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Episode #164: Molly Bauch
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Molly Bauch specializes in business transformation, innovation, and strategic communications. She has more than 15 years’ consulting experience helping clients launch new programs, transform service delivery, and embrace fundamental, sustainable change. She’s a Climate Reality Leader, an International Society for...
The post Episode #164: Molly Bauch appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the Policy This podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. I hope everyone's well. We are now through Thanksgiving here in the United States. So on our way to the holidays until the end of the year and the end of the decade. So I hope you are able to spend some time with friends and family.
00:00:29
Speaker
So on this week's episode of the show, I'm really happy to chat with Molly Bao, who is a senior manager at Accenture. She is very engaged in the climate policy that they are working on there at Accenture.
Design Thinking Insights
00:00:43
Speaker
And I first met Molly at a design thinking workshop with some of my colleagues here at the Urban Institute. And I enjoyed the design thinking workshop so much and enjoyed the process by which we went through
00:00:57
Speaker
and work through the challenges and policy ideas that we had in mind that I asked Molly to come over and chat with me about design thinking workshops in general, how she facilitates those, what's important to have those workshops work for attendees and for people who are participating.
00:01:17
Speaker
So along with this idea of how we present information to an audience and how we visualize data in a report or on a website, I thought Molly's work at Accenture and the work that she has done with us and obviously with others was really interesting and to think about how we can engage our audience or engage stakeholders
00:01:35
Speaker
to create something new and to work in ways that maybe they're not used to working with, in this case actually standing up, actually talking, actually using post-it notes and drawing and writing and all these techniques that maybe we don't use that often but can be really powerful tools in our arsenal to get people thinking, get people up and moving and working with their ideas.
00:01:56
Speaker
So I found it to be a really fun conversation as you'll hear. And I think it'll be really educational and enlightening for you as well. So I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the show with my interview with Molly Bow. And here is that interview. Hi Molly. Hi John.
00:02:20
Speaker
You're welcome. I'm using my radio voice, Jen. Hello. Hello, Jen. How are you? Thanks for coming over. Yeah. I didn't know if I'd make it because our Nats won the World Series last night and very, very late night, early morning. It's been a late, like, few weeks now.
00:02:37
Speaker
For the record, you are sporting Washington nuts, colors, well done. And it's a little hot here today. You're making it work. I'm trying to make it work. I'm just trying to stay awake for another 24 hours. We can do this.
00:02:52
Speaker
Um, so let me give folks a little bit of
Career Journey and Climate Focus
00:02:55
Speaker
background. So some of the team from urban went over to Accenture to you guys to do a design thinking workshop for a number of different reasons, primarily to talk about how our data and tech team can work with the research team. And we did this. Great full day workshop with you and your team. And I've done a few design thinking workshops, but this one I thought was really phenomenal. And that's because I was facilitating and I designed the workshop. I'm also very humble.
00:03:24
Speaker
And you've got good radio voice. There you have it. So I thought we could talk about that. Talk about your background a little bit and talk about, I think I'm curious in how you got into the design thinking work and what it takes to run a good workshop like that. And I know you do a lot of these other workshops in lots of other fields and sectors. So I'm curious about how you build all these.
00:03:46
Speaker
Maybe to give people a little bit of background, you've talked a little bit about how you got to where you are. Yeah, super circuitously. Entirely just random rabbit hole kind of way. So the long story short is I'm from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. You can't quite tell that because I was a radio and television journalist and the accent was beaten out of me.
00:04:09
Speaker
I was in I was in J school at the University of Georgia and I had a professor we used tape recorders back then say Miss Bao do you hear how you sound and I said yes yes I do and he said don't do that ever and so
00:04:25
Speaker
beat the accent right out of me. My beat was always environmental and energy and the nexus of that and policy. And I did that because as a kid, I wanted nothing more than to run with the lions and the animals and National Geographic Discovery Channel was just our jam. Zoo camp was my first camp.
00:04:47
Speaker
And so just growing up in Louisiana, which is the moniker is the sportsman's paradise. It's just, it's a beautiful place. So we did a lot of outdoor activities and I was always really drawn to that. And so I was drawn to tell stories about that in school. And there's, there's the little known fact to those not in the South that Louisiana is under massive environmental pressures. We lose a football field of land every 45 minutes to coastal erosion.
00:05:17
Speaker
We built these incredible, the Army Corps of Engineers built these incredible levies that actually prevent natural alluvial flooding and reclamation of land. And so without getting into it, I care deeply about telling the environmental energy policy story and trying to surface solutions and have focused conversations around that. So I went to J school, studied journalism at the University of Georgia.
00:05:42
Speaker
and added on political science as a major and wanted to continue in that vein and so came up to DC to be the next Christiane Amanpour and joined the Elliott School of International Affairs at GW to get my master's in international affairs. But the idea was that I would parlay that into a field journalism career and go out and be on the front lines of things.
00:06:05
Speaker
things slightly shifted when nine eleven happens two weeks after i started grad school so here we are group of folks studying international affairs and the world order is flipped on its head and most of us went into the national security sector so i quickly joined a
00:06:20
Speaker
Small start up with a mentor who is also a professor who taught me a class in formal briefing. So it's all about telling stories but through this new medium called PowerPoint. I was used to pulling things together and taking stories and finding themes and translating them into ways people could hear and
00:06:39
Speaker
here was a brand new medium through which you could tell stories that seemed to be the norm in Washington. So I took that, we connected, I did a startup and then I hopped from national security company to company and wound up in the intelligence community and did that for many years through big professional services firms. And I really, really wanted
Utility Innovation and Clean Energy
00:06:57
Speaker
to talk about the existential threat that was climate change. So that was the bigger picture to me.
00:07:04
Speaker
And so made a jump into Accenture, the firm that I found you in, we found each other in. And so I lied when I said this is a short story. So let me get to the quick of it. So I at Accenture am helping drive our clean energy transition work.
00:07:20
Speaker
So, trying to make the business case for energy transition with our utility clients. How do you help them decarbonize and drive electrification of transit, of the built environment, doing energy management as a service, helping people with e-mobility, if you will?
00:07:37
Speaker
So all of those attendant services require brand new thinking. I'm the innovation lead at one of our largest utilities and trying to get them to pivot from what has historically been a monopoly that was disrupted with deregulation. It just utilities are being cannibalized by new entrance and deregulated markets. You're seeing the rise of renewables and the price parity of clean tech just destroy their classic business models. And so it is a ripe time for
00:08:04
Speaker
innovation in business models in tech in the way we engage customers utilities still call their customers ratepayers bless their little hearts and Just think of them as someone who's going to buy the monopoly of electricity But for the fact that that's not the case and that continues not to be the case for many many folks who are seeing deregulation just up end their their fundamental and
00:08:27
Speaker
way of life, which is a good thing for consumer choice. So we're trying to decarbonize, decentralize, and digitize this sector, and it's got phenomenal implications for climate change, which is the existential crisis of our time. So I essentially try to make the business of transition work for folks, and that requires a lot of new cross-functional, multidisciplinary thinking, which is a really long way of saying
00:08:54
Speaker
Design thinking is one of the ways that we bring people into a room together and get them to go to brand new places. And so you asked me, John, to come talk about design thinking, which is the workshop we were, the methods we were using to surface new ideas for you guys.
00:09:12
Speaker
And in a nutshell, design thinking or human-centered design is a way of developing solutions in the service of people. It's a series of methods that form into a discipline. And those methods help you move into right brain
00:09:29
Speaker
contextual thinking versus left brain analytical textual thinking to help understand how to make ideas stick. So ideas are a dime a dozen. Coming up with ideas, never been a problem. But design thinking is a rigorous method to think big and fail fast because it's a heck of a lot simpler to take a eraser to a whiteboard than a sledgehammer to a construction site.
00:09:55
Speaker
So, it's got a couple of tenants that are pretty fundamental to it. It is a way of rapidly iterating on ideas. Do you know how many times it took Dyson to come up with the first vacuum, like the handheld vacuum? All I know is when I go to the store and I see the fan every time I go, I still put my hand in the
00:10:15
Speaker
You got it. You got it. You got it. Because that's what you did as a kid. It hits the little tips of your fingers there. That's right. Over a thousand. So the man was relentless in trying to find the right design for this handheld vacuum. And that's one of the central tenets is that
00:10:31
Speaker
You think big, but you fail fast and learn and then apply what you've learned into that next iteration. So it's iterative, it's prototype driven. You're not just opining and admiring the problem. You're getting it off the flipping page and you're prototyping a thing that's tangible, tactical, practical, so that you can put into play and see how people
00:10:50
Speaker
react to it and that's the idea instead of you thinking what's best for your customers or your humans you actually have real humans react to it and then you observe and you listen and you you drop your ego because you need to be willing to accept and absorb that feedback intelligently and so we we try to get people out of a classic group think of they know what's best and try to
00:11:13
Speaker
create what we call serious play environments that stimulate that right brain creative aspect. And so when you were doing the methods with us in that urban design thinking session, I had you up, I had you guys moving, I had you guys gamify, I had you guys compete with voting with each other's ideas.
00:11:34
Speaker
And so that's how we brainstorm. And the idea is that we start with volume of ideas and diverge wildly. If you think about the bottom part of a diamond, you just get way out there to think about new ideas. We frame the problems in a thoughtful, intentional way. And we always start with a how might we, because it
00:11:57
Speaker
is structuring the problem in a way that says, might, there is a problem, we, it's collaborative, and how we think there's a solution there, but we're not prescribing the solution embedded in the question. We're not saying, so how are we going to get more users to listen to Sony through better headsets?
00:12:18
Speaker
Right? That presupposes you're listening to music offered by Sony through headsets versus just getting customers to be our best advocates because we've got this brand new business model of iTunes or whatever it is, right? And so the bottom of that pyramid is wildly divergent to get you to new places and spaces. So for example, if you were a horse and buggy maker and I said, John,
00:12:39
Speaker
I need you to make a better horse and buggy. Well, you just go get a faster horse. You're not going to think about how do I capture electricity. I make a car. One of these things is not the other. If I said, my God, your candle, it's just not bright enough. We need more. We need better. You're just going to thicken the wick and exactly get a better candle. Design thinking is about how do you take those ideas in just
00:13:02
Speaker
you never say no. It's a yes and, and you just get as many as you can. And that's the thinking big part, thinking wild and outlandish. And a good facilitator is gonna synthesize the kernels of those ideas to start building. But then the top of the diamond starts to converge, right? So if the bottom is divergent, getting ideas out there, the top then converges to kick those tires, because that's the fail fast, right? You can't just noodle endlessly, right? It'll cycle and you'll get so far down the line
00:13:30
Speaker
then that's the construction site to which you need to take a sledgehammer. So this is the whiteboard and an eraser concept. So that's the central tenets of design thinking. It's human centered, it's playful, it's iterative, it's prototype driven, and it's collaborative to get cross-functional folks in parallel thinking, not group thinking. So when you are working with groups, I like to actually think of the energy
00:13:55
Speaker
climate change area that you're working with. In my head, I'm thinking about someone from an energy company, another energy company, people within regulators, all sorts of people sort of in the room. When you are working with groups who are in the room, I suspect that a lot of them may be looking at the post-it notes and the markers and the whiteboard and saying, that's not serious. So how do you break down those barriers to be like, it's okay.
00:14:24
Speaker
We're thinking broad here. We're going to get to what you might consider the serious part, but we need to start at this ground
Engaging in Design Thinking Workshops
00:14:30
Speaker
level.
00:14:31
Speaker
I let them know what the outcome is. So one is progressive disclosure. I take them along bit by bit and I give them the so what, why they should care. And so when we are starting to solution, we try to get down to the root cause of something. So before we even start to solution, and I'm circuitously answering your question, we come back to the heart of it in just a second. So just two days ago, I was up in Philadelphia and we were trying to
00:14:54
Speaker
crack a ridiculously complex nut with how you evaluate how assets are deployed in the field for utilities. So if I put up a poll or a transformer or if I make wires, whatever those things are, how do I know that that was a good investment? How do I actually evaluate that? And the system is just garbage for which they get feedback.
00:15:14
Speaker
on what was deployed, how much was deployed, and part of it is a process, part of it is just a strategic structural challenge, and then part of it's just, it's candidly the tech that enables it. And so I had a lot of serious engineers in the room, and they walk in and there are whiteboards and post-it notes and a whole bunch of concept posters, and it's a super light, bright room with
00:15:36
Speaker
No chairs. Stepping it around. A lot of very important. They were soaked fish out of water. Poor guys. Fish out of water. Just awkwardly stood around. And so the idea is we said, look, this is all about helping you guys succeed. And so you let them know what the value proposition of these exercises are. And I ask them, do you think the process today is great? And who here is completely happy? And they're like, well, no, no, no.
00:16:03
Speaker
Not met at all. So you start to build a little bit of empathy and let them know that you're listening to them. And then before we even started in on the post-it note of what the solutions might be, we started getting down to the root cause. And so we started with, without getting too long, it was called an infinity cluster. And so I said, look, I'm going to give you five minutes time to think of as many challenges to this particular asset assessment process.
00:16:27
Speaker
and tech enablement that you can, and they just went wild because it was almost cathartic for them, right? So it was a way of gaining a little bit of momentum because it was just an outlet for them. And then instead of just putting it on a post-it note and ignoring it,
00:16:42
Speaker
What the Affinity Cluster exercise does is now they're standing around and it's on a blank canvas and I start to take their problems and I say, okay, great, we seem to have some data integrity issues. Who else has that? And then five other people say, oh, I've got a data integrity issue. But then as I start to ask some of the five whys, well, why is that a challenge? Well, what's that a problem? Use more words around that. And they started to surface some of the root causes and then
00:17:03
Speaker
then I don't even have to do the work anymore. They're starting to point to each other going, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a problem. Oh, I see that. And they also see the clustering effect of how many other people also see that as a challenge. And then it starts to center where you need to be focusing some of your solutions rather than just work on the outlier challenge that might have happened once. It's not really a fundamental problem. And so that is one of the ways to gain momentum. But these activities are typically
00:17:30
Speaker
time boxed and pressurized. So you don't have a lot of time to sit there and self filter and critique the facilitator because I'm going to keep you up and I'm going to keep you moving. And then I'm going to show you how these progressively build. So while we start to unpack
00:17:46
Speaker
some of the problems and then the five whys to really get to the root, we're pulling them along with us to say, all right, now we're going to take that, we're going to use that problem set to start brainstorming some of the solutions that are going to help you be successful with your boss, your team, your customers, the impact you want to have. So it's a constant reminder of the value proposition of this exercise. So it sounds like part of it is like a group therapy session.
00:18:10
Speaker
It's certainly cathartic for some people. That's right. That's right. But it's also a very different way of working. I mean, how many times have you been in a room where people are up, are collaborating, thinking about huge thoughts? And so we do a lot of divergence. There's a lot of thoughts. And then they get to converge. They get to like vote and bring it together and kick the tires. So they get to see this moving really fast. It's not just a meeting where we're admiring the problem.
00:18:35
Speaker
We're getting up and at the end of almost every meeting, there is some level of a prototype. So they get to take that and then we hold them accountable for what is the next iteration on that. So when you have, you're working with this group, you have different levels of expertise, different levels of interest. How do you, I'm thinking about people who are listening to this who might want to try different exercises with their group. How do you as a facilitator make sure that there's not a person or
00:19:04
Speaker
maybe some sets of people are just like, I'm not doing this. Like this is stupid. Like how do you get engagement? How do you get them all engaged? Especially for the people I think there's, I'm sure you've run into the people who are just like the never design thinking people, right? Like this is not serious and I'm not going to do it. So how do you get those like,
00:19:21
Speaker
So surprisingly, John, I have been forewarned going into, say, nuclear engineering groups or executives. And from the C-suite to the tactical practical, you have to have a good facilitator.
00:19:36
Speaker
You have them a facilitator who really is part art, part science, and the art is really reading the crowd and understanding how to play to their emotional resonance of why this set of methods is going to get them to an outcome that they care about. So some of that is communication and storytelling.
00:19:55
Speaker
It's also, though, making sure you right-size your groups and are entirely intentional about the mix before. So if you walk in and you can just willy-nilly let anyone in the door, you will set yourself up for failure. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200 and sell this workshop on Tuesday up in Philly.
00:20:14
Speaker
I was maniacal with the clients that we select the right people. It's a cross-functional group, so there's no groupthink, it's parallelthink. So they're challenging each other's ideas. So we had change managers, we had senior leaders, we had junior bees, we had a vice president rolling in and out. We had consultants weigh in as well, so they're bringing in cross-functional expertise from other industry.
00:20:37
Speaker
And you've got to, when I say right sides of the group, it's not just the aggregate of the group, but the sub-teams and the working groups, so that when I pull them apart, I'm making sure that there is a mix of seniority and the facilitator is bouncing back and forth between them, so no one is dominating, and you're actively calling and pulling people into the participatory discussion.
00:20:59
Speaker
So you've set up, you've done a lot, it sounds like a lot of pre-work to make sure you have the right, let's just say 20 people. When you are in the room, at least the way we did it, you had us all sitting around this big table doing my favorite icebreaker, which is your first concert, which is a quick aside because my favorite part of our particular thing is we had a range of
00:21:18
Speaker
People and ages one of my colleagues his first concert was Jimmy Hendrix. That's right 1967 1967 and then we went around the room and someone else's first concert was Britney Spears That is range that is that is the whole
00:21:33
Speaker
That is range, sir. That is range. So you go around this room and then how do you identify, because presumably you don't want to have all the junior people in their little group and all the vice presidents in their group, you want to mix them up. So as you as a facilitator are going around the room, are you making mental notes of what each person is and saying, okay, I got to make sure that this person is over here and this person is over there.
00:21:56
Speaker
So nine times out of 10, I prearrange the seating because I sit there and I walk with the client and it might take a couple of sessions to do this to understand the functional background and the range of or the depth of their expertise and then deliberately design
00:22:11
Speaker
going ahead with using the word design, the subgroups. With Urban, we didn't have enough insight and it was fairly pressed. And so I let the key client know that we were reserving the right to mix the groups as we were progressing. You've already talked about some of the exercises you do. Can you sort of give me your top five favorite things that you do in these workshops?
00:22:40
Speaker
have coffee, tell jokes. Food is always good. Take lots of pictures. So here's a classic sequence. So a group walks in and they think they've got a problem. Let's wing it with automation. You guys were doing an automated sort of digital strategy play. A lot of folks are doing automation. And so they classically come in way too narrow without really understanding the problem. And they say,
00:23:10
Speaker
We want to use machine learning or artificial intelligence and or we want to put in a ton of bots cuz bots are the best ever thing for stuff and right I got a big hammer and I'm looking for shiny objects and I'm gonna whack the tar out of it and
00:23:31
Speaker
So they want to understand how to methodically pull a portfolio of things they want to automate together. And so that's a classic workshop. OK. Super. So we get in. And one of the first things I do is an icebreaker to help people really just understand design thinking. And so this really isn't getting the solution. But this also puts design thinking
00:23:56
Speaker
into, I think, perfect relief. When I start, I say, I want to do an exercise. I'm going to give you 10 seconds. I explain what design thinking isn't much the same language that I just explained to you. But those are words. They bounce off people's heads. Let's just like design thinking, let's do something to make the example. And I say, I want everyone to draw a present. Everyone draw a present. John, you did this. What did you draw?
00:24:20
Speaker
That's what I'm trying to remember. I know what you drew. You drew a box of the bow. Of course. Everyone draws a box of the bow. I've done this in French and everyone still draws a box of the bow. So, commonalities across the world, and you can do this in any language, right? Because a present sounds like an object.
00:24:38
Speaker
Right? And that's how we think as professionals. We're thinking about an object, an outcome, a deliverable, right? Right. And that is not what design thinking is. Design thinking is developing solutions in the service of people, solutions in the service of people. So we're thinking about the experience, the emotion, all of the endorphins that are rushing to your head when you see that present under the tree and you think it's the thing you've been yearning for, whether or not it's the diamond ring because you're about to get engaged or it's a puppy.
00:25:08
Speaker
Hopefully, you wouldn't put a pup in a box. That's a little weird. It's a little mid-box of holes. So, whatever, airlines, whatever it is. So, you're ripping it open and you're feeling just the absolute endorphin rush. You're excited. You're tearing open the paper. There's a little tear in your eye. There's the warm, toasty glow of the fire. Whatever it is, right?
00:25:26
Speaker
That's what design thinking is trying to get our designers of solutions, products, solutions, services, change, to think about what is the experience. Because again, ideas are a dime a dozen. And they fail often. So when you start to think about how humans, because we aren't aliens, humans are really going to react to this, then you start to design things that will scale, stick, sustain. That's how to make ideas stick.
00:25:55
Speaker
And so I start by priming them with that kind of framing to get them into the middle mindset. And then we do an affinity cluster, the one that I was explaining earlier, where I say, great, you want to automate. Well, what are some of the challenges you're trying to automate for? And I typically bound it a little smaller than that. I say, look, within your particular function, what are you trying to solve? What are the things that are either transactional, they've got heavy intensive labor, they're preventing you from really providing
00:26:24
Speaker
the best full service, you know, white glove service or higher order services, what are those things? And so then they start to write all this, you always time box. When you time box, you don't self filter. When you feel like you've got pressure, you don't have that extra 30 seconds to go, you know what, that's not a great idea, right? Because if you
00:26:42
Speaker
It's volume. It's quantity over quality right there because in that in that spirit of just unfettered ideation You could go to places that you wouldn't otherwise allow yourself if you're anchored to reality because at the end of the day Design thinking is about what is desirable right? What's sexy and exciting?
00:27:01
Speaker
Cup, that's the thinking big, that's the divergent, right? With the convergent effects of what is feasible and what is viable. Feasible from a tech or process perspective and viable from a business perspective. Are people going to buy this? Not just once because it was shiny, right? I download the Pokemon Go app because it was super easy, but you know what? You know what Pokemon Go is right now?
00:27:25
Speaker
Me neither. So it is finding that intersection of desirable, feasible, and viable. And so we start to wildly diverge with all the problem sets in that affinity cluster. And then we converge around some of the top two themes. And you can see it visually because you're using post-it notes.
00:27:46
Speaker
And the reason I use post-it notes is we don't want to commit too much. I don't give you an entire page to write a missive. I just want the concept, the idea. And actually, if I get you to do a visual of that and draw it, you're stimulating the right side of your brain, our centered, our directed thinking, to contextualize what is happening, right?
00:28:05
Speaker
So actually thinking with different synapses when you're thinking visually, and designing is very visual medium. Because we're trying to draw those patterns, draw those connections. So I then can see how things are clustering together in terms of density of problem. And we generally land on the two biggest, divide the groups up. These two tables take this big problem set, so that's governance, which has nothing to do with the actual digits and widgets. It turns out.
00:28:33
Speaker
that these folks want automation because there's stress and stress for time because there's no portfolio prioritization and everything's a fire and everything's equally important. So if they had a better rationalization of their time, they could time sequence and they could go deeper on things and maybe automation is relevant, but what we're really getting at with the heart of their problem is
00:28:55
Speaker
total lack of governance over their portfolio, which happens every single time. Turns out it's almost always non-technical challenges, even though I'm not dismissing there's incredible value in automating the right things. But you have to automate the right processes, which presupposes you have the right processes. So you've got to do that work first.
00:29:13
Speaker
So you then divide the group into nailing down what are the critical problems that have just emerged, and then you put the three magical words together, what the Harvard Business Review said were the three most powerful words in business, how might we? And you start to frame up the how might we problem. And you cannot bake in the solution to that.
00:29:33
Speaker
It's not how might we make a better Walkman with better earbuds. It's how might we create the best listening experience. How might we scale music appreciation. Something that is broad enough to not presuppose a set of solutions, business models or technical options. Because it might be all of the above or one.
00:29:54
Speaker
You spend a little time thinking about the right how might we framing to solve for their respective challenges. And then you start to another one you could do is what's called crazy
Prototyping and Feedback Incorporation
00:30:07
Speaker
eight. So everybody has eight ideas to solve for this how might we and say they're in a group of five. And so you take little little post-its or teeny teeny strips of paper and you draw.
00:30:17
Speaker
eight potential solutions to that. And you're doing this individually. And then I say, great, after five quick minutes, right? You always time box. So whatever, three, five minutes, whatever it is. And I say, great. Now, rip up.
00:30:32
Speaker
Two of them, and they're like, what? I've got my best, or a rip of five of them. So they're down-selected to three. So that's the divergence, and now convergence. Now I've gone narrow. And so each of them now has three, and they have to pitch around the table. And then everybody say, there's five people pitching three ideas, 15 ideas. Now I say, great, now down-select to five. So they got five on the table, which is a little painful when you see your baby just being thrown out, gun.
00:31:00
Speaker
And so then they'll take those five ideas and then they'll throw them up against a value impact matrix, also an importance difficulty matrix. So along the vertical axis, you've got difficulty. Along the horizontal axis, you've got value. And you place those five things on the horizontal value axis, think impact. So how much is it moving the needle in terms of
00:31:23
Speaker
your pressing challenges, your strategic growth, they get to set what that value means, and they place everything relative to each other. In other words, nothing can occupy the same space. And then once they place that and place that first, that's immutable, then they move it up and down the difficulty matrix.
00:31:39
Speaker
So then you wind up with four quadrants of a quick win, strategic, luxury item, dreamer, and you then start to see how these things stack out in terms of the lift and the impact. And then I let them down select a one through votes. So everybody's got three votes. You can overload your votes and you typically do it with a little sticky dots. So you can like visually see where people are voting and that voting is clustering exactly.
00:32:06
Speaker
And so then you get to see where your ideas are gaining traction or who's got the most votes. You can overload on your ideas, spread the field. And then they've got to take that one idea. And this is classically within a four-hour workshop window. So you're pressing them fast, moving them fast and hard. And then you take that and you put them into that one idea. You flush it out into a concept poster. And that concept poster has all the attended pieces of a business case. What's the name? What's the value add? What are the benefits? What's the feature? What's it going to cost? Visualize the concept. And there's a big space in the middle where they're drawing
00:32:36
Speaker
either what the outcome is or the process to get there is and they've got to draw it, all right? And then you turn around and you pitch that bad boy to the room and the room turns around and this is so they were noodling an idea, they prototyped it, but what do we do in design thinking? We always converge to find the intersection of feasible and viable, right? You've already got the desirable.
00:32:56
Speaker
Then you do room feedback, and everybody's got posted notes that are color coded for things they liked, didn't like, and things they thought might be emerging. We call it rose thorn bud. Rose they liked, thorn they didn't like, bud something that might be emerging. And you take those little posted that are colored pink and green and blue, and you place them on either the concept name, because they actually have a physical concept poster that they've pitched to you,
00:33:22
Speaker
on the customer date or a specific feature. I thought your timing was absolutely wildly off or your cost was way underselling it or you needed to add these stakeholders, et cetera. So you've got immediate visual feedback because they're putting that feedback right on top. So you time box them, always time boxing, to a two minute pitch and then the room gets just a quick few minutes for feedback. You're collecting that feedback and then you give the team that created that idea 10, 15 more minutes to absorb that feedback and pitch it again.
00:33:50
Speaker
Right, so okay, so that's just like top 10 of, you know, I didn't count that, so don't hold me. Don't hold me literally if that was 10 or not. But that's a quick example of how you move from, we've got an idea, we wanna go do design thinking to narrowing down on the real root cause, and then coming out with categories of challenges, and then broadening the how might we so that you're not limiting or narrowing yourself to a particular solution, and then letting the competition of ideas about those solutions really surface and roll around to pick one,
00:34:19
Speaker
And then you're putting on a value impact scale and picking it and prototyping it, getting rapid feedback on it. Right. That is a, that is an example of a classic design thinking session. And how do you make sure that people are being constructive? So the Rosebud Thorn, I remember we did this and I seem to recall that you being pretty upfront or clear about like we are not here. We are on a team together. We are not here to bring people down. So how do you make sure that people are being constructive and not like it's destructive?
00:34:47
Speaker
Right. You, you prime them with a, we, we are all here to it. It's, it's the making sure they realize that this is in it for them. Right. So you start with a couple of rules. It's, it's always the classic improv. Yes. And right in the, in the service of the solution and the service of the people.
00:35:04
Speaker
better the end customers of this solution. And so, classically, by that point in the day, you've experienced, I primed you with, or whomever the facilitator is, I primed you with lots of different design thinking examples, and you're moving through the methods, and folks are pretty revved up that time. They're pretty leaning in hard to these ideas. And so, I've not seen any character assassinations in the restaurant but critique, but a good facilitator will just smack that down. Right, right. So let me ask this last question.
00:35:33
Speaker
You've obviously been doing this for a while. How should people who are listening to this think about if they want to try this kind of workshop or event or meeting? Maybe even the simplest thing is just having like a meeting in their organization. Should I think about that? Do they need to go out and find you or someone like you or can they do it
00:35:54
Speaker
On their own. Two-prong approach, right? Super simple to get rose thorn bud, right? That's massive quick exercise. Another one at the end of every meeting, so think big and feel fast, so don't be afraid, be fearless and courageous in getting feedback. At the end of the meeting, you can start it tomorrow. Do an I like, I wish. So everyone goes around the table and says one thing that they liked and one thing that they wished about time bound at this project.
00:36:19
Speaker
or this meeting or this last deliverable that we put in. So you're getting rapid feedback. You're not insulating yourself with the confidence and the quixotic belief that you're right. You're piercing the veneer and you're making a better
00:36:38
Speaker
A better thing, right? So I like I wish super simple rosethorn bud super simple The affinity clusters anybody who's like listening actively can start to find those those synergies and build upon those ideas So I would take it a two ways. I would there's so much literature IDO is Phenomenal Stanford University where the founder of IDO teaches and started a design school Has just wonderful materials out there. So if you are hungry
00:37:07
Speaker
to do things better and do things in a way that sticks and doesn't waste people's time and your time and starts to get outcomes and by God we've got a lot of you know big hairy challenges in the world like climate change and we need good ideas that stick then
00:37:22
Speaker
Then the world's your oyster. The materials are out there. So I would take a two-prong approach. Start flirting with and incorporating some of these simpler ideas. And so that starts to acculturate and get people attuned to it. And then bring in a professional facilitator. But ask that facilitator train the trainer. Ask that that facilitator teaches you how to fish.
00:37:44
Speaker
almost always when we have time I go meta and I break the fourth wall and I say I'm gonna pause here guys the reason that we did this exercise or we did these series of exercises you can see how it builds you see how it breaks you out of your conviction that this was the problem and that shows you that there's a multitude of problems and if you don't answer at least a fraction of these you're gonna set yourself up for failure if you're not dealing with the governance or the funding or the skilling or the change management
Podcast Conclusion
00:38:25
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Just a quick note that the show is supported by you, the listener. If you would like to support the show, please consider sharing it or please consider leaving a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast provider.
00:38:43
Speaker
If you would like to financially support the show, please head over to my Patreon page. I have some new tiers set up so you can get some good gear, some policy of his podcast gear, should you be interested in that. And I have a couple more episodes till the end of the year. And I'm really excited about those interviews to wrap up here before we turn over into 2020.
00:39:04
Speaker
So I hope you're well. I hope you will keep in touch and let me know how things are going. And of course, if you have ideas for guests, please do let me know. I'm of course looking for guests for later in 2020. So if you have some ideas and people you'd like to support and hear from, let me know. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.