GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

We often forget, but regardless of industry, technology, product, or service, it’s a battle for hearts and minds.

The building blocks of business are processes, machines, software, and computers, but people are the underpinning. The building blocks respond in a repeatable way – same input, same output – and without judgment. People, however, not so much.

People respond differently depending on delivery – even small nuances can alter the response, and when hot buttons are pushed responses can be highly nonlinear. One day to the next, people’s responses to similar input can be markedly different. Yet we forget people are not like software or machines, and we go about our work with expectations people will respond with highly rational, highly linear, A-then-B logic. But in a battle between rational and emotional, it’s emotional by a landslide.

Thankfully, we’re not just cogs in the machine. But for the machine to run, it’s imperative to win the hearts and minds. (I feel a little silly writing this because it’s so fundamental, but it needs to be written.) And it’s hearts then minds. The heart is won by emotion, and once the emotional connection is made, the heart tells the mind to look at the situation and construct logic to fit. The heart clears the path so the mind can in good conscience come along for the ride.

Hearts are best won face-to-face, but, unfortunately today’s default mode is PowerPoint-to-face. We don’t have to like it, but it’s here to stay. And so, we must learn to win hearts, to make an emotional connection, to tell stories with PowerPoint.

To tell a story with PowerPoint, we must bring ourselves to the forefront and send PowerPoint to the back. To prevent ourselves from hiding behind our slides, take the words off and replace them with a single, large image – instead of a complex word-stuffed jumble, think framed artwork. While their faces look at the picture, tell their hearts a story. Eliminate words from the slides and the story emerges.

[There’s still a place for words, but limit yourself to three words per slide, and make them big – 60 point font. And keep it under ten slides. More than that and you haven’t distilled the story in your head.]

Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the people business. Win hearts and minds follow. And so do profits.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

That’s a best practice. Look, there’s another one. We need a best practice. What’s the best practice? Let’s standardize on the best practice. Arrrgh. Enough, already, with best practices.

There are no best practices, only actions that have worked for others in other situations. Yet we feverishly seek them out, apply them out of context, and expect they’ll solve a problem unrelated to their heritage.

To me, the right practices are today’s practices. They’re the base camp from which to start a journey toward new ones. To create the next evolution of today’s practices, for new practices to emerge, a destination must be defined. This destination is dictated by problems with what we do today. Ultimately, at the highest level, problems with our practices are spawned by gaps, shortfalls, or problems in meeting company objectives. Define the shortfall – 15% increase in profits – and emergent practices naturally diffuse to the surface.

There are two choices: choose someone else’s best practices and twist, prune, and bend them to fit, or define the incremental functionality you’d like to create and lay out the activities (practices) to make it happen. Either way, the key is starting with the problem.

The important part – the right practices, the new activities, the novel work, whatever you call it, emerges from the need.

It’s a problem hierarchy, a problem flow-down. The company starts by declaring a problem – profits must increase by 15% – and the drill-down occurs until a set of new action (new behaviors, new processes, new activities) is defined that solves the low level problems. And when the low level problems are solved, the benefits avalanche to satisfy the declared problem – profits increased by 15%.

It’s all about clarity — clearly define the starting point, clearly define the destination, and express the gaps in a single page, picture-based problem statements. With this type of problem definition, you can put your hand over your mouth, with the other hand point to the picture, and everyone understands it the same way. No words, just understanding.

And once everyone understands things clearly, the right next steps (new practices) emerge.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to learn, to really learn, experiment.

But I’m not talking about elaborate experiments; I’m talking about crude ones. Not simple ones, crude ones.

We were taught the best experiments maximize learning, but that’s dead wrong. The best experiments are fast, and the best way to be fast is to minimize the investment.

In the name of speed, don’t maximize learning, minimize the investment.

Let’s get right to it. One of the best tricks to minimize investment is to minimize learning – learning per experiment, that is. Define learning narrowly, design the minimum experiment, and run the trial. Learning per trial is low, but learning per month skyrockets because the number of trials per month skyrockets. But it gets better. There’s an interesting learning exponential at work. The first trial informs the second which shapes the third. But instead of three units of learning, it’s cubic. And minimizing learning doesn’t just half the time to run a trial, it reduces it by 100 or more. It’s earning to the hundredth power.

Another way to minimize investment is to minimize resolution. Don’t think nanometers, think thumbs up, thumbs down. Design the trial so the coarsest measuring stick gives an immediate and unambiguous response. There’s no investment in expensive measurement gear and no time invested in interpretation of results. Think sledgehammer to the forehead.

A third way to minimize investment is to evaluate relative differences. The best example is the simple, yet powerful, A-B test . Run two configurations, decide which is better, and run quickly in the direction of goodness. No need to fret about how much better, just sprint toward it. The same goes for trial 1 versus trial 2 comparisons. Here’s the tricky algorithm: If trial 2 is better, do more of that. And the good news applies here too – the learning exponential is still in play. Better to the hundredth power, in record time.

I don’t care what norms you have to bend or what rules you have to break. If you do one thing, run more trials.

But don’t take my word for it. Dr. Seuss had it right:

And I would run them in a boat!
And I would run them with a goat…
And I will run them in the rain.
And in the dark. And on a train.
And in a car. And in a tree.
They are so good so good you see!

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

We all want more innovation, though sometimes we’re not sure why. Turns out, the why is important.

We want to be more innovative. That’s a good vision statement, but it’s not actionable. There are lots of ways to be innovative, and it’s vitally important to figure out the best flavor. Why do you want to be more innovative?

We want to be more innovative to grow sales. Okay, that’s a step closer, but not actionable. There are many ways to grow sales. For example, the best and fastest way to sell more units is to reduce the price by half. Is that what you want? Why do you want to grow sales?

We want to be more innovative to grow sales so we can grow profits. Closer than ever, but we’ve got to dig in and create a plan.

First, let’s begin with the end in mind. We’ve got to decide how we’ll judge success. How much do we want to grow profits? Double, you say? Good – that’s clear and measurable. I like it. When will we double profits? In four years, you say? Another good answer – clear and measureable. How much money can we spend to hit the goal? $5 million over four years. And does that incremental spending count against the profit target? Yes, year five must double this year’s profits plus $5 million.

Now that we know the what, let’s put together the how. Let’s start with geography. Will we focus on increasing profits in our existing first world markets? Will we build out our fledgling developing markets? Will we create new third world markets? Each market has different tastes, cultures, languages, infrastructure requirements, and ability to pay. And because of this, each requires markedly different innovations, skill sets, and working relationships. This decision must be made now if we’re to put together the right innovation team and organizational structure.

Now that we’ve decided on geography, will we do product innovation or business model innovation? If we do product innovation, do we want to extend existing product lines, supplement them with new product lines, or replace them altogether with new ones? Based on our geography decision, do we want to improve existing functionality, create new functionality, or reduce cost by 80% of while retaining 80% of existing functionality?

If we want to do business model innovation, that’s big medicine. It will require we throw away some of the stuff that has made us successful. And it will touch almost everyone. If we’re going to take that on, the CEO must take a heavy hand.

For simplicity, I described a straightforward, linear process where the whys are clearly defined and measurable and there’s sequential flow into a step-wise process to define the how. But it practice, there’s nothing simple or linear about the process. At best there’s overwhelming ambiguity around why, what, and when, and at worst, there’s visceral disagreement. And worse, with 0% clarity and an absent definition of success, there are several passionate factions with fully built-out plans that they know will work.

In truth, figuring out what innovation means and making it happen is a clustered-jumbled path where whats inform whys, whys transfigure hows, which, in turn, boomerang back to morph the whats. It’s circular, recursive, and difficult.

Innovation creates things that are novel, useful, and successful. Novel means different, different means change, and change is scary. Useful is contextual – useful to whom and how will they use it? – and requires judgment. (Innovations don’t yet exist, so innovation efforts must move forward on predicted usefulness.) And successful is toughest of all because on top of predicted usefulness sit many other facets of newness that must come together in a predicted way, all of which can be verified only after the fact.

Innovation is a different animal altogether, almost like it eats itself. Just think – the most successful innovations come at the expense of what’s been successful.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Short term is getting shorter, and long term is a thing of the past.

We want it now; no time for new; it’s instant gratification for us, but only if it doesn’t take too long.

A short time horizon drives minimization. Minimize waste; reduce labor hours; eliminate features and functions; drop the labor rate; cut headcount; skim off the top. Short term minimizes what is.

Short term works in the short term, but in the long term it’s asymptotic. Short term hits the wall when the effort to minimize overwhelms the benefit. And at this cusp, all that’s left is an emaciated shadow of what was. Then what? The natural extrapolation of minimization is scary – plain and simple, it’s a race to the bottom.

Where short term creates minimization, long term creates maximization. But, today, long term has mostly negative connotations – expensive, lots of resources, high risk, and low probability of success. At the personal level long term, is defined as a timeframe longer than we’re measured or longer than we’ll be in the role.

But, thankfully, there comes a time in our lives when it’s important for personal reasons to inject long term antibodies into the short term disease. But what to inject?

Before what, you must figure out why you want to swim against the current of minimization. If it’s money, don’t bother. Your why must have staying power, and money’s is too short. Some examples of whys that can endure: you want a personal challenge; you want to help society; your ego; you want to teach; or you want to help the universe hold off entropy for a while. But the best why is the work itself – where the work is inherently important to you.

With your why freshly tattooed on your shoulder, choose your what. It will be difficult to choose, but that’s the way it is with yet-to-be whats. (Here’s a rule: with whats that don’t yet exist, you don’t know they’re the right one until after you build them.) So just choose, and build.

Here are some words to describe worthwhile yet-to-be whats: barely believable, almost heretical, borderline silly, and on-the-edge, but not over it. These are the ones worth building.

Building (prototyping) can be expensive, but that’s not the type of building I’m talking about. Building is expensive when we try to get the most out of a prototype. Instead, to quickly and efficiently investigate, the mantra is: minimize the cost of the build. (The irony is not lost on me.) You’ll get less from the prototype, but not much. And most importantly, resource consumption will be ultra small – think under the radar. Take small, inexpensive bites; cover lots of ground; and build yourself toward the right what.

Working prototypes, even crude ones, are priceless because they make it real. And it’s the series of low cost, zig-zagging, leap-frogging prototypes that make up the valuable war chest needed to finance the long campaign against minimization.

Short term versus long term is a balancing act. Your prototype must pull well forward into the long term so, when the ether of minimization pulls back, it all slides back to the middle term, where it belongs.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Know what’s new in the new design. To do that, ask for a reuse analysis and divvy up newness into three buckets – new to your company, new to your industry, new to world. If the buckets are too big, jettison some newness, and if there’s something in the new-to-world bucket, be careful.

Create test protocols (how you’ll test) and minimum acceptance criteria (specification limits) beforedoing design work. It’s a great way to create clarity.

Build first – build the crudest possible prototype to expose the unfamiliar, and use the learning to shape the next prototypes and to focus analyses. Do this until you run out of time.

Cost and function are joined at the hip, so measure engineering on both.

Have a healthy dissatisfaction for success. Recognize success, yes, but also recognize it’s fleeting. Someone will obsolete your success, and it should be you.

To get an engineering team to believe in themselves, you must believe in them. To believe in them, you must believe in yourself.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

There are a lot of complex self-help programs out there to help us reach our potential. These programs are designed to take us to the next level by building on what we have. And they do help. But implicitly the programs assume we’ve got a foundation in place and it’s solid enough to stand on. But I think our foundation is rickety.

To be what we must be is our responsibility, and if we’re going to get any value from our self-help programs it’s our responsibility to establish the conditions for growth.

Here are three forgotten pillars that must be in place if we’re to grow:

Good sleep habits – most of us our sleep deprived, yet the data is clear that a rested brain thinks better. If we’re to grow, we’ve got to think better, and to think better we need more rest.

Good eating habits – most of us eat poorly. We eat too much which hurts our bodies and we eat too infrequently which hurts our brains. We all know our muscles need calories or they don’t work well, but what we forget is our brain also needs calories. (It’s 2% of our weight but consumes about 20% of our total calories.) And when we eat infrequently our blood sugar drops and so does our brains’ ability to think. If we’re to grow, we need to eat better.

Good fitness habits – most of us don’t exercise daily. Our brain is connected to our body, and they interact. When the muscles are exercised they cause the brain to make chemicals that sooth and calm. When we exercise we have a better attitude, have more stamina, and think better. If we’re to grow, we need more exercise.

The big three are far more powerful than the best self-help scheme, but they’re also far scarier. They’re so scary because they’re easy to measure and completely within our control.

After a one month trial you’ll know if you’ve slept more, worked out more, and ate better. And if you haven’t, you’ll also know who is responsible.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Whether it’s innovation, creativity, continuous improvement, or discontinuous improvement, it’s all about cultural change, and cultural change is about change in behavior.

With the police state approach, detailed processes are created and enforced; rules are created and monitored; and training is dealt out and attendance taken. Yes, behavior is changed, but it’s fleeting. Take your eye off the process, old behavior slips through the fence; look the other way from the rules, old behavior clips the barbed wire and climbs over the wall. To squelch old behavior with the police state approach, gulag energy must be consistently applied.

To squelch is one thing, but to create lasting behavior change is another altogether. But as different as they are, there’s a blurry line of justice that flips innocent to guilty. And to walk the line you’ve got to know where it is:

• Apply force, yes, but only enough to prevent backsliding – like a human ratchet. Push much harder and heels dig in.

• The only thing slower than going slow is going too fast. (Remember, you’re asking people to change the why of their behavior.) Go slow to go fast.

• Set direction and stay the course, unless there’s good reason to change. And when the team comes to you with a reason, deem it a good one, and the cornerstone of trust is laid. (This is a game of trust, not control.)

But there are some mantras to maximize:

• Over emphasize the positive and overlook the negative.

• Praise in public.

• Don’t talk, do.

The first two stand on their own, but the third deserves reinforcement.

This isn’t about your words; it’s about your behavior. And that’s good because you have full authority over your behavior. Demonstrate the new behavior so everyone knows what it looks like. Lead the way with your actions. Show them how it’s done. For lasting change, change your behavior.

Even if changing your behavior influences only one person, you’re on your way. The best prison riots start with a single punch.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Today’s answer to everything is process and tools. Define the desired outcome; create the process; create the tools. Problem solved.

But if the desired outcome is lasting change, deterministic processes and static tools won’t get us there. Lasting change comes from people and their behavior.

Going forward, instead of creating process, create an environment of trust so people will investigate the unfamiliar; and instead of creating tools, create time – time for people to prototype the unfamiliar.

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

There will always be more work than time – no choice there. But, you can choose your mindset. You can choose to be overwhelmed; you can complain; and you can feel bad for yourself.

You can also choose to invert it – you only work on vital projects because less important ones aren’t worth your time. Inverted, work is prioritized to make best use of your valuable time. When there’s too much work you can whine and complain, or you can value yourself – your choice.

Most of us don’t choose what we work on, and sometimes it’s work we’ve done before. You can choose to look at as mind numbing tedium, or you can flip it. You can look at it as an opportunity to do your work a better way; to try a more effective approach; to invent something new. With repeat work you can dull it down or try to shine – your choice.

Sometimes we’re asked to do new and challenging work. You can choose to be afraid; you can make excuses; and you can call in sick for the next month. Or you can twist it to your advantage and see it as an opportunity to stretch. With challenging work you can stunt yourself or grow – your choice.

Negativity repels and positivity attracts – it’s time for you to choose.

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