Do Personas, Stakeholder, Journey Maps work?

Successful companies are now viewing their marketing as a method for getting the message in from the marketplace versus pounding the message out. It is this inbound marketing stuff we have been talking about the last few years. The new methodologies of User Experience, Service Design, Design Thinking and the Lean Startup^TM are all about using this found wisdom and all expound to be “Customer Centric” and concentrate on the “Customer Experience”. It is that Outside – In thinking.

The three tools that have become prevalent are Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. They are tools that we use to understand and improve the Customer Experience. There is seldom a workshop that does not utilize these three tools, and they have been widely adopted in the community. I use them myself and find them quite fun to talk about and to do.

I wonder after a workshop, how many participants actually go back to their organizations and create personas, stakeholder and journey Maps. I am familiar with a few that have, especially the customer personas. However, if you are like most, you go back to your everyday job and work. It was an exercise and only an exercise. If you do make the attempt, you do it in an isolated group with participants that already have a decent idea on what is needed. There is little disruptive change that occurs. We may bring a few “outsiders” in, but those people seldom understand the bigger picture of the organization (said in jest).

The truth is if you try to use these tools you find them cumbersome. There is not the external knowledge of the customer present, and so assumptions are made. If sales is included, they seldom are, the salespeople are disengaged and looking at their smartphones and stepping out to make urgent calls. The innovative organization would like to have both salespeople and customers included but without mastery of the tools find it difficult.

Lately, I have been challenging organizations to turn back and think internally. Think inside-out versus outside-in. At the end of a workshop or webinar, I no longer ask participants to take this knowledge back and design customer facing services or involve sales and marketing. I ask them to do it for their vendors. I ask them to take one of their own particular services or outsourced products that they use internally and create Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. I encourage the Lean Champion to head the project if and only if he can stop it from making it the typical Lean or Six Sigma Project. We are empathizing with the users and discovering how decisions are made within our own company. Our goal is one of discovery and definition. Seek to understand not fix.

We first need to address the users of the service/product and create the Customer Persona Map. Then view the stakeholders and who is influenced by the use of this product and who influences them. Mapping the Customer journey in our organization can also be enlightening. If you want to have a little fun, have your supplier create his own three maps and see how they compare. Now, bring who you would designate as your outbound map makers and show them the results. How valid will one be with your customer? Would it be worth your time? Or, would yours look like the one created by your supplier?

Shoud we question Big Data?

Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. His acclaimed blog, Junk Charts, pioneered the critical examination of data and graphics in the mass media. Kaiser is my guest next week on the podcast and this is an excerpt from it. Kaiser recently wrote his second book, Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage.

Joe: Before the podcast, we talked about John Paulos. He of course wrote the book,A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and how he frames what we read in the newspaper. I thought your book did a great job of reframing how – or framing how we should be looking at Big Data without saying who is right or wrong, but putting it in our court saying “We need to frame it.”

Kaiser: I think it is very important people need to realize before they dig into the book is, I focus on a very specific aspect of Big Data which is not receiving enough attention right now. We keep hearing about Big Data and it is like volumes of data, there are all kinds of new types of data. We are tracking everybody, every movement and that is true and an important aspect of it. Much of that aspect is very much what I would call supply folks – it is all about the people who are doing the data work, and the people that are tracking us. My book is focused on the consumption side, so one consequence of having so much data is that it is going to be that there are tons and tons of people who are going to come to us with all kinds of arguments, and they are going to tell us that their argument is supported by such and such data.

For most of us who do data analysis, it is probably even for people who read data analysis, you will realize that you can pretty much find data to support anything you want to say. So what is going to happen; we are going to have a lot of contradiction and confusion. There will be so much data analysis out there; we do not know what to think. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there. If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. Like you alluded to this is not an exercise in figuring who is a hundred percent correct and who is not. Our problems are so complex, and the data sets, even though they are so luminous will never be complete. We will never be able to know for sure that, you are right, and he is wrong.

So, I mean I encourage people to take a skeptical attitude, and to basically develop your own framework for interpreting the data analysis out there. I would have expected some people would probably not hundred percent agree with everything that I have say in the book either. That is totally acceptable, that is sort of part of the mentality of how you approach the interpretation of data analysis.

Joe: Well that is really the whole point to it is – really who do we believe, and how do we analyze? If we want to talk about topical discussions, let us just talk about Eric Snowden for a minute. Should we embrace Big Data, or should we be somewhat sceptical and scared of it?

Kaiser: It is interesting because I just put up a blog post this morning – It is about Snapchat. I wrote that blog post, and at the very end, I cited Eric Schmidt, the past CEO of Google. He had a quotation for that I used to think “Oh my god, this is so creepy.” He said something like “There is no privacy anymore if you do not want anyone to know that you have done something, then you should not have done it in the first place.” I used to think that it is like a common trend how creepy this technology companies are, but I think all these revelations are essentially making me rethink what he actually said. No matter… whether we like it or not, the data is out there and somebody will collect it. It is extremely easy for some people to collect it, we just cannot avoid it. So I think he is just basically saying “If you take that as your starting point, then you should think about whether you should be doing things that you do not want other people to know.” It is a different thing from saying it is creepy.

Kaiser first book was Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do.

About Kaiser: He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

Empathy is the Fundamental Principle of Understanding.

From my blog post, Do you only Listen through your Ears?:

Empathy is a major differentiator between the traditional process methodologies of Six Sigma, and I say this tongue–in-cheek, Lean. Many times when you review Design for Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Product Development, and Lean Design (the list goes on), seldom when you search (like never) the index of the book will you find the words Empathy. I think that is a major difference in Design Thinking, Service Design and as I like to call it, EDCA.

That word empathy is a hard thing to practice. Some people may say you are born with or raised with it. I think you can acquire it, but it takes a different set of listening skills than most of us  develop.

In a recent article in the New York Times, The Morality of Meditation, I have taken the liberty of pulling several quotes:

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended.

The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

Meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

They confirmed that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

If we want to connect with our customer, if we want to develop an intuitive read of his organizations needs, do we not need first to have compassion and empathy. It is the act of empathy that we develop through using the Sales Neuro Charger and/or meditation that allow us to utilize them in the sales process. Empathy is the fundamental principle of understanding. How can we develop objective views without it?

The Casual Relationship of Lean Sales

In a recent podcast, Scenario Thinking the Next Big Thing, with George Wright, co-author of Scenario Thinking: Practical Approaches to the Future, I asked, “When we are looking at different alternatives to the future, we paint a picture with scenarios? 

George:

Yes, the scenarios are descriptions of the future often constructed by management teams. They usually rough out about four scenarios of the future. They are all very qualitative. Their absolutely, pictures of the way the future might be. But, they are casually linked components in the scenarios. For instance, Martians land from outer space with ray guns and start shooting us, the scenario tends to be much more logical steps from now into the future may be 10,15, 20, 30 years. Hence, the scenarios are portal pen pictures of the future that are plausible to the people who constructed them. People say, “I can see this series of events starting to happen.” You can go out in that way like dominos swarming in one direction or you can go out in a different way. If they are all plausible futures, than they are futures we need to be concerned with, without occurring major investments. Scenario thinking is an approach that first started out with capture intensive industries like the airlines, the oil industry where major investment has to be made now. It has to work well against a range of futures. That’s the scenario approach, getting these robust decisions that work well no matter what.

About George Wright: George is currently Professor of Management at Durham Business School, University of Durham, UK. He has consulted and provided management development programs on scenario thinking and decision making with organizations such as Bayer, EADS, Petronas, Scottish Power, Thales, United Utilities, and national and local government in the UK.

One of the key items, I found in George discussion is the issue of causality. In scenario planning, we seek for, not one, but several casual causes. When you think of a sales process, it reminds me of a mini-scenario planning effort. Seldom are decisions within an organization made by one or two people. More often, they are being done by committee. The committee often evolves depending on the circumstances. In this scenario, sorry for the pun, how do sales and marketers understand the process? How do they determine, who has the most influence on the committee and who influences that person?

This blog post, Lean Sales and Marketing: Outcome Based Mapping, contains my thoughts and several additional links.

Standards create the WOW in Business

Many people see Lean as another process methodology still mired down in the process thinking world of the eighties and nineties. The facts are that companies, such as Danaher, Toyota, Ingersol Rand and Amazon have embraced Lean thinking or similar concepts and have excelled in the new millennium. What makes these companies stand out? They have created repeatable business models with an emphasis on continuous improvement and adaptability. We can create numerous names for this model, but the Lean Business Model has proven to be the most resilient and consistent producer of results and of growth. Lean is introduced as a growth strategy through the processes of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA. This three step process for using Lean is defined in this way:

1. Standard Work (SDCA): Define core business and put the majority of company resources into the core until it achieves its full potential.
2. Continuous Improvement (PDCA): Most big ideas are made up of a series of successful smaller ideas driven by a simple and repeatable business model.
3. New Markets and Products (EDCA): Define what you cannot do and explore what you want to do?

If you are a Lean Startup^TM or an Entrepreneur with a new product, you have just completed an exercise that is called Product Market fit. You have gone through the EDCA (Explore-Do-Check-Act) stage and converted it to a hypothesis that is proven through PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Once proven, you standardize (SDCA) your product/service and build your first repeatable business model.

How do repeatable models succeed? In the books Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change and PProfit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times, the authors use studies from the Bain and Company to point out the three design principles (the parenthesized parts are mine) most associated with success.

1. What is the essence of success? A well-differentiated core (EDCA)
2. How do we make sure we keep improving and adapting? Closed-loop learning (PDCA)
3. How do we align our people to focus on our key strengths? Clear nonnegotiables (SDCA)

In the book, the authors distinguish three different growth strategies based on repeatable business models.

1. Individual business driving core growth (Examples of companies with a single core, simple structure: Vanguard, IKEA, Tetra Pak)
2. Businesses moving into adjacencies by modifying their model (Examples of companies with a single core, complex adjacency expansion: Nike, Apple, Olam)
3. Multicore business managing a portfolio (Examples of companies with a multicore, multi industry: Danaher, UTC, P & G)

The repeatable business models are very diverse. They are highly fluid but repeatable. I view SDCA or Standard Work in much the same way. When we have clear nonnegotiable standards, it allows the fringes of our businesses to operate effectively with little intervention.

Standards are what makes business models adaptable. In recent years, Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur developed the Business Model Generation Canvas. It identifies nine building blocks required for the business model. It is an iterative approach to see what underlying structure is required to institute and develop change for innovation. A PDF download can be obtained here: Business Model Canvas. What this model does is provide clarity around the core value proposition. You may believe the model is too simple for larger companies. However, I believe that simplification is the point, and a simplified structure is in Lean terms, standards.

Standards are the most fundamental and misunderstood concept needed for growth. Your core values are the way you go about what you do and how you do it. It is what your customer understands and experiences. Standards create the WOW in your business. When an employee steps out of the box to do something remarkable, it is a result of having the clarification that this is what are standards (values) would encourage us to do.

Lean embellishes standards, not as a way of being restrictive. It embellishes standards as a way of clarity and focus providing agility, speed and relevance throughout not only to the organization but to the market. It makes growth more understandable for existing customers, new markets, and new products. When viewing the recent growth of Amazon, Apple or Google, most product/service successes occurred building upon their standards. When viewing the troubles, of Starbucks and Dell, it was a movement from their standards and the correction being a return to them.

Growth Principle: Standards create the WOW

therefore

Standards have to be at the center of your growth strategy.

For more information on SDCA, PDCA, EDCA, I would recommend you to browse through the Business901 training content located in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Training Section.

Strength-Based Organizational Change

The ASQ Charlotte Section Annual Conference 2013 will focus on Leadership Development with three different tracks. After enjoying a keynote, attendees will have the opportunity to choose from Problem Solving Leadership, Strength-Based Organizational Change and The Cultural Shift in Healthcare.

The conference is held at UNC Charlotte Center City, 320 East 9th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202. It is one day event on April 16thv with registration beginning at 7:30 AM and the conference from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Additional information and registration can be obtained at http://www.asqcharlotte.org/ASQ/. You are welcomed to register at the door, but each tract is limited to 40 participants. Please check availability.

Strength-Based Organizational Change will be led by Bob Petruska and Joe Dager along with a host of facilitators in the multiple breakout sessions offered. This participant orientated journey starts in the morning with positive change for individuals and teams advancing to organizations and results in the afternoon. Each 90-minute session will include multiple breakout sessions on such topics as Personal Kanban, Intellectual Judo and 3D organizational.

Overview of the Strength-Based Organizational Change
A Positive Framework for Sustainability

We all want our organizations to improve, so what makes change so difficult for us humans? When most people think of change, they think of something that directly affects them, or something that affects those around them. In both cases change is perceived as a negative! It turns out that change itself is seldom addressed from a positive or strength based approach.

Join us for a fun day of facilitated action learning with exciting breakout sessions! Develop a positive skills framework through active participation in rich and interactive festivities that we have planned for you. Our morning theme will address change through the growth of soft skills for both individuals and teams. Then after a refreshing lunch, participants will have the opportunity to learn and apply new skills on how to influence organizational development for positive, sustainable results.

These interactive hands-on sessions are uniquely constructed to allow you to harness the knowledge of your peers while focusing on developing your own strengths. Our day of learning together follows a unique path that we think you will find refreshing and thoroughly enjoy:

1. A brief introduction of the topic and activities by one of our presenters.
2. Participants can choose to join a breakout group to get a deeper dive in an area of interest. Breakouts will have a facilitator to convene your action learning session along with an instructional placemat as a guideline.
3. Each breakout team will have time to learn from each-other in a focused conversation, and finally present an overview of their session high points in a report-out. This will allow everyone in the room to get an exposure to additional insights!
4. A roundtable discussion with key takeaways and next steps will help to unlock the wisdom that was previously under the surface.

About the presenters:

• Robert (Bob) Petruska brings 20 years of experience improving performance in a variety of fields including aerospace, automotive, food, healthcare, office, and services. Author of Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters and an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt and Certified Quality Engineer.
• Joe Dager specializes in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. Joe is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and has participated with companies involved in retail, manufacturing, software and professional services along their Quality Journey.

About ASQ Charlotte Section: The American Society for Quality (ASQ) Charlotte Section’s mission is to create experiential quality development and learning opportunities that add value to our Members, the Business Community, and the Greater Charlotte Community.  Our Section members, networking groups, and multiple community partners, participate in numerous mediums:

• LinkedIn Jobs (available to everyone)
• Section Website and Newsletter Advertising
• Section Meeting Events
• Education Courses
• Community Outreach Projects
• UNCC ASQ Student Section
• Annual Local Conference

About ASQ: The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is the world’s leading authority on quality. With more than 85,000 individuals and organizational members, this professional association advances learning, quality improvement, and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide.

Visual Management Board for Lean Service Design

This is the Visual Management Board that I use as part of Lean Service Design Trilogy Program. It allows the Lean Engagement Team and others, instant status updates. The goals of Visual Management is to connect people to the processes they perform, communicate successes and issues in the work area and show goals versus actual performances. I have always remembered and adhere to the statement that  Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth said in a Business901 podcast, If you’re not Visual, you’re not Lean.

The board was created as part of the toolset for the Lean Service Design Trilogy Program. An actual Visual Management board may or may not include all of these components.

A brief description of the components, starting at the top right and working clockwise:

The Business Model Canvas is an analytical tool outlined in the book Business Model Generation. It is a visual template preformatted with the nine blocks of a business model, which allows you to develop and sketch out new or existing business models. This book has sold over 220,000 copies the past two years and has established itself as one of the leading sources of modeling for both startups and established businesses.

Important Dates and Events are noted.

The Service Blueprint contains Customer Journey Map, Onstage Actors(Employees), Backstage(Employees), Support processes and Vendors, and the Environment. I include the three components of value; social, emotional and functional. I have depicted a post-it-note in every block though in reality there seldom is.

Standard Worksheets are depicted for the Actors and Support teams. these can be auto-populate or completed by hand. I have also used Kanban boards in lieu of worksheets. Virtual Teams can use something as simple as Google Documents or many other popular software packages.

The Weekly Tactical and Monthly Strategic Sheets provide the discussion points and the line of sight between the actors/support teams and the Team Coordinators and Value Stream Managers.  

SALES SDCA/PDCA/EDCA: The SALES (this is an acronym, do not take it literally) part of the framework is where the sales team gets its directions and coaching from the team coordinator and value stream manager. Within the actual SDCA/PDCA/EDCA cycles the sales team is empowered to make their own choices and determine their own direction to accomplish the goals of that cycle. One of the key considerations in developing a team is to determine the objective of the cycle. Is it primarily creativity, problem-resolution, or tactical execution?

Ideas and Risk matrixes are included to quickly identify any problems and opportunities that present themselves. These later can be included into the appropriate canvases.

The question always comes up, do I need a Visual Management board for each Value Stream or in lay terms services or products. My answer is the standard, it depends. Sometimes it will be for a group of products or services and other times it will be for only a “vital few”.

Lean Service Design Trilogy Program

Is Relationship Mapping the new Critical Path?

How good are you at managing the relationships that your organization builds? As we move from a Product Dominant to a Service Dominant market, the relationships we create are at the core of our business model. However, how many of us understand these relationships? How many of us know what collaborative networks the other members of our team or organization are creating? Can we be successful, can we be social without this understanding?

Our world is increasingly more collaborative driving changes in the way decisions are made. Our organizations need to change to a more collaborative structure but the question is, where do we begin? I am always amazed how Lean happens to be there when I am ready to use it. It reminds me of the old Buddhist proverb, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Back in 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information and successfully plan major projects. A team researched and developed the seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management and planning (MP) tools, or simply the seven management tools. Not all the tools were new, but their collection and promotion were. They are:

1. Affinity diagram
2. Relations diagram
3. Tree diagram
4. Matrix diagram:
5. Matrix data analysis
6. Arrow diagram
7. Process decision program chart (PDPC)

Recently my use of the relationship diagram in particular has started to increase. Maybe not in the traditional sense of cause-and-effect relationships but the input/output connections between selected parts of the organization and the value that is created. The eerie part of this is that after creating several of these and one rather elaborate relationship map; I compared it to the Value Network modeling that had been introduced to me by Verna Allee, M.A., co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC. It was strikingly close to her model depicted below. (Verna Allee, M.A., is co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC introduced me last year to Value Network Mapping through this Business901 podcast, What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?).

From Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by Verna Allee with Oliver Schwabe is a digital edition book located at http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com.

One of the items that has intrigued me a great deal over the summer has been The Last Planner® System (LPS). The Last Planner® was created by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell co-founders of the Lean Construction Institute. In long term building projects, they have found that managing relationships is the important part of project management. Last week, I had a post that discussed this, Crucial & Collaborative Conversations for Predictable Design & Delivery and tomorrow; I have a podcast with Alan Mossman of The Change Business where we discuss this relationship style of project management. An excerpt from the podcast follows.

Joe: One of the things that you mentioned is “Collaborative Short Term Production Planning," and the promise conversation cycle. Can you explain to the audience what that is?

Alan: This promise cycle is completed entirely in language. There is a request, there is the negotiation, there is a promise, there is a declaration of completion, and a declaration of satisfaction or dissatisfaction as appropriate.

What is missing, in my view, in a lot of construction, is that because of the critical path method, there is not enough time spent on managing promises, managing commitments. It's all coming from directives. You will do this. You will do that. So the project manager is telling people what to do rather than ensuring that the people on the project understand what needs to be done, so that they are in a position to make offers and to make promises about what they will do.

The collaborative planning, collaborative programming, make ready, are foundations for Last Planners to make promises about the work that they will do next week, because they've got direct involvement in preparing the work to be done.

As our world changes, it seems that these relationships, these value networks and person to person interactions will not be decreasing but may be our critical path to success.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.

A Lean Service Gemba Walk

Learn about Lean Fundamentals from the First West Credit Union Culture. This contains a basic approach on what to look for in a Gemba Walk in a Service Environment. The actors discuss the touchpoints and eight service wastes of Lean Services.

Check out the Business901 Lean Service Design Trilogy

Lean Training and Simulation Tips

@JamieFlinchbaugh, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean discussing simulation games and how the Lean Learning Center designs and uses them. Jamie is an individual and the Lean Learning Center, an organization that practices what they preach, Lean. Jamie’s insightful responses are lessons for any trainer.

I encourage you to check out Jamie’s latest book, A3 Problem Solving: Applying Lean Thinking. I cannot think of how you could spend $7.50 better.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

Jamie Flinchbaugh is co-founder and partner of the Lean Learning Center, and bring successful and varied experiences of lean transformation as both a practitioner and facilitator. Under the leadership of Jamie and the Center’s senior managers, the Lean Learning Center has become one of the most recognized and premier lean providers in the world. The JamieFlinchbaugh.com blog is a frequent stop of mine and many other lean practitioners.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

Learning with Gamification

After reading The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Dr. Karl Kapp, I felt that not only did I understand the Gaming world better, but was willing to take a stab at trying a few games on my own. Something the author recommends that we all do if we are serious about Gamification. I have already purchased two copies of the book sending the hard copy to a client and a Kindle version for me to use as a reference tool no matter where I may be. A written excerpt from the podcast: Should you Gamify your Simulations?

I will forewarn you; it is not one of my shorter podcast.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

About: Karl Kapp is a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. He teaches a variety of courses to include game design and how to design learning courses and environments, Additionally, as the assistant director of Bloomsburg’s acclaimed Institute for Interactive Technologies (IIT), Dr. Kapp helps government, corporate, and non-profit organizations leverage learning technologies for employee productivity and organizational profitability. In his spare time, he has authored or co-authored four books on the convergence of learning and technology with his latest being The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.

You can find Karl on Twitter @kKapp  or his blog, Kapp Notes.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

Gaming Teaches you to Plan

compLexity Gaming recently added Heroes of Newerth as a division to their championship gaming family. HoN is a solid title in eSports and complexity has contracted one of the very best teams to represent the coL Community: Trademark eSports. Trademark is currently ranked #1 in the GosuGamers rank database and #3 on the recent HoNCast top 10 rankings.

I did a podcast, Games may be your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent, with one of the members of col.HON when he was member of Trademark last year and this in an excerpt from it where we talked about preparation and teamwork. Check out his first blog post on the Complexity site.    

Joe:  Well, you mention, there is a strategy. Do you develop a strategy before a game?

Peter: We can have an idea of what we're going to do before a game, but the way the game works is the other team can ban heroes that they don't want to see in the game, so sometimes that can throw off any strategy you set up before the game. Luckily, there are multiple heroes that can fill multiple roles so even if your strategy is similar; you can just alter it with different heroes.

Joe: So your strategy can be an overview, but once you go into the game, it changes rather quickly just based on who you can use and which people you can use, which heroes you can use in it?

Peter: Yes, you can't go into a game with an absolute idea of what you're going to do because you're facing up against five other players who are going to do something to try and stop you or something different that you maybe won't expect. Every game's different and it's really about understanding and adapting to what's going on.

Joe: A lot of it is like a football game. You can go into a game plan, but if someone throws you, a different defense up, or has a different configuration, you have to change and adapt to what the other team is doing as the game progresses.

Peter: For the most part, yes, unless what they're doing is bad, and it's actually helping you more than it's hurting you. Then, you just stick with what you're doing.

Joe: Well, I would equate that to have if the fullback can run eight yards up the middle and you just keep doing it. You'll take eight yards until they stop it, right? You have played sports before. What's different between offline and online teamwork? Is the collaboration stronger, weaker?

Peter: Absolutely. When you're playing a game, you're focusing on what you're doing individually, and the only way you can understand or the only way you can comprehend what's going on with your teammates is by communication. If your teammates are not communicating, you could be susceptible to the other team ganging up on you or things you’re just not ready for unless you're communicating actively throughout a game.

Joe: There's constant chatter taking place such as in a dog fight or a fighter pilot with your other teammates or your other squadron members whom you're constantly saying 'watch for this' or 'watch for that'. Is that taking place?

Peter:  When we're playing at full force, there's hardly a silent moment on Skype, which is what we use to communicate within each other.

Joe: That chatter, I mean with five... Do you find yourself talking over the other one or is it by the roles that are being played, there's kind of a leader who should be talking?

Peter:  People speak over each other when it's necessary. For the most part, our team is very good about not talking over each other unless, obviously, something's going on and something needs to happen. People will shout or yell over another in order to get that done.

Joe: Is there a planning aspect or do you just jump into the fray and “inspect and adapt”, as I would call it?

Peter: If you're going to jump into the fray and try to inspect and adapt against a good team, you're almost always going to lose. There is a lot of preparation that goes into games before they happen that's usually done behind the scenes, in order to get the one up on your opponents; you want to be prepared.

It's almost like practice. You want to scout them, you want to know what they're going to do, just like a football team, they might watch replays of the other team before. You do the same thing in video games. You want to understand how they play, what they're trying to do as a team, and you want to be able to counter that.

Joe: You're out there watching the other team’s stream. Let's say that you're in a tournament, and you know the formidable competition within a tournament is going to be these two or three teams, then you might as a team go watch video and talk about the other team?

Peter:  Yes.

Joe: So you're just talking to each other about what you could do and how the other team plays?

Peter: We talk about what they do as a team. We talk about how they play, what heroes they like to play, what wards they like to place, which gives sight of the map by identifying what they do with certain timings, we can counter that with our own timing, timing pushes.

Joe: When you go through this process, I think about a football team, for example, they practice all week for two hours in a game. How much practice in relation to playing do you do?

Peter: We practice; I would say, probably, five to ten times as much as we play. One, that's because we just like to play the game, and we enjoy playing with each other more than playing with the general public or other people. As a team, we enjoy playing as five, so we try to do that whenever we can. Honestly, tournaments aren't scarce, but they aren't every day. People like to play the game every day, whether it's after they get home from work, or after they get home from school. We try to get some games in and just hone our skills and stay fresh for when that tournament comes up.

I thought that the upcoming discussions this week on teams warrant a re-visit of this podcast and encourage you to listen to the entire podcast, Games may be your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent.  I used to think Gaming was all about “Inspect an Adapt”. That Mario and Luigi thing. However, gaming is not just child’s play. To reach the professional level of gaming, it requires planning and dedication. More importantly, it teaches you the correct way to plan. Good plans require the ability to adapt to present situations. Understanding when to deviate from your plan through adjusting or even discarding it entirely can be learned and simulated through gaming. 

In The Gamification of Learning and Instruction author Dr. Karl Kapp, had his son write the last chapter of the book for a Gamers perspective. In my series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training, I hope to include a few perspectives from a Gamer such as the one above. Dr. Kapp recommends that if we are serious about Gamification, play games. I would like to add, if we are serious about learning about planning, try planning a strategy out for your next game, Euchre anyone? 

Smarter than a Monkey with your Money

A surprising outcome when moneys are giving the same choices as humans. Find out how risk adverse you are…

About: Dr. Laurie Santos, who has been called "the Monkey Whisperer," studies the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. She'll discuss her recent work on "monkey economics" and will show that some of the silly financial choices seen in humans can be observed in monkeys too. Come hear the intriguing thoughts of the woman recently voted one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" Young Minds.

Related Information:
Traditional vs. Emerging Thoughts on Pricing
Find the Right Customer at the Right time
The Death of List Price
How Lucky are you with Pricing?

Sketching an important Leadership Tool

There are few faster, cheaper and more effective communication tools than the pen and paper. It’s easy, you can use it anywhere and anytime and it is one of the most effective collaboration tools that exist. You can start with a grand idea and instantly transform to the smallest, most minute detail. It is a skill that I encourage everyone to become comfortable doing.

Sketching in Service Design by Ben Crothers is a brief run-through of various group-based and individual techniques for using the wonders of sketching in Service Design. The second half of the presentation covers hands-on drawing techniques to tackle common objects and other things often drawn in Service Design artifacts.

Sketching in Service Design

View more presentations from Ben Crothers

A few past blogs on this subject are Your First Prototype is with Pen and Paper and Spontaneous Marks help you think – Doodling.

Related Information:
Six Sigma Storyboards
Practical Approach to Innovation used by Disney
Storyboards give Insights to Space and Time
Storyboarding for Business

Framing the Act of Innovation, as an Act of Empathizing

In my Continuous Improvement journey into the Sales and Marketing field, I have taken Service Design as one of the leading concepts. One of the areas that is most evident in Service Design and Design Thinking is the aspect of Empathy.  Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM has engrossed himself into a special project that I have found rather unique. The project name is Realizing Empathy and below is an excerpt from the upcoming podcast.

Slim:  What's really funny is... Basically, I would almost categorize myself as an empirical researcher. Because as much as I love books and if you come to my place you'll see so many books, I don't really read them as much as I probably should. I'm much more of an experiential person. So taking classes and acting is like another way of understanding, what does it mean to act instead of reading a book about it. I decided to just do it. Basically, what I learned in acting class is that it broke my preconceived notion of the idea that acting is pretending. To a certain degree, yes; there is a pretend in it. But by and large, what actors do is they try to bring in their own experiences and bring it into the moment when they're on stage. But they do it under a frame. They do it under the name of some other character that's inside a play.

They do it in a situation that is not their own. But what they're really doing is they're accessing their own personal experience, triggering them in the moment. So when the audience sees it, they may think it's the character doing it, but they feel that what they're doing is real because it is real. They're trying their very best to be true to themselves.

That's a very different way of thinking about acting. Because what they're doing is they're empathizing both in real time with what the character's going through, and also before, during rehearsals, they're constantly trying to understand what it is that this character, this writer has written, is really trying to do because the words don't really tell you enough.

You have to have gestures. You have to have facial expressions. All these other nuances have to be coincided with the words for it to really work as a remarkable piece of artwork that moves the audience and gets them to think about things differently. It wasn't until I took that acting class that the word empathy entered into my equation.

Website: http://realizingempathy.com/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/realizempathy/

Slim’s model talks about framing the act of making not as an act of innovation, but as an act of empathizing. The model suggests a new direction for design. It might be quite leap, or is it?

Related Information:
Side Effects of our Desires and Abilities to Empathize
Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
How to Design like an Architect

The Difference In Lean Problem Solving for Sales and Marketing

The transformation of Lean into Sales and Marketing has a few subtleties and one of them is the way you go about solving problems. The typical Lean Thinker goes about solving a problem very systematically using a variety of processes such as A3s, PDCA, 8D or DMAIC, etc. They are all based on the scientific method and the steps are:

• Define a Problem
• Do Background Research
• Construct a Hypothesis
• Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
• Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
• Communicate Your Results

In contrast, Sales and Marketing people have a tendency to make an initial exploration which I phrase EDCA or Explore-Do-Check-Act versus the scientific method of PDCA or Plan-Do-Check-Act. I prefer to use the word Adjust over Act. This initial step seems relatively the same but the real difference comes in the framing of the context. The engineer or scientist views it as a problem-solve analysis. Sales and Marketing solve from a solution-focused synthesis.

Paraphrased from Nigel Cross’s book, Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for Product Design:

Designers tend to use conjectures about solution concepts as the means of developing their understanding of the problem. Designers impose a primary generator and generate early solution concepts. This is used to base a tightly restricted set of constraints or solution possibilities. The problem cannot be fully understood in isolation from the solution, so solution conjectures should be used as a means to understand and explore the problem formulation. As the architect, Richard MacCormac has said, “What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you’re trying to solve it.”

Solution-focused strategies are perhaps the best way of tackling sales and marketing problems which are by nature ill-defined problems. The major hindrance to this type of thinking is found in becoming fixated on a particular early solution concept and an unwillingness to discard the concept. Instead the make minor improvements rather than discard the work and stat with a  fresh idea.  Another problem is going too much in depth versus staying at a minimum level to continue the process. You should look to having a “reflective conversation with the situation,” so wonderfully said by Schon.

Cross added these steps for the solution focused process:

• Clarify requirements by asking sets of related questions which focus on problem structure.
• Actively searched for information and critically check given requirements.
• Summarize information on the problem formulation into requirement and partially prioritize them.
• Do not suppress first solution ideas, hold on to them and return to them to clarify the problem rather than pursuing them in depth.
• Detach themselves during conceptual design stages from fixation on early solution concepts.
• Produce variants but limited the production and overview periodically assessing and evaluating in order to reduce the number of possible variants.

Another part of the process, especially used by designers and architects is the act of sketching. They have a tendency through sketching to handle different levels of detail shifting from overall concept to detailed aspect practically simultaneously. Sketching permits tentative solutions to be explored and investigated and the typical hierarchy steps of problem-solving analysis are prevented.

In marketing, think of exploring a customer journey map allowing for multiple paths to be explored. For example think of a user scenario that might help you identify multiple paths. A few ideas on constructing one:

• Practice being a user. A good exercise is to use de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and apply that thinking taking different user points of views.
• Observe users in action. Insure you are watching both novices and experience people.
• Question users about their experience. You can use a variety of methods that are formal, unstructured and even focused groups.
• Create user personas and scenarios. A persona is about a well-defined but hypothetical user and a scenario is a storyline about the use of a product or service.

In Sales and Marketing evolving to an answer though customer interaction is one of the best methods of problem solving. You may have to accept a solution that may not be the best in your mind. But an idea that can be implemented is much better than one that cannot be.

Related Information:
Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry

How do you handle inputs into your life? Do you process them effectively and efficiently?

The book A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance demonstrates how to apply lean principles to the individual.  It delivers key concepts such as visual management, flow, pull, and 5S. Dan provides these concepts to the individual results in the same kind of benefits: greater efficiency, less waste, and improved focus on customer value. The author, Dan Markovitz is the founder and owner of TimeBack Management, a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts.

These concepts will be very familiar to people knowledgeable with continuous improvement and more specifically Lean and Six Sigma. However, you do not have to be a practitioner to understand or read the book. When trade terms are used the authors explains them in simple everyday language without losing a beat. Few people other than Dan could have provided a book of this sort. His experience with Lean coupled with many years of providing guidance on individual performance has given him profound insight. There may be others with his depth of knowledge but few that can transfer it into simple, practical and useable information. I found myself reading a “how to” book like a novel. I had to remind myself more than once to bend a corner or mark a page for future reference.

Dan is also not shy about crediting or highlighting others when it fits the application. He spends time discussing Personal Kanban and how he looks at applying it. My favorite part of the book was the part on living in your calendar versus your inbox. That comment in itself added a few more minutes of productivity to my day. His A3, Value Map and Information 5S were absolutely flawless.

Are you going to get 2 hours a day of time saving tips from the book? I doubt it. What you will get is more productivity and feeling better about what and how you accomplished it. It was my New Year’s Day read and I have picked it up every day since then. Not saying you won’t be able to put it down but at this point it looks that way for me.

Related Information:
The SDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team
The Resilience of PDCA
Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA
Successful Lean teams are iTeams

The Difficulty of Mastery = The Difficulty of Lean

Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is an excellent description of modern day Lean practices. Just using the example of Mastery from the book will give you an idea on how powerful of a process Lean actually is. I would encourage you to visit the Mastery chapter in Dan Pink’s Drive book for more background. He states that mastery is based on three laws:

1. Mastery is a mindset
2. Mastery is a Pain
3. Mastery is an Asymptote

He also states that flow is essential to mastery:  “But flow doesn’t guarantee mastery—because the two concepts operate on different horizons of time. One happens in a moment; the other unfolds over months, years, sometimes decades. You and I each might reach flow tomorrow morning—but neither one of us will achieve mastery overnight.”

In Lean terminology, I can restate these same three laws this way:

1. Lean is a culture
2. Lean is grounded in Standard Work
3. Lean is an Ideal

We also think of Lean in terms of creating flow. But just as flow does not guarantee mastery, flow does not allow us to become Lean. Flow happens along the way of becoming Lean. Many people think they are Lean companies once they have done 5S, Value Stream Mapping or held a few Kaizen Events. The truth is just like mastering anything, it does not happen overnight. 

Why does it take so long? Why do so few achieve it? From Dan Pink again: “Mastery is a pain.” That is why it seldom is done. When implementing  Lean, most people draw the wrong conclusion and assume it is Leadership. They blame leadership as being shortsighted. This view is not only wrong; it is dead wrong. Our primary problem is not leadership but a long standing culture that is engrained  within our organizations. It’s the way we do things. But worse it is also the way others help us do things. The outside forces that surround us to include vendors, customers and for that matter our entire supply chain simply supports the way we have always done things.  So, not only do we have to create change internally but externally as well. It is not only a pain but it has to be someone else’s pain. Or does it?

From my blog post, If less than 1% of companies are successful with Lean, why are we doing it?, I stated: What does work is the same thing for both people and organizations. It is the scientific process of trial and error. You don’t get it right at first, you have to break habits, personal habits as an individual and company cultures as an organization. Successful companies do it a little bit at a time. In Lean, we call this scientific method PDCA. We plan, do it, check the results and adjust. It is a purposeful experimentation.

In the book, Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success the authors created a strategic, step-by-step guide to breaking longstanding bad habits introduce a system for adopting-and sticking to-better behaviors. I found the work paralleling Lean in many of its approaches and put Lean practices in parenthesis. Their strategy is based on four simple steps:

1. Identify Crucial Moments (Identify Value)
2. Create Vital Behaviors (Map Value Stream)
3. Engage All Six Sources of Influence (Create Flow – Enable Pull)
4. Turn Bad Days into Good Data (Seek Perfection - PDCA)

What people forget about Lean is that it is the change agent for an organization.  In its simplest form, you first go and see the current state. Second, you visualize your process. You make your process steps visible. You visualize things in a way that reveals your problems, not in a way to hide problems. If you understand what standards are, how the process should work because it's very clear, then whenever we see a variation from the process we react immediately. This allows you to chose one problem from the other and just solves them one by one. This is incredibly powerful, this vision we have with lean systems of increasing our competency, increasing our training without having to take people off line, without having to get to classrooms, but by building it into the way we work. It is this empowering aspect that is not easy. But it may be the only way an organization can master Lean.

Related Information:
Audio Collection of Dr. Balle on Kaizen
Continuous Improvement, The Toyota Way
Marketing with PDCA eBook released on Business901 Website
Lean is not a revolution, Lean is solve one thing and prove one thing!

Use the tools of Political Campaign Marketing to turn your Social Media into a Handshake!

Campaign Marketing was discussed in the Business901 podcasts, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2  and part 2 of 2. Part one was more of a strategic view and part 2 more tactical. This is a transcription of both of the the podcasts. I find political campaign marketing very relevant to typical business marketing. Political campaigns have more experience in creating touch-points, managing limited budgets and crafting their message to the audience that they are addressing. An excellent primer when developing a social media strategy and turning it into a handshake.    

 

Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions.

After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports.

Related Information:
Political Campaigning – Strategy Update
What political campaigns can teach business
Lean Marketing Lab Opens!
Start with Journey Mapping vs Value Stream Mapping

Developing a winning Culture the Zappos way!

My guest on the podcast Joseph Michelli takes you through the Zappos company culture now and maybe the future. Joseph’s latest book, The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW has generated my interest on the relationship of employee and customer experience as demonstrated in my blog post, Is Zappos the Next Toyota?. We discussed this and the Zappos approach that Michelli breaks into five key elements:

1. Serve a Perfect Fit—create bedrock company values
2. Make it Effortlessly Swift—deliver a customer experience with ease
3. Step into the Personal—connect with customers authentically
4. S T R E T C H—grow people and products
5. Play to Win—play hard, work harder

 

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Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Zappos or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Against all odds this online business (known primarily for selling shoes in a playful and emotionally engaging ways) has revolutionized social media strategies, developed an environment which has earned it a consistent spot in the top ten of Fortune Magazine’s best places to work, created zealous fans, and attracted Amazon.com as a purchaser for more than 1.2 billion dollars. It’s time to integrate (not balance) work and fun. It’s time to benefit from the unique and effective customer employee and customer engagement techniques of Zappos!

Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D., is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and organizational consultant who transfers his knowledge of exceptional business practices in ways that develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on the total customer experience. His insights encourage leaders and frontline workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives. Dr. Michelli has been recognized by Focus as “one of the top five Customer Service Influencers to Track in 2011.”

Related Information:
What is your iCustomer Level?
Does the Customer Experience mimic the Employee Experience?
When Efficiencies and Innovation no longer work, is Customer Centricity the answer?
Job-Centric Innovation is Rethinking Customer Needs