GUEST POST from Matthew E May

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein

You would think by publishing a book entitled Winning the Brain Game that I’m a neuroscientist, psychiatrist or psychologist. I’m none of those. I spend a good part of my professional life as a facilitator, helping work teams solve their toughest problems in creative ways.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to help a very special team, the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad.

It was a few years after 9/11, and LAPD Counterterrorism Command under then-chief William Bratton had selected 12 of the best and brightest bomb handlers and charged them with rethinking and redesigning the way bomb threats were handled in the field in the new age of improvised explosive devices.

Now this wasn’t a “hey, can you come out and help us do some brainstorming,” kind of thing, this was “we have a serious problem, and failure is not an option.” As part of the vetting process I had to meet with the department psychiatrist, a very serious gent, who let me know in no uncertain times that whatever skills I had — and whatever confidence I might have in those skills — would be put on trial by this particular team: they were a breed apart…an extreme team, high ego, high adrenalin, mostly type A, among the highest paid, and not so thrilled about being locked up for two days with some civilian who knows nothing about the job.

While I was absolutely thrilled to be involved, he was right. I’ll never forget that first morning when the young officer sitting next to me leaned over to inform me — hand on his holster — that he was only there because he was ordered. I caught enough heads nodding to know he wasn’t expressing a minority view.

I always start my sessions with a little right brain warmup. But with this team, I knew I’d need something more potent than your run of the mill icebreaker.

So I put ’em all in handcuffs. Not real ones of course, just some I had made out of rope. I had found this hundred year old parlor game called “The Prisoner’s Release.” Seemed appropriate.

A and B must free themselves without removing, replacing or untying the handcuffs.

In other words, the handcuffs must stay on original hands at all times.

Now, I’d been using this little thought challenge for a while for the simple reason that it’s nowhere near as difficult as the problems people face in their real work, but it catches them doing several things that get in the way of creative problem solving.

You could tell they thought this was a no-brainer. So I gave them five minutes. I can’t show you what happened that particular day, but what I can do is show you what ALWAYS happens when I say go.

I promise the bomb squad looked no different, and no one solved the problem. Which is at least a little surprising given what you’d think would be a certain facility with handcuffs. I think they were all a little stunned too.

But over the last 10 years I’ve done this exercise with thousands of people, all over the world. The action is always the same. The results are always the same: success rate is about 5%…1 in twenty pairs solve it within that time limit.

The question is, why is that?

The short answer is that our brain plays games with us, and it does that using the very same well-worn patterns that on one hand help us make it through the day efficiently, but that on the other hand can trip us up when we need to tap the power of our mind to produce our very best thinking.

And just in case you didn’t catch what I did there, I just made a distinction between the brain and the mind.

That’s not just me, that’s current science. We now know the biological brain is like passive hardware, absorbing experience, and the conscious mind is like active software, directing our attention. But not just any software — it’s software capable of rewiring the hardware. That’s the marvel of what’s called neuroplasticity.

LEAPING

The most prevalent brain game that I have observed is what I call Leaping. Short for leaping to solutions, aka jumping to conclusions, aka thin-slicing, aka “blinking.” Everyone in the clip above does it. EVERYONE. When I say “go” everyone starts string dancing. They spend all their time brainstorming…or more accurately, bodystorming.

Leaping to solutions is our go-to problem solving process, but all the research is clear: jumping right into brainstorming when handed a tough and unfamiliar problem is only good for one thing…generating obvious, top-of-mind, mediocre ideas that generally don’t solve the problem. As the string-dancers so gloriously manifest.

So let’s see how this works…

Take a look at this incorrect Roman numeral equation.

XI + I = X

Obviously eleven plus one does not equal ten. Now imagine that the numbers are movable sticks. Leaving the plus and equal signs locked and UNmovable, what is the least number of sticks you would have to move to correct the equation?

Most people answer “1” within a millisecond. Repositioning one of the vertical sticks is the obvious answer.

But wait. Revisit the question. What would be the optimal or ideal answer to “least number of sticks?” Answer: zero.

Is that possible?

Sure, there are at least three ways, by pausing for a moment to look at the problem differently, from other perspectives. By looking at the problem upside down, or by reading the equation literally right to left, or if you recognize the visual symmetry, reflect it in a mirror.

WHY WE LEAP

There are good reasons we instinctively leap. One is that most of the problems we solve each day are of a routine nature: you know, what to wear today, is it tall, grande, venti, what’s the quickest way to work…we don’t want or need to meditate on why traffic is slow, we just need a workaround.

Neuroscientists maintain that we jump to conclusions because of uncertainty. The brain hates uncertainty. When we are unsure of a situation we link cause and effect like that, and often in error.

But we aren’t born with that reflex. We learned and developed it. In school, we learned to get the right answer on a timed test. Uncertainty meant failure. We bring that mindset with us to our job, which makes our boss happy, just like it made our teachers happy. By the time we’re 18, we’re wizards of the leap. Given our grooming, it is no wonder that we leap to solutions whenever we’re faced with an unfamiliar problem that requires creative thinking and problem solving. But when we leap, we often lose, because we effectively close off the creative part of our brain before it even has a chance to get involved.

Because we solve so many of our problems that way, we naturally and intuitively apply that approach to problems that DO require deeper thinking.

THE FIX: FRAMESTORMING

What gets in the way of everyone in the room solving the handcuff challenge inside 5 minutes (yes, it is easily solved) is the universal tendency to let our lazy brains take over and leave our minds out of it.

Over the past few years I’ve been embedding a “ringer” pair in the handcuff challenge: I secretly instruct one pair to do nothing for the first 60 seconds other than study the situation, observe the action around them, and then approach the remaining time by considering one question: “How might Einstein solve the problem?”

I use that question because most people are familiar with Einstein’s famous quote, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

The effect is magical, and the action is a complete reversal: NO string dancing whatsoever, coupled with far more dialogue devoted NOT to solutions, but rather why the string-dancing going on around them isn’t working. Attention is far more attuned…they look more like chess players studying the board. They quickly realize the double loop nature of the problem.

And the results are amazing. It’s actually kind of freaky: they solve it close to 95% of the time and well within the 5-minute mark. And when they don’t, it’s usually an issue of not playing well with others, which is a topic for another day.

What the Einstein question effectively does is to quickly inject the one easy step that can unlock creativity: reframing. It promotes a pause that enables the mind to consider different perspectives.

If I have learned anything from facilitating problem-solving sessions, it is that we will be largely unsuccessful in attempting to shut off the Leaping impulse, and we should not even try. We will make far more progress if we instead redirect and channel the instinct to act into behavior that feels like brainstorming, but involves generating questions instead of answers.

It’s called framestorming, a mashup of framing and brainstorming. It’s a way to change behavior without the pain of change, and it works amazingly well. The ability to properly frame an issue or problem goes far in avoiding the typical pitfalls that limit our ability to reach creative, elegant solutions. But we’re not as good at it as we could be, for reasons cited above.

Framestorming is done right before brainstorming. The major difference is that the focus of framestorming is on generating questions, not solutions.

The power of framestorming lies in its ability to turn problems into puzzles. When we view something as a problem, we naturally engage in Leaping to solutions. When something is a puzzle, though, we naturally slow down a bit: we learn at an early age when doing puzzles that we need to get the corners and edges down first. Getting the puzzle frame right is half the battle!

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Generate Questions

When faced with an unfamiliar problem, generate as many questions as you can, using constructs such as “Why____?” “What if_____?” “How might we_____?” My favorite is the last one, and it’s the one I adapted for ringer pairs in the handcuff challenge. (Note: The word “might” is important, because it implies possibility. Avoid “how could” or “how should” constructs, because “could” implies capability, and “should” implies judgment, both of which can shunt creative thought.)

As in brainstorming, framestorming initially favors quantity over quality. Go for at least a dozen questions that frame the challenge, preferably more. Don’t stop until you’re well into the double digits.

Take the advice of Albert Einstein:

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein

Step 2: Pick Your Top Two

Once you have a master list of frames, you can select at least two that will launch you into the solution brainstorming mode, which is essentially another round of the Why? What if? How? questions, this time focused on answers. From there, you know what to do!

You should be aware that framestorming, while being a powerful antidote to Leaping, does not guarantee the elegant solution, but it will increase the odds of putting your best brain forward. And based on a decade of observation, it will at least double your creative output.

EPILOGUE

The handcuff exercise did indeed loosen things up with the LAPD bomb squad. That officer next to me became the quiet leader in the room. In the end, they created an altogether new, far more fluid way to respond to bomb threats, and it became the new LAPD standard.

Would they have done so without my help? Probably. But I like to think I contributed in some small way by unlocking their brains and opening their minds to speed the process up a bit.
The takeaway lesson is this: always framestorm before you brainstorm.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I am excited to say that I’ll have the honor of bringing you an exclusive interview with Matt about his latest book Winning the Brain Game very soon!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

When it comes to developing strategy using the Play-to-Win framework, the most difficult question to answer is “How will we win?” From what I’ve observed and experienced in facilitating countless strategy sessions, I believe the reason it’s so difficult is that there is a tendency to discuss and answer the question in the abstract, which results in generic responses that run counter to the what the question is really asking, which is this: what is our unique and defensible advantage over competitive alternatives?

(NOTE: There is ALWAYS a competitive alternative.)

The first clue that your competitive advantages aren’t actual advantages is that everyone else on Earth claims those advantages too. Meaning, they’re generic, and thus non-differentiating.

Abstract and generic answers sound like this: “Better customer experience.” “Service excellence.” “Operational excellence.” These kinds of answers are problematic, strategically speaking, because while they sound good, they mislead people into believing they have an advantage when they really don’t, and believing they’re making a strong choice when they aren’t really making a choice at all.

Here’s a simple “sniff” test to see whether you have unique and defensible advantage (and have thus made a strong choice): Would a competitor be able to make a logical argument for a winning by taking the opposite approach you are?

If the answer is “no,” then (a) you are not making a true choice, and (b) you do not have a true winning edge.

In other words: if the opposite sounds silly or even stupid, you do not have a true How to Win! Which unfortunately means your chances of actually winning are slim.

For example, Southwest Airlines doesn’t consider “best pilots” as a unique advantage for two reasons. First, their pilots don’t need to be any better at flying planes than any other airline. Second, no airline in the world would list “worse pilots” as a defensible advantage.

Likewise, can you imagine any company (with the possible exception of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi”) claiming “worse customer experience” or “service failure” or “operational ineffectiveness” as their choice for how to win?

There are many examples of competitors in a given space winning with diametrically opposed strategic advantages: Uber, Air BnB, Cirque du Soleil, Netflix all chose to win by delivering value in ways that were the polar opposite of the existing, traditional leaders. As did Southwest Airlines by offering (initially) one-class, lowest-priced, casual/fun service. Four Seasons enjoys a 33% revenue-per-room-night premium over second place Ritz Carlton by offering a kind of experience reminiscent of your home or office, versus a more obsequious, ornate, white-glove experience. Fidelity and Vanguard have nearly opposite offers for wealth management: one is non-managed, the other is fully-managed.

Failing the strategy sniff test tells you immediately that you are simply one of many competing alternatives, with no clearly superior value equation. And if we know anything about winning, we know that the only way to sustain a winning position in any space is to consistently offering a better value equation for a given playing space.

A truly unique and defensible advantage is one that can’t be copied and can’t be bought. OR, it’s extremely difficult and costly to do either or both.

Take a look at what you’ve listed as competitive advantages…your answers to the “How Will We Win” question. Do they pass the strategy sniff test?

If the answer’s no, go back to the drawing board. (Or, better yet, the Play-to-Win strategy canvas).

Rethink anything that sounds like: customer focus, customer service, service excellence, feature x/more features, better data/SEO/social media, contracts/patents, intellectual property, and lower price, and first mover advantage.

It’s not that any of these aren’t advantages, it’s just that they aren’t defensible. Features are only an advantage until someone copies them. So-called better data/SEO etc is fleeting at best, and the quality of competitive alternatives is outside your control. Contracts and patents are legally defensible, but rarely stave off competitors – the exception is pharmaceuticals, and even then it’s not indefinite. Intellectual property was once defensible, but in an open world of advanced technology, it isn’t. Lowering your prices lasts only until the competitor lowers theirs. Being first to market is no longer sustainable; in fact, fast followers often beat the first movers.

So what kinds of advantages are unique and defensible, even unfair?

Things like exclusive partnerships, deep subject matter expertise or knowledge, special authority, obsession with a signature experience or element, having a “dream team,” a loyal customer base, and even celebrity endorsements.

All of these are very difficult or very costly to acquire. If your competitors would kill to have any of these, you have a defensible advantage.

Do not despair if you do not now have a unique, defensible advantage, because it represents a strategic opportunity: you now have the opportunity to begin innovating!

In the meantime, it is okay to list the best advantage you do have, as long as you indicate how long you might hold onto that edge. You might even give thought to a contingency response, or perhaps another advantage toward which you can pivot when your advantage is no longer defensible.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

True story.

A brilliant engineer, one of the smartest people I’ve met, was confident that his 6-year old daughter would win the annual school science contest called the Great Egg-Drop Challenge. As the name implies, the challenge was to design a package that would protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from the school roof.

The reason he was so confident? He was a flight systems engineer — literally a rocket scientist — for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The Egg-Drop Challenge wasn’t all that different from the kinds of problems JPL grappled with in their own projects. For example, how to land a spacecraft safely on Mars without damage.

While he had the answer in a snap, he couldn’t just hand the solution to his daughter. So he coached and guided her in a Socratic way to arrive at the same solution, which involved a milk carton stuffed with newspaper.

Together they cut up newspaper, wadded it in the carton, put the uncooked egg in a plastic bag and set it on top of the loose packing. They tested it several times off their home’s high balcony to find just the right amount of padding to allow the egg to land untracked.

The whole school gathered for the event. However, the regular judge and chief tester — the science teacher — was not feeling well that day, and was unable to fulfill his duties. Stepping in for him was the school principal, who tested the designs not by dropping them straight down as was the usual method, but by tossing them underhand up and out in big, high, looping arc.

Needless to say, our JPL engineer’s daughter’s egg was crushed, as was his daughter’s morale. He realized a valuable lesson from the kindergarten experience, and applied it to his own space missions: inevitable, unforeseen and disruptive forces could be the ruin of any project, and there had to be a way to mitigate their potential impact.

Enter what I call the “Gremlin” strategy. Allow me to explain.

The term “Gremlin” was popularized during World War II, and referred to an imaginary creature that creates problems in normally reliable hardware.

And, in space projects, it’s the job of someone called the fault protection engineer to look at possible failures of the spacecraft, understand how to recognize them, how the spacecraft would react, and what the consequences might be. But the focus of the job is on “what is true now,” rather than “what must be true” for things to go as planned.

With the kindergarten experience fresh in his memory, the JPL engineer mashed up the two concepts to take the fault protection engineer position to the next level…the “Gremlin” level. The new job was almost cruel and evil: dream up all sorts of challenges to throw at a project team. A good Gremlin regularly ruffles feathers, often going so far as to come in at night while the project team is asleep and mess with the spacecraft or booby-trap supporting equipment. The task is to conjure up ways to take the team by surprise, with an ultimate goal of building in agility.

Take one of JPL’s most successful projects, Mars Pathfinder, for example. In the final preparation phase utilizing a sandy, rocky, imitation-Mars environment, the team was to test the ability of the Pathfinder’s little terrain rover to drive off the landing module ramps onto the surface of Mars. There were two ramps, one in front and one in back of the landing module. From the control room, which utilized stereo 3D-view cameras to monitor the testing area, everything looked good, and the team was all set to drive the rover down the front ramp.

Ignoring the words of warning issued by the project manager to do a last minute check of everything, the team declined, certain they had analyzed the situation thoroughly, and were ready to roll.

Except…the Gremlin had come in during the night, and had created a challenge: he had spent the night before building a mound of sand in front of the lander, and creating a pit behind it. The rover team recognized the real danger of driving off the front ramp, leaving the rover to negotiate down a quite steep sandy hill on which it would have little traction. That meant they had to use the rear ramp.

You see, the Gremlin had discovered a software glitch in the program used to gauge the steepness of the landing ramps. The glitch produced incorrect and misleading data, which in turn made the team think the ramp was shallow enough of an incline for the rover vehicle to use.

The team had run their normal calibration checks, which actually had shown something wasn’t right. Yet the team shrugged it off, confident that they’d be able to execute the test as planned. They were unprepared for the sand trap. The Gremlin’s point was made. Luckily it was made in a test environment.

I see this attitude all the time in my role as a strategy advisor. Only it happens in the throes of implementation, when it’s often too late to pivot with any agility.

JPL’s Gremlin strategy has been extremely effective in enabling project teams to learn how to ferret out and deal with uncertainties in a way that positively neutralizes disruptive forces. It has produced a level of resilience and agility most business teams can only dream of.

The application of a Gremlin-like approach to business should be clear. If you have a successful business, the chances are very good that somewhere someone or someones are dreaming up strategies that may just throw your business for a loop.

So why not beat them to the punch?

Take a page from the Mars Pathfinder story and set up a Gremlin group in your company. Charge them with putting you out of business in new and innovative ways. The goal is not to break or undo anything that’s working well, it’s come at the business problem you’re trying to solve from an entirely different perspective. Done right, it will not only ward off disruption, it will build bolster long-term innovation capability in your organization.

I recently worked with one company to set up a Gremlin group, and it has resulted in some brilliant strategies…radically innovative concepts I doubt would have ever materialized otherwise. I designed it to be a 12-week rotation through which selected cohorts would essentially engage in an accelerator/incubator-type experience, complete with gates and milestones and an exit strategy.

It’s become a coveted assignment, even though it’s temporary, with a significant waitlist of people wishing to audition. (Yes, you read that right — acceptance is based on “auditions” rather than rank, tenure, or even experience.). In fact, it’s a great place for recent hires, after they familiarize themselves with the company but before they stop asking, “why do we do it that way?” And on an ongoing basis it’s a great place for the “lunatic fringe” ranks of the company to flourish.

What’s amazing to me is the level of passion, verve and vigor I see inside the Gremlin teams. The level of engagement is a full click above their engagement in their “real job.” I’m not quite sure I can draw an intelligent or meaningful conclusion about corporate cultures from this, because I simply don’t have enough evidence (yet). But the early indications are that this may be a wonderful new wrinkle to the trend toward internal innovation and startup mechanisms like incubators and accelerators, which have by and large replaced the old school “skunkworks” approaches.

It certainly worked for the Mars Pathfinder team: a successful template for innovation resulted, and the entire project from concept to touchdown was completed in 44 months, and they did it for less than it cost to produce the huge Hollywood blockbuster “Titanic.”

So, if the word “disruption” is being uttered in the halls of your company (as it seems to be almost every firm I visit), gather ye Gremlins, and go to work!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

A little over four years ago I designed and developed a wall canvas to be used when facilitating strategic choice-making with small teams. Over time, the canvas has evolved as I learned more and more about the art and discipline of strategy facilitation…what people struggle with most, where the resource of time is best spent, etc.

Fast forward to now. I introduced v3.0 of the canvas a few weeks ago in a short post, but I thought I’d add a little content to both explain what’s different (and why) and a few tips.
The first thing you’ll notice is that strategy-making is in three big steps:

1. Choose (strategic choices using the Play-to-Win framework)
2. Reverse Engineer (what must true for the choices to be good ones)
3. Test (validating what must be true is in fact true, or true enough)

This structure will aid you in allocating your time.

The second thing you notice is while the choice-making spaces are a bit smaller (by design), I’ve added a goodly piece of working space right in the middle of the canvas, for Reverse Engineering. It makes up the bulk of real estate, for one good reason: this is not only where the richest discussion happens, but it is also where strategy meets up with innovation. An innovative new strategy is just like a new product concept: you need to identify the critical risks and leap of faith assumptions you’re making in your bias for optimism around your great new strategy.

Here’s how the Reverse Engineering space works. The goal is to get to the single most critical risk of your strategy, which you get to in a few simple steps.

1. Ask: What Must Be True? for your integrated set of choices to be successful. Ignore the grid axis for the time being. Consider all the choices you’ve made: spaces, advantages, capabilities, systems. Put each answer on a separate Post-It note and place it anywhere on the Reverse Engineering quadrant. You’ll undoubtedly have a dozen or more. Do NOT try to place them in the quadrants yet.
2. Move everything you know to be true to the left hand side of the grid. The X-axis goes from “Certain” to “Uncertain.” So move everything you’re certain of over to the left, leaving you with all of your uncertainties to the right.
3. Move all uncertainties upon which your strategy is dependent to the upper right quadrant. The Y-axis goes from “Dependent” to “Independent.” You’re looking for the things that must be true and if they aren’t your strategy is in jeopardy. In other words, the Uncertain Dependents.
4. Decide which of your Uncertain Dependents is the most worrisome, and move it into the top righthand corner of the Uncertain Dependent quadrant. This is your Achilles heal, your most critical risk, your biggest assumption, your leap of faith. And it is around this that you want to construct your first test.

The third thing you’ll notice is more space devoted to crafting a strategic test, with more guidance. This is perhaps the toughest task for many teams, simply because much of the business world has forgotten how to run an experiment. It is here that strategy meets up with innovative lean thinking.

So, in a nutshell, v3.0 is far simpler, yet represents a better blend of strategic, innovative, and lean thinking.

I’m happy to answer any questions, just message me. In the meantime, please feel free to download and begin noodling with the canvas. I’ve created two sizes: a wall size and a person 11×17 size.

Download the free wall size canvas here.

Download the free 11×17 canvas here.

Let me know if/how you like it!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

A significant portion of my strategy development work is with internal functions, a click or two below corporate and business unit strategy: marketing, human resources, purchasing, and even internal strategy groups.

There is good news and bad news in this. The good news is that internal functions have recognized the need to be strategic, even if it is because higher level strategies demand supporting strategies. The bad news is how many internal functions don’t think strategy applies to them.

When I ask internal functions to show me what guides their department’s work, I’m more often than not handed a plan, which is a budget in disguise. It is rarely explicit in laying out a winning aspiration with clear where-to-play and how-to-win choices.

Now, in fairness to internal functions, there is a reasonable explanation for not having a clear strategy: most internal functions have been granted what they believe is a monopoly. In other words, they do not have to worry about customers or competitors, because they think they’re the only game in town…town meaning the broader organization. Generally speaking, monopolies exist to serve themselves. The language I hear from internal functions often reveals this mentality: they almost think of the broader organization in an adversarial way…”they this” and “they that.”

Wake-up call to internal functions: you most definitely are not the only game in town. You MUST have customers other than yourselves. And if by chance your feathers are getting ruffled by internal customers demanding better value from you, know that in all likelihood you’re being considered for replacement. Ever heard of outsourcing? (business process outsourcing, BPO, is a multibillion dollar market!) Automation? Disintegration?

Internal functions should, in fact MUST think strategically. Meaning, focusing outwardly on customers and competition. The question is, how should internal functions approach crafting a strategy?

Let’s suppose we’re talking about the Human Resources group in a fictitious, rapidly expanding midsize company, GrowthSpurt, Inc., which, true to its name, is experiencing rapid growth due to a new service division launch, demanding dozens of new hires.

Sam Stickler, the SVP who heads the department, is getting complaints from both hiring managers and his own team of internal recruiters: positions are not being filled quickly enough with the right, high-quality candidates, and the recruiting team is spent, trying to respond to all the requests. Sam has a seat at the executive table, the new service division launch absolutely must be successful, so he needs a win.

Sam realizes his team is all over the map, essentially firefighting without focused priorities. He does not have an explicit strategy for handing the demands of the organization, but it’s clear that whatever they are currently doing is not going to produce the win he needs. He gathers his best thinkers to think through a strategy.

The team defines the problem simply: inability to effectively meet GrowthSpurt hiring needs due to a lack of focused priorities and an overburdened recruiting team.

Step 1: Reframe the Problem. The team reframes the problem as a choice between two mutually independent high-level options: outsourcing to a recruiting firm, or focusing their internal recruiting services…essentially a buy vs. build choice.

Step 2: Generate Possibilities. The team uses these two options to brainstorm and generate a dozen where-to-play/how-to-win possibilities.

For outsourcing, the possibilities generated run to a central theme of handing off some or all of the recruiting. There are many more possibilities for creating focus, though, including teaching hiring managers to do their own recruiting, designating recruiters to specific needs, creating special S.W.A.T.-like “strike” teams to handle critical and urgent hires, handling the squeakiest wheel first, focusing on the highest level positions only, or focusing on the positions most in need by the service business end-users.

Step 3: Select Strategic Themes. The team doesn’t find the outsourcing route attractive, as it builds no long-term capability. They decide that two different strategies for focusing recruiting services should be explored. One is a centralized recruiting strategy, requiring developing a clear approach to prioritization. The other is a decentralized recruiting strategy, requiring an approach to building recruiting capability among key hiring managers within the new service division. They nickname the first strategy S.W.A.T., and the second strategy DEVELOP.

Both potential strategies are then developed using the Playing to Win framework:

• Winning aspiration
• Where to play
• How to win
• Critical capabilities
• Required systems

For illustration purposes, let’s look at just the S.W.A.T. strategy.

Step 4: Winning Aspiration. The SWAT winning aspiration is defined as “to become a highly effective recruiting partner for GrowthSpurt with the ability to identify and hire the highest quality candidate within an informal service-level agreement (SLA) period of 15 working days.” This represents a three-fold improvement, and rivals the promise of the leading outside recruiting firm.

Step 5: Where to Play. Where-to-play spaces include hiring managers as internal customer segments with the most business-critical needs: Sales, Client Support, and Marketing. The “channel” is direct partnership and collaboration.

Step 6: How to Win. The how-to-win is the innovative essence of the SWAT approach: the best recruiters with the deepest specific subject matter knowledge in the need area swarm the position to be filled in a compressed time period in close partnership with the hiring manager.

Step 7: Critical Capabilities. Capabilities and activities needed to be performed at the highest level in order to produce the how-to-win advantage include: candidate persuasion, internal relationship-building with hiring managers, project agility, hiring needs-finding, and close collaboration.

Step 8: Required Systems. The management systems required to support and sustain the critical capabilities at the highest level include: a unique talent identification database, candidate attraction methodology, and streamlined onboarding process.

Step 9: Reverse Engineer. The team then reverse engineers the strategy by asking “what must be true” to identify the assumptions and conditions under which the S.W.A.T. strategy would be a good set of choices and most likely lead to success.

Step 10: Strategic Test. Of the several assumptions identified, the one that is most worrisome to the team, the one least likely to be true, is: “we can recruit as or more effectively as an outside recruiting firm.”

That’s where the team must start testing the strategy.

This type of strategic approach is what the best-in-breed organizations rely on to support and sustain their corporate and business unit strategies and move their business forward.

Does yours?

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

In front of me sit 40 six sigma “black belts,” appraising me warily, all squinty-eyed and knit-browed. I’ve been asked to give them an introduction to design thinking. I don’t have a six sigma belt of any color. I fully admit that I wouldn’t know the difference between a six and any other number sigma.

I have decided to tee up design thinking with “The Marshmallow Challenge,” which was introduced by Peter Skillman, a former designer with product design firm IDEO, at a TED conference in 2006. The exercise is this: a team of four people is given 18 minutes to construct the tallest free-standing structure from 20 sticks of straight spaghetti, a yard of masking tape, a yard of string, and a single marshmallow, which must be on top. You can alter all the materials but the marshmallow, and “tallest” is defined as the vertical distance between the base of the tower and the top of the marshmallow.

There are all kinds of lessons and ways to debrief the exercise, but I use it to emphasize my favorite line of Skillman’s: “Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

My reason for using this challenge is that I’m fairly certain that I have 40 lone geniuses in front of me, and I need to drive home Skillman’s message. If I fail, they won’t embrace design thinking as a different approach to innovative thinking.

I promise a special prize to the winning team, and they’re off.

18 minutes later, only one team has completed a free-standing tower with a marshmallow on top, and it stands a bit over 20 inches tall.

All of a sudden all those squinty-eyed skeptics were staring at me with a sort of wide-eyed and sheepish what just happened? look, as it dawns on them that 90% of the room just failed to complete the basic task of building any kind of marshmallow tower, much less the highest. Not to add insult to injury, but I let them know that the average height of a tower over the last decade is 20 inches, with CEOs, attorneys and MBAs consistently performing the worst.

But the average height of a kindergartener’s tower is 30 inches, and their success rate is nearly 100%.

I declare the winner by default, and award the special team prize: the full bag of marshmallows.

The Cause

So what did happen?

The short answer is that everyone fell victim to overthinking, aka thinking too much and complicating matters, often creating problems that weren’t even there to begin with. The more important question is, why? And an even more important question might be, how do we avoid it?

General George Patton once said, “No plan escapes first contact with the enemy.” Ex-heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson updated Patton’s sentiment by saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

The question is, where did our love of planning come from? Part of the answer comes from our evolutionary addiction to resources. The more we have, the more we feel safe, secure, in control, shielded from risk, and thus able to perform better.

But in reality, just the opposite is often true…the more we attempt to control and regulate apparent risk, the more exposed and at risk we often are. That’s partly because the more protected we think we are, the less vigilant we become.

For example, if you have just had your car fitted with brand new brakes and tires, your driving behavior will change. Not radically, certainly, but often just enough to invite danger. Because you feel safer and more in control with improved stopping power, you will actually drive a bit faster and brake a bit later, unconsciously converting a set of resources intended to be a safety benefit to what you believe is a performance advantage.

On the other hand, if your brakes are squealing and your tires are bald, you’ll drive a bit slower and brake more carefully, and thus more safely, which is what you were after in the first place. But it is not the abundant resources that made you behave more safely, it was the lack of them.

That’s one reason I like The Marshmallow Challenge…the temporal, human, and physical resources are slim and fixed. Just like they are in the real world.

The ability to view finite resources as the very source of creative thought is the hallmark of an artist. Restraining forces always rule, and relying on slack resources or ignoring constraints not only stifles creative thinking, but also breeds overthinking.

Another part of the answer centers on our need to be certain and correct, a need easily traced to how we learn, or, more accurately, how we are educated. And yes, I am making a distinction between the two.

Consider how we learn in those first few years of life, before we ever enter a classroom. By all accounts, it is our most intensive learning period. It features failure upon failure: learning to smile, hold our head up, roll over, grab things, sit up, crawl, walk, talk…everything is an experiment, nothing happens right the first time, and what we now call failure was not labeled or even considered as failure. It was learning.

In other words, before we enter a classroom, our tests produce the lesson. Once we’re in the classroom, everything is reversed, and the lesson precedes the test. And the test is not ours by design, it is the teacher’s. By the time we’re in third grade, we know that tests and experiments are different: experiments are reserved for science class.

Be that as it may, while understanding why we overthink helps, what we really need is a reliable approach for reuniting learning with experimenting, and reigniting the natural born learner in us. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a go-to, in-the-moment technique, so that when some whacky facilitator throws spaghetti and marshmallows at you and tells you to build a tower, the exercise will literally be a no-brainer.

The Cure

The key lies in how young children approach The Marshmallow Challenge: kindergarteners build five working prototypes by the time nearly all adults (save architects, thankfully) have executed their one and only attempt near the finish line.

While the children focus quickly on the real problem — the marshmallow — the adults focus on the solution, the structure. Unfettered by any special knowledge of geometry, physics, organizational or action planning, children immediately focus on the biggest item in front of them, the marshmallow, and have a freestanding tower up on average inside five minutes. It’s not the tallest, but it’s up. They then build from there, testing their tower up to four more times, each time making it just a little taller, a little stronger, a little more stable. They tend to use far more of the resources, including the string, which generally gets used as stabilizing wire.

Meanwhile, the smart and knowledgeable planners of the world overanalyze and complicate a fairly simple problem, consciously making and often verbalizing the unwarranted assumption that the marshmallow will not present an issue for a strong and stable building. So, they set it aside to spend all their time building around that leap of faith, essentially ignoring the “freestanding” constraint. Why waste any precious time testing their structure? They are certain their plan will work, so they swing for the fence.

I was able to drive home to the six sigma gang the thought that learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first — and whenever you have an concept, no matter how strong or solid you think it is, don’t even consider planning how to fully implement it until you’ve designed and run a test. Or two or three. Get it roughly right and build from there.

Here’s a simple 3-step method for doing just that.

Step 1: Assumption. Ask yourself what would have to be true in order for your concept to work. Note that this is much different question from both what is true and what could be true. There should be several answers, and those answers are your conditions for success. Choose the one that gives you the most worry to start with, because that’s the one that will undoubtedly result in Tyson’s “punch in the face.” For example, in The Marshmallow Challenge, the most worrisome condition most certainly is that a marshmallow won’t topple spaghetti sticks.

Step 2. Hypothesis. A hypothesis is essentially a testable, falsifiable belief, typically in the form of “If we do X, then Y will happen.” For example, “If we break the sticks in half to build a small pyramid, it will support the marshmallow.”

Step 3. Test. Construct and run a test with a metric that acts as your proof of concept. “The marshmallow stands free indefinitely.”

Essentially, you’re relearning how to learn, rapidly and efficiently, just like you did as a toddler. If you’re like me, you’ll find it energizing, even exhilarating. And the more you do it, the more your natural born learning instinct enlivens. Eventually, an ethos of experimentation will result.

And overthinking will be a thing of the past.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Neuroscience explains it, but psychology offers the fix

During a recent creative strategy session, I witnessed what psychologist Carl Jung referred to over a century ago as “an inner critic or judge who immediately comments on everything.”

I had given a team of young executives a thought challenge as a right-brain warmup exercise. Although they were unsuccessful in landing on the elegant solution within the time allotted, one individual pulled me aside during the session break to tell me, rather sheepishly, that the solution had immediately popped into her head, but she hadn’t raised it with the group.

I was keen to know why she had remained silent.

“It just seemed easy and obvious,” she began, “but I’m not very good at these kinds of things, so I figured my idea was too simple, and couldn’t possibly be right. I almost said something, but the stress got me.”

She had rather tragically surrendered to her inner critic, and in so doing squelched her creative instincts to the detriment not only of herself, but also her team.

Nearly everyone has experienced this inner critic, and there is a good reason for it: scientists now know the neurochemical reaction that triggers it is integral to the adrenalin-fueled threat-protection system in our brain which not only governs our fight-flight-surrender response but also enables us to learn from our mistakes.

Think about the first time you experienced the emotional sensation of stress from being socially rejected or ridiculed: you quickly learn to fear and thus automatically avoid similar and potentially stressful situations of all kinds.

But while the threat-response allows us to learn from mistakes and keeps us feeling safe, secure, and certain, it can go too far. In fact, fMRI studies have shown that our threat-protection system is triggered even when there is no actual external threat, but just us being self-critical. Researchers at Kingsway Hospital in the UK concluded that if we are overly self-critical, we may attack ourselves, put others down, or seek some form of escape to, as they put it, “flee from the knowledge of our own faults.”

In the context of thinking and solving business problems, the challenge is that our perception of threat and response to stress becomes so ingrained and so reflexive, so mindless, that our avoidance tactics automatically prevent new experiences which may have some truly rewarding payoffs. When we’re self-critical, we self-censor, and don’t even give these experiences a chance.

But while neuroscience may have the explanation for our inner critic, and for what I experienced in my creative strategy session, it does not seem to have a fix. One does exist, however, and I’m fortunate to have learned it personally from spending time recently with Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who taught me a simple mindfulness trick which involves three quick and easy steps.

For an example let’s use the young executive participating in my creative strategy session, who is facing a tough problem, but is feeling the stress of speaking up and offering an original idea.

Step one is for her to first realize that she had already made an unwarranted assumption when the solution popped into her head: that something bad will happen if she shares it with the team. In this case, that bad thing is rejection.

Step two would be for her to then come up with a few reasons why her idea might not be rejected: her team may have misunderstood or misinterpreted the problem, her team was suffering from groupthink, the idea simply hadn’t dawned on anyone else yet, or they just plain loved her solution immediately.

From experience I can tell you that when you do this step, you will notice that whatever issue or situation you’re facing immediately becomes less stressful, because you’ve just gone from “I know what’s going to happen” to “maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t.” The fact of the matter is that you do not know what is going to happen, because you cannot predict the future with any certainty. No one can.

Step three would be for her to come up with a few reasons that, even if her solution is rejected, some good things will happen. Those reasons are very easy to find once you ask “what good things could result from rejection?”. For example, even if the team rejects the idea as offered, it may spark a new and better solution. Or she might gain credibility as a creative thinker.

When you take this third step, you notice immediately that you’ve now gone from thinking “there’s this terrible thing that’s going to happen” to thinking “there’s this thing that may or may not happen, but if it does, it could have both good and bad outcomes.”

Finally, you will notice that you have not only injected a new and better perspective, but you have reduced your stress, deferred self-judgment, and thus and opened yourself up to a new and potentially rewarding experience. As Einstein once wrote, “Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration.”

While we may never eliminate our inner critic — and we would never want to — we can certainly learn to silence it when it goes so far as to stifle our creativity.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

The Healthcare Innovation Amazon and Apple Should Focus On

It is no secret that Amazon has a secret artificial intelligence healthcare project called 1492. Amazon is making several strategic moves into the healthcare vertical, including hiring machine learning experts, investing in healthcare startups, and sponsoring hackathon-type innovation challenges with six-digit prizes for killer apps that can leverage Alexa, Amazon’s voice-recognition software.

Apple and Google are in the mix as well. Apple wants to systematize all your medical records on your iPhone in much the way they did with iTunes, effectively rendering other hardware and media irrelevant. It’s safe to say Google isn’t stopping their foray into healthcare with Google Health.

While healthcare is an obviously target-rich industry rife with myriad innovation opportunities to leverage advanced artificial intelligence-driven solutions, there exists one patient-centered approach that could change the game forever.

THE REAL NEED

Eighteen months ago I was lucky enough to be rescued and survive a massive cardiac arrest suffered during a mountain bike ride. Recovery from trauma and the ensuing transition to the daily vigilance of a chronic condition gives rise to a clear and compelling human need that remains unmet: getting back to normal.

As patients, we simply want our life back. We want to enjoy the people and passions in our life to the fullest. But in order to do that, we need help. Unfortunately, that help is out of reach.

For example, three months into my recovery, I noticed that simply walking up a flight of stairs took my breath away. That might not seem strange for a heart attack victim, but I had been back on my mountain bike within a month of my incident, pedaling just fine…not going all out, of course, but certainly not out of breath. But as time marched on, things had gotten progressively worse. I knew my heart was fine, because I’d recently had a followup echocardiogram: the pipes were clear and the pump strong.

Something was going on, and I wanted to talk to someone. But I couldn’t simply text my cardiologist with a question, unless I became a “concierge patient,” to the tune of $8000 annually. I couldn’t rely on internet sites, because the information was generic, biased, and in fact often just plain wrong.

I had to make an office appointment, which of course took weeks. They drew blood, and a week later they called to tell me I was anemic. They didn’t know why. It was left to me to figure it out. I had changed nothing in my diet. The only thing different was the cocktail of medications I was taking.

Upon investigation, and sorting through opaque drug studies, I discovered that a certain percentage of males over 50 taking the specific brands of both blood emollients and statins developed anemia within six months. Iron uptake was being blocked.

I brought this to the attention of my cardiologist, and demanded a medication change to similar drugs that didn’t have the same side effects. Within a week my hemoglobin count was back to normal. In fact, I was riding my bike just as fast if not faster than before my incident.

My cardiologist is not to blame, because his job is saving my life, not my livelihood. So who or what can help me with that?

Every patient wants and needs what I’ll call “conversational care,” which can be thought of as the healthcare version of conversational commerce, which most consumers experience through AI-driven text and chat applications. Hundreds of apps with text-only interfaces exist, like Quora and Operator. And we’re all familiar with chat and chat bots.

With conversational care, I’d be able to get my questions answered.

“Alexa, is it ok to eat grapefruit when on Lipitor?”

“Ok, Google, what’s the best time to take Plavix if I want to work out today?”

“Hey Siri, why am I so out of breath today?”

Irrespective of the device — be it mobile, wearable, home speaker — I should be able to get my questions answered, cheaply, accurately, specifically, so that I can get back to normal. I should be able to have a conversation with a knowledgeable resource that can give me peace of mind.

And it goes without saying that having an ongoing conversation regarding my health focused not on recovery but rather prevention would be invaluable. Wearables that give me leading indicators would inform the questions I ask.

All of that is within reach, and my one hope as a patient is that the Amazons, Apples, and Googles of the world focus their vast resources on patient-centered innovation that meets these pressing needs.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

A parable…

Once upon a time, a man was served a dessert of home baked apple pie at a dinner hosted by his neighbor. The man had never before tasted such a perfect pie crust. “What is your secret?” he asked his host. “You are welcome to my recipe,” replied the neighbor. “There’s no secret. It’s all right there in black and white.”

“This changes everything!” the neighbor exclaimed. “It would take me many attempts in this very kitchen to perfect the crust. And it will take you many times as well. You have the right recipe, but you must search for your own secrets.”

Moral of the story: that [insert unicorn de jour name here] best practice you just read about worked well for the company that created it, and it appears to be the silver bullet to solve all your own problems — your recipe for success. But my bet is it won’t work in any way that produces a sustainable edge for your company.

Search for your own secrets.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Aristotle maintained that “all men by nature desire to know.” He was referring to human curiosity. Samuel Johnson called curiosity “the first passion and last.” Why? Because curiosity seeks what is different, without regard for whether or not it’s of benefit. Tell someone not to do something, and it creates an instant temptation to do whatever they’re being asked not to: Eve eating the apple, Pandora opening the box, and of course the infamous cat killed by curiosity.

When William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890 he detailed two different forms of curiosity. The first form is an emotional and instinctive response: anytime you see something new, out of the ordinary, or unusual, your attention is aroused. He called the second form “scientific curiosity.” He described it as the brain’s response “to an inconsistency or a gap in its knowledge.”

The question is, how can we use curiosity to build interest and engagement in our products and services?

Several years ago marketing researchers Dilip Soman and Satya Menon sought to answer that very question, in the context of how to get people to click on an online ad. Soman and Menon wanted to explore two crucial issues: first, how advertisers of new products and services can overcome the difficulty of motivating people to learn about radically new and thus unfamiliar features and benefits; second, how Internet advertisers can get Web shoppers to actively acquire product information.

The pair hoped to find that the power of curiosity can be harnessed in specific ways to design an effective advertising strategy. They constructed three different ads for a fictitious new digital product— which they called the Sony QV—and documented how consumers responded to each. They designed all three ads with the same headline and visual treatment but gave each a different knowledge gap: narrow, medium, and wide. The narrow-gap ad clearly revealed that the Sony QV was a digital camera and gave details galore on many of the features. The medium-gap ad provided a clue that the Sony QV was a camera, but withheld any further details. The wide-gap ad gave no clues or information whatsoever beyond the QV being a new Sony product.

Which ad do you think generated twice as much interest as the others? The medium-gap ad that provided a clue that the product was a camera. The “Goldilocks” ad.

Soman and Menon concluded that while some information is needed to draw people in, if you give too many details and specifics they turn their attention elsewhere. They offered up a three-point strategy for the best way to stimulate interest:

1. Arouse curiosity by demonstrating a moderate gap in the observer’s knowledge.
2. Provide just enough information to make them want to resolve their curiosity.
3. Give them time to try to resolve their curiosity on their own.

The strategy works for one scientific reason: the brain, like nature itself detests a vacuum, a gap. A broken pattern produces that gap, and when the break is made in a dramatic way, we take notice. When something is suddenly different, and in particular missing, two things happen.

First, we are taken by surprise. For example, a decade ago, when the audience at Macworld 2007 viewed the Apple iPhone for the first time, they were completely caught off guard. The mental model of what a cellphone is supposed to look like was turned upside down.

The second thing that happens is that we try to fill in the gap, connect the dots, and resolve our curiosity. Perhaps Apple knew that because for the six months between MacWorld 2007 and the iPhone on-sale date six months later in June the only information you could find was the late Steve Jobs’s demonstration and a bit of information on the Apple website. There was no marketing hype. No clever advertising. No PR blitz. No planned information leaks to entice the media. No appearances by Mr. Jobs on television. No sweeping demo model program for technology journalists. No advance reviews. No evangelistic outreach to the Apple cult.

In other words, just enough information and time was given to tantalize viewers and future iPhone buyers to want to resolve their curiosity. By the time the iPhone finally went on sale nearly twenty million Americans had expressed interest in buying one.

It seems that Soman and Menon’s 3-point strategy has scientific validity: if you want someone’s attention, pique their curiosity by giving just a taste of information, leaving the rest to the imagination.

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