Embark on a transformative journey where failure paves the path to innovation, and empathy maps the way to understanding. Together, we navigate the startup ecosystem, championing the 'fail forward' mentality and the essential quest for product-market fit. Drawing inspiration from Andy Jassy's wisdom on mitigating the risks of unsuccessful endeavors, we share personal stories that highlight the resilience and adaptability required to thrive in the startup arena. Our conversation takes a deep dive into the practicalities of validating business concepts, leveraging design thinking and lean startup methodologies, and utilizing social media analytics as a powerful, cost-effective gauge of consumer interest.
Step into the user's shoes as we dissect the intricate process of product development, magnifying the importance of truly grasping user experiences. We unravel how personas and empathy mapping can align your product with your clients' unspoken needs, fostering a user-centered design that propels innovation. By sharing real-world examples, we reveal the profound impact of empathy on organizational dynamics, transforming assumptions into actionable insights. Our dialogue sheds light on the nuanced art of crafting compelling user experiences, which can spark opportunities for product evolution and redefine your approach to problem-solving.
Unlock the secrets of collaboration and ideation in this episode, where psychological safety and collective creativity take center stage. We explore the power of play and the rules that guide it, demonstrating how constraints can ignite creativity and mutual respect. The episode reveals how simple acts of kindness, like the distribution of chocolates, can significantly boost performance, illustrating the role of happiness and safety in fostering innovation. Join us for an enlightening conversation about the transformative power of empathy, collaboration, and play in the workplace, and leave equipped with actionable strategies for igniting creativity in your team.
***
Engage, Share, and Connect!
Spread the Word: Valuable insights are best when shared. Share this episode with peers who may benefit from it if you find it insightful.
Your Feedback Matters: How did this episode resonate with you? Share your thoughts, insights, or questions. Your engagement enriches our community.
Collaborate with The Disruptor and connect with John Kundtz.
Quick Connect Call:Dive deeper into the discussion. Book a 15-minute chat with John Kundtz -> Schedule here. Stay Updated: Don't miss out on further insights. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and our Blog
Embark on a transformative journey where failure paves the path to innovation, and empathy maps the way to understanding. Together, we navigate the startup ecosystem, championing the 'fail forward' mentality and the essential quest for product-market fit. Drawing inspiration from Andy Jassy's wisdom on mitigating the risks of unsuccessful endeavors, we share personal stories that highlight the resilience and adaptability required to thrive in the startup arena. Our conversation takes a deep dive into the practicalities of validating business concepts, leveraging design thinking and lean startup methodologies, and utilizing social media analytics as a powerful, cost-effective gauge of consumer interest.
Step into the user's shoes as we dissect the intricate process of product development, magnifying the importance of truly grasping user experiences. We unravel how personas and empathy mapping can align your product with your clients' unspoken needs, fostering a user-centered design that propels innovation. By sharing real-world examples, we reveal the profound impact of empathy on organizational dynamics, transforming assumptions into actionable insights. Our dialogue sheds light on the nuanced art of crafting compelling user experiences, which can spark opportunities for product evolution and redefine your approach to problem-solving.
Unlock the secrets of collaboration and ideation in this episode, where psychological safety and collective creativity take center stage. We explore the power of play and the rules that guide it, demonstrating how constraints can ignite creativity and mutual respect. The episode reveals how simple acts of kindness, like the distribution of chocolates, can significantly boost performance, illustrating the role of happiness and safety in fostering innovation. Join us for an enlightening conversation about the transformative power of empathy, collaboration, and play in the workplace, and leave equipped with actionable strategies for igniting creativity in your team.
***
Engage, Share, and Connect!
Spread the Word: Valuable insights are best when shared. Share this episode with peers who may benefit from it if you find it insightful.
Your Feedback Matters: How did this episode resonate with you? Share your thoughts, insights, or questions. Your engagement enriches our community.
Collaborate with The Disruptor and connect with John Kundtz.
Quick Connect Call:Dive deeper into the discussion. Book a 15-minute chat with John Kundtz -> Schedule here. Stay Updated: Don't miss out on further insights. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and our Blog
Create a safe space to allow people the safety to fail to come up with that wild idea. We borrow some practice from improv, like yes, and is something that we'll do a lot where we don't discourage ideas that perhaps are unfeasible. We're like, yeah, let's play that out. So that space, this space that you're socializing in, is very much a possibility space. It's a yes space.
John Kundtz:
So I want to shift gears a little bit to the world that I spend on my sort of volunteer time, which is I try to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and startups and sort of especially in the Midwest, a little bit.
John Kundtz:
You know, one of the things in the startup world is about 90% of startups fail right, and they typically fail for one of the top three is poor market fit. And in the Midwest and, more importantly, unlike the coasts where startups sort of find a need and fill it, in the Midwest people come up with a good idea and then go try to sell it and I don't know if there's any just probably reasons for that, but it's just sort of what I've observed. And so what I keep trying to tell and I love your perspective like an advice to some of these smaller companies we have a lot of those that listen to this podcast is like you know you've got good ideas, but at the end of the day, will anybody actually buy it? Right, and how design thinking might help them. Bring those two answers together, if you will.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Yeah, no, it's fascinating. You know, I think that the same principles apply if you're AWS or if you are a smaller group, and you know, I think the CEO of Amazon Web Service said this. His name's Andy Jassy, said. I'm gonna paraphrase this but every company wants two things One, to try as many experiments as possible and two, to suffer as little collateral damage from the experiments that fail. It's the whole, you know, start-up mentality of fail early and often, right, and I'd like to reframe that and say learn early and often. You know, if you're not being clear about what you wanna learn from whatever you put into the market. You know, even if it's a kind of a you know even a splash page, right, just kind of seeing like who is might be even interested in that. That if you're like borrowing from like kind of the lean startup methodology where you're just doing the splash page and connecting emails, right, how do you burn through those experiences as quickly as possible to figure out what that product market fit is before you invest in engineering? One of the beautiful things about you know having a robust design capability is you can test ideas in a clickable format and not spend a dollar on code. You know, one of you know, the IEEE had this great article as to like why software fails and one of the main reasons that software fails is bad requirements and bad requirements, what you know. You can interpret that to mean a lot of different things, but one of the worst requirements is making a product that nobody wants. So how do you test these ideas? You know, test a lot of them and then spend that money smarter. I mean, that's a startup. You know every misstep will set you in a rough spot.
Nicholas Jayanty:
In my own experience before I, you know from the film space, you know we brought a startup mentality to the business work that we were doing. Right, we were like, let's learn from startup culture and apply this to an entertainment startup. And you know, the first business that I launched was you know, we had this idea that we had this offering that people would want. There were so many reasons that they didn't want it.
Nicholas Jayanty:
And if we had just kind of set up a website and just kind of like marketed kind of the offering and just given it like three months and kind of been really disciplined with ourselves and say, okay, if we don't make a dollar in three months, we're gonna kill this, we would have saved like four years of our lives and probably a lot of money that we kind of kept pumping into this effort. I think the opportunity to kind of you know, learn fast and learn quickly and leverage kind of lightweight capabilities to figure out what that product market fit is before you invest more heavily. It's one of the superpowers of having design capability within your organization and just enables kind of those larger goals for really creative startup founders. Which is what are those? What are those things that I wanna try?
Jan Almasy:
Something about the way that you just phrased that last little bit of the explanation. There. You said lightweight capabilities Coming from the startup world and for those of you that this is the first time you know kind of listening to why I'm even, you know, here outside of the fact that this is currently on kind of the apexes segment, but me and John met when I Was initially coming up with the idea for what would then become apex communications network Right, where we use a lot of these tactics that you and and John are going to continue to explain throughout this episode to help people you know more accurately identify problem statements online and then use that to guide their SEO strategy and a lot of their analytic strategies. And Essentially, what I didn't realize we were doing is helping them launch new revenue streams or new products or develop services to offer to their their customers. So for a long time I thought that that beta testing something or getting an MVP out and MVP for those views, that's minimally viable product right and Getting out these things had to be, you know, a month of research and and a whole bunch of thought that goes into it and putting all Of these things out. And then I started to realize that an example of a lightweight version of what you could use to really connect with your customer. We put out a single clip over coven and all it was was a step-by-step of me clicking through a Facebook FAQ on how to know whether or not your website had a Facebook pixel Installed on it. And so, for those of you that are not familiar with that space, a Facebook pixel basically allows you to connect your Google analytics to your Facebook so that you can see, like, where those users crossover, and it kind of mixes data together so you can retarget for ads and you know all this other stuff. But it's it's. It's something that was extremely functional and and super useful.
Jan Almasy:
But a lot of businesses that I was around in the Midwest like we thought that maybe they would want help with a Facebook pixel, but we weren't sure right. So we were gonna develop this service to help people, and so I was like you know what? Let's? Let's just put out a post and just educate people on how to check and see if they have one and the reasons why they should have one and, if they don't, to ask their agency why they don't have one. And we just put out this little clip and it just showed people how to audit it. And we ended up getting five or six responses from people and said, hey, I saw this video. I ended up asking my agency about it. I have no idea why we don't have one. You know, this is something we sell products on, facebook and all this other stuff and it was kind of that little confirmation that was enough for us to say, hey, okay, maybe we focus on this a little bit.
Jan Almasy:
We got six responses from people in our area that immediately recognize the need, whereas what you guys are saying correct me if I'm wrong but if you go back and try to just develop that whole Facebook service, we would have spent a month maybe figuring something out and then put it out and had absolutely nobody respond to it, whereas the way that that happened is we put out a post, you get responses and then develop the service after you actually engage with the customer. Is that? That's kind of the landscape as it is and it's beautiful because, like you, have these lightweight capabilities with the internet To be able to interact with users at a large scale, whereas previously, I think John said you know you're selling like it's 1985. You couldn't do that in 1985, but it was a lot more difficult to reach those that many users that quickly well, you know things were a lot slower, right, I mean the pace of change over the last 30 years.
John Kundtz:
His is just Exponentially gone faster and more disruptive.
John Kundtz:
I mean I you know in all my years, this last few years, the amount of Change and amount of disruption by businesses coming in and just upsetting thing, and a lot of it, is that the technology has Equalized people right, so the barriers or entry are down. But what I'm the reason I bring that up is because you don't have I've seen a lot of companies that they want to have. They want to spend a lot of time and a lot of money Trying to get something that they think is perfect before they go out and unfortunately, by the time they do that, in many cases the, the Reasonable requirements, are no good Neclases because they've changed. They might have been, you know, they might have been appropriate six months ago or a year ago, but but. But if you take 18 months to deploy something, the odds are that the, the business's requirements, the user's requirements, are going to change just because the world is moving so fast and going back to the quote that you flashed earlier Right, the last best experience that anyone has is the experience they expect everywhere.
John Kundtz:
So that actually takes me into my, my sort of next piece of this that I want to talk about, and you alluded to it and I'm going to share my screen in a second.
John Kundtz:
But you know, I want to get into this idea and I think, john, you alluded to it right, what you were doing was you were sort of co Collaborating, co-creating with your potential customers, and, and so one of the things we that's sort of this, this process, and and some of the one of the takeaways I want to give to the audience is I want to share this sort of five-step process of Nicholas, and I've sort of I sort of started and Nicholas helped me, sort of perfect, so to speak, and I think it's very relevant to sort of discussion of for, especially for entrepreneurs and others, and so, and then, what Nicholas, I want to do is I want to, you know, get you to sort of the deep dive into some of this.
John Kundtz:
So, of course, you've seen this chart before. I've cleaned it up a little, I've changed a little bit, but one of the I want to start with a concept of the double diamond right and, and I want you to get your perspective on this sort Of diverge, converge, diverge. This is something I've actually started using because I think you probably showed it to me, and then we'll go into these sort of five steps after that.
Nicholas Jayanty:
It's really helpful when you're dealing with a very diverse and empowered team Right, where you have a lot of strong opinions and a lot of strong expertise. How do you get as moat, as much out of that group that you're working with In the time by letting them diverge and work independently, and then, when you're converging right, you're bringing that back together, and that's about prioritization. And so, as you kind of move through this kind of this, this, this process right, you're continuously working together, separating and then coming back together, and it ultimately allows you to kind of grok where you're at in the process and perhaps what might be a good next step. You know, and these steps, I would say, are not linear, right, I think they're represented linearly, but you can get dropped in at any point of this diamond and start there, so you could start with a prototype, put it in front of your user base, just like yandere, right, he's like we weren't sure if the service was gonna work. So we made something, we put it out there, we're gonna make to learn, we're gonna put this artifact in the world, we're gonna provoke group of people to respond to it by this thing, and then we'll kind of land back on that, observe and define stage, now that we have a better understanding. Oh, there might be some interest. You know we're observing that people are responding. Now how do we kind of refine that and define kind of what that offering might be?
Nicholas Jayanty:
So what that could look like a follow-up step to those six respondents is maybe let's set six conversations up like 30 minute to An hour long interview and talk about what their unmet needs are around this. Perhaps that might expose kind of what their unmet needs are. Perhaps I might give you some other feature opportunities or additional requirements just by talking to them. Sometimes you can invite them to kind of say show me how you might use this data Like what decisions are you making with the information that you're? You know, how do I use this Facebook pixel data? You know what questions am I asking the data?
Nicholas Jayanty:
And by learning that now you can kind of further define the problem statement, the action want to solve for these customers. Because and even just the response is like there's interest, right. But now I've got a really kind of dig down into that interest and figure out what's that pain point like what's the why? Why are these people interested? What value does understanding the relationship between Facebook and Google Analytics and that kind of visibility. What value does that provide my business? And then, by understanding that value that you're providing to those potential customers, now you can kind of shape that offering a little bit more thoughtfully to kind of reach that product market fit that John's described.
John Kundtz:
So the idea is, we started with sort of at the end, with this idea of a problem. What's the problem? The client? So my, my advice to entrepreneurs is what is the problem that your product or service sells Right or it's trying to solve? Excuse me, you know. And and then the first step is just what we said is you know, understanding your stakeholders or personas? So give me your perspective, nicholas, on sort of how you know you. You, you're the one that really got me in depth of understanding the value of personas as Mapping in, mapping personas.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Oh, wow, it's a personas. So how would I say this? Not all personas that you'll encounter in the world are creative. The same rigor, a lot. You know if the definition I use for persona, persona is.
Nicholas Jayanty:
It's a qualitative data model that captures what users kind of key goals are, what their pain points are, what their behaviors are and what their unmet needs are. You can create those personas in a number of ways. Ideally, primary research is your primary method of data collection when you're collecting the information that's going to inform that model. You can use these qualitative data models, or these personas, in a number of ways In the software space. We'll use it right when we're kicking off a new feature, to figure out who is the potential end user of this feature, what value do they expect from this feature? When we go out to test this in prototype, are we recruiting the right people that are representative of the persona to make sure that we are testing a solution with the right group?
Nicholas Jayanty:
We can use our personas to help anchor people in a user experience. For example, when you think about the behaviors of a developer, there are behaviors that are developers that are developing in the Cloud. There are developers that are developing locally. There are developers that are using command line interface and then there are developers that are using graphic user interface. By having that segmentation across your different user group and having two personas to represent those different behavioral characteristics, now you've got more experiences that can be created.
Nicholas Jayanty:
What's the command line experience for Jim, the 50-year-old Sissedman who's been programming in a data center, who's working in a data center or in a knock his entire life?
Nicholas Jayanty:
He just loves the command line, doesn't care about GUIs, versus like Jane, who's like a 23-year-old developer, just wants to write app code, doesn't even want to open up the command line, wants all that stuff to be handled for her and she just wants to click a few buttons to get an environment that she needs so she can code.
Nicholas Jayanty:
You've got two great opportunity spaces just by understanding that segmentation. Another place that I've seen personas be used in a really interesting way is when you start to think about ability, people with varying abilities, and you can think about that across a spectrum. There are people that are permanently living with disability, for example, someone who doesn't live with the ability to see versus somebody who is situationally unable to see because they just went to the doctor and they've got their eyes dilated. When you think about those personas in the extreme and you come up with that experience for them by deeply understanding this person's ability, it opens up the aperture of the types of experiences that you can use to differentiate. By deeply understanding some of what we call the extreme users, you start to get at new spaces and new opportunities for product innovation as well. You can use personas in a lot of different ways.
John Kundtz:
Nicholas, one of the things I was thinking is also what I've noticed in this world like you've got a lot of great points and now that we take that over into a seller or a founder trying to sell their product or service, I see we see a lot of work done around buying personas, but what I didn't see was a lot of work on the people that are actually going to use the problem persona, if you will, the person that has the problem. That takes me into step two, which is one of my favorites, is the empathy mapping. I actually took Jan through an empathy mapping exercise early on in his journey. Tell us about empathy mapping from your perspective.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Yeah, absolutely. I love to use empathy maps in a couple of different ways. I think one of the best ways I've seen empathy maps employed is when you have a group of different stakeholders that perhaps are saying, maybe, yes, this is our user, but perhaps they think about that user a little differently. So the first thing it does is just gets all the assumptions about who you're serving on the table. It gives you a place to document them. It gives you an opportunity to spot the tension within the team. It also gives you an opportunity to reveal gaps in what you don't know about your user. So you can use an empathy map as a way to build your research hypothesis and then also inform your research planning as you more deep in your understanding of your users.
John Kundtz:
You're stepping in the shoes of your users or the people you're selling to.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Yeah, and we were really lucky because, instead of us proxying and imagining what these end users are saying, doing, thinking and feeling, we actually would do this activity with the end user, where they would populate it themselves. They're like this is what I do, this is what I do, so it removes all the speculation and conjecture. One of the keys of design thinking and enterprise design thinking is that our users align us with reality, and when you're in the office and you're not getting out of the building and you're not talking to your end users, we get a lot of head trashes I think John has used the word which is a lot of assumptions, thinking. A lot of energy gets invested in negotiating with your teammates as opposed to bringing some data to the conversation that is going to remove all that kind of conflict and immediately give everyone a direction to go with.
Nicholas Jayanty:
That's the other thing that a lot of the value that you get from talking to your users is is it prevents burnout. If you have a strong team with strong opinions and they're investing an hour to three hours to four hours a week negotiating how one thing should look, you're creating churn. You're not necessarily empowering those people to be as effective as possible because, instead of understanding their users and taking those four hours and talking to some customers, they're spending four hours arguing or debating or negotiating. So that's kind of a litmus test actually for those of you out there that if you notice yourself in a meeting multiple times having the same conversation, that's probably a good opportunity to get out of the building and go talk to your end users and save your team some time.
John Kundtz:
One of the things we learned was that when we got a group of people in the room, everybody knows something about the personas or the people that we're working on, but they learned a ton about each other, right, and they really were all of a sudden realizing and this I think COVID brought this out people really started to empathize with the people they were working with and they really started to realize how they sort of all were interconnected in essentially running the business, so to speak.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Which, to go back to what you're talking about, which is like how does empathy become transformation? Right, that's the catalyst, that empathy for one another, where you start to see how one action that someone you don't even talk to is not in the same department as you, they take and that impacts you downstream. A lot of times there's no visibility into how the choices that you're making impact other people within your organization. I've been in workshops where the front of the house and the back of the house of this banking organization. They were so upset with each other because the back of the house needed this one piece of information and the front of the house continued to not provide it to them. So this back of the house employee was just trapped and it didn't come out until they were in the same room that the back of the house and the front of house.
Nicholas Jayanty:
People realized that the field that the back of the house person needed populated wasn't even in the front of the house person's interface. They didn't even know and there's just like animosity between these two departments and it was just this one field that just wasn't showing up in this one interface, that was just like hamstring in an entire department and that was just, that was nobody's fault, that was bad user experience, right, that's nobody's fault. And but bringing these people together in the room, you know they're like why, oh, you're so fresh. They wouldn't even talk to each other at the beginning of the session, you know there was so much tension. And then, as they started to understand what the data that matters, one of the people in the front of the house clicked and they're like oh wait, this sounds like this is really critical to like you, you all, being able to do these parts, and like one of my reasons that I'm frustrated with you all is because it takes so long to get this task accomplished.
Nicholas Jayanty:
What I'm hearing you say is we're not actually going to need the information you need. And the person was like well, yeah, and he's like, well, that's interesting, because our interface actually doesn't even ask for that information, so I didn't even know that you needed it. And they both looked at each other and like I swear they wanted to hug. Like because they were like, oh, my goodness, like we've had all this tension, like and now we realize that, like this is technology problem, out of people problem, but it wouldn't have happened until they kind of deep dive into one another's empathy maps and deep dive into one what each other were doing and even like kind of a little bit more important, like what's the data that matters to each of these different people and how do we make sure that that information is exchanged in the way that everybody needs to find it?
Jan Almasy:
I've been like super, super obsessed recently with the right and the left hemispheres of the brain and why they're separated by the corpus callosum, right. So for those of you that, like I'm going to get a little bit anatomy here to just kind of set the stage, but so we have this thing called the corpus callosum, or corpus callosum, running through the right and left hemispheres of our brain and it's basically its entire job is to prevent electrical signals from crossing over right. Because if they start to do that and everything starts to spark all at once, it's called epilepsy right. Like it's, your brain is having a seizure, everything's, you know, connected all at one time and it just provides information or below. But what you're describing, what I think is really cool about as you guys are walking through this process and we're talking about empathy to transformation, right, there's actually a lot of like neurochemical triggers that you guys are triggering in people that will bond them to make future innovation possible. Because, like you said at the end of that, like I swear to God that they wanted to hug right In that moment, they're getting such a large rest of serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine right that they're just in this place where they now feel bonded to this person, right, so they're now, in the future, are going to communicate. You've not only identified a problem, you've destroyed a communication barrier, which I think is you know. That's really part of where the real value comes in.
Jan Almasy:
So what's, what's fascinating about the way that you guys, you know this double diamond approach is in the left part of our brain. We really anchor things down right, like a good example is like for most people they're right-handed, so the left part of your brain guides the right hand and that's like you're grasping right, so you're picking things up. That's a tangible idea. That's something that you have a hold of, whereas the right brain kind of has this. Its job is to perceive everything else, like I'm talking to you guys right now, so I'm very focused on this conversation. That's my left brain kind of guiding my perception here. But my right brain is telling me that I know that there's other things going on in my apartment. If I heard a door click, I would turn right, but that's not the immediate part of my perception.
Jan Almasy:
But the way that the diamond forces you to go is that it forces people into that right brain thought where it's like okay, what are all of the other possibilities of things that could potentially be causing this to be disrupted.
Jan Almasy:
And let's take it and then narrow it down into something where we can actually grasp something and then, like you said, that light bulb moment happens.
Jan Almasy:
But it only happens when you get into a right brain space, where the right brain is really good at pattern recognition, and it'll recognize a pattern and then, as the conversation continues, that pattern will start to get more refined, things will start to happen and then, somewhere along that continuum, there's a thing right and then it transitions over into this left brain thought process that now fills in all the details and understands the process and can actually tangibly grasp something like that problem Right. But that wouldn't happen if you didn't get those two people into the room at the same time and create that conversation or that space. You know I always talk about creating creative space to allow people to have those conversations. So, like doing that, I'm just like fascinated with all of the actual biological triggers that you guys are hitting throughout this process. That's what I've been really focused on learning a lot about recently, so I just had to throw that in there for all of my RNs and science people that.
John Kundtz:
Listen to the APEX that's the ICU nurse coming out of you. So, nicholas, give us your perspective on sort of that next phase. Right Once we've worked and we sort of lived the world, we start to now try to from a sales perspective. I'm now trying to identify things that the unmet needs of the client or the prospect with my product or service.
Nicholas Jayanty:
It's always good to design with the end in mind and I think in the context of some of the work that John and I were doing is like we knew we needed a phased approach. We knew we needed to be able to deliver value within 90 days, like that was what we were looking for. It's like where do we start? We've got all these opportunities now We've bubbled these all up, we have some hypotheses on where to start based on what we're working in this context many times. But now we're seeing if the customer's gonna arrive at some of the same conclusions that we've kind of already hypothesizing about. So if the goal is to kind of get to this 90 day proof of value or minimum viable product and you've gone through the activity of understanding the empathy map and where those pain points are, now you need to get some prioritization right.
Nicholas Jayanty:
So once you kind of have articulated some of the pain points, we'd work with our customers to kind of articulate value propositions or user centered statements of intent with a measurable outcome that's compelling and differentiating.
Nicholas Jayanty:
We call them hills in enterprise design thinking and we have those participants of these workshops actually articulate what value and success looks like to them in their own words. So we'll go through this activity where they'll craft as many kind of value statements to this particular user as possible, and then we prioritize it right. And we prioritize it by impact to that end user and feasibility of the solution. Meaning is, what do we have on the truck aligned with what the customer's seeking in that priority, and so the feasibility of us being able to deliver it and the prioritization of that value by the customer helps find kind of where that then diagram of success looks like and gives us that kind of starting point. So you know, from three to four to five, right Five is the kind of the output of kind of seeing that then diagram and then you figure out what you're going to do for a second third. But that prioritization happens in step three and then that mapping happens in step four.
John Kundtz:
If you plot those two. What's important to the client and what's available to us is our product and service. You will again create a magic gardener's perspective.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Which helps you prioritize. You know it's like, okay, everything in the top right corner, let's do that first.
John Kundtz:
Right, high priority, high value or high capability, high value to the client.
Nicholas Jayanty:
And what's cool about this is that it's emergent right. It's not like a group of people leaving the room and coming back and telling you everybody that's participating can now see it happen in front of them. So they know that like the only bias that's being filtered into this process is the bias of the people in the room. So that emergent kind of moment is very much an aha for everybody involved because they're like cool, it gets real clear, real fast.
Jan Almasy:
One thing I want to add before we move into the next you know section here is I want to anchor that down and like how powerful that moment of realization is for the group for the future, of the way they approach problem solving Like the human brain.
Jan Almasy:
I mean, they talk about all the time training military units before they go overseas right, and there's a reason why they put them in high stressful situations and put them into, you know, kill houses, as they call them, to learn how to clear houses and get timing and all this other stuff and put pressure so that when they go out into the field and they actually encounter pressure, the brain has already encountered pressure similar to it and is able to cope with it easier, right?
Jan Almasy:
So when you get that person, even if it's just one time, they experience that light bulb, they're forever going to understand that the only biases that are present are the ones that are in the room. And to get out of that thinking and escape kind of the box, go out into the unknown and the chaos, you can grab the different things that are out there and bring it back down into order. But until they go through that experience at least one time, you know they may not ever have that realization, but once that happens it is valuable all the way across the span of the organization for the existence of that employee who experienced that workshop.
Nicholas Jayanty:
It's really interesting, you know, because a lot of people don't work this way. You know, we're conditioned in like a capitalist kind of society that there's one person who does everything and the team is often obfuscated. You know, like it's called the great man theory of history, right, where there's one founder or one visionary, and in all of these contexts that John and I have worked in, it's very much a team collaboration. There's no ownership assigned to the ideas that come out of this workshop. It's owned by the group, which is very collective. One of the things that we invite people to do in order to keep the space collaborative and inclusive is we invite people to ideate silently first, which kind of neutralizes the loudest voice in the room, because we're bringing in people that are kind of the intern as well as the executive and we need them all to work together. So what are different things from a facilitation standpoint? Can we inject into this room to create a safe space, to allow people the safety to fail to come up with that wild idea? We borrow some practice from improv, like yes, and is something that we'll do a lot where we don't discourage ideas that perhaps are unfeasible. We're like, yeah, let's play that out, let's play that story. So that space, this space that you're socializing in, is very much a possibility space. It's a yes space, and so our role as facilitators is to create that level of comfort amongst the participants and facilitators to help them get there right, that ideation phase. If you're not feeling comfortable and confident, the ideas that people are going to put out are not going to be as creative as if they're in a great headspace.
Nicholas Jayanty:
There's a study that Harvard University did on happiness and there happens laboratory and it was with physicians and what they did was they had their control group and it was a group of doctors, and then the test group was a group of doctors that got a piece of chocolate before they went and saw their patient. And so they baseline the doctors that didn't get the piece of chocolate in terms of their accuracy of diagnosis. Then they looked at the group that was given a piece of chocolate and looked at the accuracy of their diagnosis and they saw an exponentially better accuracy in the diagnoses that the doctors that were given a piece of chocolate before they saw the patient were than the control group. And what they realized is that when people are in a good place and feeling safe and confident and happy, their creativity increases exponentially. You're going to get a better outcome and a better output from them if that space is maintained and curated the right dynamics.
Nicholas Jayanty:
So the psychosocial piece of this, jan, is very relevant and it's not something that John and I really index on very much when we're talking about a business standpoint, but on a human-centered standpoint. And how do you get people to engage in this new way of working and not detract and participate? Very much happens in how you set these introductions up, how you set these activities up and the space that you curate to invite people into this collaborative environment.
Jan Almasy:
Oh yeah, and that's the spot that I'm most fascinated with right now is OK, what types of activities bring people in? I was in an improv group in college and it's super interesting the way that you kind of gamified that ideation process using improv. Because games we understand how to play games if we're properly socialized children at a very young age. You're a three, four or five-year-old and you start the process off and you're just mimicking. And then there's this transition period and it might be a little bit earlier than that. I'm sure somebody will comment on the stages but you start out with mimicking what the rules are and you don't even really understand the rules. But as long as everybody agrees that the rules are the rules, you can run around in circles and have a great time. But then you get to this point where it's like why are the rules the rules?
Jan Almasy:
But then when you gamify something, it takes people back to that childhood mentality where it's hey, as long as we all agree that this is what it is and we respect that, it automatically becomes a safe space because it's so deeply ingrained in how we operate as people. That's how we learn to navigate the world at a really early age. It's basically like OK, I have empathy for this person because they're playing tag. If I break the rules, that means that I'm disrespecting them and all of this other kind of stuff. But it kind of gives this parameter set within which to operate, which makes people comfortable. And then you just allow them to kind of continue a story and improv stuff and holy. I can't even imagine the types of beautiful answers that come out of a structure like that. That's super, super interesting.
Nicholas Jayanty:
Well, even play has rules. That's one of the reasons that play works is because everyone follows this set of rules and you've created these constraints. And those constraints aren't limiting. They're freeing in a lot of ways, because there's certain things you can't do. But working within those constraints often leads to stuff that you never expected.