I firmly believe that there are certain things in life that you automatically say Yes to. You do not ask questions or pause to consider context. You simply say Yes:
Painkillers after a medical procedure
Warm blankets
The opportunity to listen to brilliant people talk about things that fascinate them.
So, when asked if I would like to attend an Executive Briefing curated by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, I did not ask questions or pause to check my calendar. I simply said Yes.
I’m extremely happy that I did because what I heard blew my mind.
He went on to tell the story of a meeting between Elon Musk and Toyota executives shortly after Musk became CEO. Toyota executives marveled at how quickly Tesla could build an EV and asked Musk for his secret. Musk gestured around the factory floor at all the abandoned hunks of metal and partially built cars and explained that, unlike Toyota, which prided itself on being lean and minimizing waste, Tesla engineers focused on learning – and waste is a required part of the process.
We decide with our hearts and justify with our heads – even when leasing office space
John E. Fernández, Director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, shared an unexpected insight about selling sustainable buildings effectively. Instead of hard numbers around water and energy cost savings, what convinces companies to pay the premium for Net Zero environments is prestige. The bragging rights of being a tenant in Winthrop Center, Boston’s first-ever Passive House office building, gave developers a meaningful point of differentiation and justified higher-than-market-rate rents to future tenants like McKinsey and M&T Bank.
49% of companies are Silos and Spaghetti
I did a hard eye roll when I saw Digital Transformation on the agenda. But Stephanie Woerner, Principal Research Scientists and Executive Director for MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, proved me wrong by explaining that Digital Transformation requires operational excellence and customer-focused innovation.
Her research reveals that while 26% of companies have evolved to manage both innovation and operations, operate with agility, and deliver great customer experiences, nearly half of companies are stuck operating in silos and throwing spaghetti against the wall. These “silo and spaghetti companies” are often product companies rife with complex systems and processes that require and reward individual heroics to make progress.
What seems like the safest option is the riskiest
How did 26% of companies transform while the rest stayed stuck or made little progress? The path forward isn’t what you’d expect. Companies that go all-in on operational excellence or customer innovation struggle to shift focus and work in the other half of the equation. But doing a little bit of each is even more risky because the companies often wait for results from one step before taking the next. The result is a never-ending transformation slog that is eventually abandoned.
Academia is full of random factoids
They’re not random to the academics, but for us civilians, they’re mainly helpful for trivia night:
50% of US robots are used in the automotive industry
<20% of manufacturing job descriptions require digital skills (yes, that includes MS Office)
Data centers will account for 8-21% of global energy demand by 2030
Energy is 10% of the cost of running a data center but 90% of the cost of mining bitcoin
Cities take up 3% of the earth’s surface, contain 33% of the population, account for 70% of global electricity consumption, and are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions
Why say Yes
When brilliant people talk about things they find fascinating, it’s often because those things challenge conventional wisdom. The tension between lean efficiency and innovative learning, the role of emotion in business decisions, and the risks of playing it too safe all point to a fascinating truth: sometimes the most counterintuitive path forward is the most successful.
Teaching at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) offers a unique perspective. By day, I engage with seasoned business professionals. By night, I interact with budding designers and artists, each group bringing vastly different experiences to the table.
Customer-centricity is the hill I will die on…
In my Product Innovation Lab course, students learn the innovation process and work in small teams to apply those lessons to the products they create.
We spend the first quarter of the course to problem-finding. It’s excruciating for everyone. Like their counterparts in business and engineering, they’re bursting with ideas, and they hate being slowed down. Despite data proving that poor product-market fit a leading cause of start-up failure and that 54% of innovations launched by big companies fail to reach $1M in sales (a paltry number given the scale of surveyed companies), they’re convinced their ideas are flawless.
We spend two weeks exploring Jobs to be Done and practicing interviewing techniques. But their first conversations sound more like interrogations than anything we did in class.
They return from their interviews and share what they learned. After each insight, I ask, “Why is that?” or “Why is that important?
Amazingly, they have answers.
While their first conversations were interrogations, once the nervousness fades, they remember their training, engage in conversations, and discover surprising and wonderful answers.
Yet the still prioritize the answers to “What” over answers to “Why?”
…Because it’s the hill that will kill me.
Every year, this cycle repeats. This year, I finally asked why, after weeks of learning that the answers to What questions are almost always wrong and Why questions are the only path to the right answers (and differentiated solutions with a sustainable competitive advantage), why do they still prioritize the What answers?
The answer was a dagger to my heart.
“That’s what the boss wants to know,” a student explained. “Bosses just want to know what we need to build so they can tell engineering what to make. They don’t care why we should make it or whether it’s different. In fact, it’s better if it’s not different.”
I tried to stay professional, but there was definitely a sarcastic tone when I asked how that was working.
“We haven’t launched anything in 18 months because no one likes what we build. We spend months on prototypes, show them to users, and they hate it. Then, when we ask the researchers to do more research because their last insights were wrong, they get all cra….OOOOHHHHHHHH…..”
(insert clouds parting, beams of sunlight shining down, and a choir of angels here)
“That’s why the researchers are so sad all the time! They always try to tell us the “Whys” behind the “Whats” but no one wants to hear it. We just want to know what to build to get to work. But we could create something people love if we understood why today’s things don’t work!”
Honestly, I didn’t know whether to drop the mic in triumph or flip the table in rage.
Ignorance may be bliss but obsolesce is not
It’s easy to ignore customers.
To send them surveys with pre-approved answers choices that can be quickly analyzed and neatly presented to management. To build exactly what customers tell you to build, even though you’re the expert on what’s possible and they only know what’s needed.
It’s easy to point to the surveys and prototypes and claim you are customer-centric. If only the customers would cooperate.
It’s much harder to listen to customers. To ask questions, listen to answers you don’t want to hear, and repeat those answers to more powerful people who want to hear them even less. To have the courage to share rough prototypes and to take the time to be curious when customers call them ugly.
So, if you want to be happy, keep pretending to care about your customers.
Pretty soon, you won’t have any left to bother you.
Corporate offsites – the phrase conjures images of everything from “mandatory fun” with colleagues to long and exhausting days debating strategy with peers. Rarely are the images something that entice people to sit up and shout, “YEA!” But what if the reality could be something YEA! worthy?
Offsites May Be the Answer to the WFH vs. RTO Debate
Offsites aren’t new but they’ve taken on a new role and new significance as companies grapple with how to manage Work from Home (WFH) and Return To Office (RTO) policies.
As with most things in life, the pendulum swings from one extreme to another until eventually, finally, landing in a stable and neutral midpoint. When the pandemic hit, we swung from every day in the office to every day at home. Then society opened back up and corporate landlords came calling for rent, whether or not people were in the offices, so we swung back to Return to Office mandates.
Offsites, the authors suggest, may be the happy medium between the two extremes because offsites:
“give people opportunities for interactions that otherwise might not happen. Offsites create unique opportunities for employees to connect in person, forming new relationships and strengthening existing ones. As a result, offsites help people learn about others’ knowledge and build interpersonal trust, which are both critical ingredients for effective collaboration.”
Offsite Connections Lead to Collaborations that Generate ROI
After analyzing eight years of data from a global firm’s offsites and 350,000 “instances of formal working relationships” for 750 employees, the authors found that intentionally designed offsites (more on that in a moment) yield surprisingly measurable and lasting results:
24% more incoming requests for collaboration amongst attendees post vs. pre-offsite (silos busted!)
17% of new connections were still active two years after the offsite (lasting change!)
$180,000 in net new revenue from collaborations within the first two months post offsite (real results!)
The benefits event extended to non-attendees because they “seemed to get the message that collaboration is important and wanted to demonstrate their commitment to being collaborative team players” and “likely identified new collaborators after the offsite through referrals.”
How to Design Offsites That Get Results
Four key strategies emerged from the authors’ research and work with over 100 other organizations:
Design for the people in the audience, not the people on stage. Poll attendees to understand their specific needs and goals, then design collaborative activities, not management monologues.
Design for the new hires, not the tenured execs. Create opportunities for new hires to meet, connect with, and work alongside more experienced colleagues.
Set and communicate clear goals and expectations. Once the offsite is designed and before it happens, tell people what to expect (the agenda) and why to expect it (your design intentions and goals). Also, tell them how to make the most of the offsite opportunities by thinking about the skill and network gaps they want to fill.
Track activities to measure ROI. The connections, collaborations, and commitments that start at the offsite need to continue after it in the form of ongoing communication, greater collaboration, and talent engagement. Yes, conduct a post-event survey immediately after the event but keep measuring every 2-3 months until the next offsite. The data will reveal how well you performed against your goals and how to do even better the next time.
Offsites can be a powerful tool to build an organization’s culture and revenue, but only if they are thoughtfully designed to go beyond swanky settings, sermons from the stage, and dust-collecting swag and build the connections and collaborations that only start when people are together, in-person, outside of the office.
AI is everywhere: in our workplaces, homes, schools, art galleries, concert halls, and even neighborhood coffee shops. We can’t seem to escape it. Some hope it will unlock our full potential and usher in an era of creativity, prosperity, and peace. Others worry it will eventually replace us. While both outcomes are extreme, if you’ve ever used AI to conduct research with synthetic users, the idea of being “replaced” isn’t so wild.
For the past month, I’ve beta-tested Crowdwave, an AI research tool that allows you to create surveys, specify segments of respondents, send the survey to synthetic respondents (AI-generated personas), and get results within minutes.
Sound too good to be true?
Here are the results from my initial test:
150 respondents in 3 niche segments (50 respondents each)
51 questions, including ten open-ended questions requiring short prose responses
1 hour to complete and generate an AI executive summary and full data set of individual responses, enabling further analysis
The Tool is Brilliant
It took just one hour to gather data that traditional survey methods require a month or more to collect, clean, and synthesize. Think of how much time you’ve spent waiting for survey results, checking interim data, and cleaning up messy responses. I certainly did and it made me cry.
The qualitative responses were on-topic, useful, and featured enough quirks to seem somewhat human. I’m pretty sure that has never happened in the history of surveys. Typically, respondents skip open-ended questions or use them to air unrelated opinions.
Every respondent completed the entire survey! There is no need to look for respondents who went too quickly, chose the same option repeatedly, or abandoned the effort altogether. You no longer need to spend hours cleaning data, weeding out partial responses, and hoping you’re left with enough that you can generate statistically significant findings.
The Results are Dangerous
When I presented the results to my client, complete with caveats about AI’s limitations and the tool’s early-stage development, they did what any reasonable person would do – they started making decisions based on the survey results.
STOP!
As humans, we want to solve problems. In business, we are rewarded for solving problems. So, when we see something that looks like a solution, we jump at it.
However, strategic or financially significant decisions should neverrely ona single data source. They are too complex, risky, and costly. And they definitely shouldn’t be made based on fake people’s answers to survey questions!
They’re Also Useful.
Although the synthetic respondents’ data may not be true, it is probably directionally correct because it is based on millions and maybe billions of data points. So, while you shouldn’t make pricing decisions based on data showing that 40% of your target consumers are willing to pay a 30%+ premium for your product, it’s reasonable to believe they may be willing to pay more for your product.
The ability to field an absurdly long survey was also valuable. My client is not unusual in their desire to ask everything they may ever need to know for fear that they won’t have another chance to gather quantitative data (and budgets being what they are, they’re usually right). They often ignore warnings that long surveys lead to abandonment and declining response quality. With AI, we could ask all the questions and then identify the most critical ones for follow-up surveys sent to actual humans.
We Aren’t Being Replaced, We’re Being Spared
AI consumer research won’t replace humans. But it will spare us the drudgery of long surveys filled with useless questions, months of waiting for results, and weeks of data cleaning and analysis. It may just free us up to be creative and spend time with other humans. And that is brilliant.
Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.
Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?
Don’t blame the status quo.
The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines. The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action.
But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.
We’re stopping ourselves.
Blame one (or more) of these.
Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:
There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:
When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow
Four different states. Only one of them is positive.
I don’t love those odds.
Yet we live them every day.
Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages. Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.
Round and round we go.
The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.
Anxiety. Boredom. Apathy.
One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild. They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request. In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.
Then overcome them
I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.
I am telling you not to get stuck there.
Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:
When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
When you feel bored, find a new challenge
When you feel apathetic, change everything
Your thoughts and ideas are valuable. Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.
