The Ideators’ Journey

I lost my grandmother the week before the Pegasus conference. Even though my Grandma was 96, she was so energetic that her death came as a complete surprise. In responding to the challenge of organizing a memorial event on short notice, my family show up as capable, compassionate, and courageous collaborators. The results have been truly amazing.

 I wondered to myself, “What do we know and value as a family that made our collaborative effort work so seamlessly? Could these same practices be applied at work?

I came up with the following 3 observations on collaborating well with others:

1. Let people do what they do best. Each of us has unique talents and gifts. Empower each person to take a specific job or role on. Let them make decisions based on their experience and expertise. This requires TRUST and RESPECT. This also takes SELF DISCIPLINE to not override a decision just because you might have done it differently.
2. Keep everyone informed. Communicate clearly and regularly so that everyone feels “in the know” and can offer feedback on things they feel strongly about. Be sensitive, receptive, and caring when listening to feedback.
3. Find creative ways to incorporate everyone’s ideas. It ensures that participants will stay INSPIRED and ENGAGED in the effort and, it makes the end-result better.

What other thoughts do you have about making collaborative efforts work? When have you seen a group pull something great together in a short timeframe with little or no conflict? What behaviors and values were they demonstrating? Be well my friends!

Warmth and gratitude, Eve E.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called it “the fierce urgency of now.” In 1963 the civil rights movement had reached a crescendo. In his most famous speech, King exhorted his listeners not to lose the momentum of the times, but to act with urgency to lift the United States out of the quicksand of racial injustice and extend the promise of democracy to all Americans.

Now More Than Ever, it’s time for us to build the critical skills we need to lead sensitively and decisively into the 21st century. To create businesses and communities capable of thriving in conditions of dynamic complexity, we need new tools and ideas for connecting with each other, redefining success, and measuring our progress.

Would you like to join that conversation at the Pegasus Conference next week? It’s not too late. In fact, there is no time like the present. Join in. 

PS. Eve will be speaking about Innovation on Monday morning at 10:45am.

Networking opportunities come from the most unexpected quarters.  Recently, I was asked to facilitate a “girl scout-style” campfire sing-along for 60 women attending an annual Girlfriends Weekend fund raising event.  I was asked because the event director knew me from a women’s choir I sing with. 

To be honest, I said yes because I think Cyndy (the event director) is a sweetheart and I just really wanted to say yes to her. 

What I didn’t know is the following:

1.        The 60 women would all be incredibly gifted and powerful women – Executives of Northwest corporations (Nintendo, Pemco Insurance, etc.), business owners, board members of influential organizations, and even a few Microsofties. 

2.       We would be raising money to send ~ 90 girls in foster care to camp next summer.  For some of these girls, the experience will be life-saving. 

3.       I would get a chance to talk about the Change the Way You See Everything for Teens book to several of the board members for Girl Scouts of Washington – all of whom were very interested in learning more about how the books could be used in their programs.

The learning? It pays to be generous;  to reach out when you feel inspired by someone or something and go with your heart. 

The startup I’ve been hinting at for the last couple months finally has a name. w00t! We’re at a very early stage: just starting the research phase for Qworky Meetings, the codename for our first product. In parallel, we’re working on creating our community, deciding on our technology base, putting together a business plan, and developing our strategies. – me, on Liminal States

There have been a few changes in direction since I posted A collaborative journey … a few months ago — including a shift in focus away from “collaboration tools”.  In a discussion on Facebook, my friend Kelly commented: “names derived from ‘collaboration’ seem associated with university publications and research projects, but not with working class, grassroots, bottoms-up teams.”     Excellent point.  And it turns out a lot of others have negative associations with collaboration as well.

So Qworky will design software that revolutionizes the way people work together.  And rather than starting with collaborative writing, we’re going to begin with something that’s common to almost everybody’s work lives: meetings.

Asset-based thinking has had a strong influence on how we’re approaching Qworky … and so do a lot of the techniques described in Change the Way You See Innovation.  We frequently start off meetings with a speed-information-exchange warmup exercise; we’re using stakeholder mapping and give/get analysis to think about our adoption and funding strategies.  And the overall metaphor of the ideator’s journey is spot-on.  As I describe in Qworky: the adventure begins!

In Change the Way You See Innovation, my former colleagues Kathy Cramer, Hank Wasiak, Eve Enslow, and Michael Foster analogize the innovation process to Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”. Coincidentally enough, a couple of days ago a Facebook friend changed her status to a quote from Campbell: “It’s amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets.”

Well, I’m ready — and based on all the help and encouragement we’ve gotten so far, a lot of others are ready too.

I’ll blog about Qworky from time to time here, and on my personal blog Liminal States as well.   For now, Twitter is the best way to join us on the journey.   Stay tuned for more!

jon

We facilitated a very exciting workshop today. What was thrilling about the meeting was the existing very innovative team dynamic and culture. This team already has tremendous competency for developing and refining their ideas, a regular planning rhythm, and strong management support. Their challenge — like with so many other truly innovative ideas — is how to get potential partners to adopt these new technologies as part of shipping products.

Our 3-hr workshop with the team today combined a crash course in asset-based thinking with a focus on engaging with stakeholders. “Stakeholders” is our term for the community of people who have some “stake” in your idea – for example, collaborators, business decision-makers, and customores. Using post-it notes, the team quickly created a map of stakeholders for several key organizations, and defined how they could add value to those stakeholders (”gives”) and what they hoped to gain from them (”gets”).

A couple of the most important learnings:

• technical teams tend to focus by default on technical stakeholders and technical gives/gets. After a little brainstorming, though, all kinds of new potential influencers opened up: business development managers, product planners, and community leaders.
• a more structured approach to identifying and managing their stakeholder engagements would add a lot of value by enabling them to see and identify gaps, and track details such as the last meeting notes/ next steps for each cluster of stakeholders. A structured approach would also enable the group to identify & focus on specific actions needed to move each relationship forward.

There’s a lot of information in Change the Way You See Innovation for people or organizations who want to do their own stakeholder engagement plan — or for the team we worked with to build on the promising start in the workshop.

Here’s a quick overview:

1. Introduction & Part1 – Innovation (p5): These introductory sections of the guidebook present innovation as a journey that starts with invention, but does not end there. Idea leaders must also develop “social” engineering skills and tools in order to influence stakeholders and build support for its implementation. ABT is the underlying mindset we use to approach this work. Asset-Based-Thinkers focus on opportunities more than problems, what is working more than what is not working, and who is with them more than who is against them. In doing so, they build energy and lead people and teams to greater performance and productivity.
2. Part II – Power (p33): In this section, we learn to become more effective by developing our power and presence as a leader. Mastery of facts and figures are a good beginning, but others become engaged when they understand the vision or story behind your invention, and when they understand why you are personally excited/ passionate about the idea. The more we embody our ideas, the more credibility we have and the more others are drawn to join forces with us in some way. No matter what type of personality we have, we can develop our own unique and charismatic leadership style.
3. Part III – Influence (p49): Now that we have a strong base from which to influence, we open to the idea that influence is a two-way street involving gives and gets. The ABT perspective on influence is that we change our own mind as much as we change others minds, we dialog and engage rather than prevail. In this guidebook, we encourage idea leaders to take a structured approach to developing their stakeholder plan – mapping out people they will meet with, and what they can hope to gain by engaging various types of stakeholders (advocates, collaborators, technicians, customers, etc.)
4. Part IV – Impact (p61): In this final section we continue to explore moving our ideas forward in the face of resistence by turning our supporters into actors on our behalf, and by starting with small wins that gradually accumulate to big impact. We improvise a “yes” with every stakeholder engagement by understanding both what motivates them and what they can feasibly say yes to at any given time.

Happy reading!  – Eve

“When you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there”
-Cheshire Cat
building on Jon’s post … A Collaborative Journey which discussed our exploration into the collaborative tools and services space.

At this point, the answer’s a definite maybe…

Is there opportunity? Definitely. Can it be cultivated? Maybe.

As Jon said we’ve been looking at the collaboration space. We realize it’s a large umbrella filled with possibilities and even more possible paths to our goal. Even how we define collaboration is subject to interpretation. To me the most prevalent digital collaboration tool is email. And here we are 10 years from the dot com heyday and email is still … well email. Our collaboration tools have yet to evolve.

But I find this not only with collaboration tools, with digital tools and services in general. The internet and PC software is in its infancy yet for how big a part of our life it’s become we need the internet to grow up faster than almost any consumer technology (I’ll say the cell phone is the lone exception here).

So where are we going?

I imagine somewhere near the beginning of the ideator’s journey is have a vision.

We have an idea that we’ve whole heartedly embraced. The vision is of software, services, internet applications etc. that allow diverse groups of people to work better together than alone.

Diversity is a core part of what we believe is necessary to take these experiences beyond their infancy. There are a myriad of perspectives that have been shut out from determining what PC experiences are meant to be. Be it discipline, gender (here is a question could women bankers have prevented the financial crisis?), cultural, class, level of technology-aversion, or even willingness to question the status quo – there are many untapped perspectives.

You can expect us to seek out diverse perspectives, embrace new ways of thinking, and in other ways explore ways to learn and work together.

So first order of business… finding a name
(to be continued)

- Mikal
You can find me at notsocommoncents.com a business blog

I attended Ignite Seattle! on Wednesday evening. twitter = #is6 for the event, @ignitesea for general info). The format of Ignite is short talks. Each speaker gets 5 minutes/ 20 slides – which works out to 15 seconds per slide. The slides advance automatically so there’s no fudging on the time. Talks were an interesting blend of science, geek, art, and life experiences.

I enjoyed the talks thoroughly. You can get a good feel for the event by visiting the central Ignite site and by searching YouTube for “ignite o’reilly”.

Even more rewarding was the chance to catch up with lots of creative friends. I particularly enjoyed getting to tell Scott Berkun to his face how much I enjoyed his book The Myths of Innovation. I studied history of Science and Technology in college and I think he does an excellent job presenting the material with both well-researched accuracy and fun-to-read levity.

Also, in a conversation on the advantages of local agriculture, I realized that “resiliency” (or lack thereof) is a useful term in describing a hidden or externalized cost of large scale agri-business. Example: Mid-Western grain farming appears to have the cost-advantages of scale. However, fast-forward several decades, the land erodes to the point where it costs so much to rehabilitate the land between each growing season that the grain becomes more and more expensive. “Externality” is when current prices of goods do not reflect the full cost and/or impact of production. (think rainforest decimation). Great opportunities for innovation around eliminating externality and building local resiliency! 

Best of all, since I’m married to another geek, the evening doubled as “date-night”.

Eve’s Ask for help makes a great introduction to a series that Mikal Lewis and I will be kicking off on collaboration.

During this series, we’ll apply approaches from Change the Way you see Innovation to a real-world problem: exploring product and business opportunities for web-based collaboration tools. Along the way, if all goes well, we’ll design and perhaps even prototype a free tool, and recruit some early users. If that sounds interesting, please join us!

Let’s start with some background. Eve, Michael, Mikal, and many of the other people you’ll see participating in this series met on the Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) project I led at Microsoft. Ad Astra was a grassroots strategy effort that focused on innovation, culture, and collaboration with a remarkably diverse* team of amazing people. Our highest-profile technique included Mashup Days, in-person collaborative events (1, 2, 3, 4) featuring pink beanbag chairs. We also did a lot of collaborative writing, where projects like our Open Letter to Ray Ozzie and Harry Potter and the Future of Think Weeks involved fifty or more people collaborating via a wiki, a blog, email, and in-person meetings. Even though weaknesses in the Sharepoint-based tools we used made it difficult and time-consuming, the results were consistently good and occasionally outstanding.Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve continued this approach with more of a social network focus: Wetpaint wikis, Google Groups, my.barackobama.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Results continue to be great, and tools like Wetpaint, Google Groups, and Mixed Ink are much better than Sharepoint. Still there’s plenty of room for improvement.

So that brings us to an example potential product and business opportunities. Imagine we had a web-based tool that complemented these other technologies and made collaborative writing for a distributed team a lot easier. Could we get people to use it? And if so, is there a business model?

At this point, the answer’s a definite maybe. Vague as it is at this stage, the idea’s clearly got a lot of possibilties. Mikal and I believe it’s worth exploring, even though it may well morph into something else. So in the next post of the series, we’ll take a first step by describing a specific scenario.

Of course we’re far from the first people to be in this “definite maybe” situation for an idea. How do others approach it?

jon

* by Microsoft standards, that is

Last weekend I had a friend in town for a visit who grew up on a small orchard.  I asked him if he would mind making a short stop at the nursery to advise me on picking out a couple fruit trees.  I felt a little sheepish cutting into his vacation time, but he was really flattered and we picked out an apple and a cherry.

When we got back to my place, he inspected the trunk wood from the sickly apple I’d recently taken out.  “Uh oh….nematodes.”  Now I’m a pretty good gardener, but words like “nematode” elude me.  It turns out that nematode is a fancy word for roundworm. 

The bad news is that I couldn’t plant my new apple tree where I’d had the old one.  Because it would likely sicken and die of the same soil infection.  The good news is that nematodes generally don’t jump species – so I could plant my new cherry tree there.  Furthermore, Jamie told me the spot I’d selected for the cherry tree was better for the apple anyway.  

What I learned is that I had NO IDEA there was so much to learn until I asked for help. Asking for help does not come easy for me.  Sometimes it is a matter of ego, but often, as in this instance, I just feel as though I’m imposing on someone else’s time or energy.  Most often we discover that people love being tapped to share their experience and expertise. 

The second story in our successful collaboration series is our proposal for a session at the 19 annual Pegasus  conference – the theme of which is “Now more than ever:  critical skills for courageous organizations”.  The conference will be held November 2-4, 2009 in Seattle, WA.  Michael Foster, Iris Lemmer, and I will be presenting a 90 minute snapshot of Change the Way You See Innovation: Through Asset-Based Thinking. 

Our process for drafting the proposal was  simple, fast,  and very effective.  I sent drafts over email to a group of about 10 people who were already fairly familiar with the guidebook content.   For any given draft, I received at least 4 responses with edits.  The final submission was much stronger than the original draft, demonstrating that engaging others in simple ways can yield powerful results.

Try it!  Reach out today and see what it does for your project.

Eve E.