This podcast is a first look at how we lead innovation teams and why it is not the same as leading other teams.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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This podcast focuses on some common mistakes companies make when they put people onto an innovation team.  Just throwing the best brains at a problem is not the best way to get a great solution.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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Pantone has released its color of the year for 2012.  Tangerine Tango.

I like it.  Nice fit with the Bright Innovation color palette.

Mostly, we use prototyping as a learning tool.  We build things to see how users might react.  The goal is to test a concept, or an idea an interaction and move quickly to refine it, change it or scrap it.

Because we move quickly, we avoid worrying about if a technology actually works.  We usually fake any technology we can.  A screen is a piece of paper, with content printed or drawn on it.  We talk through a script of what is actually happening and pretend everything works.

For a user, they generally care less about how something works than if it works.   So we focus more on what the customer will experience than on baffling them with numbers and features.

During a presentation yesterday, a client asked about this.  “What’s the value of doing these rough prototypes, as opposed to going off and creating something that really works and is more finished.”

There are two parts to the answer to that question.

First, we create these quick prototypes before we invest the effort to do proper engineering or development because it is a really cheap way to find out if we are making the right thing.

Seriously.  If we run off and develop a really complete fantastic version of a product that isn’t what the customer wants, what have we done?  Wasted a lot of money for no sales.  And a lesson.

If we spend almost no money to create the same product from paper, glue and chewing gum, we get that same lesson.  The user will show us why they don’t like it.  We learn the lesson.  We don’t spend the money.  Or the time.

These photos are of an early prototype we built to understand size, scale and configuration of a medical device.    The first is really rough.  Size and scale.  The second is really focused on human interaction.   Where do people touch it?  Where do I put it in the room?  How does it fit with the other things that are there?  Neither one contains more than a few dollars worth of materials.  There is no working software.  They didn’t require any real engineering.

Yet, we learned a ton from them.

Also, there is another factor.  It is not as apparent.  When you create a rough prototype—I mean really rough—with tape hanging off of it and buttons that are attached with Velcro and screens that are pictures of Elmo cut out of magazines, you have something people feel free to criticize.

The will let you know what is wrong with it.  Not just that the workmanship is rough.  In fact, you can tell them “Look, this is rough.  I’ve created this to illustrate an idea.  Why don’t we walk through how you would use it and you can tell me where it might go wrong.”

They will be much more likely to give you honest feedback for another reason: it does not look done.  People often don’t see the point of asking you to change something if it looks like the work is already done.

If it looks like you’re still thinking about it, they are free to express opinions, move buttons and draw right on the product.

Let’s be honest, if you bring them a really finished looking prototype, you just want them to tell you how great it is.  The work is already done.  Going back and making huge changes is not what you have in mind.

The customer knows this.   So do you, now.

Over at FastCompany, there’s a slideshow of good and bad design called ‘For Every iPod, There is a Pair of Hammer Pants.’

Do you find any of these controversial?

I think that the ratio might be off.  For every 1965 Ford Mustang there are 20, 50 or 100 Pontiac Aztecs.

We explore how to use personas and context to create scenarios, as well as how to use those scenarios as tools for inspiring and filtering ideas.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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This amazing video shows the real time reaction on Twitter to the recent earthquake centered around Richmond, Virginia.

The grey dots are regular twitter activity and the green are those that mention the earthquake.

Many companies start with what they are good at or their current product line and look for people they think might want what they have.

We often argue that starting with a market need makes more sense.  But, how do you do that?  Following up on our two-part podcast on getting started, we look at how to hunt for and collect opportunities.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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In this podcast we talk about some early stage tools to help you understand context and put it into a form that you can use.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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Market segmenting and reports look backwards.  You are making deductions about what you think will happen in the future, based on what has happened in the past.

This analysis has some strengths.  You can look at actual buying behavior.  You can see through to the consequences of past product decisions.

It also has some weaknesses.  As the stock brokers say, past performance is not an indicator of what will happen in the future.  A body in motion only stays in motion until it meets a another body–some force that causes it to change direction.

Ethnography, studying customers, is looking forward.  We are observing what customers are doing right now.  We are listening to what they are saying in the current moment.  We are collecting that information and we are using it to predict what is possible.  Roger Martin calls this ‘adductive reasoning’ in his book the Design of Business and it’s a way to think about what we might do and how that can effect the future.

Because we’ve got some tools and practices that help us to make sense of what we see, we can create something useful from this.   We can create a hypothesis of what we think might be a better way–through a product or service–for our future customers to get the experience they want.

This also has some weaknesses.  There are no guarantees.  That’s why we continually test and retest our theories to get a better idea of how right or wrong we are and correct accordingly.

Both kinds of analysis have their place.  It would be irresponsible to ignore market research that tells us where people have spent money.  There is a momentum to that kind of success.

But, if we want to uncover things that are hidden from direct view and find needs that customers can’t verbalize or don’t yet understand, we have to study them as individuals as well.

We need to integrate these two kinds of thinking and research to really get at what customers want and to be able to communicate those ideas to the rest of your company in a way that they can understand and accept.

How do you begin the process of developing a new innovation?  Everything is uncertain.  How do you deal with the idea that you can do anything you choose.

This week we talk about how to get started gathering the information you need to make those choices.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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What is happening on stage is only part of what goes into creating a great play.  In the same way, the product or service that the customer buys is only part of the experience.

This week we talk about some of the other factors that go into creating a great experience for the customer in a way that is similar to how an audience experiences a play.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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One example we discussed was tracking changes in a document, especially when more than one person is involved in the the editing process.  It gives you a record of what changes you’ve made and an opportunity to document why.

It becomes a record of the versions of your document and how it has evolved.

The document is built and tested–it’s prototyped.

Shawn talked about the concepts that led to Courting Your Career.  Hie premise is that finding the right career was a lot like dating.  You are trying to find a great match.    

He actually tested a couple of the chapters with focus groups to test if the topic was interesting enough and if he was approaching it in the right way.  He prototyped his book.

In that same way, when we have a product or service concept, we want to get it in front of people as early and often as we can.  Making the customer a constant advisor.

Who are you?

One question we discussed was ‘Who are you when you are editing.’  It is important to recognize why the editor and the writer are frequently different people.  It is very hard to judge your own work.  A sentence or idea that works in your head might not have the same clarity once you have committed it to the written word.

In the same way, it is very difficult for the person or team that conceived a product to judge how effective it is.  Too often writers fall in love with their own words and innovators fall for their own ideas.

We should love our work, but falling in love with individual ideas is very dangerous.

Luckily editors are the good friend who can tell us when love is a really bad idea.  In a similar way, users who don’t have a stake in your idea can provide you with the honest feedback you need to refine and edit your innovation.

Celebrity Tweeters Aren’t the Answer

Our conversation led to social media and trying to predict and gauge reaction to what we write.  You really can’t know ahead of time.

Shawn talked about how what people will react to is very hard to predict.  It can often be a moving target.  That makes putting ideas in front of people even more critical.

Celebrity tweeters with millions of followers can reach a lot of people, but how strong is that connection.  Even now, with a variety of channels for reaching people, personal connections are the best way to create meaningful dialogue.  (I lifted this quote directly from Shawn in the interview because I think it is a great point.)  Even with someone you have never actually met, you can share great ideas and form valuable connections.

These personal connections are similar to how we try to get in front of users and see what they really do.  If we can get our ideas and prototypes in front of the people they are supposed to help we can learn much more than if we are busy rereading our own ideas over and over and trying to figure in our own minds how they connect.

Still, it is very possible to be too close.  It is nearly impossible for us to give ourselves good feedback.  Even friends and co-workers aren’t very good sources for real criticism.  They’re too close to us.  They may not be able to separate their opinion of the work from their opinion of us.

If the boss asks the team for feedback on his idea, how can he know he is getting appropriate thoughts on this particular idea?

It can be like asking your mom what she thinks of your painting or poem or song.  She loves you too much to tell you if it stinks.   There are too many layers of relationship to unravel.

So get outside opinions on your product.  And, call your mom.  Just don’t ask her for her opinion on your latest innovation.

Listen to the interview with Shawn here.

We talk about how editing is similar to prototyping. Create, test, iterate.  You write a story.  You try it out.  You fix it.  It gets better.  At some point you declare it done.

With products, if you are keeping the user involved, you do something similar.  You present ideas in the form of rough models or prototypes.  You get feedback.  You make changes.  You try again.  It gets better.  Eventually, you declare it done.

In both cases we recognize that our first idea is not finished and it may not even be right.  We have to test and try and edit.  Our ideas evolve, not just in our own heads, but in reaction to what happens when we present our creations to the world.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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Short attention spans.   Information onslaught.  We have much to deal with and we’re not necessarily wired for sorting through it. Anya Kamenetz over at Fast Company interviews Duke Professor Cathy Davis on the the role of technology in distraction. (Don’t click yet, there’s an experiment first.  Then, go read her whole article.)

The author mentions the video above, in which you’re asked to count the number of times the team in white passes the basketball.

Watch it now, I’ll wait.  (Remember, count how many passes the team in white makes.)

How many times did they pass it?

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Now the number of passes isn’t the point as Kamenetz points out in her article.

Did you notice the gorilla who walked right through the middle of the picture while you were counting?

If you didn’t, go ahead and watch again.  I’ll wait.

It’s an illustration of how selective our attention can be, and how much we can miss–especially with the amount of information we have to wade through every day.

The subject of the article, Cathy Davidson is using the idea of changing technology to change the way we think about distractions.  She argues that we should embrace distractions as a way to disrupt work patterns created to meet the needs of the industrial revolution.  We shouldn’t expect everyone to do everything, but embrace roles that allow us to take back some of our attention from our technology.

Instead, start celebrating “collaboration by difference” — every team needs some people to count the passes and others to spot the gorilla.

I don’t disagree, but I think there might be something more fundamental here.  It’s not just that technology is changing and breaking down old work rules.  The rules of the Industrial Revolution were build for efficiency.  They were designed for manufacturing and how to get the most out of each cog in the system.

More and more technology is catering to us and our habits.  Our technology is becoming more human-centered.  That’s a good thing.

Davidson’s argument that you should have gorilla spotters and pass counters is correct, independent of technology.  Putting people in a position to do the things at which they excel always applies.  It might be easier to see now because we less buried in outdated, homogeneous technology.

Technology can give us the illusion that we can do it all.  But, should we?  If we stick to the things we can really excel and and selectively ignore either the gorillas or the ball-passers, we may find a place where we can be really excellent.

When Deep Shot transfers an open application to a cellphone, it automatically resizes the application window to match the framing of the photo. Photo: Yang Li

You’ve got the map or the website or some other piece of information that is going to be important to you once you leave your desk.  You can email it to yourself.  But, it would be nice if there were an easier way.

Fast Company Design has a great article about a cell phone app called Deep Shot that allows you to take that data from your screen and have the same website and information open on your phone just by taking a picture of the screen.

This week we discuss tools to bring you characters, your customer, to life in the innovation process. How do you give them a seat at the table in every step of the process?  How do you help everyone in your company to understand what you learn about the customer?

Describe your characters so that you can prove you understand them and tell their story.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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To build a great product or service, it is important to create a story that represents the customer the experience they are seeking.  In this podcast we talk about some practical tools for describing context that you can use to drive your new product development process.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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More than half the people in the developed world use some kind of vision correction.  Glasses.  Contacts. Surgery.

We can see.  We can be productive.  We enjoy life.

Generally, glasses aren’t particularly expensive–unless you go for something really special.  But, just to get a clearer view of the world isn’t prohibitively expensive.

In the developing world, the problem isn’t so much the glasses–although the cost is great.  It’s also a startling lack of optometrists (sometimes one for well over a million people) who can figure out what correction you need to even order the glasses.

Josh Silver, saw this problem and postulated that glasses people could adjust for themselves would eliminate the need for a medical professional and bring glasses to millions that would previous just had to live with bad vision.

Here’s Josh Silver’s talk on the idea.  He’s created a foundation called Centre for Vision in the Developing World to help make his vision of bringing clearer visions to one billion people happen.

It’s a great example of an elegant solution to a problem.  Many would think the solution would be more optometrists, cheaper glasses or some other more straightforward, resource-driven solution.

Instead, Silver found a new way to deliver what people really needed, clear vision, in a way that they can do for themselves.

That story is vital to how you can create innovation for that customer.  How can you put your new product or service into their story and make it better.  This is the first in a five-part series on how storytelling can be an important tool for innovation.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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We’ve talked about how you can use the idea of storytelling to better understand your audience and to make it easier for your team to create products and services that your customers will actually want.

(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Now, let’s talk about how storytelling will help you connect to your customer.

In talking about products and services, we often focus solely on what the customer wants or needs.  But what we’re really trying to do is give them the tools to have the experience they’re seeking.  Our products and services are just a platform for them to make their lives better in some way.

If we think of it that way, then the distinction between the physical product or core service and the services that support them start to fall away.  For the customer it’s all just the experience.  They don’t care which department has responsibility for execution of the user interface versus hardware design.  They simply want them to work together to create a seamless and excellent experience.

If you think of the customer’s encounter with your products as part of an experience, then it becomes much easier to know what’s really important and what isn’t.  Does it make the experience better?  Is it necessary to create the experience?  If not, why are you doing it?

All the World’s a Stage

That’s not to say that only the things the customer sees and experiences are important.  Think of a play.  The audience only sees what happens on the stage.  That’s their experience.  They’re not thinking about the production team and the work that goes on behind the scenes.

The onstage part is easy to see: the obvious parts of the experience where you are in contact with the customer.  This is the part that everyone thinks of as the performance.  You see the actors on the stage.  But that’s not the whole story.

What about the scenery?  Didn’t they see a ticket agent?  Who got them to their seat?  What was happening while they were waiting for the play to start?

Often the experience starts well before the curtain goes up.  Similarly, the experience with a product starts well before a customer opens the box and starts to use it.

Think of the play.  Someone has to choose the script.  The cast is selected.  The production team will build scenery.  Marketing will promote the show and ticketing will make sure people are in the seats when the curtain goes up. Every detail is examined.  Responsibilities are assigned.

But what if catering forgets to feed the cast?  If they are hungry and cranky, the performance will suffer.  The audience will only know their experience. They may never know it was because the male lead was preoccupied by his empty stomach.

A product is a production, too.   Designers design it.  Engineers insure it does what it says it will.  Manufacturing makes sure it gets made.

Someone has to create packaging.   That requires some thought into where and how it will be sold.  Will the packaging need to be attractive on the shelf?  Will it need to fit into a particular sized space?

Other things might be harder to see.  What happens if something goes wrong?  Is the support team trained to deal with any problems you expect?

Launching a product is a lot like opening night.  There are a million things to consider that can all impact the audience.

Service, Please

What if you’re more service oriented?  Think about a restaurant.  You see the food.   You encounter the wait staff.  If the staff is good and the food is good, there’s a chance you might not notice much else.

Think of all the thought that goes into creating that experience.  Someone thought about the way the place is decorated.  Someone selected the produce that morning.  Someone decided how the staff would dress.

They’re focused on creating a great experience for their customers.  They’re creating a great story.

What is the experience your customers are seeking?  Can you tell the story of that experience?

How do people first hear about your service?  How does the first person they encounter answer the phone?  Do they have to work their way through an automated phone system? How are your email inquiries handled?

Have you tried contacting your own company to participate in the experience?  Your customers are every day.

Separation Anxiety

If you take on the perspective of the customer, the lines between product, service and support get very blurry.  The customer tends to form their opinion on the overall experience.

So if they have to wait too long for their food, what’s on their plate might never be good enough to overcome their annoyance.

But on the other hand, there are also times when stellar service can make a good product, great.

The pediatrician practice that sees my kids does something unique.  In the interview before they took our first child on as a patient, they stressed that we must be early to all appointments.

You see, they actually take all of their patients on time or early.  Our family sees a variety of doctors.  This practice is the only one I’ve ever dealt with that actually delivers on this promise consistently.

We have since moved to another part of town and can now choose from dozens of other practices.  But that one promise took them to a level I consider superhuman. Tying that level of respect of my family and our time to the rest of the patient experience made me a fanatic, not just a patient.

When you’re telling your story, isn’t that really what it’s all about? Creating an experience so memorable that it makes your customers fanatical about your products and services–even before they make their very first purchase?

Innovation is not always about going faster.  In fact, taking the time up front to get direction, understand you capabilities and get context can help you go faster over the life of an innovation project.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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 Shawn Graham has a post over on the Fast Company blog about Nature in Design, realized in cocktail dresses. Amisha Gandini has created some fascinating designs.Check her Flikr feed for picture of the blowfish dress and a dress that self-amputates like a lizard tail.

That reminded me of some other biomimcry designs. Remember the Speedo LZR swimsuits that resulted in all of those swimming records. They were built on the way a shark’s skin is constructed and allow swimmers to move through the water more smoothly. Swimmers set 23 world records wearing this technology at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Or, how about Velcro? George de Mestral invented velcro based on what he saw under his microscope in the burrs he had so much trouble removing from his clothes and his dog’s fur after a 1941 hunting trip.  He imitated the hooks of the burrs and loops found on his clothes to create a new kind of fastener.

Do you have any examples of biomimcry that fascinate you?

photo by Reinis Ivanovs, http://www.flickr.com/people/untums/

Characters. You need characters to tell a story. The more vividly drawn they are, the better. This part of the story is about understanding those characters and how that understanding can help you meet their needs.

In Part 2 of this series we talked about actively telling the story of your context. We focused on the action and what’s happening in a particular situation.

We discussed the people in this context, based mostly on what they do and how they act in the space. We called them stakeholders. Each of them has some interest in what’s happening. They won’t all be customers. Some will influence the customer or the situation, but they all still have a role to play. A part in the story.

(Rest of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

Who are these characters? In a good story the author lets us peek inside their psyche. They share with us something of why they do what they do. In a well-written story, that tells us something about their motivation.

Our job is to create a new product. We can use the idea of story as a tool to help us do that really well. But we need to make sure the user is represented in our efforts.

It’s not practical to include the customer in every meeting and decision, but we can create a proxy, or more accurately a set of proxies, made up of tools we build from customer research.

The focus of these tools is to create a better product or service. We use them to understand customer wants and needs, even when they can’t describe them for themselves. We then work to create something that gives them an unforgettable experience.

We build our proxies using real data. We breathe some life into them with real details from our research to make it feel more like our customers are actually active participants in the design process.

Personas

To understand the motivation of our characters, we build Personas. We use them as character profiles. We give them a name, an age, a background.

We include details that tell us something about the person, choosing them from the real people we’ve observed and interviewed.

If we’re creating a profile of someone who is a monster truck enthusiast we might start like this:

Donnie is 43. He’s marred to Janet and they have three children together: Dennis, 9; Donnie Jr., 6; and Emily, 2.

Donnie has been fascinated with trucks for a long as he can remember. The bigger and louder, the better. He became a huge fan of Grave Digger, and its driver Dennis Anderson, when at 19, he saw the Digger team beat Bigfoot for the first time at a show in St. Paul.

He has said about these events, “I don’t really care who wins, it’s about who runs around the track the hardest and puts on the biggest show.”

He has made three trips to Digger’s Dungeon in North Carolina as a part of family vacations.

He subscribes to Trucks Magazine which frequently features articles on Monster Trucks.

He is also an ATV enthusiast and rides on weekends with either his wife or oldest son…

We build this bio to create some life around the person for whom we invite to join our team.

When it comes time to make a decision about a new product or feature, we still consult our research, look at data, conduct polls or create tools to choose features. But we also often ask “Would Dennis actually want this?”

When we build personas, we make use of things we’ve seen during our research. We reference our notes on what people said. We ask them about their goals.

This research helps us to create a virtual customer, a representative of the interests of the user. That’s the person we initially seek to satisfy and delight. We’re working to understand the job they’re trying to do.

That job may be to perform a successful surgery. Or it may be to really enjoy the Monster Truck Rally. In some way we’re enabling an experience.

Get Some Empathy

In some cases we need to get out of our own character and into another. Companies will often rely on their historical knowledge of an industry or what their experience tells them customers are seeking.

It’s easy to stay inside the walls of your company and, from your seat in a conference room, believe you have all of the answers. Many of us attend brainstorming sessions full of the belief we know our customers and what they want.

But can you really be that objective?

There’s no substitute for going out and visiting potential customers in their natural habitat. But, if you can’t, there are also other ways to get some insight and remind ourselves that we don’t actually know what’s going on in the brains of our customers.

To do this quickly, we’ll sometimes use tools that put the development team into the shoes of the user. We’ll help them experience what it’s like to be the customer.

If the customer is older, we may ask them to wear out of focus glasses or gloves and attempt to use a product. If the product isn’t user friendly, we may create intentionally difficult instructions. Then we have them try to live the experience.

If they’re focused on a particular customer service experience, the team will go undercover–actually be the customer. Call that service line and wade through five layers of options. Wait through 18 minutes of repetitive music peppered with messages about ‘How much we care about our customers’ and ‘We’ve just been voted number one again in customer service’ before you get to speak to an actual human being.

Experience the joy of going back on hold while they ‘Ask their supervisor about that’ before having to repeat that experience three more times to get a resolution.

Living through exactly how the customer experiences your company, products, or services might make you think quite a bit differently about them.

Develop Your Characters

Give your product development teams something beyond a set of requirements documents. Sure they can respond to a factual list of what the product should do and be, but their response won’t be much more than a bulleted list.

If you give them people to design for and a story to narrate through your products and services, you’ll get their maximum creativity. You’ll move their focus from completing a checklist to captivating your end user.

The end result could be a timeless love story between your company and your customer.

Tim Harford wrote last week in Wired about how big innovation prizes spur more failure–and more big successes.

Three economists, Pierre Azoulay, Gustavo Manso, and Joshua Graff Zivin, have rigorously evaluated the Hughes approach. They found that once scientists received HHMI funding, they produced more failures—but also far more highly cited “blockbuster” research papers. In other words: more risk, more reward. Yet HHMI research grants, big as they are, are substantially less than one-tenth of 1 percent of global R&D.

Specifically the abstract of this paper states (emphasis mine):

Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long- term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-defined deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that HHMI investigators produce high-impact papers at a much higher rate than two control groups of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.

The group of scientists that have more freedom to make mistakes early and greater freedom to experiment are the ones that are doing the most ground-breaking work.

(Hat tip to Shawn Graham for pointing this one out to me!)

We hear about about failing fast and cheap.  It is more accurate to talk about creating an environment where it is okay to experiment and try things.

Find out how to get value from quick experiments. Little failures that don’t cost much.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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She is teaching them the tools of design and innovation that will help them to overcome local problems with local solutions.  For instance, participants have developed 15 new methods of threshing peanuts, which are an important part of the local diet.

Smith refers to this process as “creative capacity building” — in other words, giving people a sense of how to design the solutions to their own problems. “It places the expertise in the village instead of at MIT,” Taha says. The local people know what the tasks are that they need to do, so the idea is to get them to “take that expertise you have, and develop a tool that helps you to do it better.

The D-Lab team is putting their skills to great use.  Creative capacity building is something many companies could use here, too.

How do you define innovation?  Does everyone in your company agree about the definition?

Why it is vital to have a shared definition for innovation and how it can be an advantage.

We would love to get your feedback in the comments or at thestory@bright-innovation.com.

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Observing isn’t enough.  Anyone can just sit and watch a story unfold.

With innovation, we must actively tell the story.

In part 1, we discussed getting the story of the customer by being a sort of armchair  anthropologist. A few weeks ago we introduced the idea of context.  Now it’s time to get beyond the theory and talk about what we should actually do with all of those observations.

We’ve got to move from passively observing the customer’s story to actively telling it.

(Rest of the series: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)

Why?  Because we need to take action, and that usually brings with it a whole bunch of people that need take action with you.

Not only do you have to tell them a story, that story has to be convincing.

You might have to convince someone in charge of funding a major project that the product you want to deliver is the right one.  Your story has to convince them that the budget they set aside will be a good investment.

You might have to convince a design team that the solution you’re working toward is the right one–it could mean the difference between creating a product that meets a real need, delighting the customer, or throwing a bunch of features and technology into a box and hoping that someone will buy it.

You might need to convince yourself that you’re solving the right problem.  You have an idea for a new service and you think someone will want it, but you’re not quite sure.

You need to craft a story about the customer.  But it can’t be a work of fiction.  You’ve got to base it in fact.  Do the research.  Create plausible answers to the opportunities you find.  Then you can test the story.

We need to take what we learn and put it into a form that will be useful for them.  Our end goal is to give our customers, whoever they may be, the tools to live out the story they’re seeking.

To do that job, we’ve got to do more than observe.  We’ve got to take those observations and turn them into something useful.  We’ve got to be able to tell the story.

One part of telling that story is to establish context.  Context sets the stage.

So how to you do that? Here are three tools for describing context:

Create Maps

You can create maps of the spaces that interest you.  What objects are there?  How big is it?  Where are things in relation to each other?

You can take pictures.  You can draw pictures.  It’s amazing how much easier it is to convey a sense of a place from a picture or a drawing than by trying to describe it.  Pictures and drawings will also give you a sense of how things move and where issues could arise.

Creating a map, with some sense of scale will also give you a tool you can use dynamically.  You can start to move things around.  What if I move this workstation next to that one?  What if I put the waiting area next to those big bright windows?

Describe the Rules and the “Happening”

Context is the story of a place, not just its physical setting.  It’s also about what’s happening in a place.  What are the rules of that place?  Who are the people in that place?  What are they each trying to achieve?

Think of a restaurant.  There are expectations.  You should be able to show up, give the proprietors money and, in return, receive food.

Beyond that, you have some general expectations:  the food won’t kill you or make you sick, they won’t also serve to dogs and cats at the table next to yours and, if the place expects to stay in business for more than a few days, the food should be edible.

There are rules for the customer.  You’re generally expected to wear clothes (especially if they serve hot soup). Customers are generally not allowed in the kitchen.  You can’t bring your own food and ask them to cook it.

These things are all obvious, but imagine if you were from another planet and were experiencing a restaurant for the very first time. Notice the rituals.

Groups of people come into the lobby.  Sometimes they arrive all together.  Other times they wait for a group to form.  They speak to someone at a podium.  That person takes them to a table.  Sometimes right away and sometimes they wait for a while.  Then, they sit and read.  What are they reading?  They talk to another person.  That person takes some notes.  The customers wait some more… 

What would you think of these rituals?  What are the rules of this encounter?  How does everyone know what to do next?  Why are the tables and chairs arranged the way they are?  What else is in the room?  What are those little stations where the staff type into a screen and fill water glasses?

Capture these rules.  Put them into a set of written instructions like those you might find inside a board game.

List Your Stakeholders

What about the people in the space?  Who are they?  In the restaurant we have customers who are guided by hosts and wait staff through their experience.  There are also people that the customers rarely see: the cooks, the dishwashers, the managers and others who aren’t a visible part of the show.

Instead, we see them through the well-prepared food, the spotless plate and the well-ordered team that keeps everything running smoothly.

Who are all of these people?  We can start by generating a list of those who are important in this context.    They are your stakeholders.

In the next post on this topic we’ll talk more about the stakeholders and their part in the story.

David Palmer, CEO of Pittsburgh-based ClearCount Medical Solutions

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently ran an article on expected job growth in the life sciences in the region.

The article specifically mentions two Bright Innovation start-up clients, ClearCount Medical Solutions and Cohera Medical, as bright spots.

They also discuss the success of local companies Respironics (acquired by Phililps) and Medrad (now a part of Bayer Healthcare), both also Bright clients, as companies that grew up locally and went on to become a part of big, multinationals.

Congrats to all four!