Behavioral Science – Workshop 2 (Future Vision)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Behavioral Science is provided by Dr. Heft Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Dr. Heft is Behavioral Scientist and Psychologist dedicated to helping people and organizations become more successful. Understanding that we, as humans, are surprisingly unaware of why we do what we do and what influences our decisions, she is committed to leveraging the power of behavioral science to improve lives. Dr. Heft delivers science-based solutions that drive higher performance through consulting, training, and coaching. She has over 25 years of experience in Fortune 500 companies as an internal consultant. Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration, a Master’s in Psychology, and a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Dr. Heft started a Behavioral Science function at a large financial services firm, where she applied the insights of Behavioral Science to the table to solve a wide range of challenges. One of the larger scale projects included conducting a multi-year research project to align behavioral science research related to motivation, reward, and recognition systems to drive performance. In addition, recognizing individual differences in motivation, they segmented the sales group to tailor solutions and drive performance. Today, she continues to consult with them on major projects and conducts research to leverage behavioral science principles to get better results. Since she worked as an internal consultant, Dr. Heft has a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing you. This background helped her build a Behavioral Science program that is extremely practical and focused on helping you navigate your organization to deliver better results every day.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
One of the most important steps is to create a vision of the future state of the challenge. While this may seem obvious, it is more challenging than it appears. The size and scope of various challenges may differ greatly. More complex, larger scale challenges will likely have multiple goals or subgoals. For example, a challenge could be to increase usage of a tool or sales of a product. However, there are trade-offs in terms of how this can be done. For example, there are likely multiple dimensions of success to consider. Sales are one aspect, longer term client loyalty, client experience, referrals of the product, or sales team advocacy could all be critical aspects of reaching the goal. However, the approach for achieving these different aspects can vary greatly. A large part of the work of this step is to define multiple important aspects of the goal, and also to prioritize the most critical aspects. It is also important to identify & involve appropriate stakeholders and understand research on what factors lead to goal setting success.
Objectives
01. Kickoff Essentials: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Kickoff Logistics: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Meeting Content 1: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Meeting Content 2: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Psychological Safety: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Team Effectiveness: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Vision Essentials: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Mind Preparation: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Vision Blueprints: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Set Stage: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Choose Journey: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Land Vision: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Kickoff Essentials: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Kickoff Logistics: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Meeting Content 1: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Meeting Content 2: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Psychological Safety: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Team Effectiveness: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Vision Essentials: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Mind Preparation: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Vision Blueprints: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Set Stage: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Choose Journey: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Land Vision: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
Tasks
01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Kickoff Essentials.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Kickoff Logistics.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Meeting Content 1.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Meeting Content 2.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Psychological Safety.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Team Effectiveness.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Vision Essentials.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Mind Preparation.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Vision Blueprints.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Set Stage.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Choose Journey.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Land Vision.
Introduction
Workshop two is focused on two crucial steps in the BS process. Both of these phases are instrumental and foundational to the project’s success. The first half of the workshop will cover everything needed for the program’s successful launch. This is an exciting and momentous event because it is the first time bringing everyone together as a team. When the kickoff is conducted well, you start building energy, creativity, and excitement to propel the project forward in a powerful way. The workshop will provide the ideas, tools, and tips needed to lead a great kickoff meeting. In addition, each of the sessions will provide you with more valuable BS principles and insights to help you facilitate the process in an extraordinary way. These insights and tips are the “secret sauce” needed to shepherd the team through the process to deliver exceptional results.
The first six sessions will include:
1. Kickoff Essentials
2. Kickoff Logistics
3. Meeting Content 1
4. Meeting Content 2
5. Psychological Safety
6. Team Effectiveness
The second half of the workshop is dedicated to the vital work of developing a future vision for the project. Great care is given to leading this critical part of the BS process in the best manner possible. This section will help you define what a vision is, the characteristics that make a vision more effective, and how to set the stage and prepare the team for being creative and innovative so they can do their best visionary work. You’ll learn some important information about brain science and how to work with our human tendencies that often resist engaging successfully in this work. In addition, you’ll understand how to structure the exercises and activities to lead the team to the finish line in the most productive manner possible. As we close the workshop, you’ll learn about best practices for reaching agreement on the various innovative ideas that come forth in the vision-setting process. Just like the sessions focused on the kickoff, you’ll be introduced to more fascinating BS principles that are relevant to enhancing the vision-setting process.
Leveraging these insights will make the vision-creation process easier to manage and more effective.
The last six sessions of the workshop will include the following topics:
Vision Essentials
Mind Preparation
Vision Blueprints
Setting the Stage
Choose the Journey
Land the Vision
Kickoff – Current State
Too many projects fail because groups do not devote enough time and attention to laying the right foundation for the work. This is not the case in the BS process. In this process, a great deal of planning and care is put forth to ensure the project is launched to get the best results.
The kickoff meeting is critical because it is the project’s official launch and the first time you are able to bring everyone on the team together. As the BSPL, you will have several goals for this pivotal meeting, but the most important overarching goal is to set the team and project up for success. The following objectives are set out in order to deliver on that goal: The paragraphs below outline each of the major objectives for the kickoff meeting.
First, it’s critical to immerse the stakeholders in the data and evidence relevant to the problem that needs to be solved. The kickoff will be used to make sure that everyone has a good grounding in background and pertinent information. This can be challenging because stakeholders come from very different areas of the company, with different levels of exposure to the problem, different roles on the project, and different areas of expertise. In addition, various stakeholders on the project have different pieces of the puzzle. The kickoff is an opportunity to put everyone on a level playing field, hearing the same information at the same time. This allows all of your stakeholders to begin the project with the same deep level of understanding of the core issues, so they can contribute to their fullest potential.
Secondly, it’s important to ensure all stakeholders have a thorough understanding of the BS process and roles. You’ll also want all the stakeholders to have a solid working knowledge of the BS process and a clear understanding of their responsibilities as well as the responsibilities of the others on the team.
The third objective is to launch and build an effective team. If you can also create a highly effective working team from the beginning, the project will be more successful. The kickoff meeting is the first opportunity to begin building that relationship amongst stakeholders and with you as their process leader. It will also be critical for the team to begin working together effectively and build trust and solid relationships from the beginning.
The fourth objective is to get some work done. One of the key outcomes of the kickoff meeting is to ensure all of the stakeholders understand and confirm the problem diagnosis. After all the data and evidence have been reviewed, the team will work together to define the problem. The importance of a comprehensive and thorough diagnosis cannot be underestimated.
Finally, and maybe one of the most important objectives for the BSPL personally, will be to create a positive first impression in the kickoff meeting. You’ll want this impression to extend to the project, their fellow team members, and to you as their BSPL. The kickoff meeting is your first chance to really demonstrate what the stakeholders can expect from working on this project, with you and with the team. You may be wondering why this is so important, and the answer lies in BS.
“Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept”. – Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winning economist
Understanding First Impression: First impressions are the perceptions formed immediately after being introduced to a person or situation. The judgments happen very quickly and are often formidable and enduring.
People tend to assess each other very rapidly. It can take less than a second to make a first impression. People tend to become emotionally invested in the opinions they initially form about others and find it extremely difficult to change them (even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary). First impressions are often very important. Unfortunately, the quick assumptions and judgments they make may not be accurate and can therefore lead to negative outcomes.
While some vouch for the authenticity of first impressions, others view them with suspicion. These decisions are the result of a continuous dance between the selective reading of cues and objective knowledge.
Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, believes that first impressions are somewhat correct. According to Kahneman, you can determine whether or not you will like someone fairly quickly. But he does include a warning: first impressions aren’t always accurate, and it can be difficult to change them. According to Princeton University researcher and Face Value author Alexander Todorox, most first impressions are wrong. He believes that when we establish an initial impression of someone, we often follow that impression and treat it as fact. Although research is inconclusive, there is enough evidence to show that first impressions are based on bias and can be very harmful.
Case Study
Let’s take the example of a company creating a new product. The CEO puts up a fresh product concept that he thinks will be enormously popular. She then gives her marketing research team instructions on how to build surveys, organize focus groups, and analyze the market in order to determine whether it is feasible. This may appear quite OK on the surface; many companies regularly operate in this manner.
However, take into account the CEO’s prior conceptions about the product, namely that it will be extremely successful, and how these could affect her team’s research experience. Knowing what their boss expects from them helps the marketing team do research, which could lead to the formation of hypotheses based on those expectations and the confirmation of those viewpoints. This biased procedure could ultimately cost the company a lot of money if the product fails because no serious study is done on its design or market potential.
One of the complicating factors related to forming first impressions is the confirmation bias. This bias occurs when people unconsciously look for information that validates their first impressions and ignore any information that contradicts them. Confirmation bias has many far-reaching impacts. For example, it affects how readers absorb and disseminate news, how researchers formulate theories and plan experiments, how companies create products, and even why people cling to toxic interpersonal relationships.
So why is this so important for the kickoff meeting, and what are the implications? Well, the kickoff meeting is the place where first impressions are formed. Stakeholders in the meeting will form impressions of the project owner, other stakeholders, the project, and the BSPL. As was mentioned earlier, these impressions can be very hard to change. Especially considering the power of the confirmation bias, which can make it almost impossible to recover from a negative impression developed at the outset of a project.
You may be asking what can be done, especially since these biases occur unconsciously. But this is why; It so imperative to take an active role in shaping the first impression by leading a great kickoff meeting. Since a bad impression is difficult to erase, it’s important that you actively create a positive one.
Also, consider the potential for creating a positive impression. A good first impression can be a great thing. The confirmation bias can take hold here as well. The Pygmalion effect occurs when someone has a good impression of us and a high opinion of us. In this case, a positive first impression can encourage stakeholders to expect the best. Their high expectations also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, encouraging you to maintain that impression with top performance. An added benefit of this is that even when something goes wrong, those team members are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt because they expect the best.
Clearly, the kickoff meeting is important for many reasons, and the information in Workshop 2 will provide you with everything you need to deliver a very successful kickoff meeting and form great positive first impressions.
Next, we’ll turn attention to the second part of the workshop, focusing on introducing the vision planning process. This work is one of the most important steps in the overall BS process. While creating a vision of the future state may seem obvious, it is more challenging than it appears.
Current State
Let’s begin with the current state of vision planning work. Today, every business school curriculum, management book, and strategy planning consultant includes a recommendation about the importance of developing and following a vision. They all attest to the criticality of setting a vision to chart a course for the future before starting any work.
It appears that most people agree that having a clear vision is beneficial.
There is research to back up this assertion. For example, the National Institute of Health sponsored a study that showed that vision matters and has an impact on hospital employees’ work performance. Source
Another study showed that powerful visions had a significant positive impact on customer and employee satisfaction, and employees used the vision to guide their daily decisions and activities at work. This finding was extended to a larger group of Fortune’s ‘‘Best Companies To Work For’’ (a set of high-performing organizations from a wide range of industries in the USA). Source
A further example of the power of a vision statement was identified in a study of entrepreneurial firms. In this research, we see that vision had bottom-line results with a statistically significant impact on venture growth (i.e., as measured by sales, profits, employment, and net worth). Source
Despite these robust findings and the overwhelming support for the development of vision statements, the current state of affairs in business today is not so good when it comes to vision setting. The facts are that they are difficult and time-consuming to create, and they are not being developed or used in the best manner. For many of you, the idea of coming up with a vision statement is probably not too appealing based on your previous experiences either. The next few paragraphs will explain some of the most common challenges related to the use of vision statements in businesses today.
First, some organizations create them because it is what they are “supposed to do,” and they are just checking a box instead of working through the process to chart their future course in earnest. The vision statements that result from these efforts are obviously disappointing. The people who should follow them find them uninspiring and lacking in credibility.
Another shortfall is related to future vision statements that include short- or medium-term objectives. They are not really future-focused, and by including specific targets, they seem more like a mission or purpose. While there is value in having a mission or purpose, these goals do not deliver the same results as a future-oriented vision.
Some vision statements suffer from being too bland or vague. There are just too many product and service visions that aspire to be the best in the world at ….. or to be #1 at …. Or to be excellent at … These vision statements are not clear about what they are trying to achieve, and they are not differentiated from any other product or service.
Two additional problems with vision statements are that they reach too high or are not high enough at all. In both cases, the goals lose their ability to motivate the audience. Employees are not inspired by overly simple and easy goals or by goals that are completely out of reach. A good vision strikes a balance between what is difficult but also possible.
It’s probably clear that the current state of affairs around setting a future direction for your project is not good. However, don’t despair. As you dive into the next workshop, you’ll be equipped with the information and tools to build a vision in an effective and successful way. The following cases will also give you some hope.
Case Study 1: User experience and visual appeal
A 2006 paper by Lindgaard and colleagues explored whether a first impression can be formed via brief exposure to a website. Participants viewed website homepages for 50 milliseconds each, then rated the visual appeal of each page. Lindgaard and colleagues found that participants reliably decided which homepages they liked and which they did not like within 50 milliseconds.
They suggest that this indicates that impressions of websites are largely impacted by the visual appeal of closely related to design layout and colour choices. These findings build upon previous studies which examined how usability of a webpage affects user experience and found that visual appeal of the site actually drew attention away from usability issues.
More research needs to be conducted to examine how long these first impressions last, but web designers should consider visual appeal to be as important as usability when designing websites.
Case Study 2: Biased medical diagnoses
First impressions are known to influence judgments and decisions more than information learned later on. Kostopoula and colleagues (2016) examined whether physicians are prone to first impression bias, and whether it affects diagnoses. The recruited physicians saw six patient cases, three of which could have been cancer. Each cancer included two consultations. After reading the patient description and presenting problem, physicians could request more information about the patient. The authors measured the association of the first impressions with the final diagnoses decisions.
Kostopoula and colleagues found that there was indeed a strong association between the initial diagnoses by the physician and subsequent diagnoses. Therefore, the physicians were likely basing their final diagnoses largely on the first pieces of information they learned about the patients and may have sought out information to support those original hunches (thus using the confirmation bias).
This finding can be problematic, especially if the physician’s initial impression is an absence of cancer. When patients present subtle or unconvincing symptoms, physicians may not be sold enough information early on to consider seriously following up, potentially causing diagnostic delays and further health complications in patients.
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: Kickoff Essentials
The kickoff meeting marks the formal start of the project and is thus a pivotal step in the process. The BSPL takes responsibility for leading and facilitating the meeting. As the first formal gathering of the stakeholders, planning a successful meeting is very important. The BSPL will want to do everything possible to create a positive impression with the stakeholders. As the official launch of the project, the kickoff meeting sets the tone for the rest of the project and communicates what can be expected in future meetings. Equipping the group to work successfully is another important goal.
In this session, the BSPL will gain insights into the best practices for leading this meeting and the science behind them. More specifically, the information will include details on how to determine who should attend and how to set and organize the agenda. You can think of this material in this chapter and the next as a helpful “meeting in a box.” It would be a mistake to think that these decisions are solely administrative in nature; they are critical decisions that can make or break the process.
Chapter 2: Kickoff Logistics
This chapter picks up where the last chapter left off, covering important logistical decisions about planning the kickoff meeting. It will provide details to help you make informed decisions on topics such as where the kickoff should be held, when to have the meeting, how long to make the meeting, and how much lead time is needed.
Today, considerations for remote and in-person facilitation as well as online meeting collaboration tools will be an important part of the planning. The pros and cons of these meeting approaches will be reviewed, and suggestions will be provided for conducting meetings with remote virtual audiences.
In addition, other important considerations will be reviewed, such as whether or not to provide pre-work, how to involve others in the presentation of information, and how to best prepare them for those presentations. The scope and importance of this meeting are similar to those of a major event and require the same thoughtful planning methodology. Each of these decisions is important and have implications for the success of the meeting the project overall.
Chapter 3: Meeting Content 1
Once the plans are put in place for the meeting, the BSPL can turn attention toward the specific content to build into the agenda. This chapter will review options and facilitation best practices for opening the meeting, and introducing stakeholders, as well as several approaches for discussing stakeholders’ roles. Recommendations are provided for each of these decision points that include the data-based rationale for the advice. In addition, the chapter covers many best practices for meeting ground rules. These rules of engagement will apply for this meeting as well as for subsequent discussions, so it’s important to get them right. For example, it can be very disruptive when team members raise concerns about decisions after they are made and outside of the meetings.
This chapter concludes with considerations for covering the BS process in a way that ensures all stakeholders have a thorough understanding of BS and the BS process, building on the material from the last workshop.
Chapter 4: Meeting Content 2
This chapter is a continuation of the previous section and focuses on the remaining items on the kickoff meeting agenda: data and evidence, problem diagnosis and definition, and then closing the meeting. One of the most important parts of the kick-off meeting is an activity engaging the group in validating the problem statement. It’s helpful for every stakeholder to get a full understanding of the problem, have opportunities to sift through the data, cull over the insights, bounce ideas up against the wall, and have thoughtful discussions with their colleagues in the meeting. This process should not be short-changed.
Recommendations for the best ways to conduct this work are provided. For example, the BSPL will need to document the decisions made in the meetings, list and make a plan to followup on any “to-do’s” coming from the work, and prepare an update for stakeholders (those engaged in the meetings and those interested parties waiting in the wings).
The final section offers a framework for organizing a debrief or post-mortem of the process. The final section offers a framework for organizing a debrief or post-mortem of the process, aimed at identifying the successful aspects of the kickoff and areas requiring adjustments. This will include a review of the group construction, the mix of stakeholders, the effectiveness of the team processes, and an evaluation of the outcomes. As the foundation for future steps in the process, it’s important to get this right, which may mean making tweaks to the plans for the rest of the process. While the PL needs to be a thorough planner, the need to stay flexible really comes into focus here.
Chapter 5: Psychological Safety
When people feel safe and comfortable being their authentic selves, expressing themselves transparently, and without fear of repercussions, they are in an environment that is described as being psychologically safe. Research has shown that psychological safety is one of the most important conditions needed for teams to operate effectively.
The focus of this chapter is on how the BSPL can foster an environment in which psychological safety thrives. The content will include best practices for creating safety and recommendations on how to respond to stakeholders in ways that make them feel safe. In addition, we’ll focus on how to create a level playing field on the team, especially when there are differences in status, knowledge, and experience in the group. Finally, this section will include recognition of some challenges related to being in the “out group” and the BS principle on FOMO (fear of missing out), and how to overcome those challenges.
Chapter 6: Team Effectiveness
Beyond psychological safety, this last chapter on kickoff delves into additional principles of team effectiveness. Topics in this section will include how to motivate the team, identify their interests, and speak to WIIFM (what’s in it for me)? You’ll also learn more about the importance of your own competence as a BSPL in garnering their trust.
We will introduce additional BS principles to support the effective engagement of stakeholders during this part of the process. For example, you’ll learn about several challenges to watch out for (e.g., group think and silo’d thinking). This section will provide facilitation tips on how to avoid these and other problematic situations.
Chapter 7: Vision Essentials
In this chapter, the focus will be on preparing for the vision or future state. This can be very difficult work and a challenging process to bring a group through. The session will include more information on what the vision is. While it seems straightforward, it’s easy to get confused about the definition. You also hear about why vision is so important to the BS process. In addition, we’ll go into detail on some of the most important characteristics of the vision that will be provided. For example, you’ll learn why it’s important for a vision to be transformational, concise, meaningful, and broad. We will cover additional details to guide the stakeholders in creating visions that accomplish these goals, among five others.
This chapter will wrap up with an example of how a company developed their product vision as well as several examples of vision statements to help you get acclimated to what you are trying to help the team achieve.
Chapter 8: Mind Preparation
The work of setting a vision is very difficult and challenging. This chapter outlines the brain science behind how the brain operates and why this kind of work is so difficult. It’s helpful to understand why the work is hard so you can help your stakeholders stick with it and avoid frustration with the process.
You’ll also be introduced to facilitation tips dedicated to helping get your team ready for this kind of work and keeping engaged in the most productive way possible so they can follow through. Finally, you’ll be introduced to ideas to help you bring the group back to a mindset where they can re-engage if they get thrown off track.
Chapter 9: Vision Blueprints
This chapter will include a recommendation for structuring the session to get the best result. We need to make some of the same decisions for the vision-setting sessions, just as we did for the kickoff meeting. However, given the distinct context and goals of the meetings, we will highlight several differences.
Setting the plans or “blueprints” for the future planning session will cover details around who to include, where to hold the meeting, how to schedule the meeting, and whether or not to include pre-work. Pros and cons for different options related to all of these decisions are provided, as well as recommendations for best practices. We will also include alternatives for various situations, allowing for necessary adaptations.
Chapter 10: Set Stage
This section is focused on setting the stage for a productive and highly effective vision-planning meeting. It will also include a game plan for facilitating the meetings as well as suggestions for maximizing the contribution and participation of the members in the session. Some of these recommendations include setting clear expectations about the process up front and reviewing any additional evidence that has been analyzed. Additional instructions will be provided for identifying any boundary conditions or limitations that should be understood before starting the vision setting sessions, as well as determining what timeframe is appropriate for the work (e.g., 1 year or 5 years).
Finally, but not least important, this section will do a deep dive on the methodology of brainstorming. The most popular way to determine the future is through a group brainstorming process. This section will discuss research on the effectiveness of brainstorming as well as tips to improve the effectiveness of the approach.
Chapter 11: Choose Journey
In this section, you’ll be introduced to several different activities and exercises designed to help you facilitate the vision-setting process. The pros and cons of each of these options will also be reviewed. We provide detailed instructions (including what to say to the group) for those who are not as comfortable with the facilitation process.
Once the group has finalized the future state, a best practice is to socialize the vision and other critical aspects of the project (e.g., the problem statement) with a broader group of stakeholders. These opportunities to share the problem statement and future state goals give others a chance to provide their input and buy into the process. Several of the options for doing this are discussed in the chapter. This chapter will share several BS principles that explain the importance of this action and how to accomplish it most effectively.
Chapter 12: Land Vision
We’ve finally arrived! This section covers the work of finalizing the future vision. We will share some behavioral science principles on what makes the final vision statement most effective and how to evaluate it.
This chapter will also review several methods for reaching agreement on the best future state goal, including voting and consensus discussions. Depending on the context of your project, a higher standard of consensus may be preferred over majority voting.
Guiding principles for reaching consensus will be provided, along with discussion and recommendations for what to do when groups struggle to reach consensus. This work requires a high level of dedication and commitment. A recommended process will be shared, and some alternative approaches will be provided to add flexibility as needed.
Curriculum
Behavioral Science – Workshop 2 – Future Vision
- Kickoff Essentials
- Kickoff Logistics
- Meeting Content 1
- Meeting Content 2
- Psychological Safety
- Team Effectiveness
- Vision Essentials
- Mind Preparation
- Vision Blueprints
- Set Stage
- Choose Journey
- Land Vision
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Behavioral Science corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Behavioral Science corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Behavioral Science corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Behavioral Science program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Behavioral Science corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Behavioral Science corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Behavioral Science Specialist (APTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Behavioral Science – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Great news! No pre-work is required for this workshop! However, if you want to get ahead and do some preliminary analysis work, some ideas for articles and books are provided below. Reading some of the resources below will give you a head start and may help you feel well prepared for your workshop.
Here are some resources that can be helpful if you want to work ahead to become more familiar with the materials in this second workshop on Future Vision.
Kickoff Essentials
Kickoff Logistics
Meeting Content 1
Psychological Safety
Team Effectiveness
Vision Essentials
Mind Preparation
Set Stage
Land Vision
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Kickoff Essentials
The kickoff is a critical part of the process because it lays the groundwork for the success of the rest of the project. It will help you begin the work needed to accomplish your goals. A well-planned kick-off meeting will help you engage and inspire your stakeholders and will build their commitment to the project going forward.
Planning
Planning for the kickoff is very important. In order to get the results you want, there are many decisions you will need to make in terms of structuring the meeting. In this section, you’ll be exposed to those decisions, but it will be helpful to not finalize those decisions until you get through the next few sections, which will help inform your choices.
Engage your co-leader in planning.
One thing is certain, having a co-leader will be an advantage, although as you begin working together, you can expect to have some challenges until you get to know each other better and establish your best practices for communication and division of work. If you have a co-leader, it will be very helpful to get them involved in planning the kickoff as early as possible. This is a great opportunity for you to determine how you want to work together. You may have determined roles at a high level using the RASCI process in the last workshop, but here is where you define responsibilities and tasks at a more detailed level. You might establish how you want to work together for the kickoff as a trial run to learn more about each other, and then revisit afterward to see if you want to make any adjustments for future steps in the process.
For example, you could use the co-leader as a consultant and sounding board to give you recommendations and ideas, but retain decision-making authority yourself. Obviously, retaining decision making authority allows you to maintain control over the quality of the project, but you may find your co-leader will be less involved if they aren’t also responsible for decisions. Or you could share responsibility for the leadership and come to an agreement on decisions? Another option could be to split the work according to your strengths, interests, and availability, and divide the tasks accordingly. For example, you could have one person work on all of the logistics of the meeting and the other person work on the content preparation. Finally, you could even do some sort of hybrid approach, but a good first step is to outline the work and decisions and then have a discussion with your co-leader on what would work best.
What to cover?
The agenda for the meeting will be covered in more detail in later sections, but for now, the key information delivered will be: BS introduction and process, introduction to the project (structure, roles, timelines, ways of working, etc.), evidence sharing, and validating the problem definition.
How to Organize the Agenda
While there are some important considerations regarding the logical sequence of the meeting, there are additional BS insights that can further inform the timing of the work and material covered. The following insight is related to humans’ capacity for attention and work, as well as their limitations and opportunities. The following BS insight will help you better understand and plan for the best timing for the meeting components.
Understanding Capacity and Timing: Researchers have found that humans have different levels of capacity for different types of work at different times of the day.
Case Study: Timing
The following excerpts are taken from an NPR interview with Daniel Pink, author of When.
“Well, we do certain kinds of work better in the morning. What we see from the research is that we tend to move through the day in three stages – a peak, a trough, a recovery. And most of us move through it in that order. Those of us who are strong night owls go in the reverse order. But during the peak, we’re better at analytic work, work that requires heads-down focus, vigilance, attention, batting away distractions – auditing a financial statement, writing a legal brief. During – and for most of us, that’s the morning.
You also see a pattern of mood that follows the same sort of trajectory where we have an elevated mood in the morning. It drops considerably in the early afternoon and then rises again late in the day”
“And so that pattern of mood affects our performance. And so we’re better off doing the analytic task during the peak, administrative stuff during the trough. And then actually during this third period, the recovery, we’re actually pretty good at more creative things ’cause we’re in a slightly better mood, but we’re less inhibited.”
“…research out of NYU that found that – and this is one of the great things about the research here – is that a lot of it’s being done with big data. So what these researchers did is they took the transcripts of 26,000 earnings calls – quarterly calls that executives make with analysts to report on earnings and give guidance for future quarters. And they took these transcripts of 26,000 calls, put them in this piece of software that measures the emotional content of the words that were used. And these researchers found that calls in the afternoon were more negative and irritable in the afternoon than in the morning regardless of what the fundamentals were of the numbers being reported to the point where it affected the price of the stock temporarily.”
“Because human beings are not inexhaustible supplies of energy. We need that recharge. And it’s – actually ends up being really important. And the whole idea of breaks I think especially in the United States where we have this sort of, you know, puritanical tradition of work where you power through, where you don’t relent is counter to the science. …..It could be short naps, a short lunch break. Take 10 minutes. Go out for a walk without your phone. We’re talking about those kinds of breaks – end up being enormously important. ….. Professionals take breaks. Amateurs don’t. Breaks are part of performance. They’re not a deviation from performance.”
These insights suggest holding the meeting early in the morning, when people’s mental capacity is higher than later in the day. If you work a full day, you will need to help people re-engage in the afternoon and stay focused. It’s also vital that you build in breaks, especially before and after the evidence presentations, which can be complex and require a lot of thinking and processing. The interview above gives you some ideas for how you may be able to structure your breaks to give you the maximum ability to help people recharge their “batteries.”
Who should attend?
All of the stakeholders in your project should attend the kickoff. This includes the core working team (who will be responsible for the project’s heavy lifting), as well as those who will have a role in later phases of the project. We recommended a smaller group size for the working team (e.g., 8-15). Stakeholders who may be involved later could be people in Marketing, Communications, Information Technology, etc. It is very helpful to have them attend the kickoff so they have a good understanding of the project and are able to contribute effectively when you need to pull them in.
Beyond those stakeholders who are or will be directly involved in the work, you can also include those who have a stake in or a secondary interest in the outcome of the work. By including this group of people, your project could include a group as large as 50 people. Large groups can be challenging because it’s much more difficult to involve everyone in the group, observe group reactions, manage side conversations, and to hear everyone’s perspective. While larger groups are more difficult to manage, you want them there because you may need their support along the way at specific milestones, and particularly at the end when you invite them back to learn about your solution. Inviting the stakeholder to the kickoff their importance and is inclusion as an official member of the extended team. Taking this action will also help to gain their buy-in on the solution if they are participating on the ground floor of the project launch.
The caveat here is the challenge related to having a group that is too large. A meeting of more than 30 people will take some additional planning and effort, as well as a greater risk of running into a problem. If you have more than 30 stakeholders in the meeting, you could re-prioritize the list before sending invitations, but there will be a tradeoff between including everyone and leading a meeting that’s easier to manage.
One other consideration is that, based on practical experience, there will be a number of people who don’t show up for the meeting. Some of this cannot be helped; emergencies happen. You can typically count on 1-3 people canceling at the last minute. You may also need to add a couple of people at the last minute (but that will be in your control). Be prepared for these last-minute changes, especially if you have break-out rooms organized and divided by people’s roles or functions, for example. The point is to try to remain flexible with your plans.
Course Manual 2: Kickoff Logistics
Where should the meeting be held?
If possible, it is helpful for numerous reasons to have the meeting in person. The dynamics, engagement, and opportunities to build relationships are much better when people are in the same room. However, this may not be possible, and online engagement tools and opportunities make an online meeting a good second choice. If you hold the meeting online, fully leveraging your company’s collaboration tools and technology can be a game changer. If you aren’t familiar, you should become familiar and/or find a resource that can help you plan and utilize the tools to their fullest capacity in the meeting. This is a good investment because you’ll likely be using the tools for future project meetings as well.
The challenge comes when you try to have a hybrid meeting (i.e., in person for those who can attend and online for who need to attend remotely). Facilitating these types of meetings can be very challenging, and you’ll need great technology and support to pull it off effectively. Some of your challenges will include: integrating remote users in a breakout session, ensuring they can participate effectively in Q and A, asking questions during presentations. There is just such a tendency to give precedence to what is happening in the room, that the remote attendees feel less important and may choose not to actively participate because they don’t want to be disruptive. If you choose a hybrid approach, it would be great to have a support person dedicated to focusing on those remote attendees exclusively.
When should the kickoff be scheduled?
In workshop 1, you established a preliminary timeline for the project, which included when the kickoff meeting would occur. However, after going through this and the next couple of sections dedicated to the kickoff meeting, you may wish to give additional consideration to the actual date of the kickoff meeting. One of the primary concerns will be your ability to plan, coordinate with the stakeholders to ensure their attendance, your progress on data collection, and perhaps even the fresh start effect (described below).
Understanding the Fresh Start Effect: This refers to the psychological phenomenon where individuals are more inclined to pursue their objectives and implement positive changes following temporal landmarks such as the start of a new week, month, or year. This effect suggests that these temporal landmarks act as mental cues for individuals to initiate beneficial changes and undertake productive actions. Studies have shown that people are more motivated to set and accomplish goals during these fresh start moments, making it an important concept in the realm of productivity and self-improvement. The concept of the fresh start effect finds its roots in behavioral economics and psychology. Researchers have explored the cognitive shifts that occur during temporal landmarks, leading to an increased focus on goal pursuit and self-improvement.
The fresh start effect would suggest you schedule your kickoff at the beginning of the month, week, or even the beginning of the day to leverage the motivational power of leaving your stakeholders’ past behind and beginning the project with enthusiasm and a clean slate for the future.
How long should the kickoff be?
This is one of the questions that gets the “it depends” answer. There is a lot of content to cover in the kickoff meeting, and it’s your first engagement with the full team, so you want to get it right. To lay the right groundwork, build space for good dialogue, educate the team, and get them excited about working on the project, you will likely need a half or full day. Since that is a lot of time, your team may push back or be reluctant to give you that much of their time. You can make the case for why it is important by helping them understand what will be covered and the work that will be accomplished.
Lead time
Another way you can ensure that people will attend is to get the meeting on people’s calendars as early as possible, even a month in advance. You may even want to coordinate calendars for your most critical stakeholders to make sure they can attend. For example, you can send a few potential dates and see if those days are available; some software allows you to check electronically for availability; and for some stakeholders, they may have assistants who manage their calendars. If you put in a lot of effort to put this meeting together, it’s disastrous to find out a few days before the meeting that one of your key stakeholders is not available. This can create serious delays to your project if you have to coordinate calendars again for a large group of people, or going forward without those key stakeholders could be a waste of the rest of the group’s time.
Prework
In some cases, you may want to give your stakeholders some pre-work before the kickoff. This could be helpful if you have a full agenda and not enough time to accomplish what you need. You might also take this approach if you are getting strong pushback from some of your leaders, in terms of the time dedicated to the meeting. This could be a good strategy if you are hoping to create a certain mindset prior to the meeting and you want them to begin thinking differently. However, you will need to understand that some people will not do the prework, it would need to be sent well in advance to give the team time, but if you send it too far in advance, they will forget the material. If you send pre-work, it should be very clear and concise. For example, sending a presentation about research that was done may be helpful, but not if all of your stakeholders won’t understand it. Often, data requires some discussion for those who are less familiar.
Involve others in presenting.
There are several advantages to involving others in delivering presentations during the meeting, and you should consider it where it makes sense. Hopefully, the voice-related BS principle discussed in the last workshop will stick in your mind. This is important because it gives others a chance to showcase their work, and they participate in this way, they will feel more like a part of the group.
For example, during the evidence portion of the meeting, one of the researchers or data scientists could share their research efforts and results. Someone from the business area could talk about customer interests and concerns. Even if this is anecdotal, it’s based on expert opinion from those who are close to the work, so it is relevant. Just be sure to mention that the source of the data is anecdotal. These data points are great candidates for future research to validate assumptions. You could also ask people to help you lead a break-out group during the problem definition portion, or someone could facilitate another part of the meeting, such as setting ground rules.
Having others present will give you a little break from presenting and will give the group a change in who they are listening to (which can help keep their attention). Having others present also gives you an opportunity to think about how the meeting has progressed and if you need to make any adjustments. It also gives you a chance to observe the group and maybe call on specific people to get them more involved or ask questions.
While it’s a good idea and important to ask others in the present, you’ll also need to ensure their presentations are delivered in a high-impact way. For example, presentations need to be easy to understand and follow. They should be interesting, attractive, vivid, and include examples. Graphics and charts are typically helpful in both conveying easy-to-understand insights and keeping the audience engaged. So, how can the BSPL manage the quality? There are several options. First, you can create some suggestions for what you are looking for (e.g., charts, tables, specific headings, no jargon, etc.).
You can ask your presenters to submit their presentations in advance and schedule time to review them together before the meeting with the purpose of giving feedback on potential improvements. You can also leverage a presentation they’ve already delivered and work with them to adapt it for the kickoff audience. Another option could be to develop the content yourself and ask someone else to deliver it. However, there are some obvious drawbacks to this plan. It takes your time, the presenter is not as invested, and may not do a good job delivering the material since they don’t know it well. But this could be an option if your presenter is too busy to put a slide deck together.
Case Study: The Fresh Start Effect
New Year, New Me.
We’ve all heard that phrase before. Heck, I even remember saying it to myself a couple of days back. Along with the classic, “This is the year I get ripped. No, for real.”
We’ve all been there. And we’ve all fallen prey to The Fresh Start Effect.
Definition: People are more likely to take action toward a goal after times that represent new beginnings (e.g. new week, new month, new year).
But why do we love a clean slate? And how powerful can it be for us marketers?
“It’s Time To Start Being Healthy”
Look at the graph below. It’s from Google Trends.
You’ll notice all those random spikes in interest over “workout,” “exercise,” and “diet.”
When you look closer though, you’ll realize – they’re not really that random. It’s the start of the new year. Every single time.
With all our new year’s resolutions, it’s no surprise that more than 12% of gym members sign up in January. For the rest of the year, it’s more like 8.3% per month. That’s almost a 50% hike. And you see many wellness companies, like Adidas, making the most of these times with offers like these:
But why exactly does this work? 2 dead-simple reasons:
Peak motivation: With our New Year’s fitness resolutions, Adidas picked the right time to make a sale. Motivation is at its peak. Desire to spend on fitness gear is at its peak too. Brutal combination.
An opportunity for improvement: New beginnings give people a chance to blame their past imperfections on a previous period. A new start forces people to zoom out and drives aspirational behaviors.
Dig into your user’s aspirations, find a time when desire is strongest, put it together, and you’re onto something.
It’s time to talk about leveraging science to help build your business.
1. Pick The Right Time
Identify the most iconic temporal landmarks for your specific audience. Think beyond New Year’s. You want to find the moments when your users are experiencing their: deepest level of pain, deepest lever of desire for a product like yours.
• If you have a fintech company, target tax season.
• If you own a college career network, target interview season.
• If you have a wellness company, your time is now!
2. Emphasize The Opportunity For A Fresh Start
Use copywriting to dig into your users’ deepest pain points and aspirations. Emphasize the opportunity for a new beginning. And let that natural human instinct to separate our past selves from our future, new and improved selves, take over. I love this example from Intuit Mint – a personal finance company:
3. Include Incentives To Drive Action
One way I’d improve that piece from Intuit Mint: Include a stronger incentive. Something more tangible than a score. Whether it’s a beginner’s checklist to personal finance or a free personalized audit, incentives like those will drive a lot more action.
Case Study Questions:
Exercise
1. What is the role of the leader and co-leader in the kickoff meeting?
2. Where should it be held?
3. How much lead time will you give your stakeholders?
4. How long will it be?
5. Will you include any pre-work?
6. Will you ask stakeholders to present?
Course Manual 3: Meeting Content 1
In this session, we’ll begin to review the content to cover in the kickoff meeting. The second part of the kickoff will be covered in the next session. While we are laying out the typical agenda and content, you can obviously customize the agenda and content based on the needs of your project. The availability of stakeholders and constraints on your time (which were discussed in the previous session) are considerations that may prompt you to adjust the kickoff meeting.
Let’s start with the end in mind. What are your goals for the meeting, and what does success look like? The goals for the meeting fall into several categories. First, what is the work you want to accomplish, and what do you want from your stakeholders? More importantly, what do you want them to experience in the meeting? How do you help prepare the stakeholders for the work ahead of them? Finally, what do you want them to know about you as the BSPL? The next few paragraphs will tackle each of those questions.
Open the Kickoff
You can start the kickoff by welcoming the group and sharing some opening comments.
1. First, describe the importance of the work, as well as the potential and expected impact it will have on customers, employees, the business, and others. Reinforce the “why” behind the work. This should be expressed with enthusiasm.
2. Communicate your appreciation for the people on the team and let them know you are counting on them to get the work done. Let them know that everyone’s voice is essential to achieving the best outcomes.
3. Next, describe your goals for the meeting. This is different from the specific agenda. See the paragraph above for guidance on developing your goals. It’s okay to have some public and private goals. Obviously, you’d only want to share the public goals.
4. Then share the agenda with the group. People want to know where they are going. This is important, even if you have already sent the agenda in advance.
The project owner should have a significant role in communicating key messages in the kickoff meeting. Working with the project owner will be discussed in the next section.
Introductions
To prepare stakeholders for the work, it will be helpful to ask them to introduce themselves to the group. As you are probably aware, sometimes introductions can take a lot of time, especially if you have a large group. Therefore, at this point, you might ask each person to mention just three things: 1) Name; 2) Dept.; and 3) years in the company. You could also ask them to describe one reason they are excited about this project. If you do this, it’s a good idea to capture their ideas on a flip chart or in the collaboration tool. You could also ask them to describe their role in the project at a very high level. The next section goes into more detail about alternative ways to cover roles.
You should go first to provide an example of the brief introductions you are looking for.
Roles
In this part of the meeting, it’s important to share the list of stakeholders and their roles. This can be done on the screen or in a separate handout. The kickoff meeting could be a good time to go into more specific details around tasks and responsibilities related to roles. This would help the stakeholders understand who to go to for what and how they can count on each other. However, you only want to do this if the majority of the group consists of the working team, so as not to inconvenience or waste the time of the other stakeholders. If you have a good mix of stakeholders, you could save the more detailed discussion of roles for a separate working team meeting where you can devote more time.
As you discuss roles with the group, they may identify some missing players. Even though you have been careful and thorough in your planning for the project and the kickoff, in most cases, teams will identify additional stakeholders who need to be plugged in. It’s still early enough to get people engaged in the next step without too much risk.
More recommendations about leveraging the role discussion to support other team-building goals will be addressed in the section on Meeting Content.
Ice breakers
Let’s start with familiarity. What can be done to accelerate the familiarity process? You could start with an ice-breaker designed to help people get to know each other faster. The exercise from the first workshop (i.e., two truths and a lie) is a good example. Another example is to play “getting to know you” bingo. You can set up cards in advance that have personal information listed in the squares (e.g., someone with red hair, someone who had a “stay cation” at home last year, someone planning a camping trip, a runner, someone who loves country music). In this way, team members are forced to talk to many different people on the team and find commonalities among them.
Ground rules.
This is an important meeting, and you have expectations for how you and your stakeholders will engage. It will be important to include these expectations so others can comply, and you can address issues as they come up. It’s helpful to engage the group in developing these ground rules, but you may want to start with a couple that are important to you. Here are some typical issues you may want to address:
Start and end on time. it’s very important to respect everyone’s time. This meeting sets the precedent for future meetings, so it is particularly important to get it right. You’ll need to start on time and not wait for everyone to show up. If someone is late, you shouldn’t stop the meeting to bring them up to speed. Instead, acknowledge their arrival, let them know you will update them on a break, and proceed with the meeting. This sends a message about what will happen if people show up late. Ending on time is important too. It’s very common for meetings to run behind, and they rarely make up time. We will address this situation later in this workshop.
Be present; Turn off cell phones. Ask the group to avoid checking or responding to emails. You can let them know they will have time for that with breaks throughout the meeting. Since so many meetings are conducted online, you can also ask participants to close other screens to ensure they don’t get distracted.
Assume positive intent; As humans, we can sometimes be offended or triggered by something someone says or does. It is helpful if the group “assumes positive intent” and gives the others the benefit of the doubt if something creates some stress or anxiety. This is not the same as asking the group not to challenge ideas, thoughts, or statements. You’ll need to be clear that you want that behavior.
Have one conversation; In group meetings, you may notice that suddenly there are multiple groups having different conversations at the same time. It’s disrespectful to the person who is speaking, and it’s distracting (whether you are in the conversation or not). As a facilitator, it’s important for you and everyone in the room to hear what everyone has to say and be focused on one conversation at a time.
Understanding why this happens may be helpful in managing it. First, it’s a good idea to follow your own guidelines and assume positive intent. It’s not helpful to scold or shame someone or a small group for having a side conversation. In truth, the group may be raising a very important issue, but they don’t feel safe or able to find a way to express their idea in the group.
This is an opportunity to reflect on the dialogue and consider that someone may be dominating the conversation, for example. Alternatively, a person who started the second conversation may be overly anxious about what is being said and not doing a good job of self-regulating. While they may not feel comfortable speaking out or waiting for their turn, they may decide that saying something to the person next to them is the next best option.
In this situation, your first step as the BSPL could be to acknowledge the sidebar and let the group know in a very sincere way that you really want to hear what they have to say. You can also let them know you are frustrated because you can’t listen to two things at a time, if you can do this without putting the small group on the defensive. Next, invite someone from the group to discuss their thoughts. If they aren’t willing to share their dialogue with the group, you could circle back to the group during a break and see if you can uncover what was happening.
Leave titles at the door; In many cases your kickoff will include people at all levels. This ground rule allows everyone to have an equal right and opportunity to speak at the meeting.
What is BS?
In this part of the meeting, your goal is to educate the team on what BS is and the benefits of leveraging the process. Even though you’ve introduced your stakeholders to the idea of BS, they will likely be new to fully understanding what BS is and the benefits of the approach. The kickoff is a great opportunity to continue their education on BS and see how it will help them with the challenge ahead of them.
We dedicated a section of the previous workshop to preparing you to explain what BS is and why it is so important to your company. This is the place where you will leverage those materials. While the section was thorough in preparing you to share this story, it will be helpful for you to think about what you want your audience to think, feel, and do. For example, you will likely want them to think that BS will be a wonderful tool to leverage that can make a big difference for your project. You’ll want them to feel enthusiastic and confident that you and this process will effectively lead them through the process, and they will fully invest in the process.
Remind yourself that the core work of BS is about getting to know your clients and all aspects of their complexity, impacting their path, and creating a roadmap for a journey that is not just drivable but also alluring. It’s a more profound, sophisticated strategy that recognizes the challenges to human behavior. It helps to use this knowledge to influence experiences in small but very meaningful ways.
BS Process Overview
In this part of the meeting, the BSPL will review a high-level overview of the BS process, with projected timelines. It is important for everyone to be clear about the steps and milestones involved in the entire process. People are able to do their best work when they have clear expectations regarding what is ahead. Again, even if you shared a high-level overview in the prior meeting, the kick-off meeting is the place to go into more specifics. Furthermore, since you obtained additional information with each stakeholder meeting, things may have evolved and gotten clearer since you first met with them. In addition, since this process is different, it is often helpful for people to hear things more than once. By sharing the BS process again, you’ll reinforce their understanding of the process. This will also serve to make them more familiar with, and therefore, more comfortable with the process.
The BSPL should leave time for questions and challenges. You can also probe the group by asking if the timelines are realistic or if each of the steps seems necessary. You may be asked questions, for example, about the current state. After all, didn’t the team just review the current state in the process of defining the problem? While that is true, there is likely additional data being collected throughout the process, and the group will have another chance to examine any new evidence before the work of defining behaviors.
In some cases, it is also possible to consolidate some steps. For example, the kickoff could include moving directly into the future state work; however, that would be a lot of content to get through and could negatively impact the project if the group becomes fatigued (physically and mentally). If there is a need to consolidate work, you might consider having the kickoff on day 1 and meet to do the future state work the next day .
Case Study: Intentional Meetings
Every year, U.S. firms waste $37 billion in unproductive meetings.
A 12,000-employee medical technology company was no exception. Every day, poor meetings drained their people and results.
After several failed attempts to improve their meeting culture, a strategic investment with Bridging the Difference solved their frustrations, inefficiencies, and energy-sapping conflict. Our results include:
Their Problem: Productivity Drain
• Too much time “people-wrangling and trying to get people to pay attention.”
• The right data, the right amount of time, or the right people were missing.
• “Spectators would confuse the issues,” causing conflict and chaos.
• People arrived late or left early and drifted off-topic, derailing the conversation.
• Lack of good turn-taking exasperated team members.
• People couldn’t reach decisions: One meeting became two, then three meetings, crippling project timelines.
Their Attempts to Fix It
Before working with Bridging the Difference®, the firm tried to fix the problem,
including:
• Limiting meetings to 45 minutes. That didn’t work; meetings ran over.
• Having the first two hours of each day meeting-free, so people could get their tasks done. That backfired in longer work hours.
• Using an off-the-shelf training program. That fell flat in the U.S., and it wasn’t applicable to the firm’s global footprint.
The Fix That Sticks
• In practice-focused workshops, leaders from Continuous Improvement, Manufacturing, Operations, Supply Chain, Packaging, Procurement, Research and Development, and the Strategy Execution Office applied the research-based best practices of Intentional Meetings .
• In action-centered learning focused on their real upcoming meetings, leaders immediately became more effective at boosting their teams’ energies and leveraging their knowledge. The organization saw impact right away.
The organization saw results right away
• Higher-quality team member contributions.
• More productive issue-resolution conversations.
• Quality decisions made in the first meeting—that stuck after the meeting.
• 66% time saved in weekly project meetings and decision-making meetings
• 40 to 70% fewer meetings (depending on the type)
“We have fewer meetings now because the quality of the decisions we make in the first meeting is as good or better than we used to get in three meetings.”
—Operations Excellence Leader
“Without Bridging the Difference , we would still have a lot of complaining about
meetings.”
—VP, Continuous Improvement
“There is a direct connection between Intentional Meetings and reaching our goals this year. I trained 160 salaried staff at my Mexico facility. Now, we’re all better managers, leading a better organization, with better participation and involvement from all employees. It’s now our standard work instruction for any meeting. The most important benefit is how it builds trust.”
—Facilities Operations Director, Mexico
Case Questions
1. What were the issues plaguing the organization’s meetings?
2. Why didn’t the organization’s attempts to fix the problem work?
3. How do you think applying behavioral science made a difference?
Exercise – Ground Rules
1. When have you been in a meeting where something did not work effectively or you had a bad experience?
2. Is there a ground rule that could have prevented the issue?
3. Which ground rules would you implement for your project?
4. Think about the ground rules that are important in your organization.
5. Are there some that are missing?
6. Which ones do you think are the most important?
Course Manual 4: Meeting Content 2
This section will continue to provide the information needed to lead a successful kickoff meeting. We’ll pick up with recommendations for discussing roles, reviewing evidence, and confirming the problem statement.
Review Evidence
After you lay the foundation for a successful team structure, one of the first things you’ll want to do is review the evidence with the stakeholders. This is one of the steps that can help you ensure everyone is on the same page in terms of what they know at the start of the project. It will be important to find the right level of detail for the team so that all the stakeholders will understand the information being presented. Since you will likely have stakeholders from multiple areas, you will probably have stakeholders who are less familiar with the data than those from the business area, for example.
Data reports can be very intimidating for many people. It will be important to make sure the information presented is easy to understand, free of technical terms, and that any tables and graphs are labeled well. The data presenters should do their best to interpret the data in a way that helps the audience draw appropriate conclusions about what the results mean.
This is one of the most important areas for the group to be involved in a thorough Q and A session. As the facilitator, you may be able to help by asking questions to test your conclusions about what the data is conveying. Many times, although data and statistics may seem straightforward, they seldom are. It’s important for the group to understand if the results are representative and generalizable, for example. Researchers can often add information about whether results are conditional or depend on the context.
Confirm Problem Statement
After you lay the foundation for a successful team structure, one of the first things you’ll want to do is work with the stakeholders to validate the problem statement. However, this will not be as simple as showing them the statement you drafted and asking if everyone agrees. Rather, it will be critical to work through a couple of problem-definition exercises or steps with the team.
This allows them to dive into the problem as a group, sift through it, exchange ideas and perspectives, and then develop a problem statement together as a team. In this way, the problem statement will be shared, understood, and owned by the entire group. This is important even if you feel confident that you got it right and have reviewed it with your stakeholders in the meetings you held prior to the kickoff event.
As a brief side note, it may be frustrating for the BSPL to have gone through the process of writing a problem statement on your own and then having the team adopt a different statement. However, the team will be more successful in the end because they went through the process together and bought into the problem definition at a different level because of the work. This is just a tip to prepare you so you don’t become too attached to your statement or take it personally when it goes in a different direction.
After you have reviewed and discussed the evidence available, you can lead the team to an exercise to validate the problem statement.
Facilitator Exercise 1: Defining the Problem: Part 1
1. Give your stakeholders independent time to jot down their answers to the following six questions:
• What is the product/tool/service?
• Who are the target users or audience?
• Why does the product exist? Why was it created? Why is it necessary (for new product development)?
• How does it (or will it) achieve “the why”?
• When are the target audience or users engaged with it or using it?
• Where is it happening or supposed to happen?
2. Use your best judgment as you consider the assignment of questions. For example, if there is disagreement among group members about question two, who is the target audience, you may need to have a large group discussion to decide on who is the audience before working through the remaining questions.
3. Split the stakeholders into small groups to share their answers with each other, discuss, and come to an agreement on the “best” answer for each question. You need multiple groups looking at the same questions. If you have at least 4 groups, you can assign half of the questions to half of the groups and the other half of the questions to the other groups.
4. Next, invite the teams to share their answers to the questions.
5. Record the answers on a flip chart or in your online collaboration tool if meeting online.
a. If answers from different groups are similar, there’s less of a need to discuss a great deal beyond the group sharing their answers.
b. However, you can expect to find multiple different answers to each of the questions. When there are answers that are significantly different, further discussion is important to understand the different perspectives.
c. At this point, it’s not critical to reach consensus about each answer. The next section describes a method you can use to help dig deeper into the “why” questions (i.e., why the product/tool/service exists and why it isn’t working?).
Part 2
The next step is to come to an agreement on the gap. The gap is essentially the difference between what should be happening and what is actually happening.
Key questions for the gap analysis:
1. What isn’t happening today that needs to?
2. What is the gap between what is desired and what is happening today?
To help you with this process, engage the group in the Five Whys exercise you were introduced to in the last workshop.
The Five Why Questions exercise
Ask ‘why’ questions to identify and gain an in-depth understanding of the issue. The Five Whys exercise is a straightforward and easy-to-use problem-solving technique that can help you identify the root cause of a problem. The simple framework includes asking a series of five consecutive “why” questions. Each time an answer is given, proceed to the next “why.”
1. Ask the group to break into pairs. Ask each pair to “interview” each other using the two gap analysis questions above. One person will ask question: 1) What isn’t happening today that needs to? After the other person answers, the questioner will then ask why. Repeat this process five times.
Next, switch roles, so the questioner has to answer questions and follow the same path of asking the five whys for the second question. This should help each team get to the root cause for the problem.
2. Bring the group back together for a large-group discussion about the gap. Ask if one of the teams wants to nominate their root cause for questions one and two. Record their answers on a flip chart, white board, or on the collaboration tool so everyone can see them.
3. Observe and discuss similarities and differences between the answers.
4. As a single gap emerges from the dialogue, engage the group in a dialogue about whether this gap is right or needs to be tweaked or rewritten.
5. Let the group know that this will become the project problem statement.
Refer back to Section 3 of Workshop 1 to see an example. See the section below as a refresher for the 5 Why exercise from Workshop 1.
Closing the Meeting
If your meeting looks like it is going to go over, it’s recommended that you still close the meeting on time but also provide some direction about how the completion of the discussion and work will occur. Here is where your agility as the BSPL will come into play. As the facilitator, you need to make a call on how to complete the discussion, the work, or the decision, on the fly, while you are still engaged in the meeting. Some examples are included below:
1. Excuse those who need to leave, but ask if anyone would like to stay and finish.
2. Postpone the remaining agenda items and schedule a follow-up meeting.
3. Continue the discussion through email or the collaboration tools.
Send the group a summary of the key points of the discussion and ask for their edits or perspectives to be submitted to you or “reply all” to the group.
If you see this coming (e.g., you are running behind the whole meeting and notice the group is having good discussion, but not quickly), you’ll want to make the decision and announcement in enough time for you to close the meeting in the appropriate way.
For example, if you read the room and see that the discussion or decision isn’t really close to being completed and you have 15 minutes left in the meeting, you may want to break into the conversation and let the group know what is going to happen, and then follow with your plans to close the meeting.
I’ve led meetings where we’ve gotten so far off track that I was able to make the call earlier in the meeting about the need for more time. One benefit of this happening is that the stakeholders will recognize for themselves that the activities are valuable and there is a need for more time. This is better than the scenario of you asking them for more time up front before the project kicks off and them not understanding why, pushing back, and thinking your time estimates are not credible.
At the close of the meeting, it’s very important to end on a positive note. This should include summarizing what the group accomplished in the meeting, thanking all stakeholders, letting them know about next steps, and leaving time for a group debrief. When summarizing the accomplishments, it’s helpful to spend a few minutes describing the decisions and key points from each part of the process.
Often, saying thanks at the end of a meeting can sound insincere, as if the facilitator is just being polite. To thank the participants in a more meaningful way, acknowledge the time the stakeholders gave to meeting, and the sacrifices they made to spend their time on this project vs. getting other work done. You might also mention their willingness to engage in healthy discussions, their compliance with the ground rules, and call out any particular people for specific contributions.
It is very important to leave the last 10 minutes of the meeting for a debrief, question, and answer. The facilitator can ask the group: What did you like about this meeting? What should we stop, start, or continue? What remaining questions do you have? In order to make sure you hear from everyone, this is a great time to use the round robin approach described above. Even if they take a pass, you’ll want to get a read on where everyone stands with the project at this point. This is also powerful because it ensures everyone has a voice (remember the power of voice in Workshop 1).
Follow-Up After the Meeting
After the meeting, you will need to send out a summary of decisions and next steps to stakeholders. If you have outstanding decisions, you can use this communication to close the loop on them.
Problem Statement: In particular, you’ll need to go back to your notes and fill in the remaining sections of the formal problem statement (e.g., Background, Presenting Problem, Impacts, Why is it Happening?) in addition to including the problem statement the group agreed upon. As you are writing the full problem statement, keep these guidelines in mind: Be objective (just the facts), concise, use simple language, define any key terms, and offer enough detail to be clear.
Since people also benefit from having time to process information, you could open a window of time for people to comment on the problem statement before calling it final. For example, when you send out the meeting summary, you could ask the stakeholders to please review the information, and let you know within one week if they felt anything important was missed. Depending on the nature and significance of their concerns, you can decide if you need to get the group involved or make minor tweaks to the statement based on the feedback.
After the meeting, you’ll also need to review the parking lot items. Based on the ideas that were brought forward, what additional steps are needed? For example, if additional questions came forward, you may want to review and reprioritize the data collection list as needed.
Case Study: Google Smart Glasses
Two decades after Marty McFly Jr. wore video glasses in Back to the Future II, Silicon Valley hoped to change the face of eyewear. In 2014, Google piloted its first edition of smart eyeglasses. This wearable technology presents information, like weather alerts and text messages, directly in the user’s field of vision using augmented reality (Tech Target).
![](https://www.appletongreene.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture39-5-300x200.jpg)
Because it was a pilot and not a formal launch, the Google team focused on gaining insights into how the consumer interacted with the product, rather than having a perfected version of the glasses at that point (Bentley University). This was a completely revolutionary technology that the public had not interacted with before, so Google needed to understand how their glasses could fit into people’s lives. This is where behavioral science became integral to the product launch.
“Behavioral science – from cognitive psychology, to behavioral economics, to social psychology – offers a framework to understand the impact that context and cues have on people’s decision making. The greatest innovation in the world will fail if it is not tailored to the context in which it will be used” (Kantar).
It was pretty clear that soon after the glasses were released that Google had missed the mark. Consumers didn’t really understand how the glasses were supposed to be an improvement from the capabilities of their smartphones. The high-tech “phone for your face” was reminiscent of a Star Trek look that many considered geeky and unflattering to wear in public. Additionally, businesses and organizations worried that the glasses would record everything– a privacy concern for hospitals, casinos, and other places where confidentiality is important (Bentley University).
Pilots are meant to have issues. Many times these issues translate to insights that the designers can iterate on to create a better and more useful product. By no means was the Google glass a total failure, but if certain behavioral design strategies were implemented at the beginning of the design process, the Google Glass team might have been able to realize the flaws in the product before spending millions of dollars in the piloting phase.
Based on behavioral science principles, we determined two important considerations necessary for the beginning stages of developing any innovation, whether it be a product, service, or system.
1. Identify the problem you are trying to solve.
Instead of identifying the problem that Google glass would solve, Google let the users define how the glasses could benefit their lives. When Google released the glasses, they asked consumers to “submit photographs and videos that communicated who they were and what they would do with their Google Glass.” (Market Week).
Users didn’t respond well to this because they were overwhelmed by the number of options they had. This occurrence is studied in behavioral science and is referred to as choice overload or decision paralysis. When faced with too many options, users actually have a more difficult time choosing anything (The Decision Lab). In the minds of many consumers, having countless choices about what problem the glasses could solve actually ended up being a problem unto itself.
2. Identify the target audience
In addition to not explaining what the glasses were for, the target audience also wasn’t clear. According to marketing expert Laura Lake for The Balance Small Business, a target audience is the “demographic of people most likely to be interested in a company’s product or service.”
Google’s first round of testing was initially for software developers. Later on it was opened up to consumers that Google specifically recruited because they had won their contest for the coolest uses of the Google Glass (Market Week). Essentially, Google artificially created a target audience rather than discovering one.
While creating an audience was a deliberate marketing strategy, it likely introduced selection bias. Selection bias is the tendency for researchers to choose who their user group is, and “is usually associated with research where the selection of participants isn’t random” (Institute for Work and Health). If they had organically identified a target audience by doing an initial test on a random user group, Google could have more easily seen how the broad range of audiences responded to the glasses and chosen the most appropriate audience to design for.
Conclusion
If you feel like these considerations are basic design-thinking principles, you are exactly right! We aren’t reinventing the wheel here, these considerations are popular because they work. Think of them as a launching point to position your offering in context to your user before committing extensive time and money to the project.
Large companies like Google are not infallible, which demonstrates that even the most powerful technology still relies on the fundamentals of behavioral science in order to be successful in the market. There is still a lot to be understood about where behavioral science fits into the design process
Exercise: Anticipate and overcome obstacles
1. Spend a few minutes looking at the kickoff agenda items covered in this session. List the parts that will challenge you personally as a facilitator (e.g., adjusting the agenda on the fly, demonstrating sincerity by thanking participants at the end of the meeting, addressing conflict, or handling groups that DON’T discuss ideas).
2. Consider what you can do to overcome some of those challenges (e.g., work with a co-leader to shore up places that are not strengths for you, make sure you have a note-taker in the room be prepared with options for not getting through the agenda).
Small group work: Divide into small groups.
Each person will share 1 or 2 concerns about their ability to successfully navigate a situation (they only have to share what they are comfortable with).
Team members will help brainstorm ideas for overcoming those issues.
Repeat this process for each person in the small group.
Course Manual 5: Psychological Safety
Creating an environment where people feel safe and comfortable asking questions and contributing information is an important aspect of the kickoff meeting design. This is actually a tough environment to create, but there is a key BS principle, Psychological Safety, that can be leveraged to make this easier.
Understanding Psychological Safety. Psychological safety describes an environment where people feel free to express relevant thoughts and feelings. When people feel safe, they’re willing to participate in moderate risk-taking, expressing differing opinions, and creativity without fear of any repercussions — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs. Teams that deliver remarkable outcomes have one attribute in common: psychological safety.
Make it Safe to Participate:
As the facilitator, you can continue to guide conversations in ways that engage every individual and maximize diversity of thought. To invite engagement:
• Ask open-ended questions. When someone adds a brief comment, follow-up with a request for them to elaborate. “That is an interesting point. Can you tell us more about what you are thinking?”
• Acknowledge conflicts or mistakes with curiosity, rather than judgment or blame.
Ask questions like, “I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way before. Can you say more?”
• Share your perspective after others have shared their own. As the BSPL, others will defer to your thoughts and perspectives as an authority. To encourage others to speak, you’ll want to wait until others have shared their perspective before you weigh in. This can be a challenge, and you may need to “bite your tongue” in order to create an environment where others feel encouraged to speak. This is probably most important during the early meetings.
• Remain accessible. Your availability and openness increase the likelihood that the team will openly discuss problems and questions with them and speak up quickly. This is another benefit to not delivering all of the presentations yourself. Also, it’s important to make yourself available on breaks. So don’t plan to use break time to prepare for the next exercise. Try to get all of the prep work for the meeting done in advance.
• Demonstrate personal compassion for team members and be a resource for connecting individuals with help when needed. For example:
“How are things going for you personally? How do you feel about your current workload? How can I help?”
• You should also ask for feedback from the team. This is more than just an opportunity to get personal feedback. You can get their input on how the project is going and make course corrections if needed. For example: “How do you feel about my facilitation during our last team meeting?”
• Demonstrate tolerance for mistakes during the upcoming collaboration. For example, consider telling the team, “I want to hear from you. There are no bad ideas – even if they don’t all work out.”
Responses that Create Psychological Safety
Following team interactions, help individuals feel valued and respected by reinforcing a sense of belonging and mutual respect. To do so, you can:
Use supportive language when individuals candidly share differing points of view without having to defend or agree. Thank people when they offer an idea or suggestion, but don’t overuse thanking and appreciation. For example, when someone says “that’s a great question” every time a question is asked, it loses its impact based on the repetitive nature of the same phrase. Find several alternative phrases to acknowledge contributions. For example:
• “It’s great to hear all of these different perspectives; keep them coming.”
• “That’s a very interesting point.”
• “Wow, I can tell you feel passionately about that concern; thanks for raising it.”
Practice giving positive and constructive feedback. This is the opposite of the no news is good news philosophy. Most people want to know where they stand, and your feedback as the leader of the process will go a long way in terms of shaping their participation. For this first meeting, feedback is probably best offered on a break or after the meeting, unless it’s positive (although some people don’t like being publicly recognized). For example:
“I really appreciated when you raised the point about x in the meeting. I believe it was helpful for the team to have that information.”
“I noticed you were quieter at the end of the meeting, and I missed hearing from you. Was there anything in particular going on that I could help with?”
Show your appreciation for team members who value listening and diversity rather than sameness and who pitch in to help one another.
• For example, “Sally, I really noticed how you listened when John shared a different idea than yours in the meeting. I think that really helped lead us to a better solution, and I want to thank you for that.”
Confront stress-inducing or threatening behavior to ensure it is not repeated.
• For example, “I noticed Ms. Y’s comments about your suggestion were fairly strong, I think you handled yourself well, but I wonder if you’d like to talk with me more about it or have a follow-up conversation with her on a more effective way to communicate with you going forward.”
If they prefer not to, you may choose to provide some feedback yourself to encourage healthy team dialogue practices, but it’s always best to encourage team members to handle issues on their own directly with the other person.
The examples above provide a general framework for creating the right environment for team success. These general suggestions are important for not just the kickoff meeting, but also for all phases of project success. Next, we’ll turn attention toward some specific examples of places in the kickoff meeting where psychological safety may be at risk. These examples will also be followed by suggestions for overcoming the risks.
Make everyone part of the “in group” – no FOMO
One of the particular challenges related to BS projects like this is that there may be an “in” group, and some members may feel like they are excluded or feel like they are in the “out” group. This can occur based on the sheer numbers of people in the group from the same area (i.e., the business area will likely have more people on the team than from any other area).
A contributing factor is the fact that they will be experts in understanding the problem. It makes it more challenging to ask questions when someone is feeling less familiar with the information being presented. No one wants to ask a “stupid question” in front of a large group. Being new to the party, so to speak, or not being a member of the large group/business area can create a sense of missing out. Remember from the previous workshop that FOMO is a BS principle that can create fear and anxiety and is therefore not good for team functioning.
Being aware of this, you can make special efforts to bring people who are not part of the majority group into the conversation by calling on them specifically. You can also make sure you are mixing up the groups during breakout work. Since people naturally gravitate toward being around people they already know, you could also assign seats in the meeting to mix things up. Over time, this will be less of an issue since getting to know people better and getting up to speed on the project will overcome some of this. It makes it more challenging for someone who is less familiar to ask questions and risk asking a “stupid” question.
Create a level playing field
Another way to ensure all of the team members feel safe contributing to the discussions at the kickoff is to help them feel as though they are starting on a level playing field. This may not actually be the case. For example, you will likely have people participating at all levels of the organization (e.g., factory workers, professional individual contributors, leaders, and senior leaders). You need to help people feel comfortable speaking and contributing when they don’t know each other, and they need to interact with people who may be their superiors in the organization. You’ll recall that one of the ground rules we included was leaving titles at the door. You can also ask your senior leaders to interact in a supportive way that helps encourage others to speak. They could also save their comments until others have shared them (in a similar way as we have recommended for the BSPL above).
A participant’s second source of potentially feeling they are at an unfair advantage is the reality that some people will be more knowledgeable about the project than others. This is why it is very important that all relevant areas present information. This includes the business area as well as other areas (e.g., research, data science, engineering, marketing, etc.). You will want to make sure that information and presentations are balanced and that data comes from all the relevant areas. Sharing information in this meeting makes sure everyone is hearing the same things and will help level the playing field for the team.
While we could be concerned that the participants from the business area may push back on listening to these presentations and become bored with some of the content that they are intimately familiar with, it will still be helpful for them to hear. One of the surprising benefits is that people in the business area often learn by hearing from others in their area who have different perspectives, insights, and ways of framing situations. In addition to putting everyone on the same playing field, it serves to pull everyone up from their day-to-day work and expand their horizons.
Introverted need support
People who are naturally more introverted often have very significant contributions to make to the team but may acquiesce to more verbal members. This is particularly important if you are working in a more extraverted business area (e.g., sales, marketing, or human resources). Bringing the introverted members into the conversation and getting their perspective will be very valuable.
Another generalization that may be relevant is the idea that many of the people in research or data science roles are more introverted. You may need to call on them specifically to get their perspective by saying, “We had a good discussion on X before we move on, I would like to hear your thoughts or where you stand.” However, be aware that this can backfire. Introverts process internally, while extroverts typically process while talking. If you call on an introvert who has not had time to formulate an answer, they may get frustrated and not contribute.
You can learn a lot from how they respond by observing their non-verbal communication and adjusting your style of bringing them into the discussion. If they seem frustrated or anxious, help them “off the hook” in a way that is not embarrassing, such as “no problem, we’ll circle back later to get your feedback” or “sorry for putting you on the spot; I just wanted to make sure you had a chance to weigh in if you have a contribution.” You could also take responsibility, by joking that you may have been an overzealous facilitator. Then followup with them on a break. Explain that you didn’t want to put them on the spot and apologize. Maybe ask if there’s a good way to get their contribution without feeling uncomfortable for the rest of the meeting. Finding a way to do it in a way that makes the team comfortable is important.
You could also avoid putting them on the spot personally, but open the meeting by asking a general question to a group of people. For example, you could say ,“We’d like to make sure we are hearing from the other critical parts of the team, like engineering, information technology, data science, and research.” This is a way of opening the door, but not calling out any individual specifically. It is not enough to say, “Anyone have any last thoughts?”. It’s imperative to have everyone’s participation.
Another idea is to go around the room “round robin,” which was described in a previous section. In this way, everyone knows they will need to contribute an idea when it’s their turn. You can also give everyone 5 or 10 minutes of “heads down” time to think before you start the discussion. This is a very effective approach to supporting introverts, but it is actually a good practice for everyone to slow down and think clearly about the question at hand.
Case Study: Google’s Project Aristotle
Introduction
Google’s Project Aristotle was a study conducted to identify the key factors that make a successful team. While researchers originally thought that diversity or a team’s demographics would have the biggest impact, they were surprised by the results of their findings. After analyzing vast amounts of data, the researchers discovered that psychological safety was the most important factor for team success. In this article, we will explore Project Aristotle’s findings and how they relate to Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety framework. We will discuss the four stages and how leaders can implement them to create psychologically safe teams.
What is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety is the belief that one can express themselves freely without fear of negative consequences. It’s also referred to as a culture of rewarded vulnerability. In a psychologically safe environment, team members feel safe to take risks, be vulnerable, and share their ideas without fear of ridicule or rejection. In essence, psychological safety is the foundation for a successful team. Teams that lack psychological safety are more prone to fail due to issues such as mistrust, lack of collaboration, and low morale. They’re operating out of fear, and are usually in survival mode. No team can innovate or create competitive advantage in that kind of culture.
The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety framework offers a roadmap for creating psychologically safe teams. This framework is based on human needs in social settings and follows a basic progression from belongingness needs to candor. Everyone, regardless of demographics, psychographics, upbringing, or beliefs, experiences these needs.
The four stages are inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, and challenger safety. Inclusion safety involves ensuring that all team members feel included and valued. Learner safety encourages team members to seek out new information and ask questions without fear of judgment. Contributor safety is about empowering team members to make valuable contributions and recognizing their efforts. Challenger safety involves embracing healthy conflict and encouraging team members to challenge assumptions and share their opinions.
As teams progress through psychological safety’s four stages, they create an increasingly safe environment where they intentionally model and reward bigger acts of vulnerability. Once teams reach the fourth stage, challenger safety, they’re empowered with the skills to innovate and make things better without fear of failure or punishment.
Implementing the Four Stages of Psychological Safety
Implementing the four stages of psychological safety requires intentional effort from team leaders. Leaders must actively cultivate a culture of psychological safety by demonstrating empathy, active listening, and vulnerability. As a leader, when it comes to psychological safety, you either show the way or get in the way. Additionally, leaders must encourage open communication, provide constructive feedback, and recognize team members’ efforts. Team members must also be empowered to share their ideas, take risks, and challenge assumptions. Leaders can facilitate this by providing opportunities for growth and development, celebrating successes, and creating a safe space for healthy conflict.
The Impact of Psychological Safety on Team Performance
Project Aristotle’s findings demonstrate the significant impact of psychological safety on team performance. Teams that exhibit high levels of psychological safety experience increased innovation, better decision-making, and higher employee engagement. Conversely, teams that lack psychological safety suffer from low morale, decreased collaboration, and higher rates of employee turnover. By prioritizing psychological safety, leaders can create an environment that fosters trust, collaboration, and creativity, leading to improved team performance.
What Did Project Aristotle Uncover About Psychological Safety?
Google’s Project Aristotle study sought to understand what makes a successful team. After conducting extensive research, they concluded that the most critical factor was psychological safety. In other words, the teams that felt safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other were the most successful. Project Aristotle discovered that the most successful teams had members who were comfortable being themselves and voicing their opinions. When individuals feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to take calculated risks and offer new and innovative ideas.
The study found that teams with psychological safety were more likely to admit to making mistakes and to learn from them. They were also more willing to collaborate and help one another, leading to increased productivity and job satisfaction. It’s worth noting that psychological safety isn’t just about feeling comfortable in a team. Instead, it’s about being able to speak your mind without fear of judgment or retaliation. It’s about feeling safe to take risks and make mistakes, knowing that your colleagues have your back and support your growth.
Project Aristotle’s findings align with Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model, particularly the contributor safety stage. This stage occurs when individuals feel that they are a valued member of the team and that their contributions are recognized and appreciated. In contributor safety, team members feel comfortable sharing their opinions, ideas, and feedback without fear of retribution or rejection.
Psychological safety is critical in the workplace, particularly for innovative teams. The Project Aristotle study has demonstrated that creating a safe environment where team members can take risks, make mistakes, and learn from each other is crucial for success.
Conclusion
Psychological safety is the foundation for a successful team. The Project Aristotle study highlighted the critical importance of psychological safety and how it can be cultivated through intentional effort and leadership. Timothy R. Clark’s The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety framework provides a roadmap for creating psychologically safe teams. By prioritizing inclusion, learning, contribution, and healthy conflict, leaders can foster a culture of psychological safety, leading to improved team performance and overall organizational success.
Questions:
1. How well did the kickoff instructions related this section on psychological safety line up with the four phases outlined in the case?
2. What phase do you think it will be possible to reach in the kickoff meeting? Why?
3. What can you do beyond the kickoff meeting to help your stakeholders reach level 4?
Exercise
• Have you ever felt fearful about asking a question or contributing to a meeting?
• What were the factors that contributed to that sense of feeling unsafe?
• What do you think will be the biggest barriers to psychological safety on your project (the risks may be different for different projects)?
• What are your initial thoughts about overcoming these barriers?
Small group work: Divide into small groups.
1. Each person will share their top concern about creating psychological safety.
2. Repeat this process for each person in the small group.
3. Team members will help brainstorm ideas for overcoming those issues.
Large group discussion:
• What are the risks of not creating an environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable?
• How difficult will it be to create vulnerability if they lose trust in the kickoff?
Course Manual 6: Team Effectiveness
This last section of the kickoff meeting is dedicated to achieving two additional goals for the meeting. First, we’ll cover how to create an environment that will motivate your stakeholders by delivering on what they want. You can think of this as setting the stage to answer the question, What’s in it for me? (WIIFM). The second part will concentrate on delivering on what you need from the team. It will include any remaining suggestions for how to set up the team to be as efficient and effective as possible.
One of the most important ways you can build an effective project team is to be a trustworthy leader. There are two aspects to building trust. The first, and most common, is to be a reliable, honest, and respectful person who cares as much about the people you are leading as you do about yourself. That is a tall order indeed. However, there’s a second part. When it comes to leadership, the second part is just as important. This part is competence.
People will follow you if you demonstrate your competence at leading them. This includes your ability to set a vision and plan, influence others to follow you, lead a team, and execute on the project in a way that will lead to results. So, no pressure, but if you are going to lead this process, you need to be on your best game. You’ve already gotten a good start with the “meeting before the meeting” with your stakeholders. The kick-off meeting is your next chance to further demonstrate your competence. The best way to do this is to plan the meeting well and lead it in a professional way that demonstrates both your relationship savvy and your competence as a leader. In this way, you’ll be providing an example of what the stakeholders can expect from the rest of the project.
What is in it for me?
In this session, we’ll tackle more aspects of the stakeholder experience, which I’d argue are just as important as the project’s work outcomes, if not more important! Since stakeholder collaboration is so critical to the BS process, making sure they are engaged and have a positive experience is vitally important.
In the last workshop, we discussed what engaged stakeholders looked like. It’s helpful to review some of those details, specifically with the kickoff meeting in mind. An important goal of the kickoff meeting is to ensure the stakeholders are interested and excited about the work. This gives you a better chance that they will participate fully in the meetings, do their work between meetings, and prioritize attending future meetings.
Stakeholders report that they find group project work more rewarding to participate in when 1) they buy into the need for the project, 2) they see the impact of their work, 3) they are able to fully use their skills, and 4) they feel their time and contributions are valued. These are also the very things they often complain about when projects are NOT managed well. Anyone who has ever worked on a group project can probably attest to having had a similar frustrating experience with these challenges. As the BSPL, there is a lot you can do to structure the meeting to create the environment your stakeholders want and that will help the project thrive.
Buy into the need for the project
If your stakeholders are able to understand the project’s needs in a compelling way, they will likely be more engaged with the work. By connecting the need to a higher purpose or something meaningful, their own personal connection and commitment will grow. For example, if you are from a utility company and your project is related to encouraging customers to use less energy, this has a higher purpose in terms of environmental protection and may align with the stakeholders’ personal philosophies around saving the planet.
There are a couple of ways to help stakeholders connect with the project’s purpose. First, the work of defining the problem, laying out a compelling case with data, and helping them connect the dots between the work and what it will mean to the end users will go a long way in identifying a meaningful purpose. Secondly, if the project owner, as a leader in the company, makes a personal appeal on behalf of himself/herself, the company, and the end users, this can have a compelling impact on creating purpose for stakeholders. Finally, if the project owner is also willing to share his/her own commitment to the work and why it’s personally important to him/her, this can go a long way as well. It is noted that this will only be effective if there is some sort of purpose or benefit to the project beyond a pure profit motive.
The project owner’s enthusiasm for the project can be contagious and help the team be optimistic about the work as well. As a sponsor of the project, the project owner should also communicate their support for the work and offer to help provide resources and remove obstacles down the road. The project owner can communicate the importance of the project by showing up and making the kickoff meeting important. If the PO can’t attend the entire meeting, they should be there for as long as possible. It will also be helpful to share how they will remain involved in the project throughout (e.g., assign a co-leader, attend milestone meetings, etc.). As the BSPL, it will be your job to help the process owner to understand the importance of these messages and encourage them to participate to the fullest.
See the impact of their work
Stakeholders value knowing that their efforts will make a significant contribution to the project, and that the project will have an impact on the company and clients or employees. No one likes to do work that is redundant, not leveraged, or taken for granted. An extreme case of this can happen when a project is cancelled or eliminated before the solution is executed. While these scenarios may seem unlikely, in most work environments, we hear stories about these things happening, or you may have experienced them yourself.
Similar to the example above, working through the problem definition and hearing from the project owner can go a long way in helping stakeholders see the future impact of their work. During the kickoff meeting, giving a shout-out to the members of the project team and mentioning their planned contributions can also go a long way in meeting this objective.
Able to use their skills
Another goal of a kickoff is to help your stakeholders feel confident in their ability to contribute effectively to the project. When people have questions about the steps in the process, what they’ll be doing, why, how, or when, that ambiguity can lead to doubts about the project, or worse yet, doubts about their own ability to contribute successfully. Some people can become fairly anxious if they aren’t clear about what they are being asked to do. If your stakeholders can see that you’ve laid out the process in a way that they can do their best work, they’ll be more likely to fully invest in the process.
Feel time and contributions are valued.
When meetings are poorly run, participants may assume that their time and contributions are not respected. Making sure the kickoff is well run, leverages their time efficiently (e.g., does not waste time waiting for technology, late guests, agenda mix-ups, or poorly conducted exercises) will communicate that you care about them and will also help them stay interested in the meeting. As all of us have experienced, poorly run meetings create frustration.
In addition, listing every stakeholder’s name in the project documents shared at the kickoff will help them see that they have an important and official role to play in the project. If you are short on time, you can include a list of their names and roles in the project materials, flash a slide on a projection screen, or include it as a handout during the kickoff meeting. However, running through this list would not take a lot of time and would be helpful.
You can also demonstrate your value to your stakeholders by discussing their role with them prior to the kickoff meeting. During the pre-meeting, provide the stakeholder with a list of all stakeholders, a description of their roles, any specific tasks they are assigned, and expectations for how they’ll contribute to the team. This is helpful so team members understand what is expected of them, and your time reviewing it with them will signify that they are important.
Another powerful way you can accomplish this is to communicate the value of the stakeholder’s time to the stakeholder’s leader. For example, before the kickoff, you could send a quick note to the leader thanking them for assigning the stakeholder to the team (and copying the stakeholder in your note). You can send other notes throughout the project communicating the stakeholder’s contributions.
We mentioned in the last workshop that there’s a payoff for you as the BSPL if the project goes well. In the same way, there’s a potential payoff for each of the stakeholders on the team. They can also benefit from recognition and resume building opportunities with a successful project. While you may not want to mention this to them overtly, it would be good to keep it in mind as a potential motivator for your stakeholders.
Create the Environment for Project Success
We just talked about what is in it for them, now let’s turn attention to what you need from them and how you can get it.
Put your big hat on
As the BSPL, you can also ask the stakeholders to take on a broader perspective on the project and think like an owner. This would entail going beyond their specific roles on the team and thinking more broadly. The last workshop mentioned that employees can often be biased about their own area of expertise and discipline. The best ideas often come from an outside perspective, so you want to encourage those outside perspectives.
Your project team is matrixed, which means the stakeholders come from different areas of the company. However, you don’t want them to stay in their lane. For example, you could encourage the employees in marketing to speak up, ask questions, and suggest ideas related to engineering or data science. Similarly, you want your engineers and data scientists to contribute to the marketing work. In other words, the stakeholders need to feel allegiance to the project, not just their areas. This is valuable because everyone will have a chance to broaden their thinking and showcase all of their skills (even beyond their area of expertise).
Group Think
One more idea related to roles is the concept of group think and the role of the devil’s advocate. While there are important benefits associated with having all of the relevant players participate in an inclusive process, there are also some potential pitfalls, namely the phenomenon of group think.
Understanding Group Think: When making decisions in a group, participants are often compelled to go with the majority opinion rather than raising objections or different points of view. This x has led to some very unfortunate decisions, both in government and business. In hindsight, when groups are asked how these bad decisions occurred, participants describe wanting to be “team players” and not “rock the boat” or disrupt the group, which kept them from speaking up. The group think phenomenon occurs when a group of people make a decision without considering all of the options, risks, or negative consequences or using critical thinking.
There are several techniques to reduce this tendency for group think. First discuss the bias with the team, and make them aware of this human predisposition. Ask the team to remember the bias if they find themselves debating about bringing forward an idea, thought, or question after the group seems to be aligned in a particular direction.
Another idea is to ask the team to adopt a practice of acknowledging contributions (e.g., applause, shout out, or give the team special flags to raise) when stakeholders raise a concern or alternative perspective, especially when a decision is close to being finalized. You might even add “rocking the boat” to your list of ground rules as something you want to encourage. One final approach is to assign a person or a couple of people as “official “devil’s advocate(s)” when you are entering the decision phases of the BS process. By specifically tasking an individual with questioning the group consensus, which makes it less personal and risky. If you take this approach, you could rotate the assignment of that role to different people so no one member gets branded with the label of “troublemaker.” Finally, you can increase individual accountability by making sure different points of view are considered in a decision. If this is a big concern for your project, you could even go so far as to have team members sign a joint responsibility statement in the kickoff meeting.
Facilitator Tips:
This final section provides some general tips for facilitating this meeting. They will also apply to many of the BS process steps and meetings.
• Try not to rush or shortcut this discussion. This is the place where all the ideas need to surface. Even an idea that may seem like an outlier may be very important. This is particularly challenging because you are watching the clock and noticing that the allotted time on the agenda is running out. Try not to let the time pressure conflict with your goal of having a thorough and comprehensive discussion.
• As you are discussing or leading the discussion, remember to stay curious and keep asking questions.
• Try not to get into wordsmithing here, but make sure you are capturing the key concepts around the gap and root causes. If the group starts wordsmithing, a best practice is to take the key concepts from the discussion and work on the language outside of the meeting. You can also send the statement out for review after the meeting to give stakeholders time to process it before finalizing it.
• If the need for more data emerges, be sure to keep track of those needs, add them to your list.
• It is also VERY human for stakeholders to want to discuss solutions to the problems. You can expect this to occur, and you’ll need to gently remind that team that there will be time for solution development down the road. You can track their ideas on a parking lot or ask someone to take notes, but try to keep them focused on fully understanding the problem, causes, and underlying root issues.
• Finally, everyone needs to be aligned with the problem. This is a good place to use a process to make sure every person has a chance to have a final word. You can do this by asking the question, “Can you live with this problem statement?” Then go around the room in round-robin fashion, asking every person individually to either comment, raise a concern, or express support by physically giving a thumbs up.
Case Study: Group Think and Swiss Air
Source
Swiss companies have long prided themselves on their good governance practices. However, the collapse of a number of Swiss companies since the 2000s piqued the interest of scholars. One of the best known instances of this phenomenon is Swissair declaring bankruptcy and protection from creditors in October 2002. Previously one of the world’s ten largest airlines, Swissair was thought to be so financially stable that it was commonly referred to as the “Flying Bank.” The case of Swissair’s bankruptcy demonstrates the impact of groupthink on poor management decisions. Specifically, the relevant symptoms of groupthink were beliefs that Swissair was invulnerable, mindguarding, and beliefs in the group’s morality, or superiority.
Major changes were made to European air travel since the 1980s.17 Airlines struggled to establish “hubs” where lots of passengers could be realized by linking intercontinental and regional feeder flights. In order to do this, intercontinental alliances were forged and European airports like London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle were substantially developed. In Switzerland, Zurich airport was planned to become one of the ten largest European airports, and the expansion of Swissair to become Europe’s fourth largest airline was critical to this plan.
Due to Swissair’s reputation, the company felt a sense of superiority regarding expansion plans. Swissair pulled out of a potentially lucrative alliance with other well-known airlines that could have helped its expansion, because of hesitations over sharing control.17 This meant that Swissair no longer had the option to hear the opinions of other successful groups in their industry, a form of mindguarding that allowed for groupthink.
Additionally, the CEO of Swissair decided to resize the executive board, eliminating experts in the airline industry and only having members that were politicians and finance professionals. On top of this cut in expertise on the executive board, outside experts on the European and Swiss airline industries were also not consulted. As identified by Janis, external expertise is necessary to eliminate groupthink in group decisions. The cut of board members resulted in the remaining members lacking expertise in the field, while being homogenous in background, norms, and values.
Swissair’s financial crisis had been building up since 2000, when it recorded a financial loss for the first time in its 70-year history, at an amount that consumed almost all of its capital reserves.17 Passenger numbers remained well behind expectations and the beginning economic recession meant that Swissair was unable to continue financing its expansion plans, make up for its existing debt, pay for fuel or even pay its airport taxes. Ultimately, the CEO felt that he and his board members were more than capable of making the necessary company decisions, and the smaller size of the board made the group more vulnerable to groupthink and conformity.
Exercise
1. What are your goals for the meeting
2. What does success look like?
3. What is the work you want to accomplish
4. What do you want from your stakeholders?
5. What do you want them to experience in the meeting?
6. How do you help prepare the stakeholders for the work ahead of them?
Course Manual 7: Vision Essentials
The next step in the BS process is to define the future vision for what the world be like without that problem.
Introduction
Following the kickoff of your project, the next order of business is to create a future vision. In the kickoff session, the project team wrestled with and confirmed the problem statement they were trying to solve. The problem statement helped define the current state and the problem at hand. When we define the vision, we can then begin to understand the gap between the current and future states.
The next few sections are dedicated to setting your project’s vision. People create visions for all kinds of things (i.e., your career, your company, your department), but in this case we are creating a vision just for the project, whether it’s a new product, an improvement in a website, a desire to increase prospect conversion rates to sales, or an increase in qualified job applicants for critical openings in your stores or plant. The next few sessions are going to do a deep dive into this topic and process.
What is the Future Vision?
The vision is a clear description of the desired state. It is a picture of the purpose achieved, a view of the future. It is developed by dreaming and thinking ahead. You can also think of it as an imaginative conceptualization of the future.
The vision statement of a project generally aims to clarify a longer-term goal, target audience, and market. It provides a picture of what could be. It is a catalyst that can unleash the team’s energy, excite people, and propel the group of stakeholders to move toward that dream.
The vision enables the team to start with the end in mind. In this way, everyone will be able to work together toward this broad, future-focused objective. It may also include difficulties or obstacles the team needs to tackle as well as unique selling points. Using a vision as a framework, the project team is able to convey what the team is working toward and why it is significant. Think of your vision as the destination for your team as they further explore evidence, identify barriers, develop strategies, brainstorm, design, develop, test, and iterate to fulfill the vision. Below are some of the characteristics of a project vision that can help you further understand the concept of a vision.
Characteristics of a Vision
Transformational (e.g., big, revolutionary change, ambitious)
A vision is transformational. It’s a really BIG idea. Some may call it a BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goal. It is a goal of the highest order. These goals motivate and rally people to come together to accomplish something extraordinary. Achieving a transformational vision would require a substantial stretch for the team. To create a truly transformational vision, people have to break out of their current thinking and view of reality. In general, stakeholders think “small” by default. It’s the brain’s way of keeping us safe. However, when people think “big,” they may be able to go beyond solving the problem and create additional new opportunities with their solutions. One way to do this is to get the team out of their current paradigm. You could introduce them to stories and examples of changes in other industries and environments. Some of the biggest ideas come from considering other disciplines.
Inspirational (e.g., motivational, exciting, aspirational)
An inspirational vision draws people in, compels them to get on board, and makes them enthusiastic about achieving the goal. A transformational vision can inspire, but it carries an additional quality of inspiration. This is an aspect of the vision that is not formulaic. Rather, it’s more like an artistic form. An inspirational vision appeals to the heart and emotions. When the vision is aspirational, it energizes the team to push beyond the status quo and go after a big challenge.
Broad (e.g., inclusive, expansive, far-reaching)
A vision should be broad and inclusive. It ensures that the solution will be able to deliver not just what is needed today but also anticipate needs well into the future. Yes, at this phase in the process, you can have everything. As you discuss the vision, you may be faced with many trade-offs. For example, are you focused on high quality or cost savings? Is it more important to fix some of the website problems causing customers’ pain or find completely new ways to delight them that go way beyond the website? A vision of the future doesn’t have to choose. It doesn’t need to be balanced. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the tradeoffs in the next phase of goal-setting and strategy setting. The vision can aim to have it all.
Achievable (e.g., reachable, attainable, realistic)
While it’s true that a good vision needs to be challenging, it also needs to be achievable. Goals that are too high are not motivating. People can lose hope if a vision is not reasonable. If they doubt being able to achieve it, they may give up and don’t even try. It’s important to build a vision that is both a challenge and realistic and achievable. If you create a powerful vision, but the team doesn’t buy into it, it’s pointless.
Meaningful (e.g., purposeful, significant, aspirational)
A vision statement that is tied to a higher purpose helps to motivate stakeholders and builds commitment to the project. When the project vision is aligned with the member’s own personal purposes and values, they are more likely to go the extra mile. If you can connect your vision to a meaningful purpose for your employees, customers, the community, and even your shareholders, you will likely be able to engage your stakeholders in a more significant way than if you don’t.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with making money. If companies didn’t make money, they couldn’t stay in business and serve customers, and employees wouldn’t be able to make a living and support their families. So yes, business can be thought of as a noble cause, but if you tie your project vision to a higher purpose, the connection will be more direct and obvious, and therefore more motivating.
If you’ve ever been a part of one of these efforts to create a vision, you know this is no easy task. In addition to these lofty characteristics of the vision, let me add a few practical characteristics that are less relevant to the idea of the vision but more relevant to the description of the vision:
• Vivid (e.g., bright, attention gathering, bold, easy to picture)
• Specific (e.g., explicit, unambiguous, precise)
• Clear (e.g., easy to understand, free from jargon, simple words)
• Concise (e.g., brief, to the point, not wordy)
Example: New Product Vision
Let’s take an example of a new project for example. A great vision can accomplish two goals. It first aligns the internal team of engineers, designers, sales and service representatives with the goal, target market, and distinctive features of the product. In addition to appealing to other audience members, it also tells a story that will draw in the project’s stakeholders and possibly others (e.g., company leaders and investors). A strong product vision defines success and addresses important concerns regarding the product and its future direction. In addition, a really good product vision often includes a gripping narrative.
Coming up with a new product idea is great, but it’s not enough. To ensure the success of the project, everyone involved in its development, marketing, sales, support, and product management needs a good vision to help direct their work. The vision is the primary goal the team will keep in mind when solving the problem and creating the product. Even in our fast-paced, high-change environment, a good vision provides stability in steering the project team through the process. It acts like a compass for the product, fosters effective collaboration across the team, and encourages team members in tough times when obstacles are encountered.
It takes a lot of time and work to develop a successful product. To stay committed, it’s important to believe in the value of what you are doing and have a clear idea of where you want to take your product. The vision is the north star that gets you to the finish line.
At this point, you may wonder: What do vision statements look like? A few examples are listed below. Note that none of these are perfect. Developing a good vision statement is a challenging proposition, and hitting on every one of the criteria listed above is a tall order, but these vision statements will give you a good idea of what you are working toward. You’ll also note that these project vision statements are somewhat different based on all the different sizes and kinds of projects.
• We will shift our customers experience with our website from frustration to delight in 18 months or less.
• Provide a project management solution for the marketing department that exceeds expectations
• We will build a program to increase our sales groups’ business acumen; that’s so good they will be beating down the door to get access.
Corporate project visions:
• “To enable leading revenue teams to get the unfiltered truth about their customer interaction and their deals and transform the way they go to market.”
• “Our product vision is to provide a single source of decision-making for loss prevention within Tesco, across any channel or market. We operate at the point of transaction, so Tesco chooses which transactions to allow, block, or intervene in, to grow sales and manage losses.” Tesco, a British grocery chain’s loss prevention team.
Why – Importance of Setting a Vision
It’s essential to create a vision because we have to know where we are going if we want to solve our problem. For example, if you get in your car for a vacation, you have to know the destination, or you don’t even know which way to turn out of the driveway. Think of it this way, if you just start brainstorming ways to solve your problem, how do you know which idea to choose? Is there only one way to solve your problem, or are there many ways to solve it? You have to have some way to evaluate which idea will get you closer to solving the problem in the best way. What are your criteria for success? Will the solution not only solve the problem but solve it in a way that meets the needs of your customers, employees, and the company? Of course, you can explore lots of paths to get there, but a final destination is critical to the journey. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many times people resist the process of setting a vision.
Vision statements help your team communicate the ideas behind your project. A vision serves as a north star, enabling the team to avoid stumbling blocks at every turn. The vision helps the team stay focused on the reason for the work. As time goes on and the stakeholders move forward with various steps in the process, it’s very easy to get thrown off track. It’s like going for a hike in the forest, and you can easily lose your way with a slight turn in the wrong direction. The team’s vision allows them to fly above the trees and adjust direction to their final destination.
You can refer back to the vision as you make decisions throughout the process. The vision is critical as you consider strategies for reaching your goals. You can use the vision as the main criteria for acceptance. You may ask the question: will approach “A” or “B” get us closer to our vision? You may find that approach “A” is a very eloquent solution to your problem but doesn’t get you closer to your vision. If the answer is no, you may have to make tough decisions to move forward, even when approach A may be a VERY good idea.
Vision statements help the project team work more efficiently by providing a succinct explanation of what their big, long-term goal is and what they hope to accomplish with it. This also allows you, as the BS process leader, to manage the team more effectively. Finally, since your stakeholders in the future vision development work will likely include players from different areas of the business, you will continue to create shared knowledge and understanding about the opportunity.
The following case is an example of how a product vision has continued to lead the team to add enhancements that further fulfill of the vision.
HelloWallet’s Vision:
Our vision is to empower individuals and businesses with intuitive financial tools that streamline money management.
Case Study
Product Optimization: “Wellness Score”
Great products can always get … greater
Easy-to-use tools to significantly increase your retirement savings. HelloWallet is a personal finance app that was created to answer another age-old behavioral failing: people don’t save enough money (Disclosure: HelloWallet is owned by Morningstar, where I’m a Marketing Optimization Manager). HelloWallet was designed using behavioral insights, but it’s constantly looking for ways to improve how it helps people make smart financial choices.
Case in point: Despite having lots of information about how to save money, many HelloWallet users weren’t sure just how much they should save. Recently, developers rolled out a new feature called “Wellness Score” to address this problem. It works off of the behavioral insight that people are really, really sensitive to what other people are doing. Users get a financial score on a scale of 1-100 based on how good they’re doing relative to their peers.
How well did it work? In a randomized control trial measuring the feature’s impact, people who saw their scores were lower than their peers quickly added an average of $600 to their savings accounts to catch up.
The key here is that while behavioral science theory is valuable, it will only get you so far. The best product optimization teams know this and couple theory with a rapid, on-going process of testing and refining designs based on how users actually behave in that context.
1. Which of the 9 characteristics of visions does the HelloWallet vision meet?
2. Which aspects do you think would have most significant for you? For your company?
3. How has the team used the vision to drive product enhancements?
4. What do you think about the altruistic approach taken by the successful business Morningstar in regard to this app?
Exercise
• Break into small teams
• Review the sample vision statements below
• Critique each of the statements below using the characteristics of vision statements
• Each group should pick one of the vision statements and make improvements
• We will develop a moveable, geological imaging device that drills into bedrock to insert advanced imaging tools and machine learning to diagnose structural foundation conditions in real-time. This technology will improve environmental conservation outcomes, reduce costs, and increase access to technology.
• In 2 years, we’ll eradicate the occurrence of staff infections to protect the health and welfare of our employees and patients.
• We will reduce costs in our operations by 10% in a way that meets or exceeds our customers’ expectations without negatively impacting our employees’ well-being. In doing this we ensure our viability to continue serving our customers and providing a career destination for our employees long into the future.
• Help small businesses manage their tax paperwork and filing deadlines so they have more time to focus on their businesses and families.
– Notice how this leaves all kinds of room to identify a myriad of solutions. For example, the solution could be a new service offered by CPAs or banks, a new software package offered by a technology company or bookkeeping service’s expansion into tax preparation.
Course Manual 8: Mind Preparation
Setting a vision is one of the most important aspects of working through the BS process. Unfortunately, it joins the activities like planning and defining the problem “at the front of the project,” that most organizations and leaders don’t spend enough time on. This is true whether groups are designing new products, setting new policies, creating or changing websites, or building tools.
There are several reasons for this. As humans, we are wired to see things simply so we can easily understand and process them. However, for a big project or initiative, assuming the goal is simple at the beginning may be the enemy of a potentially great outcome. Secondly, successful leaders and employees are often action-oriented and anxious to get to solving problems. After all, that’s how they’ve accomplished so much and are recognized for getting results. There’s nothing wrong with being action-oriented and focusing on results, but in the process of setting a vision, it’s more important to slow down to go fast later.
Finally, the work of setting a future vision is hard! In problem definition, you were able to rely on data and look for concrete aspects of the problem. Setting a future vision will be very different. There is a lot of ambiguity in this work, and there will not be an exact answer. At this phase of the process, you will be asking your stakeholders to blend both art and science.
This is an excellent place to introduce a very important BS principle that you will use regularly in your future work. Nobel Prize-winning cconomist Daniel Kahneman is credited with developing the concept of Dual Systems Theory, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, which describes the two different ways our brain processes information. Another way to think of this is that your brain has two different operating systems.
Understanding Dual Systems Theory. The human mind operates under either System 1 (fast, automatic, efficient, unconscious) or System 2 (slow, deliberate, intentional, conscious) thinking.
Some examples may be helpful to further explain this concept. Here are some things you likely do under System 1 without even thinking about them (e.g., brush your teeth, jerk your hand off of a hot stove, check messages on your phone). However, under System 2, you will slow down to consciously consider alternatives, analyze choices, or solve problems. This entails cognitive functions such as exerting mental effort, focusing attention, and making decisions among various options. Examples of System 2 include making a list of pros and cons before you buy a car, deciding when to take your vacation or upgrade your phone, or determining the best strategy to achieve a goal at work.
A good example of how dual systems theory works is learning how to drive. In the beginning, there is a lot to learn. There are many steps you must take in the right sequence with high stakes, so you need to pay attention and think hard. Do you remember when you learned to drive? You needed to think carefully about adjusting your mirrors, putting on your seatbelt, applying the brake, starting the ignition, checking your surroundings, and putting the car in gear. You also had to apply the rules of the road (e.g., yield on green light to make a left turn), understand signals from other drivers, and think about how to get where you wanted to go. This would be classified as System 2 complex processing.
However, after months and years of driving, you’ve repeated the behavior so many times that your brain shifts to System 1 thinking. At this point, you now do all of these things automatically, without even thinking. This allows you to focus most of your attention on other things. For example, you can carry on conversations, listen to podcasts, or practice the presentation you need to deliver at work that day. Many people can relate to the experience of driving to work without any conscious awareness; it becomes totally automatic even though they have to pay attention to stop lights, traffic, turning on the right streets, etc.
Based on this new understanding of Dual Systems Thinking, two ideas may have emerged that are relevant for this stage of the BS process. First, creating a project vision will require System 2 thinking, and our brains (focused on survival) seem to prefer to keep us attentive and engaged in System 1 fast processing. Therefore, work requiring extended periods of complex thinking is more difficult, and it’s easy to become distracted. It’s not that your team is lazy or incapable of working this way, but the brain is anxious to get back to System 1 status because it believes it is protecting you from danger.
One of the tricks our brains play on us is to shift from what we are thinking about to something easier. It happens without our awareness of the trick occurring. The excerpt below describes this phenomenon.
“Predisposition to what I like and avoidance of what is hard.
When faced with a difficult question, we often swap it out for an easier one without even noticing the substitution. It’s an exchange between the conclusions and the arguments –the conclusion comes first then the arguments, though it should be the other way around. As an example, he notes, “If you ask people their opinions about ObamaCare, their views usually have nothing to do with the policy itself, it’s their political predispositions you’ll hear.”
How the BSPL can help the stakeholders prepare for System 2 work
You may be wondering how the BSPL can ‘set the table” for an effective session dominated by system 2 thinking, and I’m glad you asked. It takes some lead time to get the brain primed and ready to “hang out” and become effective in System 2 processing. We’ll take some time to talk about what those types of activities might be.
Remind the team of their significant purpose.
Factors that influence System 2 thinking tend to involve working on things that are more important and meaningful for the operation. If they are personally significant and valued, that is still better.
Give the team a sense of accountability for the project.
Another way to increase System 2 is to help the team feel responsible for the project and vision. This is one of the reasons we spent some time reviewing how to build ownership in the project with all of the stakeholders in the kickoff meeting.
Select and lead engaging exercises and activities.
The BSPL can take steps to ensure the exercises used to land on a vision are planned, organized, and well run to ensure they are as painless as possible to help minimize frustration. Try not to take it personally if stakeholders’ rebel. It’s a natural part of human brain functioning.
Create a sense of time affluence.
System 2 thinking thrives in an abundance of time. Speed or time constraints should not dictate the creative activities needed to create a vision. Short-cutting this process or watching the clock will lead to less effective solutions.
Set expectations
The BSPL can set expectations with stakeholders to help them understand that the BS process will go slow in the beginning in order to accelerate progress at the end. Considering that you’ve already asked your stakeholders to slow down in order to comprehensively define the problem, they may be particularly impatient and frustrated as you guide them through the vision-setting process. Understanding that it is natural for stakeholders to push back will help the BSPL hold the course when they encounter challenges and resistance.
Share BS insights.
You could start sharing some of the BS insights that are relevant to the process with your stakeholders (just as they have been shared with you in these sessions). Gaining awareness of this information can help them with some emotional regulation in the sessions if and when they begin to notice their attention drifting or any negative emotions arising from fatigue. By asking them to be alert and attentive, you can help them make adjustments as needed to stay tuned in. At a minimum, they won’t be as frustrated with you as the facilitator.
Staying out of System 1
Once a person shifts out of System 2, into the fast, automatic world of System 1, it takes more time to get back into System 2 again. An analogy is the idea that once you turn off your computer system, you’ve got to reboot and wait for everything to reload before you are fully operational again. Of course, it only works in one direction. Moving from System 2 to System 1 is instantaneous.
There are several things the BSPL can do to enhance the team’s ability to do the work, stay out of System 1 thinking (or bounce back quickly), and spend more time in System 2.
Many of the ideas were already reviewed in the sessions related to the kickoff, and support System 2 thinking (and they will likely even make more sense to you now).
For example, two of the ground rules previously discussed are examples of ways to limit distractions: 1) having only one conversation at a time, and 2) turning off phones and emails. Multiple conversations or technological distractions are quick tickets back to System 1.
Case Study: M&Ms
Credit: Business Insider
In the mid-1990s, M&Ms faced a problem. The candy had become ubiquitous and was blending in with other sweets on the shelves. It had lost its identity as an iconic brand and had become just another candy brand in the eyes of consumers.
To revitalize the brand, BBDO, an advertising agency, came up with a marketing strategy that tapped into consumers’ System 1 Thinking. They created memorable characters for each color of M&M candy, with distinct personalities, to represent the brand. The characters, including Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green, quickly became popular and allowed M&Ms to stand out from other candy brands.
By appealing to consumers’ emotions and creating memorable brand assets, BBDO successfully ingrained M&Ms into consumers’ System 1 Thinking, increasing brand awareness and loyalty.
In fact, M&M didn’t change anything in their chocolate recipe, they just humanized the candies and found their way back to the market through System 1 by doing so.
The Problem of the World and the Opportunity for Marketers
Let’s face it.
We live in a world where System 1 is the king and System 2 is the princess in exile.
Nowadays, in the world of social media’s constant drive for Instant gratification, we all live in a system 1 world. But for our defense, humans always tend to behave and decide based on system 1, much more than you think and much much more than you and I are willing to admit.
The bottom line is that Humans are not rationalists and our brains are super vulnerable to manipulations.
But this vulnerability is a real opportunity for marketers and business owners :
System 2 Thinking is not always the dominant factor in consumer decision-making. In many cases, System 1 Thinking may be more influential, particularly for routine purchases or when emotions and intuitive responses are more important than conscious deliberation.
We tend to think that our potential clients (or voters..) base their decisions on System 2 but the truth is that System 1 in most cases is much more powerful. Emotional reactions are more powerful than logical arguments.
So here is the traditional mistake of marketers and sales:
Marketers, Biz dev guys, and salespeople think that their potential prospects actually calculate each aspect of the offer and after a logical process, the client decides whether or not he or she wants to buy the product.
So under the wrong assumption that most clients use system 2, the marketers and salespeople put tons of effort into providing detailed information, logical arguments, and evidence-based claims to persuade customers and prospects. In fact, people don’t use System 2 as much as we think and most of us decide based on the fast, reckless, emotional System 1.
So here is what you should do:
Don’t be so rational, you are not selling your product to chatGPT. You sell to human beings.
So, You should adopt a mindset of system 1 and focus on the fast reaction you can evoke in people’s minds. Think about what people feel and not what they should think. Your brand’s ultimate goal is to be the choice of system 1, the automatic, default choice.
Exercise
• Try to recall the last time you found yourself distracted from an important task you needed to complete. Based on your new understanding of Dual Systems Theory, how would you describe what was happening?
• Have you ever encountered the situation described in the session above where your brain actually hijacked your thought process and substituted it for another? Have you seen it happen to other people.
• You’ve likely had a lifetime of experiences similar to this, but now you can also apply an understanding of why and how it is happening.
Now pair up and discuss with a partner
• Some practical steps you can take as the BSPL to overcome some of the brain tricks when you are working with your project team on the visioning work.
Course Manual 9: Vision Blueprints
The next segment is focused on planning the vision development meeting(s). As you’ll recall a lot of attention was devoted to planning and conducting the kickoff meeting. The vision setting meetings are just as critical and will take the same level of attention to get it right.
Who to include?
For vision planning, you have multiple goals associated with the creation of the vision. At this stage in the process, you are still interested in pulling together a cohesive and engaged stakeholder group. This would suggest including the broader group of stakeholders, both those who may be intimately connected from the working team as well as those who are important but not as closely involved. In addition, you want to pull together a group that will encourage diversity of thought, so having diverse stakeholders from different areas will maximize innovation and creativity in the vision discussion. Alternatively, research on brainstorming shows that the process is generally more effective with smaller groups.
So on balance, there seems to be more to be gained by including a broader group of stakeholders (beyond the working team).
One further consideration is whether or not to include the project owner in the visioning meetings. Of course, you want to make sure that this person doesn’t overly influence or stifle any discussion in the meeting, but sometimes having them participate and listen to the dialogue can be an important part of their own journey in the process. Rather than give a recommendation, it seems that this is a good place to apply an “it depends” on the answer. This may be a judgment call you make based on the team, the situation, and your assessment of the project owner’s ability to enhance or inhibit the group’s progress. If you decide not to include the project owner, you can set up a time at the end of the process for them to join the meeting and hear about the discussion and outcome.
Determining the best way to develop a vision
Before you can schedule the session you’ll need to determine the exercises you will use and the sequence in which you’ll conduct the activities. This will inform how much time is needed for the session and the best way to structure the meeting. The session that follows this one will explain this further, but we wanted to mention it here with the other decisions you’ll be making to plan the meeting.
Where to have the meeting?
You’ll have the same decisions to make as you did with the kickoff in terms of whether the meeting will it be in person, online or a hybrid approach. Of course you’ll want to consider what worked well in the kickoff meeting, where you struggled, and how you want to try some things differently the next time you approach a kickoff meeting. These questions can help you make decisions about how you want to setup, conduct, and manage the vision planning meetings.
One factor to consider is your goals to create a sense of team among your stakeholders. Traditionally, it has been easier to build relationships in person, however, the explosion of remote work has improved the opportunities to build relationships with people in different ways. There are also other benefits to having the meeting in person for you as well. For example, it will be much easier to “read the room” in terms of people needing a break, getting excited about an idea, or handling a conflict between team members. If relationship building is a primary concern and it’s feasible to hold the meetings in person, that is your best option.
If you decide to hold the meeting in person, you will have decisions to make about where to hold the meeting(s). For the most part, the considerations from kickoff will apply. However, there are a couple of notable differences or additions to consider. First and foremost, vision-setting is creative, visionary work. As a result, if you have the meeting at a special location, you could create an optimal space for that kind of work. For instance, research has shown that a large space with ample opportunities for breaking out into smaller groups, bright walls, and in a well-lit area are all things that support creative thinking. If you are also able to find a location in a beautiful setting with access to nature, you’d really be taking it to the next level. Believe it or not, some organizations understand these contributing factors and have rooms and whole complexes available that fit the needs of these kinds of meetings.
If your company doesn’t have a suitable space, you could also reserve an external space ideal for this type of collaboration. All of this is dependent on the feasibility of attending an offsite meeting. This approach has the advantage of setting the tone for the meeting as important and different. It could also help employees separate from their day-to-day work.
Alternatively, if your only choice is a small, standard type of conference room with no ability to configure tables in an ideal way, you might give more consideration to a virtual meeting. The upcoming section on brainstorming outlines some additional benefits of a virtual meeting. A bright, expansive room can really enhance the vision-setting process, but a small, traditional conference room with one large conference table in the center will almost certainly tank the process (even in the best circumstances).
Pre-work
As a general rule of thumb, I avoid pre-work for meetings. First, I am grateful for people’s willingness to attend, and I don’t want to take the chance of creating any resistance going into the meeting. Have you ever gotten saddled with pre-work you didn’t know about or plan for? It’s not a good feeling. In addition, when you do this, there is no guarantee everyone will preview the pre-work,so you have to cover the material again in the meeting if you want everyone on the same page. However, there are a couple of exceptions.
First, if you have something that is very technical, it is helpful to give people time to sift through it, look up information, send in questions, etc. at their own pace prior to the meeting. If you wait to cover it in the meeting, you risk that people will be embarrassed to ask questions about things they don’t understand. They may also hesitate to discuss because they don’t want to slow the group down by asking questions. That said, if you are going to send out such technical information, you should still be attentive to making it as simple and easy as possible. Double check for technical jargon, and be sure to give people as much advance notice as possible.
Using pre-work to prime the pump to get people to think innovatively outside the box is another great idea. For example, do you have a great article about a competitor who did something surprising that no one believed was possible or that was really new and exciting? It doesn’t have to be a competitor either. You could share articles about innovative solutions in other industries. If you believe your team is going to struggle to think outside the box, consider assigning articles to people on the team and asking them to report back what they learned as a part of the vision meeting.
Scheduling the Session
The next task is scheduling the meeting. As previously stated, the activities you build into the vision planning work will be the most important consideration for scheduling. Another important factor in order to enable the team to be their most innovative and comfortable working in System 2 will be to build in a lot of time and then add more. Your stakeholders will probably push back on this but will appreciate it when they are in the middle of something important and need the time to get through it effectively. Of course, you’ll have to balance the need for time with their receptivity to the meeting invitation.
In addition to considering the length of the meeting, you’ll want to determine the ideal length of time to separate the kickoff from the vision meeting. For all intents and purposes, you could schedule the vision planning meeting immediately after the kickoff. In fact, you may be interested in combining these meetings for the convenience of your stakeholders. However, in most cases, it is best to separate the two meetings. People need a break between their focused attention on these topics. In addition, you want to shift to more innovative thinking for the vision planning session.
This idea is explained further in an excerpt below. The author describes an “immersion” type of meeting in which the stakeholders become acquainted with the project. In the BS process, this meeting is the kickoff.
“We always try and cram this brainstorming session into one half day or even the full day because the coordination costs, the diary coordination and the travel costs are such that you basically have to try and do everything within the course of that one occasion.
And I’ve always had this belief that it makes much more sense to split a meeting like that into two. So you have immersion, up at the beginning, and it might be just two hours. It might be a virtual meeting where everybody familiarises themselves with the issue at hand. And then you allow for a week or so of what you might call ‘fermentation’, to quote, James Webb Young in a technique for producing ideas.
Just to allow the unconscious to do its work…a chance to get lucky, because once the problem is in your mind, you might find inspiration in all kinds of accidental things.”
Scheduling a meeting two to four weeks after the kickoff is likely the most practical and helpful in terms of allowing the subconscious to percolate. In addition, you’ll need to leave time to send out the problem statement and any additional meeting instructions to stakeholders, give them time to review, and make any changes necessary. You may also decide to ask participants to do some pre-work to prepare for the vision meeting. In addition, preparing for the vision planning meeting will take some time as well. It is better to be prepared and conduct a well-planned meeting than to rush into the vision-planning meeting and struggle.
If you run multiple exercises (as is recommended), splitting those activities between a long break, a lunch, or the next day can be beneficial. Sometimes you might even want to include an activity between exercises to help the brain stay sharp, focused, and creative on the difficult task at hand.
Case Study
The Challenge: Increasing New Patient Engagement With Belong Health Care Teams
Irrational Labs partnered with Belong Health to tackle one of their most important challenges – increasing new patient engagement with Belong care teams – which include social workers, nurses, and community health workers.
We took a behavioral science microscope to the new patient experience, focusing on three touchpoints: (1) the welcome call, (2) health risk assessment, and (3) primary care provider connection.
Our Approach
We uncovered dozens of behavioral barriers around these touchpoints that could add friction and interfere with care team engagement. Then we designed a suite of interventions to directly remove these barriers.
For example, we found that the initial welcome call could last more than 2 hours and included both sensitive and confusing topics. The challenge was to create a script for welcome calls that would promote downstream engagement and was compliant with the regulated Model of Care. We streamlined the call script – focusing on the clear benefits of the plan and building social connection with patients.
Interventions
INTERACTIVE WELCOME CALL GUIDE
Based on this insight, we collaborated with the care teams to develop a simple, interactive guide featuring behavioral interventions throughout. This new solution maintains compliance with the regulated Model of Care and offers seasoned care team members a behavioral version of the checklist approach. We included science-backed strategies for building social connections and discussing sensitive topics such as mental health, loneliness, and substance use.
PERSONALIZED WELCOME POSTCARD
We designed a postcard to help humanize the care team for members with the goal of increasing engagement with the care team. We included friendly photos of care team members – reducing ambiguity about who they are (since most initial interactions are conducted via phone).
We made the postcards highly personalized – featuring messages from each care team member to the member themselves (e.g. “Hi Shayna, I’m looking forward to working with you…”).
We used language such as “your care team”, leveraging the endowment effect and aiming to help people understand that this is their custom care team, here to support them. And also to feature small fun, facts about themselves to increase relatability and encourage social connection. Further, we helped to build a simple mental model of what the care team is by featuring a clear list of things that the care team can help them with.
Health Risk Assessment (HRA) SCRIPT
We redesigned the HRA script used by care team members to conduct a lengthy health risk assessment for new members. While the HRA is a helpful source of data for Belong, the assessment can take over an hour. In addition, it includes questions that are difficult to answer and can be stigmatizing.
To solve this, we redesigned the script to prioritize the most important questions. We leveraged several strategies to address stigma and negativity bias, including building social connection, social norms, positive affirmation, and positive psychology/small wins.
For example, we recommended care team members start the call with a trust-building exchange and provided specific prompts. Specifically, they were prompted to lead members through a reciprocal disclosure exercise where both the care team caller and member took turns sharing small things about themselves with one another.
Before difficult questions about mental health, we recommended including a positive affirmation question “Could you please tell me three good qualities or strengths other people around you would say you have? Things like kindness, good with change, directness. Whatever comes to mind. These don’t have to be related to health at all.”
We framed a section with questions about physical abilities with a normalization of all abilities: “It’s very normal for people to have difficulty doing certain activities.”
We user-tested the script and collaborated heavily with care team members. To ensure that care team members understood our rationale for certain recommendations and framings – we included behavioral science bubbles throughout the script that highlight the behavioral science justifications for the design element. As with all other interventions, we made sure the script remained compliant with the regulated Model of Care.
Zooming out – these are just three of the 10+ interventions we developed with Belong. Others included text messages, a redesigned health risk assessment, and a mailer. All of these targeted various barriers to increased patient engagement with Belong’s care team.
1. How did Belong’s care team leverage BS to build a stronger relationship with new patients?
2. What was the purpose of the positive affirmation question? Does the position of this question connect back to any of the BS principles you learned in the last workshop?
3. Were there any principles of relationship building you would apply to your work building a strong project team?
Exercise
• In each group, select one person’s project or pick a project you would like to tackle with the BS process.
• Going through the Vision Blueprint section, what decisions would you make about how to structure the vision planning meeting (recognizing that we’ll be covering the content in an upcoming session).
• Discuss some of the tradeoffs in terms of who to include, when to hold the meeting, where to have the meeting, whether to include pre-work (and what you would send in advance of the meeting).
If there is time, rotate to another team member and discuss how their project might lead to a different blueprint.
Course Manual 10: Set Stage
This section is designed to help you establish the groundwork needed to help your stakeholders successfully navigate future vision work. The next session details the specific activities you will use to develop the vision. Following these tips will help prepare the stakeholders to be more effective in whatever exercise(s) you choose.
1. Set expectations
It will be helpful if your stakeholders understand the nature of this type of work. In particular, they will be able to contribute if they know the work is going to be hard. This will keep them from being surprised and disappointed in the session. You probably want to come right and tell them that this work is the hardest thing to do. The rest of the process will be easier from here. In addition, they may find themselves temped to move into solutions, just like they did in the problem-solving work. You can remind them that in this part of the process, we’ll be focused on setting the vision for the future only. Once that is complete, we’ll be able to move back toward solutions and bridging the gap between the current and future states.
2. Start with the problem statement
In building our path to the future, it is critical to understand the current state of the situation.
The stakeholders spent a good deal of time deliberating on the specific details that reflect the current state of the problem. Refreshing everyone’s memories of the particulars of the problem can make sure everyone is focused on and thinking clearly about the problem as you start. Since you probably just concluded this work in the last meeting, it may seem redundant or a waste of time to repeat it again. However, it is advisable not to skip it. People have a lot going on, and they may forget something important. It also helps to reinforce the problem statement and immerse the group in the problem as they begin.
One approach for doing this would be to have a stakeholder read the statement aloud to the group vs. asking the group to read it to themselves. Having other people read aloud increases engagement. Another option is to ask specific individuals to read specific sections aloud to the group. These approaches help to engage the audience and ensure they are listening and focused.
3. Go back to the evidence
Since making data-based decisions is a core principle of the BS process, it’s always a good idea to revisit the evidence. Since the existing evidence is baked into the problem statement, it’s not necessary to review all of the evidence. However, you may want to highlight any new data collected since the last meeting, and provide an update on any data collection in progress.
4. What is the right timeframe?
It will be important to give some thought to the appropriate timeframe for your vision. Is the time horizon 1 year, 18 months, 3 years, or 5 years? The timeframe will vary by project, but in general, a long-term future is considered to be at least a year. Given the speed of change in our VUCA world today, some experts suggest it doesn’t make sense to build a vision that goes past three years. In general, you will likely find that people can become more visionary the further out they look and will be more realistic and tied to the current state the shorter the goal is. This would be an important discussion with the project owner, and potentially, the group.
5. Identify Boundary Conditions
Sometimes on a project, there may be some boundaries to consider or ideas that are off the table. It would be helpful to understand what these criteria might be. An example might be that all improvements to a tool are possible unless they delay the publicized release date, result in a cost increase greater than 10%, or cannibalize other existing products. These types of limitations could certainly negatively impact the quality of the ideas; it’s better to understand the boundaries the group is operating within.
6. Define brainstorming rules
Brainstorming is a collaborative process focused on producing a large number of ideas. Generally, a group of people share ideas with each other, and they evaluate together, looking for the best ideas.
It is probably the best tool we have available for identifying new, high-quality, innovative ideas. As such, it is a core tool in visioning work. While there is no doubt you have likely participated in many brainstorming sessions, you can probably also attest to the fact that sometimes they work well, generating exciting new ideas, and other times they are just painful. In these cases, brainstorming is not as effective or engaging.
Since we are leveraging the popular process in the BS process, it is important to bring the best science and research to the table to clarify what parts of brainstorming are effective and why. The next paragraphs will describe how to create the best environment for successful brainstorming.
Research has shown that these core ground rules for brainstorming apply as well today as they did back in the 1950’s when brainstorming was codified in the advertising industry.
• Try to generate as many ideas as possible
• No criticism of ideas (no censorship ideas – including your own)
• Share ideas freely – encourage wild ideas
• Combine and build onto others’ ideas
One of the central ideas is that it is easier to react to an idea than to create a new one. Experience tells us that an individual’s idea may not be adopted by the group, but the idea may be the impetus or spark for the next idea that becomes the winner. This is why we encourage people not to censor their ideas. The free flow of ideas also contributes to the continued momentum of System 2 thinking.
A BS enhancement around this idea is to offer a reward for the wildest idea. This provides a license for someone who is hesitant to float a crazy idea to have the behavior sanctioned by the group. The group can vote on the craziest idea at the end of the session and provide a nominal award, such as a gift card. This can also make the brainstorming session a little lighter and more enjoyable for the group as they compete for the wildest idea and laugh with each other at the ideas.
Production blocking is one of the challenges associated with brainstorming. This occurs when a person loses their train of thought when another person is talking. One of the suggestions to improve brainstorming addresses this concern.
• Initiate the process by having people brainstorm individually before they share with the group
Amazon leverages this practice. The following paragraphs describe their practice and rationale.
Amazon is a great example of a company that holds data- informed dialogues. The beginnings of important meetings at Amazon are characterized by a strange sound: silence. People are busy reading the six-page memos describing the issue at hand. There are no PowerPoint slides. In fact, the memo’s authors aren’t meant to present anything. Rather, they are meant to facilitate an honest-to-goodness discussion on the issue.
That space is the essential feature of a strategic sparring session. It isn’t death by PowerPoint or some other kind of one-way transmission of information. It isn’t even a debate where one side fights against the other. In his book On Dialogue, physicist David Bohn said a dialogue isn’t “ping-pong, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to take points for yourself,” but rather something featuring “common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other.”
Another important recommendation is related to giving individuals adequate time for their individual work. This can get tricky when some people finish before others, but don’t shortchange the process. Stay at this independent work longer than your participants are comfortable with (e.g., 20 minutes or more). It may be helpful to have additional prompts available for people who finish early to tackle. Research has shown that brainstorming is more effective when participants focus on quantity over quality. Focusing on quantity was also superior to aiming for quantity and quality!
• Instruct participants the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible
Another complicating factor occurs when the group feels pressured to comply with the senior leader’s perspective or idea or the person in the room with the loudest voice. You may recall the issue of groupthink reviewed in the last workshop. You might want to consider:
• Excusing any executives from the process during the brainstorming step and inviting them back in to participate in the discussion that follows the idea generation phase.
• Leveraging the use of your company’s electronic collaboration tools. The ability to submit ideas in the tool anonymously can help participants overcome any fears of retribution or manage their impressions of the group.
An innovative approach to brainstorming known as “brainwalking” is to encourage your participants to move before or while they are generating ideas. Research has shown that movement increases creativity. For example, if you need to take a break in the meeting, consider combining the time for the break with the brainstorming activity. Or plan the break immediately preceding the task and encourage stakeholders to get out of the room. Participants can take a notepad or sticky notepad along on a walk (or even walk around the room). More recent research has shown that connecting with nature also increases System 2 thinking; if taking a break outside is feasible, it could increase the group’s innovative capacity.
As you prepare for your visioning session, consider which of these brainstorming rules you want to cover with your stakeholders.
Case Study
Source
When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic.
The essence of Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, at the heart of which lies a simple yet potent idea: the magic in business arises when we dare to look beyond the predictable and delve into the unspoken and the unexpected.
Rory is a prolific storyteller and draws on myriad examples from life and business (he founded the behavioral science group at the brand agency Ogilvy) to emphasize that while logic forms the bedrock of conventional problem-solving, the real game-changers emerge from the realm of the illogical.
Consider the following example: the UK government wanted to improve travel between London and Paris. Their market research indicated that people responded to surveys with a consistent request: make the trip shorter. I mean, who wants to spend more time in transit?
This logical response led to a logical project to reduce travel time between the destinations. The Eurostar upgrades cost billions and reduced time between the destinations by just over 30 mins.
A more behaviorally-informed approach could have produced a more cost-effective and satisfying answer. Rather than making the trip shorter, it could have had a much more positive impact on traveler’s satisfaction by making it more enjoyable. Rory points out that even prior to these upgrades, people continued to switch from London-Paris flights to the train. Not to save time, but because the experience of arriving at a central train station, skipping onerous security measures, strolling onto the train, spreading out across a table with your laptop or a few friends is a much better experience. Instead of spending billions to make the trip shorter, spend millions to offer better WiFi and food. As he points out, nobody brags about how fast their cruise ships are.
Alchemy, therefore, is about seeing the unseen, feeling the unspoken, and sometimes, challenging the established norms to create a masterpiece out of an ordinary product. As Rory writes, “We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.” Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.
Alchemy offers a few rules to help us introduce some more magic into our work. The first we covered above: the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Make the train fast? Good idea. Make the train slower and more enjoyable? Also a good idea.
Another maxim we’re familiar with in behavioral science is that not everything that makes sense works and not everything that works makes sense. In fact, it is not uncommon to receive a request after someone has tried something that makes sense and finds out it’s not producing the effect they intended.
Rory shares the story of Sony and the development of the Walkman. In developing the portable music device, engineers identified a way to add not just playback but recording as well. Not only that, but the additional feature would not be at a significant cost. The logical approach is straightforward: additional features are always better!
In this instance, Akio Morita, the CEO of Sony, defied his engineers and instead launched a product with just the ability to play music. His instinct was that innovations with too many features are a barrier to behavior change. “Is this device for recording notes? For playing music? For transferring music?” This may not be what an economist or an engineer would recommend but it’s consistent with some key elements of behavioral science. Namely, a focus on a key behavior in design. Loading up on features and functionality makes sense! But sometimes to make magic happen it doesn’t need to make sense.
Logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.
So why then do so few organizations seem to use alchemy as they design experiences?
You may be familiar with the phrase “nobody gets fired for buying IBM.” If you haven’t come across this before, it means that choosing a seemingly safe, easily defensible decision is better than taking a chance. Put otherwise: organizations are risk averse.
Logic is defensible. So that risk aversion leads us to choose well-trod paths and well-worn ideas. Employing a proven method may make sense, but not if all your competitors are doing the same thing. With access to the same information, technology, and talent, it pays to differentiate on the experience – and to employ a bit of alchemy.
For anyone looking to become an alchemist, here are Rory’s Rules of Alchemy:
1. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
2. Don’t design for average.
3. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical.
4. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.
5. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.
6. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic.
7. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident.
8. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
9. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club.
10. Dare to be trivial.
11. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.
In a world that’s constantly pushing towards logical conclusions, Alchemy nudges us to explore the illogical, the whimsical, and the magical in business. It’s a call to look beyond the ordinary, to delve deeper into human psychology, and to embrace the unorthodox to create extraordinary business success.
1. Which of the Rory’s 11 rules did you agree with?
2. Which of the rules did not make sense based on your life experience?
3. Did Rory make a case for some of the paradoxical rules that you buy-into?
4. Would your organization support leveraging these rules?
Exercise
• How many ideas did each team come up with?
• Were the ideas similar, different?
• Was the quality different?
• How did it feel to be in each group?
• Based on what you learned, what approach would you adopt?
Course Manual 11: Choose Journey
There’s no one-size-fits-all, best-way, or exercise for developing a project vision. Instead, there are a lot of different paths that can take you where you need to go; some are better than others. In this section, we’ll attempt to lay out several options so you can select the vision planning exercises that will best meet the needs of your project.
There are several important considerations. First, how creative do you need the stakeholders to be? If your stakeholders exhibit a strong bias in a particular direction or if their thoughts about what is possible are mired in the current state, you will need to spend more time and maybe even conduct additional exercises to help break the team out of their box and be more creative. This may be a good place to engage the process owner in a discussion of how much “blue sky” thinking is needed on the project and how locked up the group is with current ways of thinking. It might also be helpful to discuss some of the personalities on the team to determine the group’s level of readiness and openness to new ways of thinking.
You’ll likely notice a trade-off here. The approaches that deliver greater innovation take more time. The reason is fairly straightforward: we need to give the brain more time and space to shift into System 2 thinking. Time pressure is the enemy of this type of work; it will move participants back to System 1 quickly and with less thorough thinking.
The following section will present various visioning exercises, starting with more straight-forward approaches that don’t require a great deal of innovation or creative thinking and building toward more extensive approaches that lead the team toward more creative solutions. Additional suggestions and recommendations will be offered as appropriate.
The exercises below are all variations of brainstorming activities. For tips on facilitation, refer to the brainstorming section in the previous session. The exercises vary in terms of the types and extent of questions provided to prompt the brainstorming activity. At the bottom of this list, the final visioning exercise provides detailed instructions for facilitating these exercises, including some words to say. If you are unfamiliar with leading a brainstorming session, refer to the last exercise for detailed instructions. Otherwise, you can refer to the ground rules suggested in the brainstorming section above to help set up the exercise.
Future State
Ask these two sets of questions in consecutive rounds of brainstorming. You can either share answers between rounds or proceed to the second round immediately after exhausting the first list of question prompts and then review the results from both rounds at the same time.
1. Envision the future state. If everything goes according to plan, what will you be doing? (Adjust timeframes as appropriate for your project.)
o Six months from now?
o A year from now?
o Five years from now?
2. What is possible? What is included in the ideal state you imagine?
Use these prompts if the group is struggling or needs a third round of questions. You can also use these questions if some in the group have finished early but others are still working on an earlier set of questions.
3. What would we do if there were no limitations?
4. What would we do if we had no fear?
To and From Exercise
The idea behind this exercise is to identify aspects of the future state based on problematic aspects of the current state.
1. Begin with the problem statement and/or evidence summary as resources.
2. Document aspects of the current state that are unsatisfactory, and that you would like to change (this could be done individually or as a group exercise.)
a. Complete column A with relevant current state items or problems.
b. Next, complete column B. For each challenge in the current state, identify a future state version of what would be different.
3. Identify the key concepts you want to include in the future state column.
Future State from Key Perspectives
This exercise is designed to put stakeholders in the shoes of the customer and other relevant stakeholders. Ask the question, “What would an ideal state look like from the….”
• Customer’s perspective?
• Company’s president or CEO’s perspective?
• Employees’ perspective?
• Communities’ perspective?
• Business area’s perspective?
• Other?
Persona
Develop multiple personas to represent a typical customer or customers you are targeting. If you aren’t familiar with personas, your marketing or training group may be able to provide more information to help you create one. The process helps you visualize and think about your customer in a more holistic, personal, and human-centered way. Building a persona typically entails interviewing some customers and then telling a story about them. The goal isn’t to describe what most customers look like. It is to do a deeper dive into the profile of a specific customer who may represent your target audience. The persona can describe what the person needs and wants, what they do every day, what is important to them, their traits, etc. Thinking about your customer one person at a time, with a name and a specific profile for you to learn, can help you create a vision in a more accurate and meaningful way.
After you develop a persona and introduce them to the stakeholders, ask the questions listed below of the group. They should step into the role of the persona and answer them as if they are answering for their persona. If you’ve built multiple personas, you can repeat the exercise for each persona. You can also assign a different persona to different small groups to see what kind of ideas they bring forward and what is different.
• Where is your pain?
• What would delight you?
• Why do you care about the product?
• What are you enthusiastic about?
• What will be different when you use the product?
• How will that change impact your life?
Again, if you need to go deeper after the previous sets of questions, you could ask these “next level” questions.
• What do they think, feel, or do?
• What value could we provide?
• What is needed from us for that to occur?
• What would we do to deliver it?
Imaginative Exercise
• Use your magic wand to create the future.
• Imagine you have no barriers. What is possible?
• Write a story about your vision of the future as if it were happening today. Does this make it seem more real? More possible? Does it get your attention?
Detailed Imagination Exercise:
This next exercise is the last version of a brainstorming activity in this section. It includes detailed instructions, including potential talking points for the facilitator. There are two rounds of brainstorming prompts at the beginning of the exercise. You can do the first part, the second, or both, depending on what your project needs. Doing both parts will maximize the opportunities to lead your team into a place where they are tapping more deeply into their creativity.
Part 1: Imagine the Future
• Ask participants to work independently for this exercise. In the first part, they won’t even write. They will be asked to strictly just think or imagine. This will likely be uncomfortable for people at first, but try to get them to stay in the imagination phase for 10-15 minutes before writing.
• Instructions: In this exercise, we are going to exercise your imagination. For some of us, we haven’t spent time in the world of pretend since we were small children, so you may be uncomfortable with this initially, but it is really helpful to ignite the creativity we need for the work ahead of us.
• “For the next couple of minutes, try to be still; the only thing moving should be your brains. Put your pens and paper down, and just relax. It may be helpful to close your eyes and clear your mind.
• Next, dream about the future. Now that it has been delivered, think about your project solution. You are now looking back three years. What do you see? Spend some time here.”
• Go into detail in your imagination.
• What is happening?
• Who is involved?
• Why is the situation ideal?
• Is anyone talking? If so, what are they saying?
• After 10-15 minutes, ask participants to write down what they saw. Ask them to put it in terms that are vivid, descriptive. Capture what they heard, saw, felt, and smelled (if relevant).
Part 2: Round 2: Brainstorm
• Another popular variation on this exercise is to ask participants to pretend to be reading a news story in the future about the work of the project team and what was delivered. What does the story say? What’s the headline, the facts presented in the story? How does the article close? Obviously, if you use Part 2 as a stand-alone, include the instructions setting up the exercise from Part 1.
• “Next, we are going on another imagination journey. Once again, please relax, put your pens down, and just think, imagine, and dream.
• This time a reporter from The Wall Street Journal or (insert relevant industry journal or magazine) is doing a story on your project! They want to highlight your ground-breaking solution and how you delivered these outstanding results.
• Imagine what you’d say.
• How proud are you of the accomplishment?
• What obstacles did you overcome to get there?
• What a difference is it making for your customers, company, and community (if relevant)?
• Be sure to show the reporter the deliverable and describe in detail what makes it so special.
• After 10-15 minutes, ask participants to write down what they saw. Ask them to put it in terms that are vivid and descriptive. Capture what they heard, saw, felt, and smelled (if relevant).
Part 3: Share Out
• Break into small groups of 2-3 people to share what you imagined. 10 to 15 minutes
• Take turns sharing what was imagined.
• When one person shares, the others need to learn everything they can about what is being shared.
• Rotate the roles of listening and sharing.
• Ask each group to capture key ideas from the exercise on large post-it notes to share with the large group.
• The facilitator should call on each group to share their key ideas, and then the group should place their ideas on the board.
• Similar or common ideas should be shared.
• This is a good time for a break.
Part 4: Large Group Discussion
• Identify themes for common ideas.
• Discuss themes.
• Also discuss some idea that were unique but seemed important.
• Try to identify 5-10 key ideas that can be developed into the vision.
Diverge and Converge
This is not another exercise, but rather it’s an idea for helping to effectively facilitate brainstorming activities that you can use with any of the exercises outlined above.
1. Round 1 individual brainstorming (use any exercise above).
2. Future state idea review – share and read through all of the ideas.
3. Round 2: Add new ideas based on an idea you read or a new question prompt
4. Repeat Future state idea review. Share and read through all of the NEW ideas
5. Round 3: Identify your top 2 or 3 ideas.
6. Repeat the future state idea review; share and read through all of the TOP ideas.
Draft the Future Vision
Throughout all of these brainstorming activities, you should collaborate with the group to:
1. Discuss the concepts identified.
As you discuss, more ideas may emerge as they ladder and build on the original ideas.
2. Identify a short list of key concepts to include in the vision statements.
It is vitally important that you don’t simply adopt the ideas that were identified by most people. This will typically represent current thinking. Instead, focus on unique ideas and outliers for the breakthrough and innovative ideas you want to adopt.
3. Create a draft of a future vision.
This is a very difficult task for a group. It is highly unlikely that a large group will land on the best vision statement in this meeting. A best practice is to:
• Give the group individual time and ask each person to write a statement that incorporates these concepts.
• Another approach is to split the large group into smaller groups and ask smaller groups to work together to draft a statement.
Then bring those statements forward for consideration.
• Remind the group about the characteristics of a great future vision (e.g., transformational, vivid, inspirational, concise, etc.).
• Review each of these statements to see what phrasing you like. You don’t have to adopt just one statement, you can highlight parts of several statements you like.
• Are there things you like about one that you want to keep? Can they be combined or tweaked?
• Try to at least land a couple vision statements the group is generally feeling okay about.
• Assure the stakeholders that there will be time later to work on the vision and tweak it until it is right.
• This is a great place to ask for a volunteer or two to do some wordsmithing outside of the meeting. You can also send the vision statements to the group and allow all or whoever is interested in submitting alternatives.
Special Case: Product vision template
If your project is a new product or a change in the product, the vision template below can be helpful:
[Product] is for [target customer] who [statement of need or opportunity]. The [product name] is a [product category] that [key benefit, reason to buy]. Unlike [primary competitive differentiation], our product [statement of primary differentiation].Case Study
Our Puny Human Brains Are Terrible at Thinking About the Future. And that has consequences.
Our future selves are strangers to us.
This isn’t some poetic metaphor; it’s a neurological fact. FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies suggest that when you imagine your future self, your brain does something weird: It stops acting as if you’re thinking about yourself. Instead, it starts acting as if you’re thinking about a completely different person.
Here’s how it works: Typically, when you think about yourself, a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, powers up. When you think about other people, it powers down. And if you feel like you don’t have anything in common with the people you’re thinking about? The MPFC activates even less.
More than 100 brain-imaging studies have reported this effect. (Here’s a helpful meta-analysis—while some FMRI studies have been called into question recently for statistical errors and false positives, this particular finding is robust.) But there’s one major exception to this rule: The further out in time you try to imagine your own life, the less activation you show in the MPFC. In other words, your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.
This glitchy brain behavior may make it harder for us to take actions that benefit our future selves both as individuals and as a society. Studies show that the more your brain treats your future self like a stranger, the less self-control you exhibit today, and the less likely you are to make pro-social choices, choices that will probably help the world in the long run. You’re less able to resist temptations, you procrastinate more, you exercise less, you put away less money for your retirement, you give up sooner in the face of frustration or temporary pain, and you’re less likely to care about or try to prevent long-term challenges like climate change.
This makes sense. As UCLA researcher Hal Hirschfield put it: “Why would you save money for your future self when, to your brain, it feels like you’re just handing away your money to a complete stranger?”
Our current political climate in the United States reflects this same cognitive bias against the future. Recently, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order undoing a vast array of regulations designed to mitigate long-term climate change in favor of policies that provide much shorter-term economic benefits. And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently made headlines when he said publicly that he is “not worried at all” about the possibility automation could eliminate millions or even tens of millions of American jobs in the future. “It’s not even on our radar screen,” he said, adding that it won’t happen for “50 to 100 years or more.” But, as Daniel Gross wrote in Slate, he’s wrong. It probably will not take five decades or more for robots and artificial intelligence to significantly reduce the number of jobs available to Americans. Recent economic research from MIT suggests that 670,000 industrial jobs have already been lost to automation in the U.S.
But even if did take 50 years for this hurricane to hit the workforce, are we really comfortable with our leaders pushing off the problem to our future selves? According to the latest census, nearly 180 million Americans alive today should expect to still be alive in 50 years. Are we not in the least interested in thinking about what kind of world we might find ourselves in, or want to help make or avoid, when that time comes?
Unfortunately across America, thinking about our far-off future is not a habit that most people come by easily or practice often. I’m a research director at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California, where we just completed the first major survey of future thinking in the United States. In it, 2,818 people reflected on how frequently they imagine something that might happen or something they might personally do at different timescales of the future. (Respondents were 18 or older, and there is a margin of error of ±2 percentage points and a 95 percent confidence level.)
The survey found 53 percent of Americans say they rarely or never think about the “far future,” or something that might happen 30 years from today. Twenty-one percent report imagining this future less than once a year, while the largest group of respondents, 32 percent, say it never crosses their mind at all.
Likewise, 36 percent of Americans say they rarely or never think about something they might personally do 10 years from now. The largest group of respondents, 19 percent, think about this 10-year future less than once a year, while another 17 percent say they never think about it at all.
Fortunately, five-year thinking is a bit more common than 10- and 30-year thinking. Just 27 percent of respondents rarely or never think about their lives as far as five years out. The most common answer to, “How often do you think about something that you might do or that might happen five years from now?” was once or twice a month. But compared with how often with think about our close friends and family—a near daily occurrence—we hardly give our own future selves a thought.
The survey suggests that the older you get, the less you think about the future—75 percent of seniors rarely or never think 30 years out, while 51 percent rarely or never think 10 years out. A common response, of course, was: “I don’t expect to be alive then, so I don’t think about it.” But previous neurological research has also shown that imagining the future simply becomes more difficult as we age. We lose gray matter in and connectivity across regions associated with mental simulation of the future.
The data showed that having children or grandchildren did not increase future thinking. However, one life event did: a brush with mortality, such as a potentially terminal medical diagnosis, a near-death experience, or other traumatic event. This was associated in the survey data with a statistically significant increase in weekly future thoughts at both the five- and 10-year timelines (but not at the 30-year timeline). This makes sense: Brushes with mortality are often associated, in the psychological literature, with a renewed effort to lead a meaningful life and leave a positive legacy behind. Thinking about, planning for, and contributing to our shared long-term futures may be an essential part of laying the groundwork for both.
Even without a brush with mortality, some people are very future-minded. Seventeen percent of Americans say they think about the world 30 years out at least once a week. Nearly one-third, or 29 percent, think about the 10-year future at least once a week. And slightly more (35 percent) think about the five-year future at least once a week. The fact that some people regularly “check in” mentally with the future aligns with something researchers have previously discovered: People have different thresholds for when they view a future self as a stranger. For some people, their MPFC powers down when thinking about a future self a year from now; for others, the switch doesn’t happen until “future you” is five, 10, or 15 years out. It’s not clear from the present data whether thinking about the future regularly can change the brain’s behavior or whether people who have a higher threshold just naturally enjoy thinking about the future more, because they already relate better to their future selves. Either way, this leaves us with a kind of “future gap” in America.
Some people regularly connect with their future selves, but a majority does not. And this matters, beyond the links between future thinking and greater self-control and pro-social behavior. Thinking about the five-, 10-, and 30-year future is essential to being an engaged citizen and creative problem-solver. Curiosity about what might happen in the future, the ability to imagine how things could be different, and empathy for our future selves are all necessary if we want to create change in our own lives or the world around us.
1. What does this case tell us about our human willingness to spend time thinking about the future?
2. Why do we find it challenging to think about the future?
3. What kind of resistance can you expect to encounter in the brainstorming activities you facilitate?
4. What makes it more likely that people will engage productively in the vision setting sessions in the BS process
Exercise
1. Select a future vision exercise from the list we reviewed in this section.
2. Write down 3 reasons why you selected that exercise.
3. Draft your opening comments, instructions to participants, and tips you’d share with them.
4. How will you handle a participant who is disruptive and uncooperative about doing the brainstorming work?
5. What can you say to a stakeholder who complains that the exercise is taking too long?
Course Manual 12: Land Vision
If you are extraordinarily lucky, you’ll leave the previous vision-setting session with a vision that all of the stakeholders like and are supporting. However, that would be rare, and as we’ll discuss later, somewhat suspect. In most cases, additional work is needed to arrive at a final vision.
Ideally, at this stage in the process, the group will have agreed upon a few viable future vision statements or at least a handful of vision concepts to include in the vision. The final part of the second workshop will be focused on guiding the group to finalize the statement. We’ll cover three aspects: 1) tradeoffs; 2) agreement processes; and 3) additional time and perspectives.
Tradeoffs
In the last section, we reviewed what makes a good vision, and it is a tall order! You may find that it is difficult to check all of the boxes for developing a great vision. As the BSPL, you’ll be responsible for helping the group develop the best vision possible. You may need to remind them where they are going off track or gently remind them about what is most important from time to time during the discussion.
Of the ten characteristics mentioned earlier, we’d recommend prioritizing a vision that is transformational, aspirational, inspiring, clear, and meaningful. As the BSPL, if you notice the vision statements from the group are not meeting all of the criteria, focus on these as the most critical in meeting the goals of the project.
If you have reminded the group to focus on these aspects and you believe the statements submitted are falling short, you could introduce another exercise as a way to help the group reach the same conclusion. Invite the group to rate the vision statement options based on the 10 characteristics described earlier, and then let them discuss.
As a final note on tradeoffs, in some cases, you or others on your team may be tempted or pressured to include business goals in the vision. You should encourage the team to resist this urge. In the next BS process workshop, we are going to help you design specific goals and strategies for the vision. They will be much more specific, concrete, and business-focused than the vision. Knowing this may give your stakeholders more confidence about really going after the BHAG-level future vision statements.
Making the vision too much like a business goal would not serve the project in the long run. At this point, it’s important to keep the vision high-level, aspirational, and easy to share in an elevator speech.
If you go down the path of including business goals, the power of the vision will be weakened, and it may not be able to guide your team’s decisions, inspire the team, or help you reach your goals for a transformational change. The excerpt below makes the point more eloquently.
“….the vision of the computer game …. “Help children enjoy music and dancing” is a broad and ambitious vision, for instance. It does not refer to the actual product idea or a specific target group, and it is not satisfied with creating a fun gaming experience. It aims for more. If it turns out that the idea of developing a computer game for children is ill conceived then there are still alternatives to make the vision come true. I could, for instance, decide to open up a dance school or create a virtual dance course.
Agreement Processes
In order to help the group arrive at a good future state vision, this section will cover some of the methods of reaching consensus and the science behind these group decision-making processes. There are several approaches to reaching agreement on a vision. Each of them has both strengths and weaknesses. Although we recommend the consensus method, several alternative methods will also be reviewed. These alternatives are more popular and easier to use. Therefore, the BSPL will need to advocate for the consensus decision making method when they experience resistance. In addition, some thoughts will be offered for when another approach may be more appropriate.
1. Consensus
Is a process that is primarily designed to help find a solution that meets all needs. Consensus is reached when everyone agrees on the decision. The main benefit of a consensus process is the ability to meet the needs of more people. It is different from a decision approach such as compromise, in which some people get their needs met through the sacrifice of others. That said, consensus is powerful because, in the process of gaining everyone’s agreement, there is typically much more discussion so everyone’s ideas and opinions can be understood. Research has found that decisions reached using consensus are high-quality than those reached using other methods.
Reaching a consensus agreement can be particularly challenging when there are conflicting opinions and ideas in the group. In the discussion process, the goal should not be for one subgroup (or person) to influence the other subgroup, but rather that through deeply understanding and respecting the underlying issues between the opposing rationales, the group is able to find a solution that meets the needs of both groups. As you can imagine, one of the greatest problems with this approach is the extensive time it can take to reach consensus.
Setting this as a goal will lead to a better decision-making process than some of the others listed below, even though it may not always be achievable.
Research has shown that the process works best when people get trained on how to use it, and they tend to get better with more experience. It will also require stronger communication skills from the team and from the BSPL as the facilitator. In order to help understand more about this decision-making approach and some of the potential “watch outs,” the following instructions are provided based on research on the consensus process.
Consensus Guidelines
• Avoid arguing for your own position.
• Avoid win-lose stalemates in discussions.
• Avoid changing your mind only in order to avoid conflict and to reach agreement and harmony.
• Avoid conflict-reducing techniques such as majority vote, averaging, bargaining, coin flipping and the like.
• View differences of opinion as both natural and helpful rather than as a hindrance in decision-making.
• View initial agreement as suspect.
Source: Hall and Williams (1970)
So while using the consensus process takes more time, the stakeholders are more likely to support the vision and see it through to execution.
If you give the consensus process your best effort and the group doesn’t seem able to move forward, you might try taking a break, postponing the decision, or organizing a committee to help resolve any conflicts. Another approach would be to ask the group to come up with a decision they can support and live with. This is very helpful, but it should only be tried AFTER the team was not able to reach consensus. If you take this approach, team members should understand that if a stakeholder agrees to “live with” a decision, it means they agree to get on board with the decision and not undermine or talk later about how they never thought it would work. They also agree not to talk about the decision in an unsupportive fashion to others outside of the meeting. Making sure everyone understands this will ensure that the divisiveness of a decision that didn’t reach consensus does not return to haunt the team later.
One final consideration for the BSPL is to be aware of their own potential for bias as they lead the decision-making process. This is particularly relevant when conducting the consensus process. The following explanation from the Decision Lab provides a great explanation.
Understanding the false consensus effect:
• “Thinking that other people share your opinion on controversial topics
• Overestimating the number of people who are similar to you
• Believing that the majority of people share your preferences
Researchers believe that the false consensus effect happens for a variety of reasons. First, the people we spend the most time with, our family and friends, do often tend to share very similar opinions and beliefs. Because of this, we start to think that this way of thinking is the majority opinion even when we are with people who are not among our group of family and friends.
Another key reason this cognitive bias trips us up so easily is that believing that other people are just like us is good for our self-esteem. It allows us to feel “normal” and maintain a positive view of ourselves in relation to other people.
This can lead people not only to incorrectly think that everyone else agrees with them—it can sometimes lead them to overvalue their own opinions. It also means that we sometimes don’t consider how other people might feel when making choices”.
2. Majority Rule – voting
Minority voting is the most popular method of decision-making after a brainstorming activity. People prefer and widely use it due to its speed, relative ease, transparency, and perceived fairness. As humans, our System 1 thinking may nudge us toward these faster, easier, more traditional, and expected perspectives. However, there are several serious issues with this method as a decision-making process.
There are too many instances where teams move too quickly to vote without fully understanding what they are voting on. In many cases, there isn’t enough full exploration of ideas or alternative thoughts and perspectives before going to vote. There’s a good chance that the majority will overrule the minority. This is an especially critical concern in the creative, innovative process where the best ideas may come from a minority group. A large group may unintentionally silence a minority idea, simply based on group dynamics. For example, a member of the team who has an idea or thought that is different from the majority may think to themselves, “since so many others are correct, they must be right.” They may question themselves, which makes them less likely to challenge others. As humans, we look for social proof, and we believe that the majority is right. It’s easier to go with the flow than to challenge the thinking of the majority. It takes a lot of courage to speak in opposition to the majority. Consensus, on the other hand, provides checks and balances against overlooking the best ideas that are less popular. In addition, voting sets up a win-lose scenario where only one idea can win.
3. Cumulative voting
Another popular approach, that addresses some of the negative impacts of majority voting is known as cumulative voting. In this process, instead of getting one vote, each participant gets 3 or 5 or x votes to cast. There are a couple benefits to this approach. For example, we don’t ask the stakeholders to pick one vision or the other. It’s not a scenario where only one idea wins; it’s not an either or, only one idea wins. Since people get multiple votes, they can be distributed among multiple viable ideas. You get a better representation of ideas that are worthy of further consideration. In fairness, the majority can and often will emerge, but at least voters are forced to consider other options. If you decide to use this approach, we recommend further discussion and consideration of the top 3 vision statements.
4. Ranked voting
One other approach that has similar benefits to cumulative voting is a ranked voting process. With this method, each of the alternatives is ranked from most preferred to least preferred. This one may be even better than cumulative voting because it forces participants to consider and rank all of the options. With cumulative voting, a person could pick their top 3 ideas and still disregard the others, but with ranked voting, in order to assign a rank, they need to consider the value of each alternative.
Additional time and perspectives
At this point in the process, it’s important to include additional perspectives. This will start with the team. Despite fully participating in the engaging and productive sessions you are conducting, this type of deep and creative thinking takes time to fully process. Your team will benefit from time to step away, think, reflect, and reformulate. Taking time away and then returning gives the team the gift of a new perspective based on additional space and processing time.
Giving the team time to reflect on the vision, process the information shared in the meeting over a day or more, and then offer additional edits and suggestions is important. They may even come up with an entirely new version of the statement all together.
Another important step in the process is to share your vision with others.
Once the team has a draft future vision and, after careful consideration and deliberation, lands on the future vision, it’s time to bring more stakeholders under the tent. This may mean stakeholders with an extended interest, more people from the business area, senior leaders, the core team’s colleagues, etc. In this case, you will be casting a wider net across the organization.
There are multiple reasons for sharing the vision. The first is to get input from other people in the company because you value their perspective. After working through the process and recognizing all of the twists, turns, and wordsmithing involved, it’s easy to recognize there may be room for improvement. This round of feedback gathering can offer some outside perspectives that can be particularly helpful in terms of diversity of thought and fresh eyes from new points of view.
Secondly, sharing the vision means drawing a line in the sand and becoming accountable to the rest of the organization for the delivery of the vision. You will also be setting company expectations; creating interest in tracking progress and seeing the end result. Sharing the vision with others helps to create buy-in.
A third reason is related to the future support you can garner from involving others in the process. Remember the BS principle of voice from the last workshop? One of the fascinating findings from this research is that when people have an opportunity to provide input, they are more satisfied and accepting of the change, even AFTER the decision has been made! Gaining support for your vision from a broader group of people in your company can be a preventative step toward any type of resistance you might encounter from others down the road. Finally, getting feedback from people in other areas can help you identify areas that are not clear. Getting reactions from people who don’t have the benefit of your deep knowledge or experience working through the process can illuminate what may need further explanation.
This process of continually going out for review and feedback can be quite messy, and frankly, rather frustrating. After all, you’ve done the hard work of landing on a vision, you’ve reached consensus, you’ve wordsmithed the language, your team has reviewed, and now, through this process, more changes are on the table. Your stakeholders can also tire of the process. Please have faith that it will end.
Sharing the vision and asking for additional feedback doesn’t mean you need to change the vision for every piece of feedback received. At this point, a best practice is to have all of the feedback collected and then considered holistically by the team or a smaller committee from the stakeholders. It would also be helpful to organize the feedback so it is anonymous to the review committee (e.g., with no voice having more influence than any other). The group can then meet to review all of the suggested changes to determine if they are essential, seem like easy improvements or enhancements to run by the full team, or whether they are worth returning to the group for further discussion or voting.
Another concern could be that the review process is holding up moving forward. One way to approach this would be to keep moving with the next steps, while acknowledging there may be a need to circle back to finalize the vision in the future. Depending on the scope of the changes suggested, the group may be able to continue moving forward with additional steps while this process is underway.
The good news is that your final future vision will be fairly enduring. Your goals and strategies may change due to changes in the company, economic or market pressures, or customer needs, but the vision (once it is vetted and finalized) should continue to guide the team’s work and project.
One final note is that in some rare cases, when the vision is completely finalized, the process of sharing the vision could extend to customers or the entire organization (e.g., through a newsletter). This can also be described as vetting the vision.
Case Study
This case is an excerpt from a longer story.
Source
Hold Battles of Assumptions, Not Beliefs
We call this exercise “strategic sparring sessions,” but what exactly is the focus of the fight? Assumptions. Take, for example, a discussion that co-author Scott Anthony had with a team formulating a strategy to open a series of cafés in Japan.
The discussion among team members was getting heated.
“I believe we shouldn’t do this,” Rachel said. “We should shut it down.”
Another teammate, Asher immediately disagreed. “I believe we absolutely should do it. In fact, the problem is our targets are not aggressive enough.”
“Scott, what do you think?” they both asked.
Everyone looked at Scott. Rachel and Asher had entered into a battle of beliefs. While there may be individual winners in these battles, the institution always loses. Why? Because the personal connection that each person made to their claim means that at the end of the discussion, when a winner is anointed, the loser ends up feeling not heard, deflated, or dismissed.
Harvard Business School Professor and leadership expert Linda Hill notes that “you don’t get innovation without diversity and conflict.” But an overly personal battle inhibits what Hill calls creative abrasion, the friction between ideas that sparks creativity. When people take battles too personally, the sparks from abrasion glow white hot, but fail to change perspectives. Turning down the temperature allows creative abrasion to work its magic. Do that by shifting from beliefs to assumptions.
In this particular Ca, Scott stopped the discussion and reframed it. Instead of starting statements with “I believe” or “I think,” he said that Rachel and Asher should make their argument with statements starting with “The critical assumption is.”
Rachel said the critical assumption behind her assertion was that the average Japanese customer would spend less than ¥1,000 (about $9) per order. Asher said he actually agreed with Rachel’s assumption. It turned out that his critical assumption was about the degree to which customers would become loyal and make the cafés a routine destination. Rachel asked about comparative data from other cafés. Asher said that was a good question and agreed to look into it in more depth. Everyone agreed on the need to conduct deeper analysis around the performance of the prototype café the company had opened. And we brainstormed ideas for other experiments that could increase our confidence around this critical assumption.
1. What happened between Rachel and Scott at the outset of the case?
2. What is different about a focus on beliefs vs. assumptions?
3. What happened to turn the situation around?
4. What is your role as the BSPL when you notice these types of interactions?
Exercise
1. Work independently to draft a future vision for your company’s BS process.
2. Ask a partner in the room to critique your vision using the information from this workshop. What are the tradeoffs you made with your vision statement?
3. Join another group and try to reach consensus on which vision statement best represents the group.
4. After 10 minutes, or when the group has reached consensus, bring everyone back to the large group and discuss:
• your work drafting a vision on your own.
• Which of the vision characteristic did you meet, and which did you miss?
• What did you learn about the process of reaching agreement through your experience? How difficult or easy was the consensus process?
• What reaching agreement practices are you planning to leverage for your project?
Project Studies
Project Study (Part 1) – Customer Service
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 2) – E-Business
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 3) – Finance
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 4) – Globalization
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 5) – Human Resources
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 6) – Information Technology
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 7) – Legal
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 8) – Management
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 9) – Marketing
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 10) – Production
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 11) – Logistics
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 12) – Education
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Future Vision process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Kickoff Essentials
02. Kickoff Logistics
03. Meeting Content 1
04. Meeting Content 2
05. Psychological Safety
06. Team Effectiveness
07. Vision Essentials
08. Mind Preparation
09. Vision Blueprints
10. Set Stage
11. Choose Journey
12. Land Vision
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Program Benefits
Marketing
- Customer Experience
- New Customers
- Customer Retention
- Evidence Based
- Resource Optimization
- Emotional Drivers
- Increased Conversions
- Brand Loyalty
- Successful Campaigns
- Competitive Advantage
Information Technology
- User Experience
- Intuitive Navigation
- Increased ROI
- User Engagement
- Gamified Experience
- User Engagement
- Technology enabled
- Self-Service
- Client Centric
- Secure Interface
Product Development
- Competitive Advantage
- Reduced Costs
- Innovative Design
- Value Added
- Enhanced Performance
- Increased Revenue
- Better Understanding
- Reduced Friction
- Amplify Benefits
- Identified Biases
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.