New ways of working: what to do with those insights and ideas

New ways of working: what to do with those insights and ideas.

✅ Customer insights are on hand.

✅ Ideas have been generated. It's time to do something, to get into action with your good work.

Too often we think we need to find out more, keep working on something, finding out more more more. This is known as 'maximising', and it's not a good thing. It's linked to perfectionism, so no, not good. Rather, put those ideas out there and IMPLEMENT something; an experiment, a test, a pilot.

See if something you've thought of has value for your customers. Experiment and watch what happens. Once the experiment is done, take those insights and ITERATE; improve on your idea and go again with another experiment.

✅ There are plenty of customer needs.

✅ We have endless ideas.

New ways of working are focused on delivering value to customers, sooner. What counts is trying things out; not delaying or getting distracted.

To do this we need to:

1️⃣ Involve customers

2️⃣ Ideate possible solutions

3️⃣ Implement tests and experiments

4️⃣ Iterate and improve on the solutions.

What project you could apply this way of working to? 

New ways of working: let's 'ideate' and come up with ideas

New ways of working: let's 'ideate' and come up with ideas. Creativity is a must, a survival skill says the World Economic Forum, the Institute for the Future and other predictors of skills for the brutal future.

Celebrate this skill of human ingenuity we have, to make up stuff that solves tricky problems. Our customers need us to do this.

We gained insights from the INVOLVE stage (see yesterday's post) so it's time to come up with ideas about the insights. Ideas happen when you form a mental image of something that isn’t present or isn’t yet real. That's a concept or plan, a program or suggestion, a whim or a hunch ... or something more detailed.

Rod Judkins in the book 'Ideas are your only currency', says that ideas are our only currency! 😆

In a world where Netflix-ing, Uber-ing and Spotify-ing are an everyday thing, remember these are the result of ideas. Ideas that someone had, they created and put them into the world.

New ways of working need us to stop this 'I'm not creative' sh*t (it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way) and bring ingenious solutions to tricky customer problems.

You're clever and your customers need that.

New ways of working

If delivering value sooner is the goal, let’s check out how to get that started. Hint : it doesn’t start with you. It’s about involving people, users, customers, colleagues.

It means connecting more with people, not less. It’s being closer to them and understanding more about who they are, what they need, what their problems and challenges are.

Involve is about empathy, understanding things from their perspective and seeing the truth of the situation or problem. How close could you get then Martin Lindstrom in ‘Small Data’ says, ‘there’s a well-known quote that says if you want to understand how animals live, you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle.’

Lindstrom gets very close to gather data; he moves in! Why so close? ‘I look for patterns, parallels, correlations ... imbalances and exaggerations,' he says. 'Typically I focus on the contrasts between people’s day-to-day lives and their unacknowledged or unmet desires, evidence that can be found anywhere.’ A-ha!

Start with empathy and getting closer to your customers. This is a vital part of new ways of working... putting the customer at the centre.

How do you currently involve your customers? How could you involve them more?

Value sooner is the goal.

I'm posting about newer ways of working this week and getting value into the hands of customers, users, clients, patients, students - whoever those people are that you're there for - this is the goal.

The goal isn't to complicate, grandstand, waffle on, time waste or keep busy. Nor is the goal to over-consult, keep working on something until its perfect, bring even more people into a meeting or add still more people into the cc field of an email.

It's the reverse.

With new ways of working, you're looking at how to get to value, sooner. That often means reducing waste, doing the minimum to get something up and going, staying focused on the work elements that best deliver value ... and then delivering that value, testing it out.

When I work with teams and organisations helping them understand and introduce new-er ways of working than what they're currently using, I'll work through these four topics with them:

1️⃣ Involve

2️⃣ Ideate

3️⃣ Implement

4️⃣ Iterate

Let's look at them in more detail over the next few days. Are you with me?

Resisting new ways of working / stuck in old ways of working

Resisting new ways of working / stuck in old ways of working. It’s no secret the world of work keeps changing. As customers demand more, better, sooner, companies large and small need to respond and deliver. The best way for most businesses to respond to customer needs is to change the way they do their work.

Sure, keep shuffling the organisation chart around, restructuring, unsettling and disrupting people, but these are structural tweaks that don’t make much of a cultural or behavioral change.

You’ll need to do something else.

New ways of working are that.

← There were old, last century ways of working.

↓ There are new, this century ways of working.

→→→ And there are yet to be seen and experienced, future ways of working... up ahead.

New and future ways of working can mean different things to different people, teams and industries; it kind of depends where you're at now. If you resist or ignore newer ways of working now you'll only need to make a bigger shift to them later. It's easier to adapt now than play 'catch up' later.

More coming on new and future ways of working this week.

Q: What's a way of working that you use/do now ... that you didn't do just a few years ago?