussions (ex. what a product should be named), a facilitator can help redirect the conversation and keep the activity focused on creating value.

Quantum entanglement

As someone who knows innovation is about changing mindsets and unlocking entrepreneurial potential, Cam is intensely interested in human behavior. While this area of study can be frustrating in its lack of certainty, Cam finds comfort in the concept of quantum entanglement. “As a kid I always thought the world was this discrete place and that if I didn’t understand something it just meant I needed to research it more, ask more people about it, and get an answer.

Quantum entanglement embodies the idea that reality is not definite and that the world is a weirder, wilder place than we ever can imagine. When I get annoyed about something being uncertain, quantum entanglement reminds me that theoretical physicists are the smartest people in the world, and it doesn’t even make sense to them.”

Beyond helping him make sense of the world, Cam believes exploring other fields has a huge influence on getting innovation right.

“The language and marketing around innovation doesn’t feel much different than weight loss pills. The people who get innovation right learn from outsiders, from other domains. The more folks you talk to who are operating in spaces that are not your own, the more you can learn about what’s going to make you as an individual more innovative and what’s going to make your organization more innovative.”

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

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