Exponential growth by way of good design is the secret behind every startup’s scaling success story and adopting a design thinking perspective can help you attain or sustain such growth. Leading a design thinking workshop will place human-centered thinking at the heart of your company, resulting in rapid growth and increased customer satisfaction.

With a focus on design methodology, you can respond to changing customer needs through innovation as scalability and design thinking are indelibly connected. By leading a design workshop, you’ll make human-centered thinking part of your company culture. Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals.

More than a trend, the power of design thinking for scaling is backed by statistics:

• Every dollar that goes into design methodology and user experience results in a $100 return. (Source: Forbes)
• 50% of design-led businesses report increased customer loyalty as a result of advanced design practices. (Source: Adobe)
• In the last 10 years, design-led businesses have surpassed the S&P Index by 219%. (Source: Design Management Institute)

In this article we’ll explore the basics of design-centric thinking and its effect on your company’s growth with the following topics:

• Growing With Design Methodology
• What is Design Thinking?
• Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success
• The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking
• How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology
• Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability
• Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

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Growing With Design Methodology

Centering a design-driven mentality will help your business prioritize innovation and creativity, allowing for increased ingenuity, productivity, and efficiency. With a shift to design-centered thinking comes increased creativity and more remarkable growth, allowing companies to scale faster than usual. By leading a design workshop at your company, you can completely transform your company culture and the very essence of how your business works.

What is Design Thinking?

Before leading a design thinking workshop for your team, the first step is to understand the concept for yourself. Design thinking incorporates a human-centered approach to problem-solving via design methodology. Design methodology stems from the idea of design itself. As “good design” is all about finding an elegant solution to the problems at hand, design thinking encourages your team to make the most appropriate plan to meet both your company’s needs and that of the end-user.

Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success

Design thinking is integral to your success as a business. Success and design are linked through the latter’s unique ability to engage clients and build connections with customers. By leading a design thinking workshop, you can center design methodology as a business asset.

Beyond essential aesthetics, “good design” focuses on optimum functionality while providing users with an enjoyable, satisfying experience. By meeting both the company’s needs and that of the user, design thinking has a transformative effect on how companies do business.

The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking

Successfully leading a design thinking workshop starts with understanding the following five steps of design thinking:

1. Empathizing with the Client
   As design thinking focuses on uniting function and form to problem solve, you should focus on examining issues with a human lens. By adopting the end user’s mindset, your team will find the most attractive solutions by taking the client’s motivations, needs, pain points, and experiences into consideration.
2. Defining the Problem
   With design in mind, define the problem by prioritizing the end user’s needs first and thinking about the company’s needs second.
3. Ideating the Solution
   This stage of design thinking is all about innovation and ingenuity, as ideas are the lifeblood of design thinking. By generating as many ideas as possible, your team will arrive at new and creative solutions to the issue defined in the second step.
4. Developing Prototypes
   Taking the best ideas from the ideation phase, have your team create prototypes. Track the prototypes’ performance with your team and note their observations. Prototypes will be refined, sent for further testing, or rejected.
5. Testing the Prototypes
   During this stage, the final refinements are made to the prototypes and tested with the end-user. This process is repeated as necessary.

How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology

Making the shift from being a product-driven business to a design-driven one isn’t easy. If you’d like to shift your company into a design-centric mentality, leading a design thinking workshop is the best way forward. Whether your team is actively thinking with design in mind or is entirely new to the concept, making the change is possible.

As you head into leading a design thinking workshop for your team, be sure to share the benefits of a design-centric approach for scaling. As design thinking aims to create a high-quality product, your team will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what your clients want and use design-centric thinking to meet their needs.

Likewise, design methodology prioritizes understanding the customer journey, learning to meet their needs, and creating a perfect product, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and more significant growth for your company.

Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability

One of the main deliverables of leading a design thinking workshop is the facilitation framework or template that your team can rely on in future workshops. This consistent methodology and approach to problem-solving will become a way of life for your company. By putting users first through centering design, you’ll be on your way to sustainable scaling.

To get started leading a design thinking workshop with growth in mind, consider hiring an expert facilitator. With the help of the facilitators at Voltage Control, you can teach your team the ropes of design methodology as you learn how to apply it to your standard operations.

Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

Consider facilitating a workshop yourself if you’re ready to scale your company and have a great handle on design thinking methodology. Teaching elegant problem-solving skills with a people-first approach is at the heart of all design workshops.

Leading a design thinking workshop can take on many forms, but there are vital elements that will help you succeed each time:

Preparation

Each design thinking workshop starts with preparation. Before the workshop begins, make it a point to:

1. Identify challenges
2. Choose the ideal location
3. Plan the agenda
4. Gather necessary materials

Begin with a Briefing

As the focus of a design thinking workshop is to help your team innovate, activities that can stimulate conversation and ideation take center stage. Consider icebreakers and activities that help break down barriers.

Step One: Introducing Design Thinking

It’s always essential to include an intro to the design thinking methodology to make sure all colleagues and clients know what design-centric thinking is. Whether you show a presentation or hire a professional, explaining the fundamentals for design-centric thinking will help set the stage for the rest of the workshop.

Step Two: Empathizing With the User

As empathy is key to design methodology, empathizing with the client is the next part of the design workshop. By understanding the user’s needs, your team will be able to arrive at the most innovative solutions.

Design thinking exercises are a key component of this stage to help all participants identify how the end-user feels and thinks.

Step Three: Identifying Problems and Solutions

As growth results from effective problem solving, step three involves identifying the problem and creating innovative solutions. Through their brainstorming, your team should ultimately arrive at one solution that will provide the greatest user experience.

Step Four: Finalizing the Workshop

After completing the ideation and problem-solving steps, the workshop will come to a close. When leading a design thinking workshop, be sure to check in with all participants to ensure a meaningful experience was shared by all.

Ultimately, the takeaway of a successful design thinking workshop is human-centered problem-solving. As the meeting comes to an end, make sure your team members can confidently apply the skills learned in the workshop to their daily routines.

Growing Through Design-Centric Culture

The key to growing your business lies in your team’s ability to shift into a design-centered mindset. Leading a design thinking workshop will help you and your team adopt a more innovative way of working. With a newfound design-centric approach to growing your company, you’ll be able to meet clients’ needs, connect with the end-user, and scale your company at an impressive rate.

As you learn more about leading a design thinking workshop, consider hiring a professional facilitator from Voltage Control. With an expert in design thinking present, you’ll ensure that your team successfully makes the shift from a results-driven and product-centric mindset to more human-centered and design-focused processes.

Want To Lead A Design Thinking Workshop?

If you are ready to begin shifting your team into a design-centered mindset join one of our innovative trainings, design thinking facilitation, or  design sprints. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you have any questions about our innovative training!

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We all know that it helps to have an outside perspective, both in our personal and professional lives. We call a trusted friend to tell them what’s going on because they help us see things in a fresh light. The same is true in business. Often we need an outside opinion to help us take a step back, look at our business challenge from a new angle and provide valuable insight.

That’s where innovation strategy consulting comes in. An innovation consultant is an advisor who can provide new tools and methods for tackling your problem. If you’re stuck in a project, need to rethink an existing one, or are kicking off an initiative that has to go well, consider an innovation consulting firm.

What is innovation strategy consulting?

Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals. Whether you are a brand new startup or a seasoned, large organization, you can benefit from innovation strategy consulting. First, innovation consulting firms will work with you to identify the exact problem you need to solve. These will often be larger, cross-functional challenges. For example, your problem might be: we need a shared vision for our end-to-end customer experience. Or, we need to address a specific customer pain point and align our mobile strategy accordingly (which is what we helped Adobe with). 

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge.

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge. They often bring a blend of expertise from everything from enterprise design thinking and human-centered design to product design. They can work with you to think of novel ideas and approaches you haven’t considered before and make a strategic plan for executing on your new strategy.

“The consultant also has a professional responsibility to ask whether the problem as posed is what most needs solving. Very often the client needs help most in defining the real issue…” — Arthur N. Turner, “Consulting Is More Than Giving Advice,” HBR, 1982.

Here are the top six benefits of innovation strategy consulting:

Break Old Habits

One of the first benefits of innovation strategy consulting is that it helps you shake up your typical way of doing things. Most companies have ingrained habits. Maybe it’s the way you hold meetings, how you present to the group, or how projects get funded and designed. Some of these patterns exist for a reason; others are leftover, legacy ways of working that don’t serve a purpose. The reasons for doing these things are often referred to as simply “just the way things have always been done.”

An innovation consulting firm comes in and helps you look at what you should (or could) be doing better rather than how it’s always been done. Their outsider’s perspective means you’re less inclined to follow the well-worn paths of your organization and challenge the status quo. 

Wisdom from Outside Industries

Another benefit of innovation consulting is that your innovation consulting firm likely comes with a plethora of expertise in many industries and types of companies. Let’s say you’re in the financial technology business. Hopefully, your innovation consulting firm has some knowledge of your industry, but they will also bring expertise from adjacent or even unrelated sectors and fields. This is a good thing. You want outside inspiration if you’re going to make something innovative.

Because consultants usually work with companies of different sizes and in different markets, they can bring a diversity of knowledge to the table. Who knows, maybe your fintech company can learn something breakthrough from the food delivery startup your innovation consulting firm just worked with.

Focus Your Time

Typically, you’ll work with your innovation consulting firm through semi-formal meetings or workshops. This dedicated time to focus on critical business challenges is invaluable. That’s because many of us are overscheduled and incredibly busy trying to get our “day job” done. We don’t have time to squeeze innovation work into the tiny cracks of free space in our 9 to 5. But, we all want it to happen.

When you bring on an innovation consulting firm, you give yourself freedom and time. Now, you can focus on a problem you’ve meant to tackle but haven’t been able to. (For example, check out this case study about the food delivery company Favor and how they used a Design Sprint to focus their attention on a critical business need). Innovation consulting firms will usually bring in an expert facilitator to help guide meetings and conversations. A facilitator is someone who plans, designs, and leads a key group meeting or event and can help when dealing with larger topics. They offer a non-biased opinion and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. 

While you might be overwhelmed at the prospect of setting aside a whole day or week for innovation exercises or a Design Sprint when you’re busy, the results are worth it. Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues. With their help, you can shift from thinking about the day-to-day to working on game-changing innovation initiatives. Innovation consulting firms help you accelerate, disrupt and sustain innovation within your team and organization.

Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues.

Articulate Your Vision

In addition to being too busy, it’s hard for some companies to articulate their innovation strategy or to shape a compelling story for where they want to go. This is another benefit of innovation consulting firms. Through your engagement with your innovation consultancy, you will come up with a north star. Your north star articulates your vision for your product, feature, or experience.

Typically, your innovation consulting firm delivers a document that summarizes where you want to go and why. They might even help you create a prototype of your ideal, future experience. A good innovation consulting firm will articulate what you accomplished through a shareable document or prototype that will help you rally your team or organization, and get things done.

Make Connections

Innovation consulting firms are often very connected and have an extensive network of people in the business, tech and creative communities. So, if you need to engage with new people and companies to execute on your innovative vision, your innovation consulting firm might be able to help. For example, if you want to hire a team of developers or find a company to help you with brand identity, your innovation consulting firm probably knows a plethora of talented, trusted candidates. They can help connect you to the people and companies you might not have access to so that you can build your product or experience.

Learn Through Doing

One of the last benefits of hiring an innovation consulting firm is that you and your team will learn new ways of working through the process. Today, many companies have their teams do some design thinking training but don’t always show them how to put it into practice. Watching your innovation consulting firm at work is a way to see how design thinking happens in practice.

Your innovation consulting firm will walk you through their tried-and-true methods and activities. These may include innovation training strategies or Liberating Structures. If you pay attention and take a few notes, you can leverage these tools, resources and processes on your own the next time. When your team sees an expert innovation consultant in action, they’ll learn the methods through osmosis. They’ll be able to try the techniques on their own down the road when they want to spark innovative thinking, and ultimately drive a culture of innovation.

Need Innovation Consulting?

Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and challenges. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

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We have all seen a crime drama or mystery where the investigator stands in front of a pinboard and on it are multiple photos of leads, clues, and locations–everything connected with a thread allowing a pattern to emerge. This is an example of what can be created in real-time with a group of people problem-solving. Imagine a high-functioning space for idea sharing, collaboration, and unleashing everyone’s potential by designing your meeting or workshop with parallel creation in mind.

Traditional Meeting Spaces

It is very easy for a meeting to start and remain headed in one direction. We’ve all been there: a question is posed and eyes are averted, no one wants to be the first to speak. The Harvard Business Review has found that not only have meetings increased in length and frequency overthe past 50 years, but executives, on average, spend nearly 23 hours a week in them. How do we make meetings more efficient?

We need to be collaborative and get as many great ideas out in one meeting rather than in multiple meetings. Multi-threaded meetings create concept direction and give everyone a safe space to share their unique ideas. That is where real growth happens. That is where the game-changing ideas are born. Teamwork is essential to creating and maintaining a productive and stimulating work environment.

Harvard Business Review – 

“We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

There is a general consensus that the multitude of workplace meetings is a necessary evil. Most people find that they dread multiple weekly meetings, but they feel that is the only way to ensure innovation, even at the cost of productivity and engagement. In order to create a streamlined meeting process, we first need to ask, “Will this environment nurture ideas?” Whether your meeting space is digital or in person, does every member of your team feel like they have room to share and contribute to the board? Once you established the most conducive working environment, ideas can be shared in parallel among team members, and that momentum unleashes the potential of every person in your workspace. Imagine what you and your company can accomplish in one meeting if there is nothing that holds creative collaboration back!

The Why

Have you ever attempted to plan a party? The list of tasks seems endless and daunting! You approach it one thing at a time, finishing a single task before moving on to the next. Applying this parallelism to a meeting, doesn’t it make so much more sense to assign each person to one task, where everyone executes in parallel, rather than trying to accomplish one thing at a time serially? Efficiency, strategy, and trust means a more satisfying meeting experience! A  multi-threaded meeting is like a well planned party. Invite everyone to bring forth all their ideas and share in real time to unlock the full potential of participants in your meetings. Discovering the power to unleash that potential in a meaningful way changes the outcome of the meeting, the company, and the individual!

Digital Inclusivity

When it comes to working remotely, there has been significant research showing that it’s not about where your team is located, rather, it is about who is doing the work and how it is getting done. In an excellent article from MIT Sloan – Management Review, a group’s collaborative capabilities far outway the importance of where they are located. The team’s social perceptiveness is key to the underlying collective intelligence. Identifying team strengths and creating a digital workspace is crucial for a high functioning remote team. Finding the right digital tools is also very important. We must especially prompt people to have creative parallel inputs… but how? 

When we worked solely in person, we would use sticky notes, or a napkin at a lunch meeting to capture ideas and answer the questions, “How might we/how could we accomplish the end goal?” The next step, inevitably, was to stick visual ideas to a wall, sift and sort through them, decipher what would/would not work. Now, we move forward with virtual meetings, utilizing MURAL, and can have everyone capture every idea, simultaneously. This allows us to easily inspire each other in real time.

Pro tip: check out our free downloadable MURAL templates for better meetings.

The next time you run into a problem that poses a challenge to your team, rather than simply setting up a conversation, pose a thoughtful question. Allow the entire team to start working in a MURAL template. Encourage everyone to read the others ideas so they can build on them. Create a conversation that inspires and that everyone can respond to in their own time.  

This is why we’re big fans of MURAL, the collaborative tool allows every thread to happen simultaneously, where multiple people can take notes and make edits, even if another person is talking. This tool allows for idea sharing without total chaos. Another bonus: you can save anything created in MURAL  so you can come back, build on, and polish ideas.

Are You Ready?

It is time to take your meetings to the next level, discover the power of the multi-threaded meeting in depth by utilizing some of our mural templates! You will walk away with templates to run your own multi-threaded meeting, new found knowledge of meeting facilitation and the ability to unleash you and your company!

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Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting where the phrase “the illusion of control” was used. It made my stomach turn. 

This meeting was around a company’s “custom” software offering. The thing I discovered was the software couldn’t be customized, just configured. There were only a few ways their templates could be tweaked, and those were all pre-determined. If a customer’s needs didn’t jibe with what the company’s product would allow, they were out of luck. 

Because of this, the senior-most exec told his subordinates they had to give customers “the illusion of control” vs. allowing anything that would actually be true customization. And that’s when it hit me. If this was the company’s behavior towards its customers, could its treatment of employees be any different? Do the execs just nod their heads and pay lip service, knowing full well the company is going to do whatever it wants to do?

Collaboration begins with authenticity

This company missed an opportunity to be a partner to its clients — and likely isn’t one to its employees either. If its leadership had attended one of our workshops, they’d learn the value of genuine collaboration. It starts with respect, and a willingness to listen and absorb rather than firing back with a knee-jerk response. 

By giving employees a role in decision-making, the exec I mentioned could’ve helped his employees become more self-confident. And those with confidence help the larger team — and organization as a whole — succeed. 

To help you build this kind of inclusive culture, we created these meeting mantras. They are the holy grail we follow to ensure that our meetings and all attendees are getting the best (genuine) experience out of them:

No Purpose. No Meeting.

Part of respecting your team is ensuring every meeting has a clear purpose. Scheduling a discussion with only a vague objective in mind wastes time and money. It can also torpedo your team’s morale. Show you value their time by creating an agenda that’ll keep everyone focused on specific outcomes. People appreciate having goals they can work towards, whether that’s coming up with fresh ideas or helping refine existing ones. 

Foster Emotional Safety.

When you do have meetings, you’ll want to create an environment where everyone feels they can speak freely. A great way to encourage inclusivity is to allocate a portion of each meeting to the sharing of everyone’s ideas. Be mindful about cutting off over-sharers so the chronically quiet will have a chance to speak up, too. Studies have shown that this kind of inclusiveness can accelerate the speed at which sound business decisions are reached, so it’s not just a wise practice from a team-building perspective. 

Capture Room Intelligence.

I’ve always felt that many minds are greater than one when it comes to collaborating and solving problems. That’s the idea behind room intelligence: no single person is smarter than any other person in the meeting. To ensure the collective intellect is properly leveraged, you’ll want a designated facilitator on hand to guide the group through its discussion and any structured activities. This person, or someone who’s been deputized, should also be capturing everything discussed for future reference. 

See all 10 of our meeting mantras here.

Keeping things on track

Creating a culture of true collaboration can be tough. As a leader, it’ll be up to you to encourage honesty and promote comradery. When you’re effective at this, you’ll see your team develop new ideas and innovative solutions. To keep you from slipping back into old routines, here are three practices you should embrace:

1. Have 1:1 discussions.

When someone feels like they weren’t heard or thinks someone else has too much influence, it’s important to talk it out one-on-one. Committing to having an open-door policy that lets you take a temperature with your team may help you uncover some interpersonal dynamics you weren’t aware of. This will help maintain a team environment that’s harmonious and focused on thriving together.

2. Agree to disagree and commit.

Productive meetings require decisions to be made. In addition to having a facilitator drive progress, you’ll also want to have a preselected decider. Ideally, this should be someone who’s qualified to make the call on how to move forward, either due to relevant experience or professional responsibilities. 

Keep in mind that achieving consensus doesn’t mean total and complete agreement. The philosophy behind disagree and commit, which is practiced by Amazon and Intel, is that it’s acceptable for people to disagree while decisions are being made. Once a decision has been made, however, the team needs to 100% agree to support it. It’s OK that not everyone buys in so long as the dissenters can commit to moving forward as a team.

3. Give everyone a say.

To minimize the divergence I mentioned above, I suggest your team use our Improv Vision Mood Board for online collaboration tools like Mural. Unlike a traditional mood board that’s merely cool visuals, our template will help everyone get aligned through visual and written exercises. 

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First, you’ll ask each team member to share two images. Then everyone will follow this up by placing sticky notes with their thoughts on what the collective vision makes possible — and what emotions the images evoke. After individual voting on these stickies, your team will then move on to crafting a unifying vision statement. 

Improvising a vision this way can spare you going through a long, protracted process. Too often teams focus on mission statements that capture the purpose of an entire enterprise when teams often just need something that can help them tap into creative potential and inspire action.

Trust your team — and the process

Fighting “fake” collaboration begins with valuing people’s thoughts, feelings, and time. Genuine collaboration really comes down to trust. Trust that colleagues and employees can help you make better decisions — and that you have an actual interest in hearing what’s on their minds. When this has been achieved, you’ll be surprised by the staggering business impact it’ll have. It’ll save time, save money and keep teams on task and ahead of schedule.

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Want to learn more?

If you’d like information about one of our Magical Meeting workshops or a consulting engagement, you can reach us at hello@voltagecontrol.com. 

The post Collaboration: Don’t Fake It Until You Make It appeared first on Voltage Control.

Have you ever asked for input in a meeting and only gotten the sound of crickets as a response? We’ve all been there, and 1-2-4-All can quickly turn this silence into rapid insights.

Engage everyone without putting anyone on the spot

1-2-4-All is one of 34 Liberating Structures developed to add structure and meaning to everyday conversations. It’s a great way to sift and sort ideas to allow the best — and most novel  — concept to bubble up to the surface. It triggers spontaneous conversations at a time when many meeting attendees typically zip their lips and avoid eye contact. 

The activity is great for groups that are “stuck” having endless conversations without making discernible headway or decisions. It’s also really handy to combat the phenomenon of “follow the leader,” where everyone just nods and goes along with what the leader is saying and writing down. 1-2-4-All prevents a vocal minority from dictating how an organization operates. It seeks to solicit input from everyone involved, no matter how contrary or left-field their ideas are because it’s those ideas that contribute to the diversity of thought so many companies lack.

So how does 1-2-4-All work? It’s pretty simple, actually. Ask each participant to quietly reflect on the opportunity or challenge the group is seeking to explore. For example, “What ideas or actions would you recommend to move forward?” Give them one minute to think about the ideas or actions they’d recommend.

Next, pair two individuals together and allocate a couple of minutes to review their individual ideas. Where are they aligned? Are there a few ideas that both people feel strongly about? 

After the groups of two have had enough time to discuss and align on ideas or solutions, typically about two or so minutes, merge the pairs of two into foursomes and task them to spend four minutes noticing the similarities and differences in their respective ideas. Instruct them to identify the best of the best.

Finally, over a five-minute period, invite everyone into the dialog or simply ask each foursome to present the one idea they feel stood out most in their discussions. In roughly 12 minutes, you’ll get a variety of thinking and lots of lively conversations instead of a bunch of blank stares.

Shifting to virtual

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, conducting a 1-2-4-All exercise was as easy as asking participants to push chairs together and talk. In this new era of video conferencing, facilitating 1-2-4-All is a little trickier, but it’s not impossible.

The idea for the Concentric Consensus templates stemmed from a need we identified when we designed and facilitated an annual kick-off for the Global Partner Solutions group in Australia. 

One of the first activities of the day was called “Empowering You,” an event-wide conversation around the principles by which they wanted to all hold each other accountable. The objective was to define a “team code” that was co-created with all 105 attendees, giving everyone a voice regardless of hierarchy. 

The 1-2-4-All model was an excellent method for arriving at consensus, but with such a large (virtual) group we needed to tweak the interaction model. We designed the 48-node Concentric Conversations template to host a 1-2-4-8-All conversation which utilized MURAL’s voting feature to facilitate our “all” step of the process and select the five top principles. It was a huge success, so we decided to release it to the world for all facilitators to use! 

Because the number of participants ranges per meeting, we also developed templates for smaller groups so you can use them no matter the group size:

8-node Concentric Consensus template

12-node Concentric Consensus template

16-node Concentric Consensus template

24-node Concentric Consensus template

48-node Concentric Consensus template

96-node Concentric Consensus template

5 Tips to ensure you see success using these templates in virtual meetings

1. Utilize breakout rooms

Using Zoom or some other service, create smaller workgroups vs. having everyone in the same chat room throughout the entire exercise. Once everybody has had the chance to think independently, create rooms for pairs, then foursomes and finally the group at large. Randomly assign participants to respected groups.  

2. Mute/unmute participants

To provide emphasis — and reduce distracting background noise — we recommend muting everyone but the person sharing his or her ideas.

3. Turn video on/off

Similarly, we suggest you only allow the individuals/teams who are speaking to appear on camera. This will keep the focus where it needs to be.

4. Set up a chat channel

This can be a good way to facilitate conversation and avoid people from talking over each other when others are presenting. 

5. Capture feedback in a shared workspace

We’re partial to MURAL, so much so we created the Concentric Consensus templates exclusively for the platform. 

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Use this template when a large group needs to create key points for a topic or question and write down those key points to a consensus. This is an adaptation of the Liberating Structures 1-2-4-All for 48 people.

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From too quiet to total consensus

You’ll find using these templates will get everyone generating ideas without it devolving into a free-for-all. The shy in your group will also appreciate an opportunity to express their thoughts without having to do so in the spotlight. In short, our Concentric Consensus templates can create unified virtual teams by allowing them to get a sense of what the collective group thinks. Another advantage of the templates is anyone can go back later and trace through the steps to see how the ideas evolved (just zoom in on the Microsoft graphic to see what we’re talking about). 

The next time you need your team to quickly arrive at a shared understanding, try the Concentric Consensus template to make your meetings more effective. But why stop there? If you’re looking for additional ways to boost productivity in your meetings, you can browse our resource library for advice on how to improve remote collaboration and even download additional MURAL templates.

Want to learn how to ask meeting attendees better questions?

Thoughtful questions are the secret to an engaged audience. For a pocket guide to the questions you should always ask, download the free Facilitator’s Guide To Questions from our resource library.

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You’ve likely heard of differentiated learning in the classroom – the idea that individuals have different ways of learning (visual, aural, verbal, etc.) and therefore require diverse avenues of learning; one size does not fit all. This people-centered approach is also applicable to the workplace. Individuals have different working styles and needs. Therefore, they work best in certain environments and not as well in others.

Differentiation in the workplace requires you to first understand the individual needs and learning styles of your team members. To understand this is to truly understand how to work effectively with people. When you acknowledge your team members’ individual work styles, you are able to meet them where they are and provide them with what they need to thrive. 

Let’s explore what differentiated working looks like in day-to-day work, meetings, and workshops. 

Differentiation in the Workplace

Everyone on your team has their own version of working best. There are many factors that contribute to this including personality (introverted or extroverted), workstyle (optimal time of day to work, preference to work alone or collaborating with others, etc.), and learning style (learning by observing, doing, hearing, etc.). As a result, employees can suffer if they are confined to fit a certain work model that does not coincide with their needs and preferences.

For example, say you are holding an employee training for a new process being implemented. The training is a presentation-style meeting where the leader takes the team through the new process with a visual flowchart. Those who are visual learners will likely follow along well and retain the information. However, a psychical or hands-on learner may need to practice the process themselves in order to understand. If you do not account for the different learning styles in your team, you risk some employees misunderstanding or falling behind. 

No Team Member Left Behind

A team is only as strong as each individual in it. Get to know your team members learning and work styles so you can best support them. Maybe that’s sending out a questionnaire with questions and prompts to get to know each person’s learning style. Or hold one-on-ones to ask each person if they are getting what they need and if not how they can feel supported. You can use this information to categorize how team members work best and provide them with what they need when they need it. Once you have a good understanding of what everyone needs, you can adjust meetings accordingly to keep everyone on the same page.

For example, (using the previous new process team training scenario) you could offer hands-on training to identified physical learners and an informative video to visual learners. This way, each person not only receives what they need, but they also avoid wasting time engaging in a less effective method of training. 

Differentiated Meetings

Differentiated learning styles can cause some people to show up differently than their co-workers in meetings and workshops. If they are out of sync with the rest of the group, the entire group will end up suffering. For example, picture a group work session where an individual is not quite grasping the concept being discussed. If a facilitator fails to notice this disconnect and continues with the meeting anyway, the person will fall behind and become further disengaged. You then lose the crucial brain power and contribution of that person–and you need it! 

Supporting team members in meetings starts with the setup. Make sure that everyone is versed in the tools you’re using and is briefed on the topic before the meeting beings so there are no misunderstandings or gaps of knowledge. What this looks like: send an agenda beforehand that outlines the tools everyone will need to participate and the topics that will be discussed. Include a “how-to” video or written instructions to educate people on how to use the tool(s). If people need additional support, offer training. Also, assign any prep work necessary for everyone to be primed to participate. You want everyone on the same page once the meeting begins so you can get the most out of your time together. 

Once the meeting has begun, read the room and take note of where team members are at in the meeting. Does someone appear to be lost or disengaged? How can you adjust to bring them up to speed? Sometimes this looks like taking the person aside to answer questions or provide necessary context. Other times it requires adjusting for learning styles: some people may need time to process their thoughts internally before contributing their ideas to the group, while others thrive when spitballing their ideas out loud. Get to know your team and give them what they need to succeed, or find the best facilitator in your team.

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Continuous Learning

Differentiation in the workplace is fluctuating, so stay open to change and making adjustments as needed. People and connection are at the center of any great business. Keep them a priority by maintaining an open dialogue with your team about what they need. Some team members may grow in and out of certain work styles (think: remote vs. in-person work), or you could hire someone who has a different work style than you’re accustomed to. Adapt accordingly. 

You must also consider offering different versions of trainings and team work sessions as needed in order to really cater to individuals’ needs. Again, forcing people to conform to one certain style or way of doing things can stifle their performance. When we consider differentiated learning with our teams, we can maximize individual growth and performance. The stronger the individual the more effective the team is as a whole.

To learn how to facilitate the room with grace & ease check out our Professional Facilitation Workshop on July 13 + 14 here.

The post Differentiated Working 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. 

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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.

As a student of how to make working together better, I’ve been reflecting on the work of past thought leaders who have influenced the business world we operate in. I find we can learn a lot when we revisit original ideas and mantras and apply them to our modern lives today. 

One such thought leader is Peter Drecker, a famous business coach and management mogul of the 1900s. He is in fact one of the original business gurus–considered as the founding father of modern management studies by common consent. Many of his ideas and thoughts on management are still used by managers worldwide today. He was one of the first authors to describe management as a distinct function and the role of a manager as a distinct responsibility; he understood and had sympathy for the challenges and demands that managers face. 

I’ve been thinking about his mantra: “What gets measured gets managed.” To me, it means that if we don’t track something and keep it top of mind, we’ll have no hope of improving or maintaining it. For example, if we don’t record the fact that we are always spending more money than we take in, then we don’t manage that problem, and we never fix it. 

His idea inspired my modern-day mantra of visualizing your thinking: “What gets visualized gets velocity”.  In other words, if everyone is not clear on the opportunity or direction, it’s very difficult–if not impossible–to get steady traction on collaborative work; and the best way to get clarity quickly is through visualizing!

One of the most effective ways to visualize your thinking is through a prototype designed to transform ideas into tangible, workable artifacts. Prototypes are visual representations of ideas and can take various forms. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

The type of prototype depends on your objective. For example, a project manager may use a storyboard, written brief, or sample pitch of an idea to present to her team. A designer may use a mood board to portray his ideas, and a developer might code something to show her approach to other team members. To choose your prototype, think about how your idea can best be portrayed visually. 

This is critical for productive work because when we come together and just talk about ideas, we’re not truly doing anything. It can actually stop us from doing any meaningful work at all. So many times when a leader or manager asks for something and there is slow or no progress it usually because the team doesn’t fully understand the ask, and it’s hard to get motivated if you don’t understand the what and why. Creating a quick prototype that visualizes what you are going to do adds tons of clarity.

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Also, if we don’t capture ideas and input during meetings, it is likely they will be forgotten and participants might walk away with different interpretations of what happened. When we come together and prototype, we are able to see individuals’ thoughts and ideas and surface differences. Without the alignment and clarity from visualization,  teams get stuck in endless cycles of stopping and starting work, lose momentum, and eventually fall short of maximum acceleration. You are more aligned and able to execute in unison when you visualize and bring the thinking “together”. Using a prototype during meetings means nothing is forgotten and more is explored–achieving more velocity. 

Prototyping Tools

There are several excellent tools that help you construct, share, and collaborate prototypes. Here are a few of our favorites as Voltage Control:

1. Google Docs – Smart editing and styling tools support joint teamwork to flow smoothly and easily and keep ideas in one place. Teams can work on different pages or in different docs accordingly. Use comments and tags to work in real-time.
2. Google Slides – Interactive work templates with multiple pages to allow individual and collective work.
3. Google Sheets – Collaborative spreadsheets to organize, plan and update tasks and information. 
4.  Mural – Digital whiteboard with collaborative templates for visual collaboration including planning, brainstorming, and designing.
5.  Figma – Collaborative design platform to design, prototype, and gather feedback in real-time in one place.

The team at Voltage Control uses each of these tools every day to create prototypes and work together. Here’s an example of one of our MURAL templates used to brainstorm and get inspired around a new idea:

Find what prototype tools work best for you and develop a practice of bringing a prototype to every meeting. Doing so will provide clarity, direction, and actionable steps to help your team visualize for velocity and achieve more by doing the work in the meeting, together.  

The post What Gets Visualized Gets Velocity appeared first on Voltage Control.

Heidi 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.

Heidi Helfand believes that coaching is a core aspect of effective organizations where people are excited to come to work every day and create innovative solutions. After working as a writer, interaction designer, and project manager, she came to coaching when she was hired as AppFolio’s first Scrum Master. Now as the Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore, she works as an embedded coach to help staff realize the Procore promises: the pursuit of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

As someone who was regularly involved in team-based work, Heidi wanted to understand how to improve her teamwork skills. “I’d read different books within and outside of software and one of the constant things I would always hear was the dogma that, if you want high performing, highly productive, successful teams, they have to maintain the same composition. They have to be stable.”

These team recommendations were often based on research like Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing. “He forgot a phase that I call stagnating, when you keep teams together for too long, the energy is low, and the people feel like they’re trapped. They need a change. Things aren’t moving.”

Reteaming

While these models are often referenced in the software world, Heidi learned that they are largely based on research done on therapy and training groups outside of technology. Heidi’s experience with product development teams didn’t match up with the accepted wisdom that successful, productive teams were ones that didn’t change. Realizing and embracing that changing teams were inevitable, Heidi was driven to uncover why her teams were able to achieve success despite the constant change.

“I conducted over 30 hours of interviews with colleagues at software companies all over the world. I coded the stories for themes, and then I wrote the book Dynamic Reteaming, which talks about five team change patterns for successful reteaming. It’s almost a study of proving the point that these teams change and there are patterns to how it happens in the wild. You can do various things to coach teams when they change and that’s my specialty.”

For years, the effectiveness of software development has been focused on the work and workflow. Everything from counting lines of code written to the number of hours remaining on a task was seen as indicators of success or productivity. Based on her research, Heidi has put the “accounting of the work” aside and chosen to focus more on helping individuals and teams pull themselves out of stagnation and get excited to come to work every day.

“When we give people the ability to choose how often they change and the topics that they work on, it can help them find that spot that is renewable.”

While the appetite for change varies from person to person, Heidi has observed that change can often serve to refresh an organization and inject a renewed sense of motivation or creativity. “Some people want more change than others. Some people prefer more of a stable situation. We have these different preferences. When we give people the ability to choose how often they change and the topics that they work on, it can help them find that spot that is renewable.”

For organizations seeking to ignite a drive toward innovation, reteaming is an approach that can foster greater creativity. But reteaming is not the solution for every situation. “I’m not saying bust your teams up and start your reorg now. I get misinterpreted for that. If you have a team and the chemistry is awesome, they’re delivering value continuously to the customers, it’s an enjoyable experience, and they feel like they’re continuously improving and motivated toward excellence, keep them together. Anytime that you embark on a deliberate reteaming, especially a large scale one, even if it’s through self-selection, it can cause a lot of fear and discomfort, so this is not to be taken lightly.”

Human-centered metrics

Heidi views coaching as one of the key components for determining opportunities for change with metrics that are geared toward the whole human rather than productivity-based data.

“I’m a big believer in engagement surveys on the individual level as well as a team level. Since the context is always changing, you can have benchmarks and check-ins with people to see how they’re doing. It’s focused on the learning and desire to be in that place that brings out the best in you.”

One tool that Heidi uses to ascertain the level of fulfillment for individuals and teams is the Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS). She recommends asking questions like “How likely are you to recommend working at this company?” with an accompanying field to explain why the rating was chosen.

Culture Amp is a product that Heidi uses to get feedback from a large number of people, but free products like Google Survey for groups of 250 people or less are available for those willing to spend time manually processing the responses.

In the process of writing her book, Heidi interviewed Kristian Lindwall who works at Spotify. He and a colleague shared their internal process for visualizing areas of improvement through their Spotify Squad Health Check (SHC).

In an SHC, “good” and “bad” are contextualized with an “Example of Awesome” and “Example of Crappy”, and team members use a scale of red, yellow, and green to indicate where practices in each area fall in the spectrum of awesome to crappy.

Heidi has adopted the SHC approach with the addition of movement to engage different areas of the brain. “I get a group in the room. We’d have red, yellow, and green objects on the floor. People would walk to the different red, yellow, and green, and then you debrief. You foster a dialog and take notes so you can use it as a team improvement activity.”

Heidi recommends the SHC be conducted quarterly and emphasizes that the results are not for management to analyze team dynamics. Rather, the activity serves as a tool for team reflection and self-improvement.

In addition to team reflection, Heidi is an advocate for individualized coaching. “I do unscripted coaching on a one-on-one basis with people and help them by listening, asking powerful questions, and forwarding and deepening the conversation. I help people set goals for how they either want to be different in the future or what they want to do differently in the future.”

“Through listening and powerful questions…managers get better at helping the person solve their own problem as opposed to…telling them what to do.”

As a coach, Heidi works with individuals that she doesn’t manage so there can be openness without the complication of her having control over salaries and promotions. While there are advantages to dedicated coaches, coaching can also be another component of a manager’s toolkit. This approach to coaching is one that Heidi teaches in her workshops at technical conferences.

“Through listening, powerful questions, and other things I teach, these managers get better at helping the person solve their own problem as opposed to the manager telling them what to do.”

Autonomy, master, & purpose

Heidi’s definition of innovation was inspired by Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. “I equate the ability to innovate with the ability to be creative — to come up with ideas and to act on them. It’s the pursuit of new ideas through the pursuit of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”

A key takeaway from Pink’s book was that knowledge and creative workers are not incentivized by money but instead by the pursuit of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Inspired by Drive and a coach she knew at Atlassian, Heidi started a 24-hour hack day while working at AppFolio to inspire creative solutions for customer and company problems by giving staff “wild autonomy” to work on any project they desired.

“I’ve seen firsthand the shift in energy possible at a company when you give the people more agency.”

The hack days were set up to emulate Pink’s ideals of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Two weeks before, everyone participates in a facilitated brainstorming session to come up with topics and prioritize them through votes. The week before the event, a marketplace reteaming event is setup during which people autonomously form teams based on what each person wants to help build.

“There was one project that was legendary called 24 fixes in 24 hours, which involved fixing bugs and UI issues that were really nagging but that never really got the time of day because they weren’t the top priority.”

In addition to the satisfaction of fixing a nagging problem, hack day participants found purpose in improving the experience of their coworkers and would sometimes get the added satisfaction of hearing from customers directly about the success of a tool.

“If you go to appfolio.com, they have a marketing website and within there you can see a webpage which is the real-time indicators of whether the system is up or down real-time monitoring. That came out of a hack day. It was an incredible experience.”

At Procore customer conferences, engineering and product teams partner with people from the construction industry through innovation labs to learn about needs and get direct feedback. “Things like this give us a connection to customers, connection with each other, and can shift the energy and motivation.”

Activities like workshops and hack days provide an opportunity for organizations to try out the idea of reteaming and self-selected teams before making a longer-term change. “When you do things where you give people the choice of topic and who they work with, you can see a different kind of energy that you might not see in the day-to-day. It leads one to believe maybe we should do something different in our day-to-day work.”

Heidi embraces the idea that giving people the freedom and choice to do what they want leads to better solutions. The value of events like hack days and innovation labs are often evident in the solutions that are created and the feedback those solutions garner. Even so, summaries are created after each event to capture what was produced and share across the company so that people at all levels of the organization can understand the value of the exercise.

“We’ve got to be responsible business people. We’re funded to do very specific things, so we have an obligation to talk about what happened and to make the time to close the loops. What happened and what did we learn?”

Agency & Open Spaces

Agency is another marker for gauging the success of a given program and is a focus for Heidi when she reflects on her own contributions. She asks herself: “How can I help others have agency? How can I help others feel like they’re pursuing whatever it is that brings out the best them every single day? Those are the people we’re gonna retain. Those are the people that are gonna want to come to work each day to work on our mission. Those are the people that you’re gonna want to work with because you see that spark in them. We’ve got to just try to ignite the spark.”

Heidi is excited by practices like open space events as a means to show individuals their own agency. She writes about an open space event at Procore and how she and her team planned the event.

“Having an event where people come together and find the shared causes that are of interest to them, can be really, really powerful.”

In an open space setting, the people who attend the event are empowered to construct the event schedule based on a common goal like improving collaboration across the organization.

“In organizations that are growing and changing and hiring really fast, you have the problem that sometimes people just don’t know each other. You’re walking around, even if you’re in the same co-located space, you don’t have the history together, you don’t really know each other. Having an event where people come together and find the shared causes that are of interest to them, can be really, really powerful.”

Experiences like open space events can help people embrace the idea that team change is inevitable and provide an opportunity to get good at it. By giving people choice and agency, organizations can provide an environment that fosters the purpose and drive that results in creative solutions for happy customers.

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

The post Reteaming & Creativity in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

I was first introduced to Marcus when I read his post on medium titled: “Why Your Programmers Just Want to Code”. The article was quite popular. Like many folks, I was prepared to hate this article and one I started to read it, I realized Marcus had a played a trick on me. He went on to explain that even the most customer-focused engineers can’t do so in an environment that doesn’t reward or encourage the behavior.

I invited Marcus to speak at the first annual Austin CTO Summit. His talk was a simple note card based activity that he facilitated from the stage. The premise was for everyone to write down ideas for how to improve the summit and the suggestions would be judged based on seniority and or criteria specific to each individual. His simulation demonstrated that systems like this discourage many people from sharing thoughts and stifles innovation.

I’m excited to help bring Marcus to Austin on July 16th and 17th at Capital Factory where he and his wife will lead their Technical Leadership Workshop.

Great skills are not enough

You’re part of a solid team where everyone has great skills and are passionate about their craft. You use agile, or scrum, or Kanban. You have modern tools and frameworks. Everyone’s working hard, putting in the long hours.

“My team was good, but something was getting in the way of being it great.” — Workshop Attendee

The industry is filled with success stories about great software teams. Teams that deliver amazing things with very few people, under incredible pressures. Teams that collaborate, cover for each other, and focus on providing innovative products together. What are they doing differently?

Create an environment where everyone is fully engaged

Beyond Agile. Beyond Teams. Beyond Culture. Remember how excited you were when you heard about agile? The manifesto states that “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” The scrum framework adds to that idea by stating, “Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.”

The Workshop

I’m bringing Marcus back to Austin for a 2-Day workshop focused on technical leaders. In the workshop, you will learn out to help your team perform at their best.

This is a hands-on workshop that will leave you with practical methods and solutions for improving how you and your team work together. The workshop is limited to 26 participants to guarantee an intimate and focused environment to maximize learning.

You’ll participate in engineering simulations which will challenge you and create “sticky” lessons that you’ll internalize and take back to your team.

Price: $2,099 per seat

Get Your Tickets Today

Who should attend?

• People who influence, organize, lead or manage smart technical people in order to achieve business goals.
• Tech Leads, Project Managers, CTO’s, QA Managers, Product Owners, Directors, Software Managers, ScrumMasters who want to improve leadership skills.
• Engineers, Programmers, Testers, and Architects who want to help their teams work better from the inside.

Day 1

[AM] Navigating Change and Learning

• Learn the difference between leading and managing
• Understand why change is hard, and how to help your team navigate it
• Uncover how to introduce self-forming project teams to your organization
• Use the Piaget learning cycle to build personal and team improvements
• Connect hands-on design exercises to real-world situations

“The debrief following each exercise provided ample opportunity for deep thinking about how we approach team dynamics, leadership, communication, etc. within our organizations.” — Workshop Attendee

[PM] Building A Productive Team Environment

• Learn the MOI(J) model of leadership
• Put your team’s ideas into practice in the real-world
• Hone your observation and feedback skills
• Improve your retrospective and structured debriefing skills

“The program revealed traits I want to avoid as a leader.” — Workshop Attendee

Day 2

[AM] Improve Communication about Requirements and Design

• Observe the impact of time pressure on technical communications
• Improve communication about complex technical tasks
• Understand the cost of assimilating new members into a team
• Identify real-world areas of improvement for your team’s communication practice

“I gained insight into what might demotivate people.” — Workshop Attendee

[PM] Removing Silos and Low-Bandwidth Communication

• Improve communication with remote engineers
• Understand the role of conversation in communication
• Observe the effects of silos on team motivation
• Observe the effects of Management by Walking Around
• Build proficiency in leading through asking, rather than telling

“Seeing the Satir change curve really helped me recognize that the feelings I had against change were something that affected everyone, even if there is a little difference between each of our experiences.” — Workshop Attendee

Space is Precious

This unique, hands-on workshop is held in small venues where the facilitators constantly interact alongside participants during the workshop.

Each workshop is limited to only 26 participants to ensure everyone has the best experience possible. These workshops fill up fast, so register today.

“You Gotta Love It” Guarantee

All of Marcus’ workshops offer a “You Gotta Love It” 100% money back guarantee. If you attend and feel the workshop was a waste of your money and time, they will issue a full refund, no questions asked. If you’re not happy, we don’t get paid. It’s as simple as that.

“I continue to work one-on-one with Marcus to this day, and I hope I will always be able to lean on him and dialog about challenges He is worth way more than you can ever pay him.” — Andrew Coven, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, Box.com

About the Facilitators

Their goal is to revolutionize the world of work for engineers and those who lead them. They believe that every engineer deserves a good boss, and that any engineer can become one. They stand apart from those who preach that “Leaders are born, not made”, proudly helping great coders become great leaders.

When you sign-up you they meet them, Marcus and Amy. They aren’t a large corporate team with an army of drone trainers. They’re a small, Oregon based team who does 100% of the training ourselves. They create and test their own curriculum. They live and breathe this stuff, and it shows.

Marcus Blankenship

Marcus has worked as a Software Engineer, Architect, Team Lead, Software Manager, Consultancy Owner, College Instructor, Leadership Coach and Business Coach. He specializes in helping Technical Managers and Leaders create high-performing organizations.

His book, Habits That Ruin Your Technical Team is now available. He is currently pursuing an I/O Psychology Degree (Leadership Specialization) from Penn State and lives in Eastern Oregon.

Amy Blankenship, RN, BSN, MSN-Ed

Amy has worked as a Nursing Instructor at Oregon Health Sciences University, specializing in clinical simulations and interprofessional instruction. She has also worked as a post-surgical nurse, hospice nurse, and a hospice clinical manager.

She currently serves as an Executive Board Member of Klamath Hospice, on the Oregon State Board of Nursing Curriculum Council, and as a leadership mentor for the Oregon Nurses Association. She will enter a Ph.D. program in 2018 and also lives in Eastern Oregon.

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