This post is intended to share the highlights from a 2018 Keynote at the Swindon & Wiltshire Women in Business Conference and provide links to additional resources. If you were in the audience, feel free to reach out with your feedback. After all, this presentation is a form of experimentation for me and I’d be grateful to hear your perspective. You can find my socials and contact info in the footer.
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Growing up in a rural part of the US, I had never heard of Women’s Day. It wasn’t until 2004 when I was living in Italy and stepped outside my door one morning to see nearly everyone carrying a small bunch of yellow flowers. In Italy on March 8th, the mimosa flower is given from husbands to wives, sons to mothers, students to teachers and women to women as a symbol of love, appreciation and solidarity.
Ever since that day I have been inspired by the community surrounding Women’s Day. That’s why I was honoured to present at the 2018 Swindon & Wiltshire Women in Business Conference. During the keynote, I shared my story and approach to work in innovation. In good teacher fashion, I also brought a worksheet to encourage reflection on how collaboration, experimentation and perspective might be applied to make an impact for the SMEs in the room. Download worksheet >
Warmup: 1-2-3 Clap, Stomp, Shimmy
The warmup, 1-2-3 Clap, Stomp, Shimmy, is one of my favourites as it offers a great example of chaos in life and business. You started with a simple task of counting to 3 but, as life goes on things often begin to become much more complex. This set the stage to talk about the role of collaboration, experimentation and perspective in a human-centred approach to business.
Collaboration
Often in business, especially as a single-founder startup, we feel we need to do it all alone. My favourite things about taking a human-centred approach to business is that it lifts some of this pressure. We don’t have all the answers, and that’s okay! The trick is knowing where to get them.
Collaborating with partners, employees, experts and friends are all great ways to build business; however, customers are often underestimated collaborators. The better we can understand our customers, the more adaptable we can be in a rapidly changing world.
To quote Jonathan Aberman, “Startup founders must have empathy and the ability to see the world around them and adapt.” A big part of that is finding ways to become immersed in the experiences of your customers.[i]
I was recently sitting with a client in a café in London. We were only there for 20 minutes, but in that time five different groups of people (including us!) walked in and asked if the café served a hot breakfast. They didn’t and three of them walked out again in search of a different café.
I couldn’t help but wonder how things might be different at that café if the owner were to turn to the people the café exists to serve – its customers – to listen and seize the opportunity to grow the business.
“When companies allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs to inspire them…they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”[ii]
Experimentation
The warm-up activity was low-risk so conference attendees didn’t hesitate to just dive in and try a variety of strategies to help them complete the task. If something didn’t work they just tried a new strategy, freely experimenting with the best approach.
One of my favourite examples of applying this mindset of experimentation in business is from Zappos. In 1999 the founder had an idea for an online shoe store but wanted to test: Would people buy shoes without trying them on? Instead of making a huge initial investment, he decided to experiment. He “went to a couple of stores, took some pictures of the shoes, made a website, put them up and told the shoe store, if I sell anything, I'll come here and pay full price.” This move certainly didn’t make him money, but it did help him test and validate his idea which has since grown to be one of the best known online shoe retailers.[iii]
In the case of the London café, they could have easily and inexpensively run some food tests to validate if there really was a need or market for launching a full breakfast. And, in doing so, they may have begun to identify which foods would or would not work best on a future menu.
Experimentation is one of the key drivers of innovation. A study by the design company IDEO found that organisations that experiment with five or more different solutions increases the odds of a successful product launch by 50%. [iv]
Experimentation also loops right back into collaboration; when experimenting, you are coming up with ideas and testing together with your end users.
Perspective
Collaboration and experimentation offer a business new perspectives; this ability to embrace new perspectives is what leads to innovation.
Embracing the perspectives of others and experimenting with our own assumptions help us step out of our own world and see other points of view [v] and we quickly begin to see there is more than one way to solve a challenge.
There is a great story where a physicist, an engineer, architect, a marketer were each given a barometer and asked to find the height of the church tower. The physicist knew air pressure changes with height so took a barometer reading at the top and bottom of the tower. The engineer dropped the barometer from the tower and timed how long it took to hit the ground. The architect tied it to a string, lowered it to the ground, then measured the string. The marketer went to the Sexton and asked to be told the height of the tower in exchange for the barometer.[vi]
Each were given the same challenge but approached it in very different ways. How might you widen your perspective on a current business challenge you are facing? Where might this different perspective come from?
Wrap-up
The keynote wrapped up with a challenge to take a moment to consider how they might use the incredible potential in the room to find new ways to collaborate, experiment with an idea or gain new perspectives.
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Resources
[i] Ashoka. "Empathy in Business: Indulgence or Invaluable?." Forbes. 22 Mar. 2013. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/03/22/empathy-in-business-indulgence-or-invaluable/
[ii] Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, & Suzanne Gibbs Howard. “Empathy on the Edge: Scaling and Sustaining a Human-Centred Approach in the Evolving Practice of Design” IDEO. Jan. 2014. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. https://www.ideo.com/news/empathy-on-the-edge
[iii] Jay Yarow. "The Zappos Founder Just Told Us All Kinds Of Crazy Stories – Here's The Surprisingly Candid Interview." Business Insider. 28 Nov. 2011. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. <http://www.businessinsider.com/nick-swinmurn-zappos-rnkd-2011-11>
[iv] Katharine Schwab. "Ideo Studied Innovation In 100+ Companies–Here’s What It Found." Co.Design. 20 Mar. 2017. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. <https://www.fastcodesign.com/3069069/ideo-studied-innovation-in-100-companies-heres-what-it-found>
[v] Katherine W. Phillips. "How Diversity Makes Us Smarter." Scientific American. 16 Mar. 2017. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/>
[vi] The Open University. "Systems thinking and practice." Google Books. n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2018. <https://books.google.com/books/about/Systems_thinking_and_practice.html?id=isyrDAAAQBAJ>