Click here for the full audio recording of today’s Wise Talk on Designing for Growth with guest Jeanne Liedtka and Mariposa CEO @SueBethanis!
MOREWISE TALK November 2012: Sue Bethanis talks with strategy consultant and educator Jeanne Liedtka on the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for optimal business growth.
Saul asked:
Can you explain the impact, if any, that social networking and Web 2.0 has made on your organization or you personally?
Eric Nitzberg, Senior Leadership Consultant responded:
Social media is a new reality where people live and work. It’s as if someone discovered a new continent, and everyone is buying a home and opening up a branch office there. This new world will never replace face-to-face interactions for human relationship building, but it’s here to stay. For Mariposa, it means we have to be active in this space to stay relevant and connected with our community (our clients). For me personally, it means letting go of biases I’ve had against digitally-based ways of building relationships.
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Will asked:
How can I help a new employee understand the culture of our organization?
Barbara Baill, Senior Leadership Consultant responded:
The first step is to be able to verbally describe the culture of the organization. We all intuitively know the culture of the organizations in which we live, but it can be challenging to articulate that knowledge and articulate how the organization demonstrates its beliefs, values, underlying assumptions, attitudes and behaviors.
Here are some questions to think about:
• What stories demonstrate the culture? Can you describe situations where individuals have gotten themselves in trouble by unintentionally violating cultural norms?
• What have successful employees done that demonstrate the company values and attitudes?
• If your company has articulated a set of values, what specifics behaviors demonstrate what those values really mean in terms of winning behaviors/successful performance?
• Where is the decision making power in the organization?
• How risk adverse/risk taking is the culture?
• Does communication flow hierarchically (formally) or democratically (informally) across, up and down the organization?
• In what ways and for what reasons do people really get recognized and rewarded?
It’s a good idea to ask multiple people for their input on describing the culture of the organization. You can also give your new employee the task of asking these questions to a list of others that you believe would be honest and open about the culture and who are also highly regarded across the organization.
Over time, continue to mentor your new employee on the cultural realities of your organization. As he or she gains experience in your organization, their contextual understanding of the cultural nuances will grow. Your coaching will help accelerate the integration of the new hire.
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Find any innovation leader in an organization and chances are they have been practicing design thinking all along. However, leaders don’t need to be naturally talented or creatively gifted to foster business development; a systematic approach is needed to problem solve.
Design thinking starts with the ability to understand a customer’s needs and figuring out how to pilot a new idea with minimal risk. In the book, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, co-authors Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie demystify design thinking by translating “design” from an abstract idea into a practical, everyday tool any manager can profit from.
Join us Thursday, November 29, at 12 pm PT, on Wise Talk as Mariposa Leadership, Inc. CEO Sue Bethanis talks with strategy consultant and educator Jeanne Liedtka on the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications to maximize business growth.
Topics for the interactive discussion will include:
• What is your interpretation of design thinking?
• You describe the design thinking process around four questions: What is? What if?
What wows? What works? Can you tell us a little about each one.
• How is design thinking beneficial to managers? How can a non-designer apply
design thinking to solve intractable problems?
• What advice could you offer a corporate leader or manager that might doubt their
own ability to innovate and foster growth inside their organization?
• What is one example of a simple tool that a practicing manager can use right away?
We welcome you to join this month’s Wise Talk teleconference and submit your questions for discussion. Sign up and be entered to win a copy of this month’s leadership resource, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers. One lucky listener will be announced at the end of the talk!
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Zack asked:
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
Anne Loehr, Senior Leadership Consultant responded:
I’d suggest using Jim Collins’ 80/20 rule, which says that the best leaders listen 80% of the time and speak 20% of the time. During that 20%, good leaders actually ask probing questions to dig deeper into the conversation.
Why is this an important skill for first-time leaders? Leaders initially were good at a technical skill. A good programmer will get promoted to lead an IT team; good sales people are asked to lead a sales team. Yet a leader’s job is very different than an individual contributor’s (IC) job. An IC’s job is to complete the task; a leader’s job is to empower their team to do their best thinking about the task, and find better ways to execute the task. To do this, leaders need to listen to their team and ask probing questions to help their employees think outside the box.
So this week, try listening more and talking less. You’ll learn a lot more about your team, and your team will be empowered to share ideas and find new solutions for the organization. That’s a win-win for all!
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Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka & Tim Ogilvie
Head: (4.5 of 5)
Heart: (4 of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (5 of 5)
Practicing managers don’t have much time for buzzwords and platitudes. Managers are doers, and when they hear about a promising solution, they want to know how to do it. Design thinking is one of those topics that has burst onto the scene accompanied by lofty promises but precious few practical details.
Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers is the book that provides those details. It goes beyond the theory and philosophy of the recent books on design thinking, showing you how to apply design thinking in a step-by-step way to solve complex growth opportunities. This book translates the fundamental promise of design thinking into a straightforward set of tools that the practicing manager-without any design training-can use immediately to create growth and innovation. The design thinking process described in this book is built upon four questions:
The book contains 10 ready-to-use tools — each aligned to one of the four questions. These tools include visualization, brainstorming, customer journey mapping, value chain analysis, customer co-creation, rapid prototyping, concept development, assumption testing, and the learning launch. This book will help you discover strengths you already have, develop some new ones, and give you the tools and templates to be an instant brown-belt in design thinking.
Mariposa Leadership is very excited to welcome Designing For Growth author Jeanne Liedtka to join CEO Sue Bethanis on this month’s Wise Talk. Join us on Thursday, November 29th from 12-1pm PT as they plan to discuss the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for optimal business growth. To sign up for Wise Talk and submit your questions, please visit our website.
For more information and to buy Designing For Growth, please visit http://designingforgrowthbook.com
We welcome your thoughts in the comments section below.
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Shannon asked:
What is one characteristic that you believe every leader should possess?
Sue Bethanis, CEO responded:
I hear this question a lot from friends, colleagues, clients; and my response is the same each time, and hasn’t changed over 20 years of being in the coaching industry. BE CLEAR! Clear communication is the single most important aspect of effective leadership. Clear in your requests, clear in your goals/vision, and clear in your expectations of others. With this clarity, followers/employees/colleagues have the perimeters they need to strategize and create products, services, and experiences.
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Leadership team development is at the forefront of growth and as a business scales, it must do so in a way that is smart and sustainable. In addition to executive coaching to assist organizations with growth, today’s successful leaders need to embrace tools and methods for innovation and problem solving. Design thinking is one of those methods and a proven approach to growth.
In the article, Design thinking and the new language of leadership, *Tim Ogilvie conveys the process of design thinking through a narrative about an executive and his business travel experience.
He identifies three design thinking tools for leadership:
Journey mapping, also known as empathy, is a way to walk in your customer’s shoes, to see the world from their perspective, and is the most fundamental way in which the design process differs from an analytic process. Rather than breaking things down and tweaking the trouble spot, design thinking seeks to build up something new while framing it in a holistic context.
Once you’ve mapped the customer’s journey, leaders become problem-solvers, immediately seeing new possibilities. The problem is: Will the customer see them the same way?
To help solve this, leaders can implement Visualization, also known as ideation — the process of forming and testing ideas in planning, ad-hoc, and research and development activities. Essentially, it’s a tool to create clarity and transparency for collaborative work. This can be done through various methods – gamestorming especially, provides numerous possibilities.
That being said, visualizing a new result is only part of the process. Co-creation, also known as prototyping, is a tool that lets the market tell companies which solution works best. This is the results driven aspect which shows the progress that’s been made. Co-creation is used to engage customers directly in “playing with the future” so we can discover what will truly meet their unarticulated needs.
No mater what the business is, using these design thinking distinctions, leaders can meet the needs of their customers and provide a better product or service before a problem or unmet need becomes common. Leaders who design the growth of their organizations and innovate in such a way will keep themselves on the leading edge of thought. And in the long run, the effort it takes to do research and development using design thinking will in turn save you time and resources.
So, what are you waiting for?
We welcome your thoughts in the comments section below.
*Tim Ogilvie is CEO of innovation-strategy consultancy Peer Insight and co-author with Jeanne Liedtka of “Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers.” We are very excited to welcome co-author Jeanne Liedtka to join Mariposa CEO Sue Bethanis on this month’s Wise Talk, Thursday, November 29 from 12-1pm PT where they plan to discuss the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for optimal business growth. For more info and to sign up, please visit our website.
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