InnovationCompass

Experience Maps

Every for-profit and non-profit entity would love to have a treasure map showing them where to find the most profitable and loyal customers and/or donors.

This treasure map would also point CEOs and Board Chairs in the right direction as they design the ultimate experiences and services for customers. Leaders of organizations and firms would have uncanny insight into what their customers want as well as key knowledge on how to provide it.

Sound like an impossible dream?

At the 12th Annual Innovation Convergence, Ben Jacobson of Conifer Research in Chicago hosted an innovation lab on how an Experience Map can be your organization's treasure map. Experience Maps can be the precise tool you need to identify innovation and design opportunities as well as to pinpoint un-articulated customer needs.

What is an Experience Map?

Here is Conifer Research's definition: "An Experience Map is a model of how people experience a product, service, environment, or computer system. Like a good highway map, it organizes and abstracts complex reality to focus us on the important bits."

The core of making an Experience Map comprises three elements: defining which experience you want to map, documenting (through videos, photos, samples, etc.) your observations and conversations in real time, and digging through the information you collected to find treasure (What seems to be working well? What seems to be missing? Where are customers' needs neglected?).

Ben Jacobson suggested that you arrange your data into 5 areas on your map: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend. Assign metaphors to each experience stage and explore the relationship of your metaphors to your brand. Fix problem areas, fill in gaps, and build on bright spots. Finally, create a plan and share it with key stakeholders.

What jewels are hiding in the experiences of your customers? Employ Experience Maps in your organization and design around your customers' needs. You'll find that once you do, your own treasure chest will be within reach.

Business Success through Storytelling

"When placed in an outstretched hand, this stone symbolizes that something important is about to be shared. This is good news for business, for if we listen, the gifts within the stories will be ours. The premise behind the storytelling stone is that whoever holds the stone, their voice will be heard."

   -- BJ McCabe, President, Idein Rise, Inc.

During the conference kickoff for the 12th Annual Innovation Convergence, BJ McCabe treated us to a session on storytelling.

We learned the history and power of storytelling and that our charge is to liberate the stories in our own companies. Stories of ordinary people accomplishing the extraordinary inspire others to dig deep down and find the energy and passion to do the same. 

Using traditional Sufi stories as a creative teaching tool, each of us read and shared our stories with those seated at our table. Some made the stories completely their own and stood in front of the group and shared on a larger scale. As if by magic, whether communicating with 5 or 500, an immediate intimacy forms when we tell stories.

BJ McCabe left us with this: "We live our lives by the stories we tell ourselves and tell others. Change the story and life changes."

What stories are you telling to yourself, your team, and your customers? Look for common themes. Do you need to redefine your organization's culture?

If so, decide your future and change your story. Shape a new vision and begin the transformation through stories.

Seeing the World with New Eyes

"When a diverse team (product development, marketing, consumer insights) goes out together into the customer's real world, what they see and hear acts as a powerful springboard and catalyst for their own creative thinking and dialogue. Innovation -- both the insights and the commitment necessary to implement them -- comes from this team-based approach. Customer understanding is everyone's business."

         -- Barbara Perry, PhD (Founder and President, Barbara Perry Associates)

At the 12th Annual Innovation Convergence Event, Dr. Perry shared her ethnographic methods for sparking innovation as well as her 30 years experience consulting to Fortune 500 companies. Her workshop comprised three phases:  getting ready work, the fieldwork experience, and making meaning.

Dr. Perry asserted that via team-based ethnography, companies may experience a "creative leap." Once stories and observations (from fieldwork) are recorded and shared meaning is discussed, an opportunity for discovering actionable insights comes to the fore.

We often only see the "tip of the iceberg" or tangible artifacts, rather than underlying assumptions and un-articulated customer needs. In order to tap the large base of the iceberg below the surface, we must understand what drives a customer's behavior. We obtain those critical insights through listening to and sharing their stories in the context of their lives and beliefs (not through our assumptions or lenses).

This "soft" data helps us formulate predictive or forward thinking.

And, it is here where you may be awarded with the greatest of all gifts -- a glimpse into your customers' world that surprises you and awakens you to new opportunities for developing products and services.

Spend time living in your customers' shoes. Explore where their experiences could be improved or changed completely. Observe where the gaps are currently.

Their values and needs hold the key to your understanding and ability to see what is next.

Conference Magic

I attended the 12th annual gathering of innovation practitioners at InnovationConvergence in La Jolla this past week. As the promotional material for the conference promised, attendees were delighted by presentations from dynamic innovation gurus, rich networking opportunities, and the beauty of the La Jolla coastline.

Over the course of the next few days, I will write separate posts detailing the three workshops that inspired me the most: Barbara Perry's Inspiring Innovation Through Team Ethnography, BJ McCabe's Innovation Stories, and Ben Jacobson's Consumer Experience lab. Interestingly, each shares the power of stories as the driver of innovation.

For now, I'd like to talk about the essence of conference magic:  new friendships.

I was fortunate in being able to share dinners and walks on the beach with new friends who graciously told me their stories, their hopes, and their passions. As I listened, I found simple, tangible beauty, not unlike the lovely, smooth stones that dotted the California shore.

When we engage with each other in an honest and vulnerable way, something happens to us that transcends the here and now. We travel to another place that is at once quiet and teeming with thoughts and emotions. When the conversation ends, we return to where we began, but with completely new eyes.

I realized that creating an opportunity for such an experience is the very charge of all enterprises.

Whether your venture or nonprofit organization is marketing products or services, fostering an authentic conversation among your customers is truly where the magic happens.

Mindmapping with Mindmanager

For those of us who tend to work and think predominantly with our left brain, it is important to ramp up right brain time – especially when we are brainstorming and nurturing innovative projects.

Mindmapping is a fun and productive way to tap the strengths of your right brain and capture dynamic ideas on paper. By working in a non-linear way, you’ll find that mindmapping is an essential tool for all kinds of thinking activities (including everything from meeting agenda creation to project planning).

So how does mindmapping work? How do you mindmap?

Joyce Wycoff, Co-Founder of InnovationNetwork and author of Mindmapping: Your Personal Guide to Exploring Creativity and Problem-Solving, has written a concise (yet thorough) article entitled Mindmapping in 8 Easy Steps.

While mindmapping with paper and color markers is fun and productive, you might find Mindjet’s mindmapping software, MindManager, to be a great idea facilitator. In particular, this easy-to-use software helps you get the ideas down so that you may begin the process of building associations and linkages among those ideas (thereby strengthening them and further clarifying your thinking).

Once something is in ink, one tends to hesitate to cross out and redraw. MindManager lets you drag main topics and sub topics to new locales on the map with the greatest of ease. Plus, you can add URL links, PDFs, spreadsheets, and databases to your map, enabling it to completely house your project at one central place.

Rev up your right brain and watch your innovative ideas and productivity soar!

Creating an Innovative Culture

"The day you stop learning is the day you cease to be valuable in an innovative culture."

                                -- Jeff Immelt, Chairman/CEO of GE

Nobody ever got it wrong because they were too passionate, they cared too much, or were too interested.

Aren't we always attracted to people and organizations with sparkling enthusiasm for everything they do? Don't we find their energy and zeal for learning and communicating ideas to be intoxicating?

And don't we feel an adrenaline rush when we are in the pursuit of new ways of thinking? Isn’t it fun (and profitable) to find new ways of understanding what our customers want now as well as those things they don't know they want yet?

We are learning. We are accruing vast amounts of empathy for our customers. That learning and empathy translates into new experiences (compelling experiences!) for our customers.

If the “keeper of the vision” in your organization believes in and promotes the lifelong pursuit of learning (both for the individual and the organization), that core value will most likely become a part of the organization’s culture.

Without it, innovation doesn’t stand a chance.

In an innovative culture, no one stops learning. No one pulls the old play book off the shelf and dusts it off for the new game. No one mindlessly follows the current way of solving problems “because that’s the way it has always been done.”

And no one believes that doing an “okay” job suffices.