E2: Goldilocks and Going Virtual

What if Goldilocks knew the key to better problem solving? Hi, I'm Steve Shapiro, and welcome to Invisible Solutions. Each week we will tackle your most complex problems. Putting them through the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. Now, if you don't have the lenses, you can get them for free at get the lenses dot com. That's get the lenses dot com. With that, we will get started with the second episode of Invisible Solutions. And today we're going to start off with Goldilocks. We've heard the Goldilocks principle before. The Goldilocks principle basically says that you want to have something that's not too soft, not too hard, just right. Well, the same thing applies to problem solving. It applies to problem solving because in most cases, we tend to ask questions that are either too soft or too hard. Let me just explain that a little bit. When we ask questions that are too soft, we're asking questions that are too abstract or too broad. And these are the default questions of most suggestion boxes. So we might ask, how can we improve the business? Now, that's a question. But if you ask a thousand employees that question, you will get 10,000 different answers. So we need to actually make them smaller. When we ask these big questions, we get a lot of irrelevant solutions. On the flip side, though, we do sometimes ask questions that are too hard, they're too specific, or they're too detailed. And in this situation, we are asking questions that are either really solutions masquerading as questions, or they are questions that are so narrowly defined that the odds of our finding a good solution is very slim. So as you would imagine, we want to ask questions that are just right. If they're too broad, we need to make them less so. If they're too specific, we need to make them a little broader. So the Goldilocks principle gives us an insight into the way we tend to ask questions and how we might start reframing them. And with that, I'd like to get into today's problem. It's a problem that all of us are facing, at least at this moment, which is how can we replicate the in person experience virtually? So when the pandemic hit, everybody was scrambling around trying to automate and replicate what we were doing in person. And so that's why we have so many zoom calls, for example. But maybe we can use the lenses from the book to help us find different and potentially better solutions. And I want to be clear, just because a question is different doesn't necessarily make it better. We need to look at it in the broader Context. So let's start off with lens number four. Lens number four is the eliminate lens. And this to me is a great place to start when asking a question like this. What can we eliminate? So in some cases we might want to just completely eliminate the meeting. Think about every meeting you've been in. How many of them have actually been valuable? Probably a small percentage. So how can we get rid of the, the meetings that really just don't create a lot of value? Now if we ask that question, how do we eliminate certain meetings? We might then need to follow up with a, well, what do we replace those meetings with? Maybe there's a different way that we will get the information to people and we'll talk about that in different lenses. Now, in some cases we may just eliminate aspects of a meeting. So the eliminating lens doesn't mean you have to eliminate the whole thing, but maybe you eliminate parts of it. What parts of meetings are not productive? What parts of meetings aren't creating value? And what parts of meetings could be delivered in different and potentially better ways? So when we shift from how can we replicate the in person meeting virtually to how can we eliminate the things that aren't working? Well, now we have a different range of possible solutions. So let's step back and go to lens number seven, which is the result lens. And the result lens says, what does this make possible? What, why do we care? What are we looking to achieve? And when you start to look at the problem of meetings through this lens, now all of a sudden I think it starts to open up some really fascinating ways to go. So we might shift the question from how do we replicate to how can we focus on meeting outcomes? Why are we having meetings? What are the primary goals of meetings? And now you can step back and start saying, well, we hold meetings because it's about networking, it's about engagement, it's about social, or maybe it's about education, or maybe it's about entertainment and making people feel better. Each of those are going to give us a completely different range of solutions. If it really is about networking, well, then maybe Zoom isn't the best platform. There's a number of different platforms for that. Maybe we don't even need to do meetings. Maybe it's something completely different. If our whole goal is to get people engaged and, and connected to others, if it's about entertainment, maybe there's something completely different we can do there. But asking the question, how can we create an environment of networking, how can we keep people engaged? Is different than how can we just replicate the in person meeting. So it's not about automation, it's actually about really thinking about things differently. Now this might lead us to a lens which I really like. Lens number 11 is the resequence lens. The resequence lens. Now this one is really powerful for so many different reasons. And the resequence lens is all around timing. So in some cases you may ask yourself, can I shift the timing of when things take place? Now, sometimes it might be about predicting, might be about postponing, or it might be just rethinking the timing in general. So for example, instead of asking how can we replicate the in person meeting, maybe we ask what can happen before the meeting? Like, why are we having everyone sit together in a zoom call when a lot of the content could be delivered before the meeting? Think about the typical status meeting. You've got a person giving a status report for 5 minutes and then the next person stands up and they give a status report for 5 minutes and then the next person. And then after about six people, everybody's asleep and everybody forgot what happened. What if instead of having everybody sitting there on zoom watching these status reports, everybody submitted the status report before the meeting asynchronously? I love the use of asynchronous content when it comes to virtual. It's a great benefit of virtual. What can we send people before the meeting? So we can send them videos, we can send them text, we can send them documents and only use the real time meeting for conversation where everybody is participating. So that's a different question. We're not just replicating, we're now rethinking and resequencing the entire process. You might even ask what could happen after the meeting. A lot of meetings we hold, the meeting's done, people took notes, they go off on their way and everything's finished. But we don't necessarily take enough time to step back and say what should happen after the meeting? How do we continue the progress? We have a very event based mentality. So especially like I give speeches for a living. One of the things that has been the case in the past is you get up on a stage, give a speech, you leave, and it's the next speaker and everybody forgets. But what if the event wasn't the end, but the event was the beginning? What if the event actually kicked off something? That's something which I love to do and it's great in the virtual world when we have speeches, when I do my speeches for my clients, one of the things that we always Explore is what are we kicking off? Whether it's a competition, whether it's a game, whether it's some kind of enhanced learning, what are we doing to keep people engaged after the meeting so that when the meeting is done, the real learning begins, the real application begins, we start to get the most value from it. So again, to me, this is really powerful. When we start to think about how can we resequence the meetings. Now, we could also talk about this in terms of not just virtual but also in person, because I think the resequence lens is a really great one for this. So, for example, postponing a decision is part of the resequence lens. So what if, and this is happening now, what if you were to postpone a meeting until a later date? That's one option. But what if we postponed? Who could attempt attend the meeting? Now that's a different variation. So in that situation, maybe you postpone a meeting for people who haven't tested negative for the virus or don't have the antibodies, whatever you think it might be appropriate. And then you obviously use the appropriate social distancing. But how can we bring people together where it's safe to bring them together? And that's a different question. And then that might bring up different questions such as, well, how can we rapidly test people and make sure that we have a high level of accuracy? So those are different questions. But each of these questions I want you to start seeing is we started off with how can we replicate and automate to. Now we're getting into questions about how do we test people? And then we could even take this a little bit further with the variations lens. And the variations lens IS lens number 24. And basically what the variations lens says is instead of thinking about a one size fits all strategy, which is our typical mentality, it's an all or nothing. Everybody's going to do this or nobody's going to do this. What if we created variations? And the variations could be a number of variations. One variation could be how do we handle meetings for people who test negative for the virus versus people who test positive for the virus. But we could even look at variations by geography. Maybe people who have to fly versus people who can drive. Or there might be other variations that we start looking at the point. Point is as we start to build our meetings, I think the opportunity is to recognize that we don't need to design for one size fits all strategy. I just did an event recently where originally when we were supposed to meet in person, the maximum capacity was going to be about 600 people. And when it went virtual, they had 3,000 people in attendance. Now, I want you to think about this for a moment. That means that five times more people were attending, getting the message. So if you're an event organizer in the future, to me, it's not like, when are we going back to in person meetings? It's like, how do we go back to in person meetings and leverage the virtual world? Because now we can bring in people from all over the world to be able to get the content. And there's so many different things that we could do with that. Which then will lead us to the last lens we're going to talk about today, which is lens number 13, which is the access lens. And the access lens says that instead of thinking about things from an ownership perspective, how do we use access words such as rent or subscribe or lease or use. And this might really move us towards the how do we create a subscription model for content? How do we give people access to the content without them owning it? So this is sort of like the Netflix model in some respects. You don't have to buy the dvd, you basically get to rent the movie. Now maybe you have an all you can consume subscription model like they do on Netflix. Now maybe it's instead of getting one event, how do you subscribe to multiple events? And I've seen this taking place especially with virtual, where it creates greater value. Instead of just a single event, which is very transactional, if you have a 10 event series where you're building on what you're doing in each event, now you've created greater value. So you could subscribe to a 10 event series and maybe even look at, okay, well, who gets access to the recordings? Maybe you do a subscription model to the recordings, or maybe you do a subscription model to the in person or the live experience. If you go to the live experience, you get to ask questions. If you do the recordings, you can't. Whatever it is, it gives you options and you can see with just a few different lenses. Here we took what was a relatively straightforward and simple example that most people have been using to basically just take their meetings and put them online. To really rethinking what's our goal? What's the result that we're looking to achieve? Can we change the timing to get something completely different? How can we think about subscription and content and delivery? And so there's so many different ways that we can start thinking about this, but it just takes us a few minutes. And when you use the lenses from the book Invisible Solutions. That's going to help you take whatever you thought was the original problem and look at it from different angles. And again, if you don't have the lenses, go to getthelenses.com this is Steve Shapiro. Thanks for listening and happy problem solving.