Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

If you see a problem, tell someone.  But, also, tell them how you’d like to improve things.

Once you see a problem, you have an obligation to seek a solution.

Complaining is telling someone they have a problem but stopping short of offering solutions.

To stop someone from complaining, ask them how they might make the situation better.

Problems are good when people use them as a forcing function to create new offerings.

Problems are bad when people articulate them and then go home early.

Thing is, problems aren’t good or bad.  It’s our response that determines their flavor.

If it’s your problem, it can never be our solution.

Sometimes the best solution to a problem is to solve a different one.

Problem-solving is 90% problem definition and 10% getting ready to define the problem.

When people don’t look critically at the situation, there are no problems.  And that’s a big problem.

Big problems require big solutions. And that’s why it’s skillful to convert big ones into smaller ones.

Solving the right problem is much more important than solving the biggest problem.

If the team thinks it’s impossible to solve the problem, redefine the problem and solve that one.

You can relabel problems as “opportunities” as long as you remember they’re still problems

When it comes to problem-solving, there is no partial credit. A problem is either solved or it isn’t.

“Fry complaining” by kaibara87

Creating new ideas is easy.  Sit down, quiet your mind, and create a list of five new ideas.  There.  You’ve done it.  Five new ideas.  It didn’t take you a long time to create them.  But ideas are cheap.

Converting ideas into sellable products and selling them is difficult and expensive. A customer wants to buy the new product when the underlying idea that powers the new product solves an important problem for them.  In that way, ideas whose solutions don’t solve important problems aren’t good ideas.  And in order to convert a good idea into a winning product, dirt, rocks, and sticks (natural resources) must be converted into parts and those parts must be assembled into products.  That is expensive and time-consuming and requires a factory, tools, and people that know how to make things. And then the people that know how to sell things must apply their trade.  This, too, adds to the difficulty and expense of converting ideas into winning products.

The only thing more expensive than converting new ideas into winning products is reusing your tired, old ideas until your offerings run out of sizzle. While you extend and defend, your competitors convert new ideas into new value propositions that bring shame to your offering and your brand.  (To be clear, most extend-and-defend programs are actually defend-and-defend programs.)  And while you reuse/leverage your long-in-the-tooth ideas, start-ups create whole new technologies from scratch (new ideas on a grand scale) and pull the rug out from under you.  The trouble is that the ultra-high cost of extend-and-defend is invisible in the short term. In fact, when coupled with reuse, it’s highly profitable in the moment.  It takes years for the wheels to fall off the extend-and-defend bus, but make no mistake, the wheels fall off.

When you find the urge to create a laundry list of new ideas, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.  And when you feel the immense pressure to extend and defend, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.

And when all that gets old, repeat as needed.

“Cave paintings” by allspice1 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

I like to help people turn complex situations into several important learning objectives.

I like to help people turn important learning objectives into tight project plans.

I like to help people distill project plans into a single-page spreadsheet of who does what and when.

I like to help people start with problem definition.

I like to help people stick with problem definition until the problems solve themselves.

I like to help people structure tight project plans based on resource constraints.

I like to help people create objective measures of success to monitor the projects as they go.

I like to help people believe they can do the almost impossible.

I like to help people stand three inches taller after they pull off the unimaginable.

I like to help people stop good projects so they can start amazing ones.

If you want to do more of what you like and less of what you don’t, stop a bad project to start a good one.

So, what do you like to do?

Image credit — merec0

Next year will be different, but we don’t know how it will be different. All we know is that it will be different.

Some things will be the same and some will be different.  The trouble is that we won’t know which is which until we do.  We can speculate on how it will be different, but the Universe doesn’t care about our speculation.  Sure, it can be helpful to think about how things may go, but as long as we hold on to the may-ness of our speculations.  And we don’t know when we’ll know. We’ll know when we know, but no sooner. Even when the Operating Plan declares the hardest of hard dates, the Universe sets the learning schedule on its own terms, and it doesn’t care about our arbitrary timelines.

What to do?

Step 1. Try three new things. Choose things that are interesting and try them.  Try to try them in parallel as they may interact and inform each other. Before you start, define what success looks like and what you’ll do if they’re successful and if they’re not.  Defining the follow-on actions will help you keep the scope small.  For things that work out, you’ll struggle to allocate resources for the next stages, so start small.  And if things don’t work out, you’ll want to say that the projects consumed little resources and learned a lot.  Keep things small.  And if that doesn’t work, keep them smaller.

Step 2. Rinse and repeat.

I wish you a happy and safe New Year.  And thanks for reading.

Mike

“three” by Travelways.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When times are stressful, it’s more difficult to be effective and skillful in our interactions with others.  Here are some thoughts that could help.

Decide how you want to respond, and then respond accordingly.

Before you respond, take a breath. Your response will be better.

If you find yourself responding before giving yourself permission, stop your response and come clean.

Better responses from you make for even better responses from others.

If you interrupt someone in the middle of their sentence so you can make your point, you made a different point.

If you find yourself preparing your response while listening to someone, that’s not listening.

If you recognize you’re not listening, now there are at least two people who know the truth.

When there are no words coming from your mouth, that doesn’t constitute listening.

The strongest deterrent to listening is talking.

If you disagree with one element of a person’s position, you can, at the same time, agree with other elements of their position.  That’s how agreement works.

If you start with agreement, even the smallest bit, disagreement softens.

Before you can disagree, it’s important to listen and understand. And it’s the same with agreement.

It’s easy to agree if that’s what you want to accomplish.  And it’s the same for disagreement.

If you want to move toward agreement, start with understanding.

If you want to demonstrate understanding, start with listening.

If you want to demonstrate good listening, start with kindness.

Here are three mantras I find helpful:

Talk less to listen more.

Before you respond, take a breath.

Kindness before agreement.

“Rock-em” by REL Waldman is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

By definition, the approach that made you successful will become less successful over time and, eventually, will run out of gas.  This fundamental is not about you or your approach, rather it’s about the nature of competition and evolution.  There’s an energy that causes everything to change, grow and improve and your success attracts that energy.  The environment changes, the people change, the law changes and companies come into existence that solve problems in better and more efficient ways.  Left unchanged, every successful business endeavor (even yours) has a half-life.

If you want to extend the life of your business endeavor, you’ve got to be novel.

By definition, if you want to grow, you’ve got to raise your game. You’ve got to do something different.  You can’t change everything, because that’s inefficient and takes too long.  So, you’ve got to figure out what you can reuse and what you’ve got to reinvent.

If you want to grow, you’ve got to be novel.

Being novel is necessary, but expensive.  And risky. And scary.  And that’s why you want to add just a pinch of novelty and reuse the rest.  And that’s why you want to try new things in the smallest way possible.  And that’s why you want to try things in a time-limited way. And that’s why you want to define what success looks like before you test your novelty.

Some questions and answers about being novel:

Is it easy to be novel? No.  It’s scary as hell and takes great emotional strength.

Can anyone be novel? Yes. But you need a good reason or you’ll do what you did last time.

How can I tell if I’m being novel? If you’re not scared, you’re not being novel.  If you know how it will turn out, you’re not being novel.  If everyone agrees with you, you’re not being novel.

How do I know if I’m being novel in the right way? You cannot. Because it’s novel, it hasn’t been done before, and because it hasn’t been done before there’s no way to predict how it will go.

So, you’re saying I can’t predict the outcome of being novel?  Yes.

If I can’t predict the outcome of being novel, why should I even try it? Because if you don’t, your business will go away.

Okay.  That last one got my attention.  So, how do I go about being novel? It depends.

That’s not a satisfying answer. Can you do better than that? Well, we could meet and talk for an hour.  We’d start with understanding your situation as it is, how this current situation came to be, and talk through the constraints you see.  Then, we’d talk about why you think things must change.  I’d then go away for a couple of days and think about things.  We’d then get back together and I’d share my perspective on how I see your situation.  Because I’m not a subject matter expert in your field, I would not give you answers, but, rather, I’d share my perspective that you could use to inform your choice on how to be novel.

“Giraffe trying to catch a twig with her tongue” by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

If you want to grow the top line right now, create a hard constraint – the product cannot change – and force the team to look for growth outside the product. Since all the easy changes to the product have been made, without a breakthrough the small improvements bring diminishing returns. There’s nothing left here.  Make them look elsewhere.

If you want to grow the top line without changing the product, make it easier for customers to buy the products you already have.

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy what you have, eliminate all things that make buying difficult.  Though this sounds obvious and trivial, it’s neither. It’s exceptionally difficult to see the waste in your processes from the customers’ perspective.  The blackbelts know how to eliminate waste from the company’s perspective, but they’ve not been taught to see waste from the customers’ perspective.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the last three improvements you made to the customers’ buying process and ask yourself who benefitted from those changes.  Odds are, the changes you made reduced the number of people you need to process the transactions by pushing the work back into the customers’ laps. This is the opposite of making it easier for your customers to buy.

Have you ever run a project to make it easier for customers to buy from you?

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy the products you have, pretend you are a customer and map their buying process. What you’ll likely learn is that it’s not easy to buy from you.

How can you make it easier for the customer to choose the right product to buy? Please don’t confuse this with eliminating the knowledgeable people who talk on the phone with customers. And, fight the urge to display all your products all at once.  Minimize their choices, don’t maximize them.

How can you make it easier for customers to buy what they bought last time?  A hint: when an existing customer hits your website, the first thing they should see is what they bought last time.  Or, maybe, a big button that says – click here to buy [whatever they bought last time].  This, of course, assumes you can recognize them and can quickly match them to their buying history.

How can you make it easier for customers to pay for your product? Here’s a rule to live by: if they don’t pay, you don’t sell. And here’s another: you get no partial credit when a customer almost pays.

As you make these improvements, customers will buy more.  You can use the incremental profits to fund the breakthrough work to obsolete your best products.

“Shopping Cart” by edenpictures is licensed under CC BY 2.0

How to decide if a problem is worth solving?

If it’s a new problem, try to solve it.

If it’s a problem that’s already been solved, it can’t be a new problem.  Let someone else re-solve it.

If a new problem is big, solve it in a small way.  If that doesn’t work, try to solve it in a smaller way.

If there’s a consensus that the problem is worth solving, don’t bother. Nothing great comes from consensus.

If the Status Quo tells you not to solve it, you’ve hit paydirt!

If when you tell people about solving the problem they laugh, you’re onto something.

If solving the problem threatens the experts, double down.

If solving the problem obsoletes your most valuable product, solve it before your competition does.

If solving the problem blows up your value proposition, light the match.

If solving the problem replaces your product with a service, that’s a recipe for recurring revenue.

If solving the problem frees up a factory, well, now you have a free factory to make other things.

If solving the problem makes others look bad, that’s why they’re trying to block you from solving it.

If you want to know if you’re doing it right, make a list of the new problems you’ve tried to solve.

If your list is short, make it longer.

“CERDEC Math and Science Summer Camp, 2013” by CCDC_C5ISR is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Companies have control over one thing: how to allocate their resources. Companies allocate resources by deciding which projects to start, accelerate, and stop; whom to allocate to the projects; how to go about the projects; and whom to hire, invest in, and fire. That’s it.

Taking a broad view of project selection to include starting, accelerating, and stopping projects, as a leader, what is your role in project selection, or, at a grander scale, initiative selection? When was the last time you initiated a disruptive yet heretical new project from scratch? When was the last time you advocated for incremental funding to accelerate a floundering yet revolutionary project? When was the last time you stopped a tired project that should have been put to rest last year?  And because the projects are the only thing that generates revenue for your company, how do you feel about all that?

Without your active advocacy and direct involvement, it’s likely the disruptive project won’t see the light of day.  Without you to listen to the complaints of heresy and actively disregard them, the organization will block the much-needed disruption. Without your brazen zeal, it’s likely the insufficiently-funded project won’t revolutionize anything. Without you to put your reputation on the line and decree that it’s time for a revolution, the organization will starve the project and the revolution will wither.  Without your critical eye and thought-provoking questions, it’s likely the tired project will limp along for another year and suck up the much-needed resources to fund the disruptions, revolutions, and heresy.

Now, I ask you again. How do you feel about your (in)active (un)involvement with starting projects that should be started, accelerating projects that should be accelerated, and stopping projects that should be stopped?

And with regard to project staffing, when was the last time you stepped in and replaced a project manager who was over their head? Or, when was the last time you set up a recurring meeting with a project manager whose project was in trouble? Or, more significantly, when was the last time you cleared your schedule and ran toward the smoke of an important project on fire?  Without your involvement, the over-their-head project manager will drown. Without your investment in a weekly meeting, the troubled project will spiral into the ground.  Without your active involvement in the smoldering project, it will flame out.

As a leader, do you have your fingers on the pulse of the most important projects? Do you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to know which projects need help? And do you have the chops to step in and do what must be done?  And how do you feel about all that?

As a leader, do you know enough about the work to provide guidance on a major course change? Do you know enough to advise the project team on a novel approach? Do you have the gumption to push back on the project team when they don’t want to listen to you? As a leader, how do you feel about that?

As a leader, you probably have direct involvement in important hiring and firing decisions.  And that’s good.  But, as a leader, how much of your time do you spend developing young talent?  How many hours per week do you talk to them about the details of their projects and deliverables?  How many hours per week do you devote to refactoring troubled projects with the young project managers? And how do you feel about that?

If you want to grow revenue, shape the projects so they generate more revenue. If you want to grow new businesses, advocate for projects that create new businesses. If you need a revolution, start revolutionary projects and protect them.  And if you want to accelerate the flywheel, help your best project managers elevate their game.

“Speeding Pinscher” by PincasPhoto is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When was the last time you did something that scared you? And a more important follow-on question: How did you push through your fear and turn it into action?

Fear is real.  Our bodies make it, but it’s real.  And the feelings we create around fear are real, and so are the inhibitions we wrap around those feelings.  But because we have the authority to make the fear, create the feelings, and wrap the inhibitions, we also have the authority to unmake, un-create, and unwrap.

Fear can feel strong. Whether it’s tightness in the gut, coldness in the chest, or lushness in the face, the physical manifestations in the body are recognizable and powerful.  The sensations around fear are strong enough to stop us in our tracks.  And in the wild of a bygone time, that was fear’s job – to stop us from making a mistake that would kill us. And though we no longer venture into the wild, fear responds to family dynamics, social situations, interactions at work, as if we still live in the wild.

To dampen the impact of our bodies’ fear response, the first step is to learn to recognize the physical sensations of fear for what they are – sensations we make when new situations arise.  To do that, feel the sensations, acknowledge your body made them, and look for the novelty, or divergence from our expectations, that the sensations stand for.  In that way, you can move from paralysis to analysis. You can move from fear as a blocker to fear as a leading indicator of personal growth.

Fear is powerful, and it knows how to create bodily sensations that scare us.  But, that’s the chink in the armor that fear doesn’t want us to know.  Fear is afraid to be called by name, so it generates these scary sensations so it can go on controlling our lives as it sees fit.  So, next time you feel the sensations of fear in your body, welcome fear warmly and call it by name.  Say something like, “Hello Fear.  Thank you for visiting with me.  I’d like to get to know you better.  Can you stay for a coffee?”

You might find that Fear will engage in a discussion with you and apologize for causing you trouble.  Fear may confess that it doesn’t like how it treats you and acknowledge that it doesn’t know how to change its ways.  Or, it may become afraid and squirt more fear sensations into your body. If that happens, tell Fear that you understand it’s just doing what it evolved to do, and repeat your offer to sit with it and learn more about its ways.

The objective of calling Fear by name is to give you a process to feel and validate the sensations and then calm yourself by looking deeply at the novelty of the situation.  By looking squarely into Fear’s eyes, it will slowly evaporate to reveal the nugget of novelty it was cloaking. And with the novelty in your sights, you can look deeply at this new situation (or context or interpersonal dynamic) and understand it for what it is.  Without Fear’s distracting sensations, you will be pleasantly surprised with your ability to see the situation for what it is and take skillful action.

So, when Fear comes, feel the sensations.  Don’t push them away.  Instead, call Fear by name.  Invite Fear to tell its story, and get to know it.  You may find that accepting Fear for what it is can help you grow your relationship with Fear into a partnership where you help each other grow.

“tractor pull 02 – Arnegard ND – 2013-07-04” by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Speak up.  Your ideas can’t see daylight unless others know about them.

Be wrong. When you’re wrong, you sharpen the rightness.

Be right. When you’re right in the face of wrongness, everyone wins, except for you.

Stand tall. Stand behind your decisions, but you can’t be responsible for their outcome.

Be truthful, but not hurtful.

Be overwhelmed.  This is difficult.

Give it away. When things go well, delegate credit to the up-and-coming.  They’ll remember.

Support others. When someone’s in the bucket, pull them out. They’ll remember.

Pay it forward. A kind soul gave it to you, and it’s time to give it to someone else. They’ll remember.

Say “thank you.” And mean it.

Be quiet. When things are on the right track, there’s no need to derail.

Take the heat. When there’s a mistake, own it so the young don’t have to. They’ll remember.

Make room for others. Nothing blocks their growth like your career aspirations.

Say nothing negative, unless you can’t. And if you must, say it in private.

Praise publicly, loudly, and often.

Set up others for success. And when accused of doing so, plead ignorance.

Share your frustrations, but sparingly. Done skillfully, it’s a compliment.

Be human.  People will notice.

“Uncomfortable Fisher” by DaveFayram is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0