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?

Learning and Development

L&D: does it stand for learning and development or long and drawn-out.

Is it time for L&D to be more responsive, to lead the way in agility, experiments and lean solutions?

I was speaking with an L&D team about running my ‘ish' workshop for the organisation - where people learn to challenge perfectionist tendencies and work until it's 'good enough', working in increments and iterations. The L&D team said, "Actually, WE need that!"

Often an organisation’s learning program is embedded in an annual calendar; by the time the dates come around there’s other/better/more responsive things out there, the market has shifted, and the skills need has shifted. Does your organisation still work on an annual calendar? (Sure, a calendar works for availability, logistics and managing budget).

Is it time to get more agility into L&D? How responsive is something that’s planned a year or more out? How does a team or project and the skills and capabilities they need change in that time?

Could L&D run on shorter 90-day cycles for example, responding to the needs in the business and what’s happening in the market, offering stuff swiftly to build skills now, not in 365 days time?