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Tag: creativity

  • The alignment workshop: Unearthing opportunities

    The alignment workshop: Unearthing opportunities

    In the good ol’ days, you’d make something useful, and then you’d put it on a shelf in your shop and somebody would come and buy it. You’d more than likely know that person as well. You’d be the supplier, distributor, shopfront, marketer, and customer services person all in one. You’d do all this and you’d still be home in time for dinner.

    Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. The process of getting your goods into a customer’s hands involves several teams. In my experience, very few of these teams are talking to each other.

    If you’re looking for a way to get alignment with your teams, there’s nothing better than doing an alignment workshop. What follows is a bit of an instruction guide to get you going.

    First things first, this is supposed to be fun and interactive. Everyone needs to participate, so if you see someone sitting back, invite them to give ideas or get their opinions. The fun part is that for the purposes of this kind of workshop, there’s no budget and no mandates. In other words, ideas don’t necessarily have to fall within each team’s discipline and this allows for participants to bring new perspectives to each other’s daily grind.

    You will need some A2 blank page workbooks and a bunch of post-it notes.

    Team creation

    Begin by creating teams. To run an interactive workshop with a group bigger than five is a nightmare of dominant personalities and ‘under-the-radar’ coasters. So, break them up a bit. Try to split the teams so that there is a good spread of expertise and personality in each one.

    There are two approaches to dominant personalities – put them all in one group and let them fight it out, or put one or two in each group. They both have their pros and cons, but I prefer option one because dominant personalities often become groups of one without input from others. Make sure each team has a designated scribe, a workbook, and post-it notes for ideas.

    Persona creation

    Once your teams are figured out, it’s time to begin creating personas. Personas are basically the archetypes of the kinds of customers that you serve. At the end of the day, every business is about serving a customer.

    The scribe needs to split a page up into three columns, titling them who, challenge, and opportunity. Let the teams make up people with rich personal lives, work lives and challenges, fitting all of these under their relevant columns.

    Once you get to the opportunities section, let them come up with some very broad ideas. Don’t get into detail here. You don’t need mechanics. If the idea is “a Facebook competition with a car as a prize”, that’s fine. No need to break it down further.

    At the end of the process, each team presents their personas to the rest of the room. This is for debate and crafting. This is not a competition to see who made the best personas. Keep it light.

    The customer journey

    The next step is customer journeys. Come up with three situations that a customer might find themselves in. Maybe it’s buying supplies. Maybe it’s looking for more information. For each situation, come up with what your customer may be thinking or doing. Are they stressed out? Are they phoning a lot of suppliers? Are they googling something?

    Then the ideas, as the name suggests, are where we come up with a few tactical ideas to help this customer with their thinking/doing or situation. This needs to be done for each persona and can be quite time-consuming. Gauge how many breaks are required here.

    The six in 10 approach

    Finally, there are six in 10. Six in 10 is coming up with six ideas in 10 minutes. This is a solitary activity. Each person sits with an A4 page to do this. Once they’re done, they converse with their team about their ideas and pick the top three. They then present those to the broader team.

    And you’re done. A workshop like this can take up to five hours, so make sure you can clear diaries to get it done.

    The next step is to take those personas, user journeys, and ideas and look at how feasible everything is. Compile everything into a document that you can share. By the end of the day, your teams will have understood the customer better, understood each other better, and you’ll hopefully have a few ideas on how to improve your customer’s experience.

  • Working from home’s impact on innovation

    Working from home’s impact on innovation

    In Greek Mythology, Hercules had 12 trials to overcome. These included slaying lions, nine-headed monsters, and cleaning the stables of immortal livestock. If the ancient statues are accurate at all, Hercules completed all of these trials without wearing pants. Imagine what he could have done in a pair of jeans? Moving on to some recent (and perhaps more relevant) events, COVID-19’s adverse effects should never be underplayed or ignored.

    Having said that, there is one positive thing that shines out in the gloom: societal change. In the last few years, negative events have sparked the adoption of new behaviours. During the SARS pandemic, ecommerce thrived. The 2008 financial crisis sparked the Uber and Airbnb revolution. Can you guess what COVID-19 has sparked?

    A dream come true?

    Working from home is now a thing. Before COVID-19, how many grouchy conversations did you have about working from home? If you’re anything like me, quite a lot. What stood in the way? The ship doesn’t sail until everyone’s on board. So here we are, we’re all on board. And guess what? It isn’t the cruise we all thought it would be. Working from home comes with a price. That price is a detrimental loss of innovation. Team cohesion, constant contact and communication, all drive inspiration. Without inspiration, there’s no innovation.

    It seems that the only way to get innovation is to stop working remotely. That has one obvious ramification, we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and people’s health is at stake. There’s another, less obvious ramification – working from home has increased productivity. Without the constant distraction of chatty colleagues, frequent coffee breaks, and adhoc tasks, productivity has shot through the roof. The dilemma is, do you kill productivity to drive innovation, or do you kill innovation to keep increased productivity? Increased productivity is a short-term win. It improves your bottomline in the here and now. Innovation is a long-term game. It gives you an edge when it comes to penetrating new markets, optimising processes, and building better products. You can’t pick one; you need both.

    The making of innovation

    There are many hypotheses as to what drives innovation within a business. Some will tell you that it’s a combination of smart people, process and policy. Others will tell you that innovation is about need, funding, and research. Clearly, it has something to do with being around people; else, our isolation from one another wouldn’t have made such an impact. In its simplest form, innovation is born when your perception of an external situation is altered by an internal shift in perspective. The shift will help you see the situation from a different angle, which opens you up to other solutions.

    Think of it like a Rubik’s cube. You’re not going to solve a Rubik’s cube if you just look at it from one side. What causes these shifts? Empathy. What causes empathy? A leading cause is listening to and understanding other human beings. There are outliers who seem to generate innovative ideas out of nothing, but it is very likely that they’re just really good at understanding people’s needs and shifting their own perspectives accordingly.

    More talk, less meetings

    So, where does that leave us? What’s the solution? Is there some sort of killer app? The answer is no. But perhaps, now that you’re aware of the innovation issue, you can make more of an effort to keep in touch with your colleagues and do some active listening. Video chats don’t need to be restricted to meetings.

    The year 2020 has been an absolutely devastating trial for everyone. There have been a record amount of retrenchments, economies have crashed, and things seem bleak. Like Hercules, we will overcome these trials. Most of us still have our pants, and that puts us a step ahead of him.

  • Ideas and data

    Ideas and data

    I’m taking a brief break from writing semi-amusing stories to talk about creativity.

    There is a kind of creative idea that needs to be carefully moderated. The WIBCI idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if…

    WIBCI’s are great during brainstorms. They’re great to get the ball rolling, to stir, to inspire, to get the room talking. WIBCI’s should never make it to production unless they can stand up to the test of ‘why’?

    All great ideas share one thing in common. They have purpose. Their purpose may be to explore a theme (like a well-written novel or a movie), their purpose may be to solve a problem (like a new product or an application). The bottom-line is that purpose is important. To be cool is not a purpose.

    An idea’s strength can be tested by how many people would potentially care about its purpose. If an idea’s purpose is to strengthen a brand position, you can be assured that not many people are going to care about the idea. If an idea is going to fundamentally disrupt an industry, then you’ll find the number of people that care will shoot up dramatically. People care about things that make them think, that inspire them, that change their lives, both functionally and intellectually. How do you determine if your idea is going to do that?

    Simon Sinek tells us that we should ask why. We should interrogate. We should seek the reason for existence. We can apply this principle to just about anything, but it works quite nicely with ideas. Asking why an idea needs to exist is fundamental to its success. Having the data to back up the existence of an idea is crucial. To say that we need an application to allow people to see aggregated local community news might sound like a good idea, but where’s the data? Have I identified a need? Has their been an overwhelmingly positive response to a survey? Did I create a rapid prototype that received a ton of praise? No? Then I am sitting with a WIBCI, and sorry to say, WIBCI’s are nothing.

    Creativity is only as good as its foundation. If the foundation is data, research, insight, empathy, and communication, then your output is going to be great. But if your foundation is weak, you’re going to have weak ideas. Once in a while you’ll luck out, but mostly you’re going to be shooting in the dark, wasting a lot of time.

    Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.