John Winsor

Co-creating

One of my favorite bloggers, Josh Spear, points to a couple of great examples of co-creation between Mazda and Quicksilver and BMW and Joshua Davis. Both Mazda and BMW are doing a good job of connecting with culturally relevant people and leveraging the relationship in an authentic way.

Listening to the Key Voices #2

Here's the rest of the list I mentioned yesterday about finding and keeping key voices:

1.      Consistently bring in new blood – Too many companies rely on the same key voices over and over to help them develop their strategic thinking. For instance, it’s important for consultants to understand your business, but the reality is that any market is just too complicated to rely on any single perspective to understand it. Likewise, when developing a dialogue with translators it is essential to refresh their numbers for every investigation. That’s not to say that a few key voices shouldn’t stay involved. But it is important to re-interview the translators that you are having a dialogue with for every project. This keeps things fresh.

2.   Respect their opinions and their time – I’ve been in the field with way too many companies who consider their customers a necessary evil. It’s always amazing to watch as a company has a conversation with its customers but doesn’t respect their time or opinions. How many times have you heard someone say that their customers don’t know what they want or dismiss an idea as one that has already been tried? The superior attitude comes through loud and clear when you’re listening to someone. Just remember, there is always something to learn.

3.     Don’t burn them out – It’s easy to establish a dialogue with a key customer and then begin to really rely on that one perspective. That person becomes your “go-to guy.” It’s great to have a few of these relationships in your quiver, but it’s important to remember that while you might spend 80 percent of your life thinking about your work, chances are your customer probably doesn’t. Connect with them often, but give them a break every once in awhile.

4.    Keep Listening – None of us can be reminded too many times to slow down and listen. You can get halfway to where you want to go if you aren’t able to do anything else besides listen.

Listening to the Key Voices #1

Lately, I've been engaged in a number of dialogues about how to improve the way companies listen. I've written about it here a fair amount, as well. While learning how to listen is essential to everything from marketing to being part of your community, it's also important to listen to the right or "key" voices.

Here are five steps to ensure that you’re finding, and keeping, your key voices. I'll post five more steps tomorrow:

1.      Identify cultural cornerstones – It’s always easier to find the right people in the right places. Would you expect to find a fashion diva at a football game? Context is everything. Instead of just thinking about those people who you believe to be your brand’s key voices, think about who they really are. Where do they hang out? What do they do? Are they online, in the mall or hanging out with friends at someone’s home? Get out of your office and spend time in your key customers’ environments. By understanding the cultural cornerstones and understanding the context of people’s lives, you can go a long way in finding and understanding them.

2.      Identify the key voices – Once you understand your key customers’ environment on a firsthand basis, start to look around and listen. Who is talking? What are they saying? We always ask people who influences them in their thoughts about a certain subject or product. By always asking people this question, you can quickly understand who the opinion leaders are.

3.      Make them a part of the team – If you want people to be honest with you, you have to be honest with them. One of the big problems with focus groups is that they are rarely honest – they exist apart from reality. How would you feel, and act, if someone was behind a one-way mirror in your office, watching your every move? In order to get people to open up you’ve got to get into their environment, be human and do more than just let them talk. Let them lead.

4.      Create a community space – When I was publishing special interest magazines, I realized that in order to be successful it was my job to set a community table and invite all of the members of the community to it. At the time, this included employees, advertisers, readers, writers and photographers. I figured if I was able to make one of our magazines into a community space, where everyone in the community would come to find out what was going on and would actively participate in an ongoing dialogue, I’d be successful. In its essence, a special interest magazine doesn’t attract everyone in the market. It only attracts trendsetters and translators. For instance, when I published Inline Magazine, the biggest magazine in the inline skating market, our circulation was 40,000. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 30,000,000 active inline skaters at the time. Yet, creating a community space for this relatively small number of participants had a very large influence on the rest of the market. The community space not only provided a place for the company to connect with the key voices, but it also became a place for key voices to connect with each other.

5.      Create a dialogue with each trend translator – If you really want to understand the subtleties of the marketplace, it is essential for each person you engage in a dialogue to feel that they are important and honored as an individual. Today, having an individual conversation with each and every translator is much easier with the power of the Internet. Include them in every corner of your business.

Great Stories, Continued

After reading my Sharing the Story post, a friend sent me a link to Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen blog. It's worth checking out.

Sharing the Story

Lately, I’ve been talking to lots of folks about improving their internal presentations by turning them into powerful stories. All of us have sat through boring PowerPoint presentations. So, how do you make your information have more impact?

In order for any organization to really change, inspiration from the street must find its way into the core of the company. As in any other organism, change happens at the fringes of a species. The center of the species is always the last to change and the part of the community that resists change the most. It is essential to take the intelligence found on the streets and start a revolution internally.

That means making that intelligence as impactful as possible. Impact can come from ease of use, accessibility, insight, relevance and beauty. But the real power resides in the actual presentation of the story. It is also essential to remember that you are simply the storyteller, the illustrator of the information, and that the story itself should be the star. Your job is to be the conduit between the intelligence from the streets and the rest of the company.

Here are some things to think about when you’re sharing your stories, to make them as impactful as they can be:

1. Engage the Audience – While a great story can engage the audience, most of the time the magic that makes the story engaging comes from the way it is told. Think about reading stories with your parents when you were a kid. The best stories were those that your parents were passionate about and told with excitement. As a speaker, if you’re excited by what you’re talking about, chances are your audience will be excited as well. Conversely, if you dread the story you are telling, then your audience will as well. Think about the story and how you can change it to get yourself excited about it. Be passionate.
2. Ownership – To motivate people through storytelling you must master the performance of the story. By mastering the story you can free yourself to have the flexibility to deal with even the most difficult situations. I was speaking at a “Voice of the Customer” conference, and went to the podium to turn on my computer and set up for the telling of my story as the audience was having lunch. For some reason my computer crashed and would not turn on. A couple of days before, I had made a CD of my presentation, but in the 48 hours before the speech I had changed the material radically. Fortunately, someone loaned me a computer. I was able to use the CD to rebuild the story in a half hour. The only way I was able to pull it off was because I knew the material so well that I could retype several slides from memory. I owned the story.
3. Testing – You know the saying: Practice makes perfect. There is no substitution for it. Focus your energies on the core of the story, making it interesting and meaningful in the story’s presentation. Practice in front of people and get feedback. Don’t be afraid to modify the story up till the very end. I always find the more times I practice a story, the more small changes I make to it. The story becomes my story. Only then can the magic of ownership really come out.
4. Informal Settings – I always find that if you’re relaxed as a storyteller, then your audience will also be relaxed. One of the ways to make the setting more informal is to start the story off with a series of questions. Solicit participation in the story’s co-creation. Every once in a while slow down, take a breath and ask more questions. It keeps the audience engaged and the setting more informal. It becomes a dialogue between peers instead of a classroom setting where a teacher instructs the students.

Tools for Creating a More Innovative Environment #2

Here is the second part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

1.       Focus on Open Communication – One of the stumbling blocks to which many innovative teams fall victim is a feeling of disconnectedness from the rest of the company. Many times, it feels like nobody really cares. Likewise, others in the company might feel the special group is full of dreamers doing nothing to achieve the goals of the company. The key is to appoint a co-creation evangelist on the team whose job is communicating with the rest of the organization about what the team is doing. Invite others to participate in the team’s co-creation.
2.       Support Varied Innovation – Innovation is a messy business. Mark’s experience at Nike proves it is critical to try lots of different avenues to birth successful innovation. Look at an innovation problem from many different angles. Support different efforts in pursuing co-creation with different stakeholders. One team might pursue co-creating new innovation with a supplier while another team gains the customer perspective.
3.       Identify Generalists – Often the strongest person in the innovation process is a generalist inside the company. Early in Mark’s career, one of his bosses recognized that he was a generalist who knew a lot about many different aspects of making shoes. Mark’s broad knowledge gave him a unique ability not only to work with others, but also to see connections that others might not. Identify generalists that can benefit the innovation team. They will bring a new perspective to the co-creative process.

Tools for Creating a More Innovative Environment #1

Many people wrote me about the Mark Parker interview and asked me how they might create a more innovative environment in their business. Here is the first part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

1. Create SWAT Teams – Does your company use hothouses or SWAT teams currently? If not, consider assembling a diverse team around a specific innovation issue. The key is to insulate them from the day-to-day demands of the business.
2. Think About Team Chemistry – Mark has a real talent for understanding how to put together a dynamic team. When constructing your teams, bring together a group of personalities that work well together. They will probably outperform a team with one or two big egos.
3. Create Organic Teams – When you need to tap into innovation quickly, put together the kind of team that makes sense for the situation. Sometimes it can be one person charged with figuring out a problem through getting out into the marketplace and exploring options. Other times it takes a highly skilled team. Constantly experiment with the kind of teams you assemble to innovate.
4. Find the Balance Between Structure and Creativity – To stay innovative, it is critical to constantly seek out balance between structure and chaos, especially for the teams trying to innovate. Change things up if necessary to keep people focused on the main goal of co-creating innovation.