An average leader tells.
A good leader explains.
A great leader shows.
The best leader inspires.
—
Inspired by this William Arthur Wards quote: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."
This is one of my favorite quotes:
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” - Bucky Fuller
Great tools create leverage. But notice the quote doesn’t stop with “makes the job easier.”
The best tools facilitate learning and growth.
The best tools create new possibilities.
The best tools unlock potential.
The best tools empower.
The best tools make the impossible feel possible.
Many leaders create directives, vision statements, mission statements, and values. Properly designed, these leadership artifacts can act as a force multiplier in an organization, enabling better prioritization and faster decisions.
For maximum impact on your company’s culture, performance, and engagement, visions, missions, and values need to be crystal clear, inspiring, easy to remember, and easy to share.
Your vision should be something that people can easily visualize; how many of us have read vision statements that don’t create a clear mental picture?
Your mission should be something that creates intense emotion; how many mission statements are flat and generic?
Your values should become obvious in your organization and part of your everyday language and actions; Enron had integrity chiseled into their lobby wall.
Importantly, your vision, mission, and values should be brought to life with frequent, fresh, authentic emotional stories about the impact your organization has on others and the world.
Terms - vision, mission, values - are critical, but not enough.
Some leaders go farther by investing in training for their people. The training aims to help people demonstrate values, achieve the vision, accomplish the mission, etc. Training sometimes involves a subscription to a content library, sometimes it’s a workshop, sometimes it’s only for leaders and managers.
Training can be a great investment, especially if you apply your training immediately. Unfortunately, training is often quickly forgotten and left in the classroom, whether it’s virtual or real-life. (Aside: This is why micro-learning can be extremely effective. Learn one high-leverage practice, apply it, repeat.)
Terms are the table-stakes starting point. People often forget training. This is why leaders and managers need to provide their people with great tools.
Great tools are designed with immediate application in mind.
Great tools embed the learning into the design of the tool itself.
Great tools instantly upgrade performance. (Checklists are one of my favorite examples.)
Great tools increase leverage.
Great tools become indispensable.
So, leaders and managers, are you giving your people the tools they need to accomplish your mission, realize your vision, and demonstrate your values? Or are you satisfied with a value stating “be innovative” and encouraging your people to read a book by someone at IDEO? More on great tools tomorrow…
Knowing the right things to build is less magic and more process.
Here’s a summary of the philosophy behind Productyzer, a simple and unique approach to building the right thing:
Needs first - Customer needs and goals are the building blocks of great products.
Whole journey - Needs and goals should inform the end-to-end customer experience.
Same metrics - Companies and customers should measure whether needs and goals are met identically.
Syntax matters - Using the same language reduces “lost in translation” fallout.
Fresh data - Like fruit, customer data should be consumed fresh.
The Productyzer process is simple: Observe. Listen. Prioritize.
Observe.
Observing customers and users is absolutely essential to understanding unmet needs. After experimenting with dozens of qualitative and quantitative methods on a wide range of projects, I’ve come to recommend a combination of three approaches most often:
Day in the Life - Understanding the broader context and real lives/jobs of your users and customers provides context and builds empathy. Direct observation of human behavior by trained individuals reveals unmet needs that people may be unaware of and/or not articulate in interviews. Learning to perform and performing the tasks oneself gives an even deeper understanding.
Think Aloud - Listening carefully while watching your customers and potential customers use your product and/or competitive products highlights unmet needs, unfulfilled aspirations, and related jobs-to-be-done.
Actual Use - Measuring actual use of products, features, etc., validates whether a problem is actually important to your customers and which features are worth investing in.
Your observations should be reframed as product building blocks:
When I _______, I need to (increase/decrease) the _______ of _______.
Notice that the building block gives context (When I…), includes the word need, indicates a direction (increase/decrease), and unit of measurement. This simple, consistent syntax helps reduce confusion and increase validity and reliability in your quantitative Prioritization process.
Other sources of customer data such as NPS and feature requests from sales are valuable but should be reframed as building blocks as well.
Listen.
Listening during a needs-first interview is both pleasantly simple and deceptively difficult. The simple part is mastering only three questions and reframing into product building blocks.
Here are the three questions:
What do you want to accomplish?
Why?
How will you measure success?
The difficult part is asking these three questions over and over without adding leading questions (e.g., “But, do you like feature X?”) or annoying the interviewee. Starting the interview by describing your desire to deeply understand the most important unmet needs of your customer and maintaining an active, constructive interview style will reduce the likelihood of annoying the interviewee. An active, constructive style means authentically and obviously care about what the interview is saying and consciously building upon the responses. Also, silence is your friend as an interviewer. Allow people a few moments to resume talking before you jump back in.
The interview process should focus on the whole journey that a prospect takes starting with discovering and defining the problem or need, researching solutions, deciding how to proceed, using the solution, and measuring success.
These three questions will give you all the data you need to create product building blocks, which you should do in real time during the interview to maximize clarity and reduce translation time later. A product building block is a statement of a customer need that gives your designers and developers the best opportunity of understanding and solving customer problems.
The building block syntax is as follows:
When I _______, I need to (increase/decrease) the _______ of _______.
Notice again that the building block gives context (When I…), includes the word need, indicates a direction (increase/decrease), and unit of measurement.
Here’s an example of a reframe for a statement like, “I hate when people bother me for no reason when I’m trying to get stuff done.”
Reframe: When I am deeply involved in a task, I need to decrease the frequency of non-critical, non-urgent interruptions.
As mentioned, the goal of reframing is clarity. Ideal responses to the reframing process are “That’s right.” and “No, when I…” with a correction. For the reframe above, I would respond, “That’s right!” and hope that the promise of unified communications someday comes true.
At the end of an interview, you should have dozens of product building blocks from across the end-to-end customer experience to prioritize. When asked “how many people should I interview?”, I would say at least 5 and as many as you can afford given your budget and timeline. Also, assume that you will need to conduct interviews as often as every month or quarter for some markets to keep the data fresh.
Prioritize.
Your Observe and Listen phases should generate somewhere between 50 to 250 unique building blocks; nearly identical building blocks can be combined, especially if you have a large number . Prioritizing your building blocks requires a comparison between how critical and urgent a need is and how satisfied a customer is with the existing solutions. Addressing needs that are neither critical nor urgent is a waste of time and money.
A simple formula for prioritizing your building blocks is as follows:
Critical + Urgent - Satisfied = Priority
A survey of 30-300 customers and prospects asking the following questions for each building block, along with a few demographic questions, provides sufficient prioritization data:
How critical is this need on a scale from 0 to 10? (0 = unimportant, 10 = my job depends on it)
How urgent is this need? (0 = no plan for investment, 10 = I am looking for a solution now)
How satisfied are you with your current solution? (0 = no solution, 10 = no plan to change solutions)
For example, a building block with a 10 in Critical, an 8 in Urgent, and a 4 in Satisfied would have a Priority of 14 (10+8-4). The highest Priority score a building block can have is 20; the lowest is -10.
In addition to prioritizing the building blocks individually, relationships between building blocks and demographics should also be examined. For example, analysis may suggest that a number of unmet needs may be shared by respondents for particular industry, highlighting a possible opportunity for product, sales, marketing, etc.
Roughly sizing the opportunity and investment required for the building blocks with the highest Priority determines the roadmap. A minimum viable business case and minimum viable technical sizing triangulates the building block data to finalize the prioritization process. For example, an unmet need with a high Priority score may require a prohibitive amount of investment.
Communicate.
Importantly, the prioritization data should be shared throughout an organization to inform not only product and development, but also strategy, sales, and marketing.
Ideally, this process is iterative and participatory throughout development as well. For example, prototypes and user testing continue the customer feedback process as products and features are developed.
The next time someone at your company or one of your customers asks what your product roadmap looks like, don’t hold an idea session with a lot of sticky notes on the wall...at least not until you have prioritized unmet needs to solve against.
People innovation is combining novelty, value, and execution to optimize performance, culture, climate, engagement, leadership, and organizational development. People innovation requires a dramatic, conscious commitment to purposefully designing and cultivating the proper conditions for business success. It’s applying scientific insights and fostering experimentation. It’s creating an inspired, focused, self-aware community where both internal and external stakeholders can rally around your purpose and create value in their own way and in their own voice. It’s demonstrating that people are your most valuable asset.
Importantly, it’s about becoming the organization that competitors envy because you’re always stealing their talent and market share: everyone wants to work both with you and for you.
To enable you to quickly and easily benchmark your team or organization, we created a simple people innovation scorecard.
How the scorecard works Complete online here
Higher scores are better. Select the highest number you can say genuinely describes your organization. Add up your score for the 9 trends (between 1 and 5 points for each).
What’s your score? Rate your organization on a 1 to 5 scale for each trend.
Meta-trend 1: Start with your stakeholders and all else will follow.
1.1. Meet your users and clients where they are.
1.2 Make it even simpler.
1.3 Value accomplishment over activity.
Meta-trend 2: No more lords of business.
2.1. Share your expertise as broadly as possible, internally and externally.
2.2. Architect engagement.
2.3. No one can hide…or should want to.
Meta-trend 3: Disrupt thyself.
3.1. Know thyself.
3.2. Know thy aspirations.
3.3. Know thy red team or know thy future substitute.
40 - 45 World-class. Talented people everywhere admire you and want to work with you and for you.
35 - 39 Great. Internal and external stakeholders recognize you as a leader in people innovation.
30 - 34 Good. Your organization and culture could be much more productive and engaged.
20 - 29 Mediocre. Your competitors are stealing talent and/or market share from you regularly.
<19 Lackluster. You’re at a significant risk of disruption from a non-traditional competitor and many people, especially your best leaders and high potentials, are actively looking to leave your organization.
Meta-Trend 1: Start with your stakeholders and all else will follow.
Stakeholders are external and INTERNAL people who are essential to your business model. Google famously stated, “Start with the user and all else will follow”. Now this philosophy needs to extend to other stakeholders, including employees. Understanding what your users, buyers, clients, and employees want to accomplish is absolutely critical in today’s fast-moving free agent workplace.
To create breakthrough products, services, and experiences, you must understand what your users and clients want to accomplish. Knowing and relating to their most important goals, the most important problems they are solving, their most valued wants and needs, etc., is essential. Even successful companies that have traditionally spurned market research (famously, Apple) create desire by delighting people; delight comes from a profound understanding of aspirations and a solution that exceeds them. Feedback, as well as user and client insights from qualitative and quantitative research, helps your organization throughout the value chain, from mission, marketing and sales to development, delivery, and support.
Ask “What do you want to accomplish?” not “What do you want?”. Users and clients are often unable to articulate or envision the best solution to their problems or the experience that will change their lives. (That’s your job!)
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Today’s top people and HR leaders are recognizing that personalized development is necessary from top-to-bottom in organizations. However, employees are busier than ever. This means that HR and People teams need to measure the effectiveness of different programs and curate accordingly. This means applying frameworks like Lean Startup’s “Build Measure Learn” to continuously improve programs through metrics and stakeholder feedback.
This also means using flexible frameworks that can effectively be deployed throughout an organization. Using fewer models and frameworks means that everyone in an organization is speaking the same language about leadership, values, development, decision-making, conflict, and more. Since many HR/People teams are understaffed, this also reduces their burden. That said, balance is important – people crave variety, so learning experiences around the “fewer frameworks” should vary to keep employees interested, especially top talent and high potentials.
Furthermore, the “new HR” focused on culture, engagement, leadership, teams, etc., is about not only simplicity and personalization, but also real-world business results. Senior teams are acknowledging the relationship between traditional HR metrics like retention and the success of various functional teams. This means that HR and People teams should not only think about the impact of HR programs throughout an organization, but also understand the relationship between HR/People initiatives and the organization’s most important business objectives.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
The days of “time in office” affecting performance evaluations should be gone; however, in many organizations, the importance of an employee is still measured by the number of meetings one “must” attend or how many late nights and weekends one works. This antiquated thinking may be limiting innovation and creativity through interruptions, unproductive meetings, and other engagement killers. Providing a clear mission and empowering people to work whenever and whenever they want may change your organization for the better (with a certain amount of overlap for communication purposes).
Whether it’s coding or marketing, creative work requires concentration. 24x7x365 availability can also increase interruptions if it’s not managed appropriately. Ensure that your employees don’t have to cram “real work” into nights and weekends due to the onslaught of interruptions at the office or during traditionally-defined work hours.
Perhaps most importantly, disconnection is critical for productivity, innovation, and focus. Leading employers are making vacation mandatory to ensure people take time to recharge.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Meta-trend 2: No more lords of business.
Leaders must be inspiring rather than motivating, conscious as well as quantitative, and open to collaboration and feedback. Controlling and restricting information at the top of an organization doesn’t work anymore.
Whether interacting with clients, prospects, or employees, the best companies are excellent communicators: mission, purpose, and values resonant internally and externally. Just as importantly, the best companies create advocates by selecting a meaningful purpose and delighting their customers again and again. Their brand message expands virally, increasing the number of advocates even more and attracting top talent.
Given the amount of online research buyer’s conduct during their journey, inbound marketing created the need to not only be found through great online content, but also provide valuable information and expertise at every single touch. CX (customer experience) and UX (user experience) are viewed (rightfully) as interconnected, facilitating a personalized, delightful journey from unknown visitor to passionate advocate.
The same thinking applies to internal communications as well: employees should feel valued at every touch from leadership, people/HR, their manager, whoever. In addition, employees should be equipped with valuable user, client, and market data so they can apply their best thinking to the most important business challenges.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Having a crisp, resonant mission and clear, simple organizational values are now the status quo for any competitive organization. The best organizations now provide a mission AND do everything possible to inspire, enable, and get out of the way of their talent at every level of the organization. This means that information and day-to-day decision-making are pushed down the organization, not held up at the top.
Of course, if mission, values, strategy, and goals are not simple and well-understood, chaos can result. This critical information should be communicated so frequently (and simply) that everyone understands. We’ve observed that when it starts to feel like over-communication, an organization might be communicating just enough.
Importantly, a clear strategy and organization-level understanding of a company’s business model, value proposition, business goals help people prioritize their work and know what they should NOT do.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Fortunately, even large, traditional companies are abandoning the often-unproductive annual performance review. People need feedback more than once a year to improve. Fortunately, many solutions allow organizations to gather observations about character strengths, engagement, leadership, etc. Unfortunately, we’ve observed that overuse of these tools can replace authentic, in-the-moment conversations and places unproductive distance between stakeholders.
Research has strongly suggested that focusing on strengths (without overusing them) and character is critical for optimal performance. Understanding and appreciating other people’s character strengths can build relationships and empathy between key influencers in an organization. Great relationships between people facilitate compassionate candor, which accelerates and improves the feedback process.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Meta-Trend 3: Disrupt thyself.
Organizational change must be inside-out, client-focused, and, most importantly, self-disruptive. More than ever, you must challenge and question assumptions and bureaucratic practices to increase agility.
Enabling self-knowledge and self-awareness throughout an organization is essential for optimal performance. In addition, research suggests that focusing on strengths and overused strengths is superior to attempting to address weaknesses. Self-understanding can inform job design, selection, performance reviews, training, development plans, and more.
Today’s best organizations are helping individuals develop from the inside-out, focusing on character, strengths, emotional intelligence, stress, energy, and well-being. Contrasting against merely focusing on competencies, this enables lasting, authentic change. Research has also suggested that feedback is necessary for self-awareness; according to Fred Kiel’s Return on Character, people rate themselves highly even if others don’t.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Traditionally, personal development is offered only to leaders. Now, expectations for learning opportunities, promotions, stretch assignments, and more are common throughout an organization. To keep individuals – especially top talent – from jumping from company to company for promotions, new challenges, etc., organizations must encourage and enable people to become their best selves.
To facilitate whole person development, top organizations provide tuition reimbursement, gym memberships, onsite meditation rooms, mindfulness training, internal and external events, mentorship, mentoring, and more. Leading HR/People teams should recommend and curate personalized developmental experiences as often as possible.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
New entrants and substitutes are a well-known threat to every business and organization. Today, substitutes can appear out of nowhere. Red teams combine client insights, business expertise, and start-up style without the constraints of your existing business, enabling you to find novel solutions to critical business challenges more quickly.
Red team experiences can be utilized to expose your top talent to client-facing, high-stakes challenges even faster, capitalizing on their beginner’s minds and fresh perspective.
What’s your score? Select the response below that best represents your organization.
Time to add up your score… Complete online here
Meta-trend 1: Start with your stakeholders and all else will follow.
1.1. Meet your users and clients where they are. _____
1.2 Make it even simpler. _____
1.3 Value accomplishment over activity. _____
Meta-trend 2: No more lords of business.
2.1. Share your expertise as broadly as possible, internally and externally. _____
2.2. Architect engagement. _____
2.3. No one can hide…or should want to. _____
Meta-trend 3: Disrupt thyself.
3.1. Know thyself. _____
3.2. Know thy aspirations. _____
3.3. Know thy red team or know thy future substitute. _____
Total
40 - 45 World-class. Talented people everywhere admire you and want to work with you and for you.
35 - 39 Great. Internal and external stakeholders recognize you as a leader in people innovation.
30 - 34 Good. Your organization and culture could be much more productive and engaged.
20 - 29 Mediocre. Your competitors are stealing talent and/or market share from you regularly.
<19 Lackluster. You’re at a significant risk of disruption from a non-traditional competitor and many people, especially your best leaders and high potentials, are actively looking to leave your organization.
Now what? We’re here to help you improve your score! Contact us at hello@tilt365.com or jeff@tilt365.com
About the Tilt 365 People Innovation Scorecard Complete online here
This simple framework was designed by Tilt 365 people innovation SMEs for individual contributors, leaders, coaches, consultants, and internal experts in HR, OD, people ops, etc. to use when evaluating a team and/or organization’s people innovation. The scorecard highlights 3 meta-trends in people innovation distilled from Tilt 365’s primary research with our clients, as well as a modified informal delphi analysis using dozens of expert sources with hundreds of insights (e.g., HBR, PWC, Forbes, McKinsey, DDI).
About Tilt 365
We measure and grow character strengths like creativity, inspiration, trust, and integrity for world-leading organizations like Red Hat and Facebook using proprietary, research-based self-assessment and feedback software. Fundamentally, we are people people who want to ensure that every stakeholder interaction you have, both internally and externally, reflects the character strengths that people value at the appropriate intensity. (We humans have a tendency to overuse our strengths.)
We’d love to hear from you.
Asking “What do you want?” is often an awful experience, often leading to boring ‘me-too’ feature requests and short conversations.
Asking “What do you want to accomplish?” is enlightening, uplifting, interesting conversation starter.
The classic example is Henry Ford’s “people would say they want a faster horse.”
More contemporary examples…
More cabs or friendlier cabbies instead of Uber. People want to accomplish arriving at Point B safely, quickly, and economically.
People may have asked for more hotel choices instead of AirBnb. People want to accomplish staying at Point B safely, quickly, and economically.
People may have asked for better mailing or phone number lists for potential donors instead of indiegogo. People want to learn about (and support) amazing causes.
Focus on what your users and clients want to accomplish…all else will follow.
Inspiration: Outcome-Driven Innovation (Ulwick)
Note: I started this work while I was at IBM and divested to Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions as we recognized the often unrecognized to involve users and clients, as well as a broad range of internal stakeholders, in innovation and experience design processes.
Isn’t innovation just a buzzword?
Innovation is valuable novelty realized through execution. In other words, value, execution, and novelty are each necessary conditions for innovation. Value differentiates innovation from invention, execution separates innovation from mere ideas, and novelty distinguishes innovation from best practices. In spite of its recent popularity as a buzzword, few organizations have combined the insights, resources, and processes necessary to utilize innovation as a sustainable competitive advantage. This manifests itself in many ways: unforeseen substitutes creating serious disruption, the promise of future technology unrealized, and organizational silos often create internal competition rather than healthy conflicts and collaboration. This article aims to provide a brief, yet comprehensive plan for creating innovation quickly.
To facilitate innovation, organizations must understand market needs, invest in people and processes for creating novel approaches to meeting those needs, systematically analyze the value of those approaches, and refine approaches, products, services, etc., to maximize value.
In my observations from working within and with more than 25 Fortune 500 companies, the three most commonly encountered enemies of innovation are arrogance, isolation, and uncertainty.
Unfortunately, arrogance, isolation, and uncertainty often negatively impact culture, process, and analysis in the following ways:
1. Arrogance
2. Isolation
3. Uncertainty
Fortunately, neutralizing the three enemies of innovation is simple with a systematic, comprehensive approach that properly combines understanding, observation, valuation, conceptualization, validation, iteration, and implementation.
Enabling innovation through a clear, resonant, healthy organizational culture (even in a huge organization with traditional processes)
Borrowing from two famous quotations, innovation favors the bold — and the prepared.
o Identify the executive owner of innovation
o Create a cohesive, interdisciplinary ‘board of innovation’ to provide high-level direction and resources.
o Include 4–8 other stakeholders (e.g., users and clients)
o Benchmark your current experience against leaders and competition.
o Align innovation metrics and business metrics using a balanced scorecard approach
o Create an innovation strategy that is clear and actionable.
Notes about strategy: Strategy is systematic, inclusive, and, perhaps most importantly, exclusive. Strategic analysis is not a daily thing like execution, management, and measurement. Strategy is not a collection of lists, a vision, or a plan. Strategy is both qualitative and quantitative.
o Overcommunicate strategy, mission, and commitment throughout your organization.
o Empower innovation resources.
o Identify and empower an innovation team
Minimally, four skills are necessary: research, design, business analysis, and prototyping.
o Communicate your innovation mission, strategy, and plan internally
o Create a broad internal process for gathering insights such as an innovation jam (e.g., through Yammer)
o Enable lab and field experimentation.
o Create lab testing environments and processes that enable rapid validation and user testing
o Create field testing environments — preferably locations near corporate headquarters with otherwise superior service to ensure satisfied customers even when concepts, POCs, and pilots fail. (This is even easier on the web.)
Facilitating innovation through people, processes, and analyses
The following process for innovation can be completed comfortably in 2–3 month cycles by a small team with 2 week checkpoints and iteration. Reducing the time between research and conceptualization is critical, as user and client insights are like dairy products — consumed fresh and in small quantities (thanks, Jan Chipchase!). Also, requiring designers and developers to participate in field research will likely increase empathy and invigorate creativity.
o Framing
o Establish Biannual Innovation Workshop (Offsite) with action research elements, strategy and plan evaluation and updates, etc.
o Understanding | Observation
o Incorporate ethnography into research processes: field research fuels innovation
o Desired Outcomes focus groups with End Users
o Preliminary IP Evaluation
Conceptualization | Validation Phase
o Planning workshops
- Create rapid business cases focused on both revenue and cost benefits
- Decide which ideas should be included during this iteration
- Formative Test Plan — Establish appropriate measures, variables, controls, participants, etc.
o First iteration
- Design Charrettes — Broad participation to generate and synthesize ideas
- Conceptualization — Sketches, wireframes, low fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.
o Second iteration
- Conceptualization | Refinement — Low/medium fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.
o Third iteration
- Conceptualization | Refinement — Low/medium fidelity prototypes
- Validation — Focus groups, user testing, walkthroughs, etc.
Formal Innovation Evaluations
- Executive Evaluation — POC, pilot, refine, or reject
- Documentation — Failures, successes, experiments, procedures, solutions, etc.
- Intellectual Property (IP) Evaluation — patents, publications, etc.
Implementation Interlock with Champions, Stakeholders, etc.
- Create objectives, requirements, specifications, etc., for implementation teams
- Define quantitative and qualitative analyses during POC, pilot, and beyond using embedded metrics, quasi-experimental designs, etc. o Iterative participatory design
- Review feedback from users, clients, and other stakeholders
- Review relevant business metrics
- Communicate internally and externally regarding innovation
Guiding Innovation
When adapting the formal process described above to your own innovation aspirations and strategy, consider the following guiding principles throughout:
Note: These ideas didn’t just come to me ex nihilo; special thanks to users I had the pleasure of observing and clients we had the pleasure of partnering with, as well as many of my colleagues at IBM and Toshiba.
Here's why product managers should really be called experience managers:
1. Product focuses on a product, its features, etc. Good start, but experience focuses on the user/client perception of the product, which matters much more than the product itself.
2. Product focuses on the product. Experience focuses more broadly, considering how the product is used, who is using the product, what users/clients need to know before, during, and after use, why the problems solved by the product matter to the user/client, etc. The additional insight about what users/clients want to accomplish is innovation and creativity fuel for your team.
3. The best product managers are experience managers already, focusing on FAQs, documentation, support, user stories, collaboration between organizational functions (i.e., translating sales and marketing for engineering and vice versa). Might as well start owning the role formally.
Here's how to become a great experience manager in just 5 sentences (assuming you're already a great product manager):
1. Humanize users, clients, and teammates to build empathy between teammates and stakeholders (e.g., personas, participatory design, direct observation, day-in-the-life).
2. Ask, understand, and, especially, observe what users, clients, sales, and marketing want to accomplish (specifically do not ask what they want).
3. Create and maintain a detailed experience map and experience roadmap that includes formally users/clients as stakeholders.
4. Have the courage to ask dumb questions and question assumptions, the foundation of "design thinking".
5. Welcome and appreciate any opportunity to gather feedback first-hand, whether through observation, listening in on a sales call, or using embedded analytics.
Science suggests that one’s happiness is approximately 50% heritable, 10% situational, and 40% deliberate actions. While it might be too late to influence your genetics and certain elements of your situation might be outside your sphere of influence, you can focus on deliberate actions and building new habits to make ourselves substantially happier.
Again, all of these have scientific evidence behind them. Related… Thank a scientist! So many brilliant individuals anonymously provide the insights that are organized by popular science writers (non-scientists) like Gladwell and Pink. Important work, but remember the hundreds of scientists who contributed to their work as well!
Sonja Lyubomirsky — the author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want- is both scientist and author. The list below comes from her excellent book, which organizes her work and the work of hundreds of other scientists; the methods are roughly listed in the order that each has influenced my own life. (I’m still working on all of them!)
1. Religion / Spirituality — Believe in something beyond yourself.
2. Social relationships — Humans are meant to be social.
3. Optimism — For example, believing that negative situations are temporary (and not, for example, your destiny).
4. Flow experiences — The beautiful, uninterrupted balance between challenge and skill.
5. Avoiding overthinking or social comparison — Norming against oneself, not against others.
6. Gratitude — Expressing appreciation for life, often recommended as part of journaling.
7. Acts of kindness — Simple happiness booster: Volunteer for a cause you’re passionate about. Win-win.
8. Goals — Actionable, aggressive, achievable.
9. Meditation — Meditation in 6 words: Be still. Start with one breath. 10 more: Focus on breath as if your life depended on it.
10. Exercise — 20 minutes a day, at least. (Pickup basketball often combines exercise and flow for me.)
11. Learning to forgive — Let go whether the other person deserves it or not to avoid carrying the weight around yourself.
12. Coping strategies — Acknowledging negative emotions appropriately. For a fun but on point intro to this topic, see the movie Inside Out.
13. Savoring life’s joys — Making time to enjoy what you should enjoy.
Which methods are most effective for you?
Jeff
@jeffsmithphd
jeffsmithphd.com
Why I created the change canvas and checklist
I love checklists. My PhD dissertation was about checklists and how checklists can increase performance in only a few minutes without any previous training. Some people may think that checklists are boring, but there are rarely quicker and easier ways to increase performance than by implementing a checklist that captures and simplifies best practices. Read Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto if you don't believe me.
Any change involving people is hard; organizational change can be extraordinarily hard, especially for an organization with a history of success and an established culture.
Fortunately, there are empirically-validated best practices that should be part of any change project (unless you're purposefully experimenting with improvements upon best practices through systematic design and measurement). I've used these best practices during innovation and change projects with clients ranging from Fortune 100 to startup. Strongly recommended!
Tool 1: Now these best practices are captured in a simple, easy to understand Change Checklist.
Hierarchical task analyses always have been and always will be one of the fundamental techniques for human factors, process optimization, industrial engineering, etc. The technique is simple to describe - break an activity down into tasks and subtasks until you've captured and organized everything. You've now established a common language for discussing change, identified areas for improvement and intervention, etc. Importantly, you've broken the activity (or experience or whatever) into manageable components.
As usual, UX and design have come along and added a fresh, chic element to a decades-old technique, calling it experience mapping. As I mentioned, I adore the organization of a checklist. An experience map gives similar visual structure, adding the dimensions of people, time, place, touchpoint, etc.
A well-designed experience map template (or canvas) provides visual structure AND incorporates best practices.
Tool 2: The Change Canvas adds this visual structure to conversations about change, providing guidance about appropriate techniques during each stage if and when change seems hard or impossible. The techniques are pulled from a variety of disciplines and represent best practices for implementing change.
These two tools should be used together, starting with the canvas's simple but huge question, "What do you want to accomplish?" This is the most important question in design and/or innovation research.
As you read through the questions, you might think they seem basic and rudimentary. However, my experiences with leaders, managers, teams, and organizations has taught me that essential fundamentals are rarely agreed upon, documented, or even discussed.
Moving back and forth between the two tools will guide conversations and refine plans for change.
Here are the top ten leader and org dev challenges, as shared with Tilt 365 and I by our clients and our expert community of Tilt 365 certified coaches and consultants:
1. Lack of execution
2. Lack of innovation
3. Lack of autonomy
4. Lack of internal communication and collaboration
5. Lack of work-life balance
6. Lack of retention
7. Lack of accountability
8. Lack of user and client insights
9. Lack of creativity
10. Lack of organizational learning
There are dozens of great productivity tricks, leadership tools, performance metrics, cool apps, etc., that are intended to address these challenges: OKRs, red teaming, ROWE, developing great product managers, mandatory vacations, MTP, OKRs (again), field research, participatory design, and micro-training, to name one method or idea for resolving each of these 10 issues. Happy to help you and your organization with any of these…just message me.
But I want to explore these issues a little more deeply.
As an example, let’s use the 5 why’s method to explore “silos / islands”. Silos are isolated pillars of a hierarchical organization; islands are similarly isolated areas within a matrixed organization. (The 5 Why’s method comes from Toyota.)
Challenge: We don’t communicate well across functions; for example, engineering and sales don’t share information effectively.
Why (1)? We don’t have a process or simple way to connect.
Why (2)? We don’t need to talk.
Why (3)? We speak different languages. Engineering always says ‘no’ while sales always says ‘more, faster’ and promises the customer faster, better, and cheaper.
Why (4)? They don’t understand what we’re doing and how hard it is.
Why (5)? We don’t talk.
Let’s look at another challenge.
Challenge: The voice of the customer is not well-represented in our business.
Why (1)? Only salespeople and marketing talk to customers; internally, he or she who codes, wins.
Why (2)? Putting technical people in front of customers make us nervous.
Why (3)? Engineers don’t understand how to talk to customers and have better things to do.
Why (4)? Engineers don’t care about customers, they care about solving technical challenges.
Why (5)? It’s always been this way.
I quickly conducted a 5 why’s analysis on each of these ten challenges and 5 themes consistently emerged:
1. Agility - How quickly an organization can adapt and shift to context. Too much creates a lack of execution; too little, a lack of innovation.
2. Feedback - How well an organization communicates information. Too much limits autonomy; too little creates silos and islands internally.
3. Purpose - How well an organization defines its purpose. Too many purposes creates burnout and confusion; a lack of and/or weak purpose creates retention issues.
4. Empathy - How much an organization appreciates its stakeholders. Too much empathy eliminates accountability; too little empathy means people don’t care about user and client issues (not to mention colleagues, especially from other functions).
5. Awareness - How well an organization knows itself. Too much awareness stifles creativity by defining one’s role and mission too narrowly; organizational learning and development is limited when there’s not enough awareness.
Many of the challenges had numerous root causes. For example, let’s revisit organizational silos and islands. Surely there’s more to this challenge…with email, mobile phones, chat, texting, wikis, smart watches, etc., there are no technological limits to communication.
Why (1)? We don’t have a process or simple way to connect. (No agility.)
Why (2)? We don’t need to talk. (No feedback.)
Why (3)? Engineering always says ‘no’ while sales always says ‘more, faster’ and promises the customer faster, better, and cheaper. (Too many purposes; no perceived connection between purposes.)
Why (4)? They don’t understand what we’re doing and how hard it is. (Not enough awareness or empathy.)
Why (5)? We don’t talk. (Too much awareness maintaining ‘traditional roles’ in an organization. Not enough awareness of why sales and engineering would be valuable to each other.)
Here are the top ten organizational challenges again with primary root causes. Again, numerous root causes typically contribute to each organizational challenge. In typical Tilt 365 fashion, each root cause is triggered by the overuse or under-use of something that is extremely valuable when used optimally.
Agility
Lack of execution: Too much agility
Lack of innovation: Not enough agility
Feedback
Lack of autonomy: Too much feedback
Lack of internal communication and collaboration: Too little feedback
Purpose
Lack of work-life balance: Too many purposes
Lack of retention: Not enough purpose
Empathy
Lack of accountability: Too much empathy
Lack of user and client insights: Too little empathy
Awareness
Lack of creativity: Too much awareness
Lack of organizational learning: Too little awareness
Implementing cool tools like Trello and WorkLife, ingenious methods like public OKRs and ROWE, and uploading eLearning modules for having critical conversations without an appropriate amount of agility, feedback, purpose, empathy, and awareness compounds organizational challenges rather than solving them.
As CEO of Tilt 365, people are always asking me what makes Tilt 365 valuable and different. Here’s the short answer: our software, training, services, and empirically-validated model address the root causes of significant organizational and leadership challenges: agility, feedback, purpose, empathy, and awareness. Our tools are valuable not only on their own, but also as a catalyst for other tools and methods (like those above).
We also accelerate leader and org dev for high-performing organizations by increasing positive influence and facilitating the creation and development of innovative cultures.
We’re different because our software is simple, scalable, connected, conversational, and positive. We focus on what’s best about you and your colleagues, your natural strengths. Then we allow you to quickly gather feedback at a pace you’re comfortable with, again focusing on your strengths and creating awareness, balance, and agility. This enables agile shifts based on context, candid feedback that matters, inspired conversations about purpose, empathy across your stakeholder network, and self-awareness throughout your organization
A story in six words from Hemingway (perhaps, there’s a controversy):
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Concise. Emotional. Impactful.
I’ll never be the writer that Hemingway was, but here’s leadership for high-growth organizations summarized in only 5 words:
1. Learn.
2. Enable.
3. Inspire.
4. Act.
5. Repeat.
(If only LEIAR was an easily-said acronym or spelled a clever word.)
These steps don't always need to be followed 1 to 5, but if the leaders and people innovation processes in your organization embody these 5 words, you’re in (or headed to) a great place. Lean's build-measure-learn is great for startups, but I think 'enable' and 'inspire' are worth mentioning from my observations at larger and/or more mature organizations, where sometimes people are encumbered, disenchanted, and bored.
If I missed a word or you have a better 5 (or 4, or 3, or 2, or 1) word summary, I'd love to hear it.
The “flipped classroom” movement started when teachers realized that it was easier for students to watch lectures at home and complete homework with expert assistance in the classroom - flipping the classroom experience. This is a brilliant idea and should be implemented nationwide here in the USA where nearly everyone has access to technology. (Maybe our embarrassing STEM challenges could be resolved?)
Many organizations have not adopted the iconoclastic 'flipped classroom' approach for training leaders or developing their organization. We just implemented the ‘flipped classroom’ approach for our certifications at Tilt 365 and I conducted research on the related concept of problem-based learning about 12 years ago at the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future, so I wanted to share some benefits and pitfalls.
1. Saves time and money for attendees without compromising the experience. Fewer overhead costs to pass along (e.g., reserving a physical space), no travel for participants or instructors, fewer hours of expensive facetime with SMEs, etc.
2. Self-paced learning. Videos, presentations, exercises, case studies, etc. allow participants to learn when it’s convenient on a variety of devices.
3. Expert “office hours.” Integrative discussions with a subject-matter expert through virtual “office hours” allow students to actively participate in the class and provide a natural checkpoint for the self-paced learning elements.
4. Easier to schedule. Shorter sessions are easier to schedule for today’s knowledge workers. Rather than waiting for 2-4 entire days to open up in your calendar for an in-person training, you can start immediately.
1. Neglecting the relationship-building elements of training. Because the training is not occurring face-to-face, I strongly recommend video chat during the “office hours”. Related - Office hours should be about questions, not lectures. If questions are not forthcoming, start with a related question from a previous participant or keep asking for questions until someone asks one. Also, use surveys, quizzes, and LinkedIn research to learn about your audience.
2. Not creating a simple feedback loop between in-class questions and course material design. Great questions always occur during the “office hours”. These should be fed back into FAQs and the next round of course materials.
3. Not having a dress rehearsal and pre-class checklist for your “office hours”. Meeting and webinar software can sometimes be clunky, not to mention the risks of unmuting participants, bad internet connections, VoIP, etc. Have a quick checklist that you run through prior to any webinar.
4. Not designing the class for a “beginner’s mind”. This is especially important if the subject-matter expert attempts to design the training without outside input. It’s challenging (impossible?) for an expert to assume a beginner’s mind, so make sure your materials and discussions truly start at the beginning of the journey by involving novices (and participants) in your design process.
5. Boring materials. Video lectures can be exciting (hint: unless you’re telling an engaging story, shorter is always better), but make sure to add exercises, links to related sources, checklists, scorecards, tools, models, etc.
I strongly recommend reading Duarte’s Resonate to learn about how to create compelling presentations and stories, which are the foundation of any flipped classroom approach.
I think that the ‘flipped classroom’ approach can be applied to any skill or objective (even Leadership and Organizational Change!), but I’m eager to be proven wrong.
PS Even subjects and sources that require face-to-face and/or physical interaction (e.g., cooking classes) can be augmented by a 'flipped classroom' approach to save time and money while improving the quality of the physical experience.
There are plenty of articles about how Lebron is the best player in the world right now (true), should have won the MVP instead of Andre in one of the best NBA Finals battles I can remember (maybe), and works hard before, during, and after every game (no doubt). I’m from Steeler country and even I have to agree.
That said, Lebron is the most frustrating player in the NBA because he overuses his character strengths of inspiration, creativity, and confidence (Tilt 365 parlance) to fulfill the Magic/Michael prophesy bestowed upon him since he was probably 5 years old. Lebron would win more often and would dramatically increase his positive influence with more focus and less creativity.
Three ways for Lebron to become a better player and leader immediately (yes, it would be this easy):
1. Stop overusing creativity: Don’t play H-O-R-S-E with yourself during NBA Finals games for no reason. You are the best player in the world and have an extraordinary basketball IQ. Fadeaway 3’s, contested fadeaway 19 footers (the worst), cross-body runners, floaters, and jumping skip passes to a teammate that has fallen asleep after you’ve dribbled around pointing and grimacing for 15 seconds should be your last resort, not something you waste 23 seconds of the shot clock setting up with lazy (or perhaps overly macho?) isolation offense. Please take more efficient shots.
2. Stop overusing inspiration: Don’t keeping taking the other team’s triple-dog-dare to score in the most challenging and tiring way (even though you can). Yes, Lebron, you can score in isolation by backing up to 30 feet and taking someone off the dribble, but you can get much easier, more efficient buckets, which will help keep you fresh throughout a game and series (not to mention involve those sleeping teammates). There’s no shame in using numerous screens or even setting screens to win. (See, for example, 2015 NBA Champion Warriors) Jordan learned this as he matured by moving to the post instead of dribble isolation; you seemed to regress in the Finals. Fewer highlights, more wins.
3. Stop overusing confidence: Involve teammates by taking different roles in contemporary offensive sets. Watching the Cavs offense during the Finals was like watching a team from 1960 with bigger, faster players. Most players stand around for an entire possession; one player aims to score using isolation and brute force. Boring, inefficient, and exhausting! What would a team do to defend a J.R. Smith / Lebron screen-and-roll with Thompson/Mosgov on the glass and Shumpert/Jones/Miller/Delly knocking down corner 3’s? Lebron could have played the Curry or screener role with the Cavs running the same plays as the Warriors to great effect.
The quick backstory on how my wife Meg and I ended up in the Kiln.We saw Bryna Donnelly of GreaterGood.org receive an award in November 2014 on Fox’s Cause for Paws, so I cold emailed Pedigree offering to help whoever was working with Pedigree in 2015. The email reached Bryn and she invited us to Mississippi, enticing us with the opportunity to learn how to weld, jackhammer, build fence, and save animals. Coincidentally, I just had a conversation with a Tilt 365 colleague about how most people don’t have “business” heroes, so I immediately accepted her generous invitation and booked flights to MSY so we could meet one of ours face-to-face.
We had high expectations for what Bryn would be like and she exceeded them in every way. PhD’d professor and geneticist turns into construction, animal rescuer, and disaster response expert. I observe leaders for a living and Bryn is a truly great one: bold, focused, inspiring, decisive, flexible, likable, passionate, hard-working, patient, funny, humble, willing to admit a (rare) mistake, hands-on, a natural teacher, etc. It’s hard to decide what her greatest strength is, but I watched her interact effectively with stakeholders ranging from the local council to expert local welders volunteering their time to trustees of Mississippi to the abandoned animals themselves. Bryn was extraordinary in every context.
Here are the 5 most important leadership lessons I learned from Bryn while in the Kiln:
1. Pour your own concrete. Leaders should always be deeply involved in the foundation and permanent elements upon which the rest of your business or organization will be built. When building an animal shelter, this sometimes means pouring the concrete yourself; for your organization, this might be product development or client relationships.
2. Passion alone doesn’t get things built. Bryn embodies “be the change” - transforming raising awareness into meaningful change through execution and resilience. For her, this involves everything from raising money, identifying the most needy shelters, managing the projects from top-to-bottom and end-to-end, enlisting volunteers, negotiating prices for materials, finding local police to guard materials overnight, and even the most hands-on tasks like welding, demo, fence building, and triple-checking measurements. Bryn left the job site as sweaty and filthy as the rest of us every day.
3. Plan to be flexible because it’s going to rain or the wrong parts will be delivered or… Planning and flexibility are essential. That said, Bryn was never flexible about the purpose of the project: helping the animals of Hancock County, Mississippi. Whether advocating at a council meeting, feeding us delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so more money could be spent on the build, or training someone how to make wire ties safer for puppies, Bryn was always focused on creating a safe, comfortable environment for the animals in spite of lightning, thunder, hail, rain, negligent subcontractors, etc.
4. Work smarter, not harder. This became a mantra at 7175 Texas Flat Road as we lifted steel beams, worked around a subpar foundation, constructed fences, etc. Taking a moment or two to think about the simplest and easiest course of action is essential for every organization. A related note, don’t confuse activity with accomplishment or waste time on unnecessary activities. The real work is taxing enough.
5. Always show gratitude. Bryn expertly involved every conceivable stakeholder (human and animal) and thanked them repeatedly for their important contributions. For animals, this could mean a better tarp to provide shade or rain cover in ‘exchange’ for reinvigorating break time play sessions with the volunteers; for humans, it was a thank you, smile, laugh, hug, meal, handshake, and/or post-work drink. From the generous locals who donated excellent homemade meals for us to all of the volunteers who traveled from Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and elsewhere, Bryn made everyone feel appreciated and valuable.
For Bryn and the other extraordinary volunteers I met this week (Yacco, Allan, Shawn, Greg, Zach, Flori, Becca, Nate, Emily, Cheese, Keith, Nancy, Roo, John, Jason, the crew from Red Rover, and anyone I regrettably forgot), I hope the weather is holding off this week so you can continue your amazing work. Thanks again for allowing Meg and I to enjoy the hands-on experience with all of you. We hope to see you in North Carolina soon, maybe in Wake County?
If your organization is looking for someone to help your volunteer or outreach program make a bigger, better impact, I suggest you contact Bryn and GreaterGood.org immediately.
This simple framework was designed by Tilt 365 people innovation SMEs for individual contributors, leaders, coaches, consultants, and internal experts in HR, OD, people ops, etc. to use when evaluating a team and/or organization’s people innovation. The scorecard highlights 3 meta-trends in people innovation distilled from Tilt 365’s primary research with our clients, as well as a modified informal delphi analysis using 20+ expert sources (e.g., HBR, PWC, Forbes, McKinsey, DDI) with 200+ insights.
How the scorecard works
Add up your score for the 9 trends (between 1 and 5 points for each). Higher scores are better.
What the scorecard means
40 - 45 World-class. Talented people everywhere admire you and want to work with you and for you.
35 - 39 Great. Internal and external stakeholders recognize you as a leader in people innovation.
30 - 34 Good. Your organization and culture could be much more productive and engaged.
20 - 29 Mediocre. Your competitors are stealing talent and/or market share from you regularly.
<19 Lackluster. You’re at a significant risk of disruption from a non-traditional competitor and many people, especially your best leaders and high potentials, are actively looking to leave your organization.
1.1 Architect engagement. Inspire your people and design conditions for success, don’t try to drive it and/or own it.
1.2 MIES is the new KISS. Especially with people innovation, less is more and fewer are better. MIES = Make It Even Simpler.
1.3 No one can hide. Feedback has elevated customer/client expectations and eliminated bureaucratic camouflage.
2.1 Go there! Empathy multiplied participation = perceived value
2.2 Go big! Design for scale, not for internal bureaucracy.
2.3 Go home! Take vacation and disconnection as seriously as performance and availability.
3.1 Know thyself. Structured personal development is more personal (and necessary) for everyone.
3.2 Know thy clients. Organize around what your clients want to accomplish (specifically NOT what they want).
3.3 Know thy red team or know thy (future) substitute. Red teams combine client insights, business expertise, and start-up style without the constraints.
So what's your score?
Add up your score for the 9 trends (between 1 and 5 points for each). Higher scores are better.
What the scorecard means
40 - 45 World-class. Talented people everywhere admire you and want to work with you and for you.
35 - 39 Great. Internal and external stakeholders recognize you as a leader in people innovation.
30 - 34 Good. Your organization and culture could be much more productive and engaged.
20 - 29 Mediocre. Your competitors are stealing talent and/or market share from you regularly.
<19 Lackluster. You’re at a significant risk of disruption from a non-traditional competitor and many people, especially your best leaders and high potentials, are actively looking to leave your organization.
A formal definition might sound like “People innovation is about combining novelty, value, and execution to optimize performance, culture, climate, engagement, leadership, and organizational development.”
People innovation requires a dramatic, conscious commitment to purposefully designing and cultivating the proper conditions for business success. It’s about applying scientific insights and fostering experimentation. It’s about creating an inspired, focused, self-aware community where both internal and external stakeholders can rally around your purpose and create value in their own way and in their own voice.
It’s about becoming the organization that competitors envy because you’re always stealing their talent and market share: everyone wants to work both with you and for you.
Most importantly, it’s about demonstrating that people are your most valuable asset.