Podcast appearances and mentions of jim kalbach

In this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky speaks to Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural, about getting over the uncanny valley in Gen AI adoption.You can learn about Mural at https://www.mural.co/

Facilitation isn't just about guiding a process—it's about creating meaning. And in this episode, Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs To Be Done: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs, shares how facilitation and Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) go hand in hand.We dive into the art of moving from insight to action, exploring how facilitators and leaders can use JTBD to break through assumptions, foster collaboration, and design experiences that truly serve the people they're meant for.Jim shares his own journey—from journey mapping to facilitation—revealing how shifting the focus from solutions to human needs changes everything.Find out about:Why facilitation isn't just about neutrality—it's about shaping meaningful outcomesThe power of customer journey maps as tools for conversation and sense-makingHow Jobs to Be Done helps teams focus on real human needs, not just solutionsWhy co-creation leads to better collaboration, alignment, and decision-makingHow to avoid “workshop amnesia” and keep momentum alive after a sessionPractical ways to embed customer-centric thinking into everyday workDon't miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.Links:Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.Jobs to be Done ToolkitConnect to GUEST:Jim on AmazonLinkedIn Support the show✨✨✨Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a free 1-page summary of each upcoming episode directly to your inbox, or explore our eBooks featuring 50-episode compilations for even more facilitation insights. Find out more:https://workshops.work/podcast✨✨✨Did you know? You can search all episodes by keyword to find exactly what you need via our Buzzsprout page!

Jim Kalbach is the Chief Evangelist at Mural 00:00:08 Intro / Chatting / Holiday Reflections 00:02:40 Introducing Jim Kalbach 00:04:20 The Influence of Jazz  00:04:25 Comfort with Uncertainty 00:07:26 The Role of Language 00:09:48 The Nature of Truth 00:10:20 The Importance of Art 00:13:42 Jim's Journey to Mural 00:14:43 Defining Creativity 00:18:28 Music as a Creative Process 00:21:13 Embracing Nonlinearity 00:22:50 The Future of Organizations 00:26:54 Managing Uncertainty in Business 00:33:11 Neurodiversity in the Workplace 00:36:31 The Shift Towards Imagination 00:42:04 The Impact of AI 00:50:38 The Need for Balance 00:57:49 Navigating Change 01:01:57 Personal Growth and Change 01:17:44 Rethinking Business Structures 01:23:26 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

"Now more than ever, we need facilitation, which is different than being a facilitator."- Jim Kalbach In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson talks with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL and author, about his facilitation journey and expertise in mapping. Jim shares a pivotal experience leading a workshop at LexisNexis and how it propelled his career. He discusses the influence of room setup on collaboration, the power of visual maps for team alignment, and his interest in Wardley maps. Jim also reflects on the evolution of facilitation with technology, the shift to remote workshops, and the future of facilitation as a widespread skill. The episode emphasizes the transformative role of facilitation and visual tools in improving group collaboration.  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophkarger/https://www.linkedin.com/company/gotonetwork

In every manmade job, place, and activity, design plays a pivotal role in shaping our experiences. Sadly, many designs miss the mark by neglecting the profound psychosocial impact they wield. This is where Dr. Sara Pazell steps in. As a dynamic design strategist, she empowers companies across industries to embrace human-centered work by integrating designs that ensure not only functionality but transformative success.Dr. Pazell is the managing director and principal consultant at Viva Health at Work and podcaster of WhyWork. At Viva, Sara leads companies to find solutions for human factors and ergonomics design across industries like mining, transportation, healthcare, retail, finance, food and beverage, sport and fitness, and government organizations. In this episode, Dart and Sara discuss:- The job of a work design strategist- Ergonomics and human factors in design- Why companies should consider psychosocial factors in design- The 7 principles of a human-centered organization- How to generate excitement and engagement when designing work- Improving design using failure modes analysis (in reverse)- How to contextualize design for success- The best and worst ways to generate new ideas- And other topics…Dr. Sara Pazell is a principal work design strategist, WhyWork podcaster, and managing director and principal consultant at Viva Health at Work. At Viva Health at Work, Sara leads companies in finding solutions for human factors and ergonomics design and work practices across industries like mining, transportation, healthcare, retail, finance, food and beverage, sport and fitness, and government organizations.In the past, Dr. Pazell has served as a healthcare professional, an executive business manager for health and surgical care facilities, and a trainer for business, leadership, and health and fitness training companies. She has helped publish various case studies and articles around work design and received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Queensland, where she is an Industry Fellow.Resources mentioned:International Ergonomics Association: https://iea.cc/ Human Factors and Ergonomics Society: https://www.hfes.org/ Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia: https://www.ergonomics.org.au/Charted Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors: https://ergonomics.org.uk/ Jobs to Be Done, by Jim Kalbach: https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Be-Done-Playbook-Organization/dp/1933820683 How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand: https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966 Connect with Sara:Viva Health at Work: https://vivahealthgroup.com.au/ WhyWork Podcast: https://whywork.com.au 

In this episode of The Future Of, Sean McDowell, Senior Vice President of Design and Innovation at MillerKnoll; Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural; and Rich Knepprath, Creative Director at Fresh Consulting, join host Jeff Dance to discuss the future of collaboration. They dive into best practices for effective hybrid workplace collaboration, tools for innovating collaboration today, as well as the evolution of work.

Does it feel like something is missing in your remote work environment? Have you been told to just schedule more virtual meetings to enhance collaboration, only to end up feeling disconnected and unproductive? The pain of trying to foster human connection through endless video calls is real, and it's time to explore alternative ways to achieve meaningful collaboration.Jim Kalbach had always been an advocate for remote work, long before the world was thrust into a virtual environment due to the pandemic. Working with Citrix, makers of GoToMeeting, he had already been navigating the remote collaboration space for over a decade. But, he quickly realised that the conventional etiquette of an in-person office setting didn't translate well into a virtual space. The norms, the rituals, and even the simple act of turn-taking in a meeting required a rethink. It was this realisation that pushed him on a journey to find alternative ways to foster human connection in a remote work environment. He began experimenting with intentional habits and rituals, aiming to create a sense of inclusivity and equity in virtual participation. Introducing microstructures such as popcorning, a method of taking turns in a meeting, proved to be a game changer, fostering a sense of connection among team members. His efforts were guided by a single principle - intentionality. The pandemic may have ripped off the band-aid of conventional norms, but in its wake, it also presented a unique opportunity to reimagine and redefine the remote work experience.In this week's episode, Jim will uncover the untapped potential of remote work and the transformative power of collaboration tools and will walk us through the common pitfalls of virtual meetings and how to turn them into productive engagements.Download and listen to learn more. On today's podcast: Harnessing digital tools for effective team communicationUsing Mural to enhance team collaborationTeam agreements in remote workDiving into the Jobs To Be Done framework Follow Jim Kalbach:WebsiteLinkedIn Jim's books:The Jobs To Be Done PlaybookMapping ExperiencesDesigning Web NavigationKiller Walking Bass  Book recommendations:Playing to WinA New Way To ThinkReinventing Organizations Enjoyed the show? Leave a Review

On the podcast today, I had a bit of a fangirl moment. I'm talking to Jim Kalbach, the Chief Evangelist at MURAL and the author of Mapping Experiences. This book has greatly impacted me, and I'm excited to share this conversation with you. We will discuss aligning your marketing and offers around your customers' needs. We will cover why it's important, the role that empathy plays, and how to create a framework that makes the whole process easier.  Jim made me finally stop thinking I sucked at marketing. Instead, I started looking at my emotional intelligence and empathy as strengths instead of weaknesses, which was a game-changer. Let's dive in. Get your Revenue Goal Calculator - https://theboldleadershiprevolution.com/revenue-goal-calculator or Text Revenue to 415-528-7403. Join the waitlist for The Bold Profit Academy - https://theboldleadershiprevolution.com/the-bold-profit-academy  

In this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky speaks to Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL, about how psychological safety provides the basis for creativity in remote teams. You can learn about MURAL at https://www.mural.co/

Most customer experience data strategies include two types of insights: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data tells the stories behind the customers, and quantitative data shares trackable metrics of customers' actions and a brand's performance. But according to Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, modern CX teams have an over-reliance on quantitative data, which can distract from building strong customer relationships.   Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling book The Customer Of The Future.   

Jim Kalbach wrote the book on the jobs to be done research methodology (JTBD). Jim argues persuasively, that JTBD is way more than a tool for understanding what customers really want from a product. When used right, it can be the organizing principle that gets every part of a company pointing in the same direction, all towards satisfying customer needs. In this episode, Dart and Jim discuss:- Applying the Jobs to Be Done theory and methodology to business- Understanding and identifying the unmet needs of a marketplace - Promoting innovation by focusing on problems, not solutions- Jobs to Be Done in HR to find the right work for employees- Social, emotional, and differential factors that affect product market fit- Developing product lines to meet different circumstances- The Jobs to Be Done tools that help teams align their focus- And more…Jim Kalbach is an author, speaker, and instructor in innovation, design, and the future of work. After consulting for large companies such as eBay, Audi, Sony, and Citrix, Jim became Co-Founder and Principal at the JTBD (Jobs to Be Done) Toolkit, an online resource with learning, training, and content on human-centered business. He is also the current Chief Evangelist at Mural, the leading online whiteboard.Jim lived in Germany for 15 years, where he founded the European Information Architecture conferences and the leading UX design event, IA Konferenz. In 2013, he moved back to the United States and wrote Mapping Experiences and The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, among other publications. He is also the former editor of Boxes and Arrows and a former advisory board member of the Information Architecture Institute.Resources Mentioned:The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, by Jim Kalbach: https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Be-Done-Playbook-Organization/dp/1933820683Mapping Experiences, by Jim Kalbach: https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Experiences-Complete-Creating-Blueprints/dp/1491923539 Jobs to Be Done toolkit: https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/The Experience Economy, by Joseph Pine: https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Economy-New-Preface-Authors/dp/1633697975Connect with Jim:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/www.JTBDtoolkit.com 

virtual whiteboards allow for a lot of flexibility when collaborating remotely Subscribe to Managing Remote Teams podcast on Soundwise

Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at Mural, joins us to discuss innovation efforts in the world of visual collaboration. Remote work was at nearly one hundred percent during the pandemic, creating a need for effective digital whiteboards. Not only did people need a working space, but also a space for visual collaboration to take […]

Jim Kalbach shares insights from jazz into collaboration, how experience maps help us navigate design, and why Jobs To Be Done deserves our attention. Highlights include: Why do we confuse ideas with innovation? What does it mean to have ‘big ears' and how is that useful? How do you manage challenges to your recommendations? What gets in the way of effective collaboration? How can Jobs To Be Done help to find the right problems to fix? ====== Who is Jim Kalbach? Jim is the Chief Evangelist and VP of Customer Experience at MURAL, the world's leading digital whiteboard.  Prior to joining MURAL, Jim was a Principal UX Consultant at Citrix Online, and he has also worked in numerous consulting roles for other large companies such, as eBay, SONY, LexisNexis and Razorfish Germany. Somehow, on top of all this, Jim found the time to write three critically acclaimed books: The first, Designing Web Navigation, was published in 2007, followed by Mapping Experiences in 2016 and, most recently, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook in 2020.   While working in Europe, where he spent the first 15 years of his career, Jim co-founded the popular European Information Architecture conferences as well as the leading UX event in Germany - the IA Konferenz.  He has also previously served on the advisory board of the Information Architecture Institute and as an editor for Boxes and Arrows, the popular online journal for user experience, and has graced the stage at TedX, UX Brighton, Enterprise UX, and UX STRAT. ====== Find Jim here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimkalbach Website: https://experiencinginformation.com/  Jim's books: The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs -  https://amzn.to/3vwdoky Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams - https://amzn.to/3G9lZ1s Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience -  https://amzn.to/3IfGah9  ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

In this episode we speak with Jim Kalbach - author, speaker, chief evangelist at MUURAL, and author of 3 books including The Jobs To Be Done Playbook - about how to use the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework to drive better marketing performance and growth.

During this podcast episode, Jim Kalbach shares how “asynchronous communication is a muscle we haven't trained” and how boosting creativity in a remote environment is mostly about using different tools and strategies. He shares his experience developing creativity in remote teams and what has worked and what hasn't. 

What's it like to ditch UX design and take on a new role at your company? How do you get it together to write a UX book? Are UX skills relevant outside of work? Meg and Jessamyn speak to Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL. More on Jim Kalbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/ https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Be-Done-Playbook-Organization/dp/1933820683 https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/

In this session, we talk all about the need for enterprises to be customer-driven. We speak to Milan Guenther, President of the Intersection Group, and Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural. We talk about not only the importance of enterprises being customer-driven but how they can practically go about organizationally and architecturally achieving this, always thinking about the customer experience and everything they do. 

virtual whiteboards allow for a lot of flexibility when collaborating remotely

During the writing and editing of User Tested, coauthor Janelle Estes reached out to Jim Kalbach to review draft chapters and share his feedback.  Kalbach, the Chief Evangelist at MURAL and author of several books, loved the book but wanted more stories and proof points.  In this bonus podcast episode, a previously recorded LinkedIn Live conversation, Kalbach and Estes, UserTesting's Chief Insights Officer, discuss the writing of User Tested and the importance of talking with your customers.  Kalbach reviewed the first two chapters on why Human Insights are important, and the last two chapters on how to make this happen in any organization. He said his advice could be applied to anyone writing a book. He wanted more stories— or evidence— as a way to connect to a larger audience, who may be unfamiliar with incorporating testing and customer feedback into their business processes. Kalbach said you want to be able to talk with these people in a language they can understand. Ignore them, and you're just talking with folks in an echo chamber who already believe and support your point of view. It is a challenge many in the UX industry have experienced, explaining the need for user insights. But as Tamara Adlin in Episode 12 of the Human Insight Podcast said, you need to talk in a language your audience will understand.  Listen to the episode for further insights.

During the writing and editing of User Tested, coauthor Janelle Estes reached out to Jim Kalbach to review draft chapters and share his feedback. Kalbach, the Chief Evangelist at MURAL and author of several books, loved the book but wanted more stories and proof points. In this bonus podcast episode, a previously recorded LinkedIn Live conversation, Kalbach and Estes, UserTesting's Chief Insights Officer, discuss the writing of User Tested and the importance of talking with your customers. Kalbach reviewed the first two chapters on why Human Insights are important, and the last two chapters on how to make this happen in any organization.He said his advice could be applied to anyone writing a book. He wanted more stories— or evidence— as a way to connect to a larger audience, who may be unfamiliar with incorporating testing and customer feedback into their business processes. Kalbach said you want to be able to talk with these people in a language they can understand. Ignore them, and you're just talking with folks in an echo chamber who already believe and support your point of view.It is a challenge many in the UX industry have experienced, explaining the need for user insights. But as Tamara Adlin in Episode 12 of the Human Insight Podcast said, you need to talk in a language your audience will understand. Listen to the episode for further insights. To learn more about User Tested: https://www.usertesting.com/usertested.

In observance of the winter holidays, this episode doesn't feature a guest interview. Instead, I reflect on five themes that emerged in the diverse conversations we hosted on the podcast during 2021. I wish you and yours happy holidays! Cover photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash. If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review it in Apple's Podcasts directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200 Show notes The Informed Life episode 53: Jason Ulaszek on Healing Social Rifts The Informed Life episode 54: Kourosh Dini on DEVONthink The Informed Life episode 55: Hà Phan on Product Leadership The Informed Life episode 56: Margot Bloomstein on Trust The Informed Life episode 57: Ben Mosior on Wardley Maps The Informed Life episode 58: Jesse James Garrett on Leadership and IA The Informed Life episode 59: Matt LeMay on One Page / One Hour The Informed Life episode 60: Kat Vellos on Friendship The Informed Life episode 61: Jeff Sussna on Customer Value Charting The Informed Life episode 63: Sophia Prater on Object Oriented UX The Informed Life episode 64: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale The Informed Life episode 66: Jim Kalbach on Jobs to Be Done The Informed Life episode 68: Mags Hanley on Career Architecture The Informed Life episode 69: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1 The Informed Life episode 70: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2 The Informed Life episode 71: Sunni Brown on Deep Self Design The Informed Life episode 73: Patrick Tanguay on Newsletter Curation The Informed Life episode 74: Annie Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind The Informed Life episode 75: Hans Krueger on the Cycle of Emotions The Informed Life episode 76: Dan Brown on IA Lenses Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Welcome to the informed life. In each episode of this show, we find out how people organize information to get things done. I am your host horsehair angle. Today, I don't have a guest on the show. Instead, I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than a conversation with a single guest, I'm going to do a review of some of the things that I heard during the course of the year. So, you'll be hearing from several of the folks who graciously agreed to be on the show. And the reason why I'm doing this is because I listen to a lot of interview-based podcasts. And while I find myself getting totally engrossed in each individual conversation, I often lose track of what I've heard before in prior conversations, and I have a hard time making sense of patterns that may be emerging. So, I thought that during this quiet time of year I might take some time out to do just that, to see if there are any themes or patterns that have stood out during the interviews i've done in the past 12 months. Of course, the guests on the show, didn't speak with each other. I don't want to imply that they're somehow in conversation or responding to each other's points. In fact, the only point that any of these conversations have in common was that I was a part of all of them. I'm also aware that when you take snippets of interviews out of context, It may change their meaning, especially when put next to other snippets from other conversations. And that's definitely not my intent. I'm not going to present these in the order in which they were recorded. In fact, I'm going to talk about these in no particular order. So, in this episode, I'm just going to edit these together and see if I can highlight some of these themes that seemed to have come up in more than one conversation. If you want to check out the full conversations, which I encourage you to do, I will include links to each episode in the show notes. Hopefully, this will prove useful to you if you choose to revisit the conversations we've had over the last year. So, now onto the themes. We recorded 25 conversations during 2021. And in revisiting them now, I've grouped them into five high-level themes. There are other ideas that have come up and there are different arrangements you could make, but these are five themes that stood out to me. The first theme, I'm calling, aligning our values with our actions. The second is about using intentional structures for self-development. The third is about practicing information architecture at scale. The fourth is highlighting tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent. And the fifth is about thinking beyond the brain. I'll unpack what these are about one by one and hopefully draw connections between them to try to bring some coherence to the conversations that we've been having throughout the year. Because I do think that there are things that connect them. Aligning our values with our actions Jorge: So now, let's dive into the first of these themes, which has to do with aligning our values with our actions. And this is one that came in this year, particularly strongly and with intent on my part because I was appalled by the January 6th insurrection in Washington, DC. This horrible event brought to life the degree to which there are deep social rifts in the U.S. And I I've been thinking about what designers can do so what can I do through my work to help make these things better. So I wanted to talk with folks who have been explicitly thinking about this stuff. And this led me to reach out to Jason Ulaszek, who has used design to help heal Rwandan society in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, which I think is obviously a much more extreme situation than the one that we're facing here in the U.S. Now, Jason is not originally from Rwanda, he's from the U.S., so I asked him if there's anything that we could learn from his experience that might help us in our society to start healing the rifts that divide us. And I was very intrigued by his answer; he talked about re-engaging with cultural values. And this is what he had to say: Jason Ulaszek: What was part of the Rwandans cultural value system well before the genocide against the Tutsi, and is now swung fully back -- and they're working hard to ensure that that's the case -- is a really strong sense of cultural values. What they've really tapped into -- and I think this is where it gets into design a bit -- is that they've tapped into ways to embody these cultural values inside of the experiences people have within education. Jorge: So there's an explicit attempt there to create structures — in that case, within the educational system — that help highlight the common social values that bind a people together. And in part the way that I understood it, at least the part of the idea there is to try to rebuild a sense of trust among parties. And we had another episode this year where we talked explicitly about building trust. And this was in episode 56, where I had a conversation with Margot Bloomstein about her book on the subject, which came out this year, called Trustworthy. And, as Margot put it in our conversation, a big part of building trust has to do with authenticity: with having our actions be grounded in a clear set of values and having them be aligned with those values. This is how Margot put it: Margot Bloomstein: You used the term "authenticity." And I think that that's a term that we throw around a lot; that's a term marketers love to throw around. Who wouldn't want to be authentic? And I always wonder, authentic to what? Do you know who you are? Know thy self first, and then you can determine, well, how do we align our actions with our values? Because that's how we measure authenticity: it's the distance between our actions and our words, all of that external stuff and our values. And I think for many organizations, they can jump into kind of the national conversation, into the international conversation, around many of those social issues and say, "Here's what we're doing. Here's why we support this. Here's what we're doing internally. And here's what we're doing externally to make this better for everyone." To put a stake in the ground. And they can do it building on that long-term, authentic investment in their values. Jorge: I love this idea of being more intentional about aligning our values and our actions as we seek to be more authentic. And of course Margot was talking here about doing that at the level of organizations, but it's also possible to do it at an individual level. And in my conversation with author Kat Vellos, we dug into that specifically in the context of her work. In nurturing friendships. And I asked Kat about how we might be more authentic in looking to create the structures that allow us to nurture friendships as we get older. And she highlighted the importance of being present. This is what she had to say about it. Kat Vellos: The more you immerse yourself in what is actually happening in that time that you're connecting with the other person, the more likely you are to feel the benefit. You know, when you're spending time sharing stories with a friend say, focus on their story, focus on them. Get curious. Ask followup questions and have that be the focus of your attention, rather than halfway listening and halfway being in your own head. Like, "do I feel less lonely right now? Do I feel less awkward right now?" Get out of that mental evaluation mode and get real immersed and real curious and interested in the other person. And that's actually when somebody feels heard. That's actually when somebody feels more connected is when you're really present and holding space with each other. Intentional structures for self-development Jorge: This idea of being more present was also an important part of our second theme, which has to do with creating intentional structures for self-development. I like to think of this almost as kind of an information architecture of the self. So, while it might seem on the surface like some of these conversations run a bit further a field from the subject of the show, I see them as being quite aligned in that we are creating conceptual structures that help us affect some kind of change. And in this second theme, the change has to do with internal transformation. We delved into this in a few conversations during the year. The first I will highlight is episode 71, where I interviewed Sunni Brown about her work in Deep Self Design, which is a practice rooted in Zen Buddhism and design thinking. And during this conversation, Sunni chastised me for allowing myself to let my devices keep me from being more present during a camping trip with my family. And I loved how Sunni talked about being more present. This is what she had to say: Sunni Brown: Camping, when it's like safe and beautiful... the point of it is to actually get you into a different state. To get your regulatory system in a different state so that you can enjoy your life and be present with your family and look at the sky and realize that you're part of... you are the sky, there's no difference between you and the sky, you just project that there is. And like, you know what I mean? So, you have to understand that that space is essential for your humanity and and make it a priority. And you can tell people, I mean, there's ways to approach it that are gentle on other people. So you can let people know, "I'm going to go dark for 72 hours. You should know that," Or, "I'm going to go dark, and then I'm going to have one hour where I look at stuff," you know? You have to design it for your life and what's actually available for you. Sometimes people have sick parents at home or sick kids or whatever, but you have to start to understand the benefit of it. Because I think most people think it's just like something they would lose. Like, they wouldn't get... something taken away from them. And I'm like, "no! It's something you're giving yourself that is priceless." And you get amazing ideas. Like your productivity goes up. So, I call it going slow to go fast. Actually I read this interesting Nietzsche quote, which I don't read Nietzsche a lot or anything, but like he said like great ideas are found when you're walking. And Steve Jobs was... Also, I'mnot obsessed with Steve Jobs, but he did a lot of walking meetings. So, If you are a productivity junkie, going slow helps you go fast. And it actually frees up a lot of stuck tension in the body and stuck ideas that you can't get through and it gives you solutions and ahas and insights. So there's huge rewards in it anyway, if you need it to be aligned with productivity. But it's like, dude, we're gonna die one day, Jorge. Like all of us! And the last thing I want to do is be like, "I spent my whole life on my iPhone!" That is like the worst thing that could happen. Jorge: So, we need to be more aware about what is going on with our systems, with our bodies — and we need to be present. And this was not the only conversation that I had that delved on similar subjects. In episode 75, I talked with my friend, Hans Krueger, who has also been influenced by Buddhism, on what he calls the cycle of emotions, which is a conceptual structure — a way of thinking about emotions and how emotions affect our behavior. Here's Hans: Hans Krueger: What surprisingly few people realize is that there is like a real system behind this thing, this whole emotional complex. How they work, how they interact with each other, what leads to what, what you can do to actually cultivate your own emotional state. A state that allows you to perceive as clearly as possible what is real, versus what you imagine is real. Jorge: There's an emerging theme here in the power of visualizing, might be one way to think about it, but at the very least naming these conceptual distinctions, becoming more aware of what is happening internally. And again, this might come across to some folks as not being relevant to information architecture at all. But I do think of these as conceptual structures where there are distinctions that we label and we establish relationships between those distinctions. And the structure helps us understand what we're doing so that we can act more skillfully, more mindfully. And at least one guest during the year talked about using such conceptual models, not just to help us personally, but to help us in our careers. In episode 68, Mags Hanley shared with us her work on career architecture, which is also the subject of her book, which was published after we talked. And Mags made the connection between the methods, processes and tools that we use as information architects and how we develop our careers. Mags Hanley: Career architecture is about how we can use the methods that we think about and we use as information architects or as UX professionals and apply that in a very systematic way into how we think about our careers. Practicing information architecture at scale Jorge: I like this idea of using information, architecture and user experience methods, practices, and tools for our own personal development. But we can also use them to develop our teams and to work at a different level of impact. I think of this as information architecture at scale, which is the next theme that emerged in the conversations that we had on the podcast over the year. Two that immediately come to mind, but I'm not going to highlight as much here, are the conversation with Jim Kalbach on jobs to be done, which, in addition to Jim's book, helped me clarify my own understanding of what jobs to be done are. And this is an important subject, one that designers and product managers need to be aware of. So, if you have heard the phrase, but are not entirely clear on what it means, I encourage you to check out my conversation with Jim. Another one is the conversation that I had recently with Dan Brown on information architecture lenses. And as that explained in that episode, the lenses are a set of cards, and now podcasts and YouTube videos, that aim to serve as a tool to help designers deal with architectural conundrums. So again, if you are into information architecture, and you haven't done so already. I encourage you to check out the conversation with Dan Brown. That said, there are a few episodes that I do want to call out here and bring to your attention. One is the conversation I had on episode 63 with Sophia Prater about her object oriented user experience framework. I see this as a way of formalizing conceptual models so they can be shared and discussed with other team members. This is how sophia described it during our conversation: Sophia Prater: OOUX is all about saying, "okay. If we know that our users think in objects and just human beings think in objects - not not just our developers - human beings think in objects, and to be able to gain understanding, you need to understand what the objects are in that system. And to understand what the objects are we need a certain level of consistency and recognizability to our objects." So as the designers of these environments, if we don't get really super clear on what our objects are, there's no way. There's just absolutely no way in hell that we're going to be able to translate that to our end users. We're just not! If we can't get it straight on our team and we can't get it straight among ourselves, then 1) that's going to create a lot of communication problems internally which is a problem that I hear all the time. We've got everybody on the team coming together. And some people, depending on what department you're in or what your role is, you've got the same object, the same thing being called two or three different things and different objects being called the same thing. And you're trying to design complex software. So just getting on the same page internally is going to be absolutely intrinsic to making sure that it's clear to your end users. Jorge: Another conversation that had to do with considering design at a different level of abstraction was in episode 64, where Sarah Barrett shared with us considerations about the architectural scale of the systems we design. I was particularly drawn to the way Sarah described how we should approach the intended effects of our work: Sarah Barrett: Occasionally, I get comments or people worrying that our information architecture isn't innovative enough that we're not doing anything surprising or introducing anything brand new. And I feel very strongly that your architecture is not the place to surprise people. Like, there are actual architects out there building very innovative homes that no one wants to live in. And I have no interest in doing that. I really want us to use the oldest, most standard, most expected way of doing things. I think the example of the grocery store is another great way here. There's a lot of benefit to not innovating in the layout of a grocery store. There probably is some benefit in innovating a little bit around the edges or in some details, but you gain a lot from making it legible and making it expected for people. And so, that one is really about... okay, given these things that we expect to have: we expect to have global navigation, we expect to have metadata on content, we expect to have titles and breadcrumbs... how do we unpack what each of those things is doing for us and make sure that between the suite of those elements we are using? Because you never use just one, you use lots of them together. Between all of those elements, we are presenting a coherent, complete view of the wayfinding people need. Jorge: It's one thing to create a coherent and complete system that allows people to find and understand things, and it's another to create the conditions that allow that system to evolve over time gracefully as conditions change but to retain that cohesiveness. And doing this requires that we understand that the things that we are designing are in fact systems and they are systems that will require stewardship over time. This implies that we need leadership. And that was the subject of episode 58, where I had a conversation with Jesse James Garrett about leadership and information architecture. This is part of what jesse said during that show. Jesse James Garrett: The way that I talk to folks about design leadership, who have come from a design background -that is to say they've been doing design work - is that leadership is just another design problem. And you're working with different materials and you're working toward different outcomes and you're having to follow different principles, but the task is the same task. It is a creative problem-solving task. It is a systems-thinking task, as a leader. So looking at the ways that you're already doing that systems-thinking, the ways in which you already doing that architecture for yourself in the work that you're already doing, and those will be your strengths. And those will be the pillars that you can lean on that are going to support your work as a leader going forward. They will evolve and they will not look like what they looked like when you were doing content inventories or task flows or whatever other artifacts you might've been working on as a designer. But the skill set that you're building is the same skill set. Jorge: The relationship between design and leadership, and how designers can use our tools, methods, practices, et cetera, to take on leadership roles, was also the subject of episode 55, which featured a conversation with hop-on about her own trajectory from design to product leadership. Hà Phan: I think the difficulty was between the role I have now, or the delta between the role I have now versus being a UX designer is that, you know, it's really a leadership role to basically provide the path to clarity. So when you have a vision, even as a seasoned UX designer, you're going to present forth this vision. And usually there's a thousand questions and a thousand steps before you get there, right? And usually you don't get there entirely. You know, you don't get to the vision entirely the way you had envisioned it. You're going to take turns, right? And I think in this role, what I get to do is that I get to enable the team to find that path to clarity, and to provide the milestones or the mission for each of the goals along the way. Jorge: This idea that leaders provide clarity and vision is very important. And it's one of the reasons why designers can make good leaders, because part of what designers do is clarify and help visualize abstract ideas. I keep saying that design is about making possibilities tangible: we take these vague notions, requirements, constraints, ill defined contexts, and we make things. And these things that we make can be validated somehow. We can put them in context and have them be used by the people that we intend to serve, to see whether things are working or not. And we create feedback loops where we make them incrementally better, better suited to meeting the needs of the people they serve. Visualizing systemic intent Jorge: And this idea of leadership as a role that clarifies and articulates a vision, brings us to the fourth theme that I noticed in going back over this year's episodes, which has to do with highlighting tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent. And by that, I mean different ways of mapping systems and making systems more tangible. Again, this idea of making the abstract more relatable. And we had several conversations along those lines. The first I'm going to highlight here is episode 59, in which Matt LeMay may shared with us One Page / One Hour, an approach he's developed to help teams articulate what they're making by working fast and iterating. So, rather than creating some kind of polished deck, the idea here is to articulate a vision really quickly so that you can spend less time upfront creating polished artifacts and spend more time iterating with stakeholders and other team members. Here's Matt describing how he came up with One Page / One Hour. Matt LeMay: I wrote up this pledge to my business partners saying I'm willing to forego the sense of individual accomplishment that comes from presenting finished and polished deliverables to my colleagues. I promise that I will spend no more than one page and one hour working on any deliverable - any document - before I bring it to the team. In other words, if I show up with five beautifully formatted pages or a one-page that took me 10 hours to create, I want you to hold me accountable to that. I want you to say, "man, why did you do this? We made a deal. We made a commitment to each other! We all know that if we actually want to deliver value, if we want to do valuable work, we need to collaborate earlier on. You can't go off onto your own and create this big thing, and then just want us to tell you how great it is!" Jorge: One Page / One Hour is about trying to articulate very quickly what we have in mind and sharing it so that we can start iterating on it. A few of the other conversations that we had during the year around visualizing systems and visualizing intent were about artifacts that are a little more elaborate. An example of this is Customer Value Charting, which Jeff Sussna shared with us in episode 61. Customer Value Charting, as Jeff explained, it is a tool to balance strategy and agility. And the purpose of creating that balance is to drive customer benefits, which are related to but not the same as business benefits. Jeff illustrated this by means of an example using a common service. Jeff Sussna: The benefit of the dry cleaner is that I can get my tuxedo cleaned in time to go to the formal event. It's not fundamentally about a cash register or a counter or even cleaning chemicals. And I mention that because a lot of the conversation I see around outcomes over outputs tends to actually talk about business outcomes. You know, revenue growth and customer retention, and time on site and business outcomes are great. I don't have any problem with them, but people tend to skip this step. We have a hypothesis that this feature will cause this change in customer behavior, which will lead to this business outcome or business impact. But it leaves open the question of, well, why is the customer changing their behavior? What is the benefit to them? Jorge: These are complex questions to take on for designers or for anyone, frankly. And it's helpful to hear about how folks are going about it. Customer Value Charting is one way of doing it. Another way of visualizing systems and visualizing things like customer needs in a systemic way was shared with us by Ben Mosiure in our conversation, which focused on Wardley maps. Ben Mosior: Wardley mapping is a visual way of representing systems: its users, its needs, its capabilities, its relationships between all those three things. And then it's also positioning those things in a way that helps their qualities become more apparent. So there's this thing that Simon Research called "Evolution." It's basically how do things evolve and get better or die under the pressures of supply demand competition, and what you get is like things start out new, uncertain, high risk, high failure, but with a high potential for future value. But then as they evolve, they get better. You know, someone's always like looking at these weird ideas and trying to make them better because capitalism basically suggest there's money to be made. So someone out there is going to try to make it better. And over time, if the idea is worth investing in, it will continue to get better, more known, more boring, more predictable, and the value of it will be more concrete. And eventually, if it evolves to a certain extent, it becomes an invisible part of our everyday lives. And so, Simon says, look, you want to represent the systems that we're a part of both in terms of their parts and relationships, but also in terms of how evolved each of those parts are. Because what that does is it sets you up to understand the implications of those qualities. New stuff is going to be high failure, old stuff that everybody understands, that's just part of everyday reality like power in the wall. It is going to be less surprising, it's going to be less failure. And so that means that depending on the context, depending on the part of the system we're looking at, we need to have a different way of approaching it. And I think that's the entire point. By making visual artifacts -- by talking about our systems visually -- we can come together, look at a specific part of it, appreciate its qualities, and then together determine what our collective intent is about that part of the system. Jorge: That's a great description of this idea that we can take these complex abstract ideas and make them tangible, make them manifest in the world, and as a result, make it possible for us to have conversations about them, to somehow change the state of things, to make things better. Thinking beyond the brain Jorge: And that brings us to the fifth and final theme that emerged over the year and that I want to emphasize here, which has to do with using tools and our environment to extend our cognitive system. So, in some way, when we are putting up stickies or diagrams or anything up on the wall, we are making it possible for us to share a cognitive space of sorts. And this is true, whether we're doing it with a note-taking app or stickies on a whiteboard. In taking stuff out of our heads and putting them out into the world, we can somehow extend our minds. And that's why I'm calling this fifth theme "thinking beyond the brain." Conversations about this theme came in two different flavors. On the one hand, we had folks who shared with us their thinking processes and tools. And on the other hand, we had a few conversations that were about thinking in this way itself and I'll say a little bit more about both of those. So, first with the thinking processes and tools. In episode 75, Patrick Tanguay shared with us, how he uses a combination of tools to write one of my favorite newsletters, Sentiers. And it's a setup that mirrors somewhat closely my own setup. Another great conversation about a particular tool was in episode 54, where Kourosh Dini told us about how he's using DEVONthink for building a personal knowledge management system. I was very excited to talk with Kourosh because he wrote a book that helped me use DEVONthink better. If you're unfamiliar with this tool and you are someone who needs to manage a lot of information, let's say if you're teaching or writing, it behooves you to give episode 54 a listen. As I mentioned, I also hosted a few discussions which were not about tools in particular, but a little more meta about how the mind itself works beyond the brain. I'll be frank with you, these were some of my favorite conversations during the year. One was with Annie Murphy Paul about her book, The Extended Mind. Annie's book is the clearest explanation I've read on the science behind the field of embodied cognition. It was one of my favorite reads of the year because it does a really good job at dispelling erroneous notions about how the brain works. And I think that this is a very important subject for designers to understand. Here's Annie. Annie Murphy Paul: I always like to say we're more like animals than we are like machines. You know, the brain is a biological organ. I mean, I know this is obvious, but we really can get very entranced in a way by this metaphor of "brain as computer." The brain is a biological organ that evolved to carry out tasks that are often very different from the tasks that we expect it to execute today. And so, our misunderstanding of what the brain is leads us, as you were saying, Jorge, to create these structures in society. In education and in the workplace, in our everyday lives, that really don't suit the reality of what the brain is. I mean, I'm thinking about how, for example, we expect ourselves to be productive. Whether that's in the workplace, or what we expect our students to do in school. You know, we often expect ourselves to sit still, don't move around, don't change the space where you're in. Don't talk to other people. Just sit there and kind of work until it's done. And that's how we expect ourselves to get serious thinking done. And that makes sense, if the brain is a computer, you know? You feed it information and it processes the information, then it spits out the answer in this very linear fashion. But that's not at all how the brain works. Because the brain is so exquisitely sensitive to context, and that context can be the way our bodies are feeling and how they're moving, that context can be literally where we are situated and what we see and what we experience around us, and that context can be the social context: whether we're with other people, whether we're talking to them, how those conversations are unfolding -- all those things have an incredibly powerful impact on how we think. And so, when we expect the brain to function like a computer, whether that's in the office or in the classroom, we're really underselling its actual powers -- its actual genius -- and we're cutting ourselves off from the wellsprings of our own intelligence, which is the fact that we are embodied creatures embedded in an environment and set in this network of relationships. So, it really... we're really kind of leaving a lot of potential intelligence on the table when we limit our idea of what the brain is in that way. Jorge: While this may seem like we are venturing a little far from the ostensible subject of the show, which is about how people organize information to get things done, there's two reasons why I think it's important for us to delve into this subject. One reason is that, if we are to properly organize information so that we can find things, understand things and so on, we have to understand how our minds work, because ultimately what we're doing is we are designing for minds. And the second reason is that in so doing — in organizing information, in creating these information environments — we are creating contexts of the sort that Annie was talking about there. Even if they are not physical contexts, they are contexts that influence how we understand things. The second conversation I had this year on this subject and which I want to highlight here is the conversation I had with my friend, Karl Fast over episodes 69 and 70. And as you might know, if you've been listening to the show for a while, that's the first time I've ever done a double header. In other words, that I've split a conversation between two episodes. And it's just because we had so much to talk about. And I don't think I can do that conversation justice by extracting just any one clip. But again, I do believe that this is an important subject for you to know about, so I encourage you to check out the whole thing. Closing Jorge: So there you have it, that's a very high level overview of some of the conversations that have stood out to me in the podcast over the last year. Now, obviously there were many more — I told you that we recorded 25 episodes — I don't want to in any way suggest that the other ones weren't as interesting. I just wanted to highlight the ones that I thought manifested some of these themes. And to recap them, the five themes are: aligning our values with our actions, using intentional structures for self-development, practicing information architecture at scale, tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent and then finally, thinking beyond the brain. These are subjects that I care about. And it's no accident that we end up having conversations about these things on the show. One of the interesting things about revisiting them now at the end of the year, is that I can start seeing threads that run through several of the themes. For example, the idea that we need to visualize abstract and complex systems, and that doing so allows us to have better conversations about them. That seems to be a thread that's running through various of these themes. It's true, whether we are talking about our own internal values or our career development, or whether we're talking about a service that we are looking to develop for our clients. And like I've said before, I think that designers — and particularly structurally- and systemically-minded designers, such as information architects — are particularly well-suited to visualize systems in this way. The other thread that I see running through all of this is the importance of considering the context that we are working with and working on, and not just the content of what we're designing. The things that we make are going to be experienced in some kind of environment, whether it's a physical environment or some kind of information environment. And the environment makes a big difference. We understand things in context. And part of what we do as information architects is establish those contexts. That's one of the reasons why I've been emphasizing these conversations about embodied cognition and the extended mind. Because science is making it increasingly clear that thinking happens, not just in our nervous systems, but in our bodies. And more to the point here, it happens out in the world. It happens in our environments and it happens in the tools that we interact with. And again, it's a system that is comprised by ourselves as actors, agents, but also the environments in which we're operating. And we can configure those environments in various ways to help us think better. And I think that this is an important frontier, so to speak, an important area of development for people who design structures of information, who create contexts through language and signs. I've loved the conversations that we've had on the show this year. And that is mostly due to the fact that the guests have been great. I am very grateful to everyone who has agreed to be on the show to have me interview them, to share their ideas, their work, their research, their experience with us. I also want to thank Sarah Clarkson, who I have not acknowledged in the show before. And I'm long overdue in doing that, but Sarah helps me edit the podcast. And her help has been invaluable in getting these shows out to you on time. And of course, I'm very grateful for you; for the fact that you are listening to this, that you have decided to make the show a part of your podcast listening. I would love to know whether there's anything that we can do to make things better. So, please drop by the informed.life, and leave us a note. But for now, I'll just tell you that I am planning to keep the show going. I have guests already lined up for next year. I'm excited about these conversations: having them and also being able to share them with you. So again, thank you. I wish you and yours happy holidays and I look forward to sharing more with you next year.

How do you bring humanity to work? How do you connect with your team on different levels?   Today, we are in New York, and we talk with Jim Kalbach. Jim is a noted author, speaker, musician, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the digital online whiteboard designed for remote collaboration and visual problem-solving. Jim studied music theory and composition with 12-tone composer Charles Wuorinen, and that gives us a kick-start to discuss the differences between fixed instructions, lead sheets and free improvisation in music and our daily work.  We talk about systems thinking in a 12-tone composition where every note is equal and how this connects to design thinking. And we chat about the difference between rhythm, beat and cadence in agile development.  Jim shares with us his CEO playing guitar and singing in a meeting and how this brought in playfulness, opened things up and made it meaningful.   Show notes Connect with Jim:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/   JTBD Tool Kit website: www.jtbdtoolkit.com   Jim on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JimKalbach     More info The Power of Music Thinking is brought to you by CREATIVE COMPANION Learn more about The Music Thinking Framework, the Jam Cards and the blog on musicthinking.com or the Music Thinking LinkedIn page. See the latest episode of The Power of Music Thinking    

In Episode 577, Rob Walling chats with Jim Kalbach about how to uncover the right problem to solve with the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework. If you haven’t been exposed to JTBD, this episode will be a great primer as we dive into practical examples for bootstrapped or mostly-bootstrapped founders. The topics we cover […]Click the icon below to listen.       

Hybrid work is the order of the day for many companies as they ponder their future. But what does hybrid work actually mean and how do you design it to work for both employees and the organization? In this episode of Get Reworked, Jim Kalbach, chief evangelist at digital whiteboard company MURAL, talks about how the current moment is an inflection point for designing places where people actually want to work. "I don't think it's a change in work that we've experienced during the pandemic," he said. "It's a change in lifestyle that we've experienced and because of that people kind of got a flavor of a different way of living and working. And I don't think they're ready to give that up." Highlights of the conversation include: Why you have to be intentional about how you design hybrid and remote work. How to use small moments within meetings to create a positive culture. How user experience and design thinking can be used to create effective hybrid work experiences. The 5 P Framework for thinking about hybrid work, and why policy and practice should drive your approach. ​Why now is the time to reinvent how you engage with teams and embrace a playful mindset. Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk about the oeuvre of Nicolas Cage movies and how the journeyman Hollywood actor just might be the panacea for what ails the digital workplace. Listen in for more. Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at editors@simplermedia.com.

The hybrid office is not new. It existed long before the pandemic, but we've forgotten how poor the experience was for remote participants. We now have a chance to reinvent meetings so that all participants – both remote and in-person – are 100% engaged and productive. How? In this episode, I interview Jim Kalbach, author, [...]

Welcome back to another episode of The Defiant Business Podcast! Today, I have Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL, an amazing interactive whiteboard application. You can use MURAL to brainstorm, do exercises, make a workshop more engaging, and more all in real-time. Jim is a noted Author, Speaker, and Instructor in experience design, strategy, and visual methods, as well as remote facilitation. A long-time member of MURAL for nearly six years, his personal mission is to make imagination work possible in global organizations, anywhere, anytime. In this episode, we're going to talk about how Mural came to be, as well as how entrepreneurs, coaches, and people who create online workshops can use it to increase engagement with their audience during an online workshop or class. So if you're interested in learning unique ways to make your next online workshop more engaging and interactive, then this episode is for you. Follow along on Instagram at @defythestatusquobiz To connect with other Defiant Businesses, join the Facebook Group --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/defiant-business-podcast/message

Jim Kalbach is the chief evangelist at MURAL, a leading provider of online visual collaboration software. He's the author of Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O'Reilly, 2016), and his latest, The Jobs to Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). In this conversation, we dive into Jobs to Be Done, how it relates to design, and how jobs can create an “out of body experience” for organizations. Listen to the show Download episode 66 Show notes @JimKalbach on Twitter Jim Kalbach on LinkedIn MURAL The Jobs to Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams by Jim Kalbach Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience by Jim Kalbach JTBD Toolkit Book Notes: “The Jobs To Be Done Playbook” by Jorge Arango Know Your Customers' “Jobs to Be Done” by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan How We Align Product Development with Jobs To Be Done at MURAL by Agustin Soler The JTBD toolkit Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Jim, welcome to the show. Jim: Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jorge. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited to have you. Not only have you and I been friends for a long time, but you also wrote a book last year that I liked a lot, and I actually wrote about it in my blog. I'm excited to talk with you about the book and about what you're up to. So, for folks who might not know you, can you please introduce yourself? About Jim Jim: Yeah, sure! Hey everybody, Jim Kalbach here. Calling in from Jersey City, New Jersey, where I'm originally from, on the east coast. I moved to Germany for a long time. I lived in Germany for about 14 years and then came back to the U. S. But I have a background in information science and worked as an information architect for a long time, getting into topics around usability and UX. I have a very strong classic kind of design — product design — background. But I was always interested in research and strategic aspects of design and innovation. And then I got exposed to Jobs to Be Done around 2003, and always tried to incorporate aspects of that in my work here and there. Just kind of testing the waters. So, I've been looking at Jobs to Be Done for a while now, actually, in my design roles, but then also beyond that as well too. Jorge: You're currently at MURAL, right? Jim: Correct. Yeah, I'm the Chief Evangelist at MURAL. I've been with that company for six and a half years now. I was employee number 12 and through the pandemic, our business has expanded greatly. It's just… things have just exploded in a good way. Of course, we believe we have a tool — a virtual whiteboard — we have a tool that can help people. You know, through the pandemic, it was great to see our mission that we had been building up for five years before the pandemic then suddenly become hyper-relevant, and people reaching out and grabbing us by the collar and saying, "thank you for saving my project!" So that was just really fulfilling to see our mission, become hyper relevant. But again, at the same time, it was absolutely fantastic for our business. And now we're like 600 people in the company. It's crazy how much we've grown. I started and I built up the customer success team and the support team here at MURAL. So, it was a little bit of shift from my background in product design when I got to MURAL. But then as we scaled, I wasn't the right person to scale a global customer success team. So, I moved over into what we're calling "Chief Evangelist" and it's basically a lot of outreach, writing, speaking onstage, doing some research, building relationships with our biggest and best customers, but also just reaching out to the community in general. So, it's a really great role for me to be in here at MURAL. Jorge: You alluded to Jobs to Be Done, which is the subject of your latest book, the one that we were talking about earlier. I'm wondering about Jobs to Be Done at MURAL. And I remember when I first used MURAL, it seemed to me to be a tool that was looking to replicate the whiteboard. And with the pandemic we've been unable to access physical whiteboards, and MURAL has filled in the gap, right? So how would you describe the job that MURAL does for teams? JTBD at MURAL Jim: It's a really good question, and I've been chewing on that for a very long time. Before I answer that, I just want to mention that Jobs to Be Done at MURAL… haven't been very overt about it. It's not like we have a Jobs to Be Done round table and every week we do research and things like that. But it's there, and it's been in the background lurking behind… even our support team. Did a session with our support team, how Jobs to Be Done could help them in their work. Our head of product, there's a nice blog post out there where he talks about Jobs to Be Done in guiding the roadmap, and things like that. So, it's been around, but it's kind of like where we've been soaking in it rather than having a Jobs to Be Done research effort or explicit team around it. And in doing that kind of ongoing work, I've been really thinking about what are the Jobs to Be Done of MURAL. And it's a little tricky. Because it's a whiteboard, it's a blank canvas. It's… you know, Jorge, I think a MURAL almost as a platform. A lot of times you buy a piece of software and you expect the software to tell you what you can do, and what you can't do, right? There's a workflow involved. There are steps involved, and that kind of thing. But with MURAL, it's like you can do anything that your imagination can bring to a whiteboard with it. So, I really think it's almost like a platform that you can develop on. And what can you develop? And the answer is, "yes!" It's like, what can you visualize? Then you can do it on MURAL. So, it makes the answer to the question, "what's the job-to-be-done?" really slippery. But it also then puts out, the way that I've been approaching it, is looking at a constellation of jobs. And by the way, that's one of the first things that you need to do when you work with Jobs to Be Done is map out what I call your jobs landscape. Because it's not uncommon that organizations and businesses are targeted at a constellation of jobs, particularly in software. Software gets multiple jobs done. And one of the first things you have to do is map out your jobs. And that… it's not just one dimensional, it's actually hierarchical; that there are jobs and smaller jobs that roll up to higher jobs. So, you end up with this landscape of jobs. And in MURAL, it can just go on and on and on. Because we're basically an open-source development platform that is as limited as your own imagination. But I think where we started and the jobs that we're looking to target first are things around like running a collaboration session with your team at work, because we're all about collaboration and we want to be relevant in the workplace, although we have a lot of educational institutions as well, too. It's really about running a collaboration session with your team, is kind of a high-level job. You can go up from there and even say, solve problems together visually. Could be even a higher level… that's really abstract though. And if you were to research that using the Jobs to Be Done lens, which you could, you would come up with something more abstract. So, I usually try to break that down into things like running a collaboration session. But we also have people running projects. How do people run projects and where does MURAL fit into that job to be done? Teaching a course! People teach, as you know, MURAL is a platform to teach from as well, too. Teaching a course is another big use case that we tend to target as well too. So, I have about… right now, I have about four or five jobs at that level. The main one though, is really around collaboration. It's collaborating as a team at work, right? And what is the beginning, middle, and end of that? And I've found that if you map that out, you can take a lot of the situations that people come to MURAL with and you can fit it into that beginning, middle and end of collaborating at work. The jobs of JTBD Jorge: We're talking about this kind of in the abstract and I'm assuming that folks listening in know what we mean when we say Jobs to Be Done. Before we started recording, you were mentioning that you've done dozens of podcast interviews about this, so I'm not going to ask you the "what is Jobs to Be Done?" question. I'll leave that up to listeners. If they haven't heard about it, it's worth your while. But you just now mentioned that something that's been on my mind in using Jobs to Be Done in my own work. And it's a fact that some of the definitions of a job-to-be-done can get quite abstract. And at that point, their utility stops being evident to team members. So, I'm wondering the meta-question: what do you see the jobs of Jobs to Be Done? Like, what does Jobs to Be Done buy a team? Jim: Yeah! I think it's focus in innovation efforts. I really see Jobs to Be Done as an innovation framework. And innovation occurring at any level. You want to innovate your product or your solution, you want to innovate your go to market motions as well, too? But it could be, we want to expand our company. So, it works at different levels, right? The first question that I always teach people to answer in defining the jobs that they're going to be targeting is, "where do you want to innovate?" And once you're able to answer that question, what Jobs to Be Done brings is a lot of focus and clarity to that. Because then there's a structured language behind Jobs to Be Done. And that's what I try put out in the first couple of chapters in my book is, what's the language around Jobs to Be Done to describe our innovation target, but to describe it in human terms. In human terms, right? And notice I didn't say "user" or "customer" or "prospect" or "target market. " It's human terms. It's understanding within that space, once you define your innovation target, what do human beings want? And trying to find that out. It's different than ethnography though, because we're not going out and doing this very grounded, bottoms-up… there is some bottoms-up work to it, but you're not just trying to understand everything about their lives because you've defined your frame of innovation. It's very specific in the human-based information that you're extracting from it. So, it's very focused and it's very lean in getting out human insight that then becomes opportunity for innovation. Jorge: When you say, "human terms", I hear that as human terms in distinction to the drivers of an impersonal system, such as the organization or the market or what have you, right? Jim: Or the product or the solution. Right! And one of the great benefits of the language of Jobs to Be Done is that it expunges all of that from your vernacular. That when you're talking and working with Jobs to Be Done, you're not allowed to refer to any technology, solutions, brands, or even methods. So, Agile is a method. Design thinking is a method. You wouldn't write that down when you're notating Jobs to Be Done. You wouldn't refer to any of those things. You're trying to describe human needs… a very specific description of human needs. Again, it's not this ethnographic type of thing. You just want to go in and get what you want and get out. It's very surgical in that sense. But you're describing it in a way that is independent of yourself, because organizations are really good at looking at human beings through the lens of their own brand and their solution. We looked down at the market and we say, "those are users. Those are customers. That's a buying behavior. That's a user behavior. We have a solution. Click the button! Optimize conversion rates!" That's about you. Let's be serious here. A customer journey map and a lot of that stuff, that's about you and your organization. That's not about human beings. Jobs to Be Done explicitly puts that to the side and then you're asking yourself, "well, how do I describe that then? How do I describe what people want and what they're trying to get done?" And Jobs to Be Done gives you way to do that. Once you put all that other stuff to the side, you can still — in a very structured, targeted and focused way — you can describe human behavior. Very specific types of human behavior. JTBD for the reluctant Jorge: When you say innovation… when anyone says innovation, one of the things that I hear is change. So, we have a current state in which we're doing things a certain way, and we want to change that to a different state in which we're doing things differently. Or our product looks different in the market. And innovation has kind of a positive tinge to it, whereas change is more ambiguous, right? And a lot of folks are resistant to change internally in organizations. I'm wondering about how you might explain the value of Jobs to Be Done to reluctant stakeholders or to folks who may not be fully on board with driving some kind of change? Jim: It's a really good point and in fact after we launched the book, I created an online resource called the Jobs to Be Done toolkit, jtbdtoolkit.com. And we were talking about exactly this. Like, who are we targeting? And we ultimately threw away roles and labels and ended up with changemakers. We're targeting changemakers in organizations because of the question that you just asked is that some stakeholders are resistant to change, you're right. But other people in organizations want change, right? They see their own brand or solution on the market. Or they see the way that they're working internally and they say, "we have to change. " And I think a lot of that is driven by the world we live in. And I don't want to say, '"now it's different than in the past!" But there are specific you know, things that are unique about today's world. Hyper-connected containerization and productization around the world, global economies and talent pools and things like that. There is the different, more complex business world that businesses face these days. And I would argue that it puts a lot more power in consumer hands than even just two or three decades ago. We're all on a burning platform because any consumer can rate you, and any consumer can go to a competitor with one click of a button. So, I think it changes the equation of business from the middle of the last century. I think that's the motivation for change, in general. And stakeholders that don't get it, well, you know what? They're going to be left behind, Jorge, first of all. Because there are lots of statistics like the list of customers of companies on the S&P 500 list is… their duration on that list is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. You know, IBM is IBM and it'll be IBM forever. It's like, "well, man, you know, maybe it won't right?" Because disruption is happening at a quicker rate as well too. So, I think the imperative is there from the way that things work in general to make change, and yeah — some people will be resistant to that, I agree. I think the thing that's different about Jobs to Be Done, is it's very no-nonsense and the focus and the clarity that it brings… and it also speaks a business language to businesspeople on their own terms. I think it's more appealing than other change mechanisms. Like Design Thinking. People have used Design Thinking to affect change to their organizations as well too, but a lot of people react to that: "I'm not a designer. Design is aesthetics. Why would I want to think like a designer?" You know, and things like that. So, there might be a lot of overlap of Jobs to Be Done with other fields, like Design Thinking. And there is. But it's the way that it does it that I think actually appeals to those stubborn people better than some of the other approaches. And I'm not saying throw away Design Thinking; I teach Design Thinking, you know? So, I'm not saying throw that away, but I think we need a new arsenal of conversation styles and languages because of the question that you asked that some people are stubborn, right? And I think Jobs to Be Done helps overcome that stubbornness. Exactly that. That's exactly my attraction to Jobs to Be Done, Jorge. Creating an out-of-body experience Jorge: One of the interesting things about what you're saying here is that it's all very self-consistent, in that at the root of the approach is reframing our offerings from the perspective of the people who are benefiting or who are getting value from our offerings, whether they be customers or end-users or what have you. And that requires that we as a team, as an organization, step outside of our own needs, right? Jim: Correct. Jorge: And what you're saying here is that this applies not only to the product or the initiative that we're undertaking, but to ourselves. Like, our own perception of who we are is up for questioning here. Jim: That is absolutely correct. And one way that I like to describe the reason and the benefit of Jobs to Be Done is to intentionally create what I call an out-of-body experience for yourself, right? Because you're so wrapped up in yourself as an organization. Like I said, organizations are really good about talking about their own brand and their own solutions and their own customer base, that we forget about other perspectives. And the other perspective is, there's a human being over there just trying to get something done in their daily lives, and they may not care about your brand or your price point or your conversion rates. What would happen if just momentarily — and it's only momentary suspense of belief — that we flip perspectives and we see things from their perspective, and look back at ourselves. And the answer is… or the benefit is, you can find opportunities that you don't see because you're your own blinders. So. It is a perspective shift and that's why I also describe Jobs to Be Done as a way of seeing. It's an alternative way of seeing because we see our organizations from a business standpoint, like I was saying. It's like, well, what would happen if we just shifted over and saw it from 180 degrees and looked back then pick out those opportunities, and — no question about it, Jorge — you always come back to those conversations about your own organization and your own product. Have no fear that you're not going to talk about your own brand. So, it's just a temporary shift outside, and then you come back in. And the idea is you can find opportunities that you wouldn't see from your own perspective. JTBD and design Jorge: And in that it shares a lot with the design process, right? Like you… Jim: Absolutely! Jorge: You mentioned Design Thinking here. In fact, when I read your book in preparation for reading that I read, Clay Christensen, et al's Competing Against Luck. And I revisited the notes that I took on that book before our interview this morning, and I wrote down that at the time, it struck me as user-centered design made palatable to stakeholders because it's being taught by Harvard Business professors, which is kind of what you're talking about here, about the language. Jim: I agree. And you know, I don't think that's unimportant though, Jorge. Like I said, I've been looking at ethnography and Design Thinking and UX and all of these other disciplines and human-centered design, and I've been steeped in those things, right? And as you know, the design community pounds its fist on the table and says, " we want a seat at the table!" Right? And rightfully so, as well too. And I think Jobs to Be Done helps that because it comes from the business community. There's no territory or ownership there that anybody can own… there's no one discipline that runs or owns Jobs to Be Done. It's really a language across your organization. And I'll tell you, since I wrote the book, I'm being contacted by marketing teams, by customer success people, obviously by people in product. Entrepreneurs are looking at Jobs to Be Done as well, too. So, I think there's a chance to have that same kind of human centeredness, whatever you want to call the center of gravity there, and to actually get further in our organizations because of its origins and because of how it's positioned as not any one discipline owning it. That said, I do think there are some important differences though. There are some really important differences between existing methods that are human centered design and Jobs to Be Done. Jorge: I would love to hear what those are. Jim: Well, the first one we kind of touched on already too, and that's the hyper, almost fanatical expunging of any reference to technology, solutions or products, right? I get a lot of people say, "tell me task analysis. This is just task analysis, right?" Jorge, I cannot find one example of task analysis that doesn't include a reference to the solution that the person who does task analysis has in front of them. In fact, some examples of task analysis are literally saying, "click the button on the second screen, then click the next button on the next screen. " That's product design. That's not how humans think about their own needs, right? I think that is… it's huge and it's important and it's not that easy, to be honest with you, Jorge. I teach a lot of classes now on Jobs to Be Done. And I get a lot of designers because a lot of people that follow me are in the design field. And then, and I'll say, "you can't use any technology. " And then I do a little exercise with them, and they use technology! In the sense, I say, "no, you can't say Design Thinking, you can't say screen. You can't say document. You can't say all these things. " So, to actually do it… and once you actually do it, you're like, "oh, I can't use any of these terms. And if I don't… " Here's the thing, if I do that, step-by-step through Jobs to Be Done, I don't use any technology, solutions, brand, any reference to any of those things, and then you look back at what you just built up, you get that freedom, you get that out of body experience that you often don't in those other fields, to be honest with you. Jorge: Circling back to the effectiveness of this language versus the language of design, in hearing you describe that, I was thinking that as information architects, our own job-to-be-done is to create effectual language structures, right? And we iterate on labels to find the ones that resonate the most with folks. So, if we are doing the work and we find language that makes it more understandable, more engaging to stakeholders, let's use that language, right? Jim: I agree. Yeah. And it's interesting, you mentioned that because… well, first of all, I said, "you have a landscape of jobs that's your first thing to do?" Guess what? That's a little mini information architecture right there. What's my innovation target is, there's a little architecture in there. But then when you're working with Jobs to Be Done, it is very, very much about language. And one of the first things that I try to show people and demonstrate is that you need at thesaurus. So, it starts with qualitative research, and people don't speak in regular normal terms. Jobs to Be Done is essentially a big categorization mechanism, that when you're listening to people talk, you say, "oh, that's a job performer. That's a job step. That's a job step. That's a job step. That's an outcome. That's an outcome. " And then you end up with piles of regular information that you gather from your qualitative research, which, you know, is very messy. And that normalization that you do to categorize things, often requires a thesaurus because you're saying like, " what's the best word to express that? What's the simplest, most compact word that I can use to express this?" You know, somebody just talked in two paragraphs, and I want to rewrite that in one phrase in one, three-word phrase, right? What's the best word in there? And some things are obvious. Some things are super obvious. But sometimes you get on these cases where you're like, "what's the best word for that?" And it really is about language. It's really about how you're expressing that. And the models that come out of Jobs to Be Done research… it's really a model of, language. Of rewriting qualitative input that you get using the Jobs to Be Done rules. And it's really about modeling that. And there is a lot of architecture involved. Making "jobs" more actionable Jorge: I'm thinking about what I think is a job-to-be-done and it's one of my favorite ones because it's actually, stated up front when you visit this place. And it's the bronze plaques at the entrance of Disneyland. There's two tunnels under a train track when you enter Disneyland. And there's these plaques that say, "here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy. " And it's almost like they're telling you what the intent is for that environment, right? Like they designed this thing that aims to accomplish that. And there's this story that Walt Disney used to give his designers, the people were designing the parks, one overarching direction: whoever comes in contact with this thing that you're making should leave the experience with a smile on their face. And those to me are descriptions of jobs, right? Of what the thing is supposed to do. But there's a very wide gap between, "here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy," and what it takes to actually design a theme park ride there's a lot of decisions in between. And I'm wondering about how you bridge that gap. There's this language, this three-word pithy phrase that you have defined that sets the vision. How do you make it actionable? Jim: Yeah. Well, I think, there are two things at play there from the example that you mentioned. One is a hierarchy, and a hierarchy of needs or intents. You used the word intent, so we can talk about that. And I would actually… the examples that you gave, I would actually categorize those as… the first one as aspirations, right? And then you said, "leave with a smile on your face. " I would call that an outcome as well, too. This is all detailed in my book. But to actually put it into practice, maybe this is a good example to help folks think about that. So, actually break things up into… well, there's multiple categories. But for this conversation right here with you, Jorge, I think there are three things going on. One is the aspiration. What's the ultimate aspiration? And Clayton Christensen, who you mentioned, and others, they tend to work at that level, which is fine. And I think that's super important. But I think if you come down a level, you can also say, "yeah, but what's the functional job that people are trying to get done?" I call that the objective. And in your example, it might just be visiting a theme park. So I think you can anchor that aspiration at a high level, but then come down and say, "you know what? We got to build solutions that get people from point A to point B. " Visiting a theme park, right? There's a beginning, middle, and end to that, and we better fulfill that functional job or that objective they have. And then on the other side is what are the outcomes that we want people to have? And that would be, leave with a smile on your face. So, the thing that you said on the plaque, I forget exactly what that was. I would categorize that as an aspiration, and then "leave with a smile" as an outcome. The thing that's missing though is what's the functional job? What's the getting from point A to point B, the plain vanilla… I just have an objective to get done because your solution better get that done, right? Independent of emotions and aspirations and all that kind of stuff. So, Jobs to Be Done is really no nonsense and very structured around taking that example that you just gave and puts things into different categories. Let's think about the aspirations. Fine! Let's think about the outcomes. I can do analysis on that. But what's the functional job that people are trying to get done? That's another piece that you also have to work with. I've done a lot of, let's say Design Thinking workshops where you walk into the room and you say, "we're going to solve world peace today," and that's your target for the group, right? And then you brainstorm on world peace, and you ended up in a room full of sticky notes. And you're like, this is a group of mid-level UX designers. What are they going to? There's too much distance between what we do as a business and what we just came up with. You're trying to innovate at too high of a level. And I've been guilty of doing that, in blue skying everything. "Let's blue sky! No constraints, blue sky!" It's like, no. Why can't we say, "we want to figure out a better way to drill a hole in the wall. " Why can't we innovate at that level? I think actually innovation has a better success when you don't just go in and write down pie in the sky. Let's brainstorm, but say, " how can we make a better hole in the wall? Let's innovate that, guys. " Because that's the level of our focus. And you can absolutely do that. In fact, I was drilling a hole in my wall a couple of weeks ago and I was like, "wow, there's a lot of problems here. There's dust all over the place. I got to set up my drill… " Like this, "oh, this is ripe for innovation, actually. Drilling a hole in a wall is absolutely a place where you can innovate!" But we overshoot. We tend to overshoot, I believe, a lot. Jorge: Definitely. And it's part of why I find the concept of Jobs to Be Done so attractive. And especially as you express it in your book — it's very pragmatic. It's not academic in the way that so many of these ideas tend to be. So, I heartily endorse the book and your work, and I am very grateful that you've made the time to share shared with us here today. Jim: Well, thanks for having me on and for your writeup as well, too. And again, I think I said it before too, but I think that's not unimportant: the pragmatism of Jobs to Be Done. And a lot of people criticize it. "But you're leaving out this," and "you're leaving out that!" Then it's like, yeah, you're leaving all that stuff out because sometimes that confuses those people or puts off those people who are reluctant to change. And you can just go in and say, "we're just going to do these three things. " There's a lot that gets left on the editing floor in Jobs to Be Done. And I like to scoop those up and put them into a separate pile, but you can just go in and just do this really focused thing, with Jobs to Be Done. And I think, again, you mentioned it at the beginning. It's the focus that Jobs to Be Done and the no nonsense focus and the practicality and the pragmatism of Jobs to Be Done that I find really attractive, but it doesn't exclude those other things. It doesn't exclude Design Thinking or ethnography or UX design as well too. And I think you can actually add those things together. So, one of the things that I'm working on, Jorge, is how does Jobs to Be Done fit in with those other pieces of the puzzle and even things like Agile and Lean. Closing Jorge: I think that a lot of folks listening in and I myself would be very interested in hearing what you have to say about this when you publish it. Where can folks follow up with you to keep up with what you're thinking about? Jim: Sure. On LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I make announcements and post some information there also. Also, Twitter. It's @jimkalbach at Twitter. But I think also at the Jobs to Be Done toolkit, the website, it's an online resource. There's some free downloads there jtbdtoolkit.com - some free downloads. We also have an online course. It's a self-paced video course there. So, you can just sign up for that any time, but we also regularly… pretty much every other month. It's not a hundred percent regular yet, but we've been at a pace of about every other month we run a live course. And you can find out information about the next live course on Jobs to Be Done toolkit. Jorge: Well, fantastic. Thank you for being on the show. Jim: Thanks for having me, Jorge.

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim is the author of three books: Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O'Reilly, 2016), and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). He is also the Co-founder and Principal at the JTBD Toolkit, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content. Jim blogs at www.experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.

JIM KALBACH is the Chief Evangelist at MURAL - one of the virtual whiteboard everyone is raving about. In this interview, we discuss the experience that the MURAL team had when covid hit in 2020, why virtual whiteboards are so important for remote collaboration, and how they can help us navigate the new world of working. For more stories of remote teams doing great things, visit https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com

This week, Kristen Hayer interviews: Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook.The next book we will be diving into is The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi. Before Kristen starts digging into that, she'll be reviewing an article or two.While she has some books in mind for the rest of the season, she'd love suggestions as well. Email kristen@thesuccessleague.io with any questions or ideas.

Welcome back to part two of our interview with Jim Kalbach. Hop on in, and let's continue our conversations from part one. Missed the previous episode? See below for links to the show. Jim Kalbach is an author, speaker, and instructor in design. Jim has authored the books Designing Web Navigation, Mapping Experiences, and the most recent one, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which we will be talking about in this episode. Jim is currently the Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He is responsible for advocating for imagination work, remote collaboration, creative teamwork, design thinking, and more. Main Takeaways: ● How to apply Jim's recipe for successful innovations ● The Jobs To Be Done Playbook is a tool that's not for everyone ● How they are utilizing Jobs To Be Done at MURAL Be sure to check out full show notes at https://innovationmeetsleadership.com/resources or click "Episode Website" below. To learn more about Jim, you can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter: @kalbach, or Head on over to or head on over to https://experiencinginformation.com/. Learn more about the Jobs To Be Done Toolkit at https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/. These are proven solutions to advance your innovation process. Check out our website  innovationmeetsleadership.com or connect with us on Instagram or Facebook @innovationmeetsleadership.  Don't forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review. Let's go transform something! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/natalie-born/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/natalie-born/support

Jim Kalbach is an author, speaker, and instructor in design. Jim has authored the books Designing Web Navigation, Mapping Experiences, and the most recent one, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which we will be talking about in this episode. Jim is currently the Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He is responsible for advocating for imagination work, remote collaboration, creative teamwork, design thinking, and more. Main Takeaways: ● Explanation of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook ● Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that focus on the customer ● How Outcome-Driven Innovation differs from other methods of innovation ● Find the unmet market needs before the market finds them ● Why Job Maps are important Be sure to check out full show notes at https://innovationmeetsleadership.com/resources or click "Episode Website" below. You can follow Jim on LinkedIn @kalbach, Twitter @jimkalbach, or https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com. To learn more about MURAL, visit their website at https://www.mural.co/ These are proven solutions to advance your leadership and innovation process. Check out our website innovationmeetsleadership.com or connect with us on Instagram or Facebook @innovationmeetsleadership Don't forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review. Let's go transform something! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/natalie-born/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/natalie-born/support

"I didn't sign up to be making wallpaper." That's a quote I can strongly relate to from this conversation with Jim Kalbach. As service designers we want to make a tangible impact on the world around us. For that you need to make sure that your work gets "shipped". If you fail to do that you're often just making wallpaper as Jim said. And the stakes are high because if you fail to ship you run the risk that your contributions will be seen as insignificant or irrelevant. So an important part of doing good service design is following up and making sure your work is actionable for other people. Now how can you do that? What Jim had found is that we are in a very good spot to facilitating meaningful conversations. Often these conversations are the way do drive initiatives forward. After watching this episode you'll walk away with a better understanding of how you can make great design happen. I really enjoyed the chat with Jim. It's filled with practical tips and with entertaining one-liners as you'll hear :) --- [ GUIDE ] -— 00:00 Welcome to episode 121 04:30 Who is Jim 06:00 60 second rapid fire 07:30 Getting design delivered 11:15 Design in a bigger context 14:15 How did we get here 18:45 AHA moments! 24:00 What makes workshops work 29:45 Do pilots 33:15 What are we missing 37:45 Understanding organisational design 40:30 Stop doing this 45:30 The figure 8 is everywhere 47:30 What does success look like 50:30 Naivety about go to market 56:15 Final thoughts --- [ LINKS ] --- * https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/ * https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/ * https://experiencinginformation.com/about/ * https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/ * The Statue in the Stone (book) - https://amzn.to/3bX4Zwi * Rise of the Deo (book) - https://amzn.to/382QVQL * Presumptive Design (book) - https://amzn.to/3sMWFGx --- [ SELLING SERVICE DESIGN ] --- Learn how to win the hearts and minds of clients, managers & CEOs, without wearing a suit. https://servicedesignshow.com/selling

Join Kristen Hayer in conversation with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist for MURAL as he shares some great ideas on ways to optimize the customer experience.

This week, Kristen Hayer reviews: An article from HBR.org called How to Help (Without Micromanaging) by Colin M. Fisher, Teresa M. Amabile, and Julianna Pillemer This article explores how to assist your team without getting in their way.Season 2 will continue next week with Chapters 1 & 2 of a new book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach. Kristen highly recommends getting the hard copy so you can take advantage of the included diagrams and images. While she has some books in mind for the rest of the season, she'd love suggestions as well. Email kristen@thesuccessleague.io with any questions or ideas.

This week, Kristen Hayer reviews:An article from HBR.org called Negotiating Your Next Job by Hannah Riley Bowles and Bobbi Thomason2020 was a year of great change for many of us and it may be time to start looking towards your next big move. This article explores steps you can take to prepare yourself for your next professional shift.Season 2 will continue with our next book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach. Kristen highly recommends getting the hard copy so you can take advantage of the included diagrams and images.While she has some books in mind for the rest of the season, she'd love suggestions as well. Email kristen@thesuccessleague.io with any questions or ideas.

Jim Kalbach wrote a book. And that book has shook the world of those of us who practice Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) — an amazing research and ideation method focused innovation space discovery. I've met Jim some time ago and decided to talk to him about his experiences of working with Jobs To Be Done. Listen to this; it'll help you in your practice of JTBD and in your design practice in general. Links: Jim Kalbach on LinkedIn Jim Kalbach on Twitter Jim's website Jim's book: 'The Jobs To Be Done Playbook' Jim's training: JTBD Toolkit (check'em workshops out!) Podcast mastering: Chris Kutyla

Collaboration is a critical element of design. It facilitates the cross-pollination of ideas, concepts, and diverse perspectives. What happens when collaboration in a physical, face-to-face sense becomes at best much more difficult and at worst, explicitly outlawed? If this was some time in the not-so-distant past, we would brush this off as science fiction. But the pandemic of 2020 made it a reality. In this episode, Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at Mural and expert workshop facilitator, will discuss what collaboration means today and into an uncertain future. Follow Jim on Twitter: @jimkalbach Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben & Jay talk to Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at MURAL and author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Mapping Experiences, and Designing Web Navigation.  Jim shares his perspective on Jobs To Be Done as a mindset, how an organization can start using it, and how it can influence various aspects of the organization.  Since the episode was recorded, Jim has also launched a new Jobs To Be Done learning platform, JTBD Toolkit.  Jim also has a web site, Experiencing Information, where you can learn more about him and book office hours.  Stick around after the discussion for a special musical treat courtesy of Jim!See Jim discuss customer journey mapping as compared to job mapping through the lens of the chicken crossing the road.All Things Twitter:Jim KalbachJTBD ToolkitA Sherpa's Guide to InnovationBen TingeyJay GerhartSupport the show (https://healthpodcastnetwork.com/)

Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at Mural, joins Designing Next to talk with us about developing and maintaining a culture with remote and distributed teams. In this episode, Jim speaks with Chad & Steve about what the pandemic taught him and the team at Mural as their business grew quickly over the last six months, what organizations need to do to establish and maintain a culture in a remote work environment, and why remote teams can be just as effective - or even more effective - than in-person teams.

Adi Mazor Kario will interview Jim Kalbach about his latest book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, and how this method could help companies innovate better and faster. Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. More about the Jobs To Be Done Playbook: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/ Details about Jim's workshop: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-ux-workshops/practical-jobs-to-be-done-a-way-of-seeing/ I'm Adi Mazor Kario, #1 Innovation & Value Creation Expert, Invincible Innovation. I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts in the comments below! If you want to know more about me and my work: https://www.invincibleinnovation.com/ Hope you enjoyed the talk! #innovation #leadership #management #invincibleinnovation #openinnovation #cocreation #covid19 #opportunities #valuecreation

How can businesses apply the Jobs to Be Done method to grasp and successfully fulfill customer needs? Our guest today is Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook and Head of Customer Experience at MURAL. You’ll learn about the human-centered approach to products and marketing, interview methods, job maps, and Jim’s definition of customer success.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music.Show NotesThe Jobs To Be Done Playbook — Jim’s book (Rosenfeld Media)MURAL — a leading online whiteboard for digital collaborationEpisode 56: Product Development Secrets with Claire SuellentropEpisode 30: Describing Customer Motivation (JTBD) with Eric WhiteMapping the Job-to-be-Done — an article by Tony Ulwick on job mapsContextual Design — a book by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh BeyerInterviewing Users — a book by Steve PortigalMike Boysen — a famous Medium blog on JTBDFollow Jim on Twitter: @JimKalbachConnect with Jim on LinkedInGet 20% off Jim’s book on the Rosenfeld Media website with promo code UIBREAKFASTJTBD (valid till September 1, 2020)Today’s SponsorThis episode is brought to you by the new season of Wireframe — a podcast by Adobe about how UX can help technology fit into our lives. Hear from designers and design leaders who have built UX and UI experiences for major companies, and learn how design impacts your everyday life. Check out the show here, or just search for “Wireframe” in your favorite podcast app.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.

In the Power of Ten podcast, Andy Polaine talks to guests from a broad range of disciplines about the intersection of design, technology, psychology, organisations, culture and society. The show looks at how design operates at many levels and in many forms, from thoughtful detail through organisational transformation to the changes in society and the world. My guest in this episode is Jim Kalbach (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/) , an author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. Jim has worked with many large companies and is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL (https://mural.co/) , the leading online whiteboard. He is the author of Designing Web Navigation (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Navigation-Optimizing-Experience/dp/0596528108/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314717308&sr=8-1) , Mapping Experiences (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920038870.do) and, most recently, the Jobs to be Done playbook (https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/) . Show Links Jim’s website, Experiencing Information (https://experiencinginformation.com/) Jim Kalbach on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/) Jim on Twitter (https://twitter.com/JimKalbach) The Jobs to be Done playbook (https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/) Designing Web Navigation (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Navigation-Optimizing-Experience/dp/0596528108/) Mapping Experiences (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920038870.do) MURAL (https://mural.co/) This episode's links and notes (https://www.polaine.com/podcasts/power-of-ten/jim-kalbach-jobs-to-be-done/) Doctor’s Note newsletter (https://pln.me/nws) Andy on Twitter (https://twitter.com/apolaine) Andy on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/andypolaine) Polaine.com (https://www.polaine.com/) Get in touch! (https://www.polaine.com/contact) (https://www.polaine.com/)

Welcome to the new season and feed for Power of Ten, a podcast about how design operates at many levels and in many forms, from thoughtful detail through organisational transformation to the changes in society and the world. In upcoming episodes, I'll be talking about culture, airports and toilets with Design Anthropologist and Researcher, Chris Hayward, Jobs to Be Done and remote work with Mural's Jim Kalbach, Designing Conversations with Daniel Stillman, Radical Alignment with Bob Gower and Alex Jamieson, Architecture and artificial intelligence with Molly Wright Steenson, and journeys into Design Leadership with Ryan Rumsay. Unfortunately, I was asked not to move the feed over to the new podcast host, so make sure you subscribe to the new feed (https://audioboom.com/channels/5029873) and, as always, get in touch if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions for guests. Links Power of Ten's home (https://www.polaine.com/podcasts) Doctor’s Note newsletter (https://pln.me/nws) Polaine.com (https://www.polaine.com) Andy on Twitter (https://twitter.com/apolaine) Andy on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/andypolaine) Get in touch! (https://www.polaine.com/contact)

The Art of Opportunity: Know Your WhyHave you ever thought about an organization as a living entity? Think about it. Much like our bodies’ organizations, as Parker Lee describes, are “living, breathing networks with integrated holistic systems that will thrive in a networked fashion” and can build the necessary defenses to fight off any type of invasion or, in their case, innovation—making it challenging to enact even the slightest change.Parker Lee, Global Managing Partner at Territory Global, says it’s essential that companies are clear about their WHY: the reason(s) they want to enact change. He joins Paul for a conversation about the Work Forward movement and how Territory helps companies structure a plan of action (the HOW), and provides insight on how the future of work can be embraced today.Connect with Parker:LinkedInThe Art of Opportunity: How to Build Growth and Ventures Through Strategic Innovation and Visual Thinking (by Marc Sniukas, Parker Lee, Matt Morasky)Learning Done Right & Done RemotelyContact TerritoryWork Forward: Get InvolvedTranscript of this episodeParker Lee:I'm so tired of people talking about the future of work because the future can be achieved right now. It's not about the let's look way out there and maybe we'll get there, or what new shiny little toys are there. It's about taking advantage of all the different tools, and approaches, and resources, et cetera that exist today.Introduction:There's a revolution taking place right now. Talent and intelligence are equally distributed throughout the world, but opportunity is not. The talent economy: the idea that at the center of work is the talent, is the individual.Paul Estes:Companies today face a global war for talent. High-skilled talent is demanding flexibility around the way they work and the way they live. This podcast brings together thought leaders, staffing experts, and top freelancers to talk about the evolving nature of work and how companies can navigate these changes to remain competitive, drive innovation, and ensure success. Welcome to The Talent Economy Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Estes.Today, my guest is Parker Lee, managing partner at Territory Global. Parker joins us today to discuss a new way of working and the impact that a collaborative, co-creative working environment can have on both talent and the organization.Parker Lee:As you said, I'm managing director at Territory. I love speaking about working forward transformation, about helping people and teams achieve better outcomes and results.Paul Estes:Now, before we get into your organizational behavior background, long-range planning, your journey to Territory Global is quite an interesting one, to say the least. Tell me a little bit about your love for music and how that took you to Caesars Palace.Parker Lee:I had been in music and passionate about it since a little boy and played piano and trumpet. And then all through school, drum major of the Cal Aggie Marching Band when I was at UC Davis. Formed my own little madrigal group, had a barbershop quartet, did a lot of singing, and that. Upon getting out of UC Davis, broke my parents' heart when I told them instead of being president of the United States, I was going to sing on the streets of San Francisco and I was a busker.That led to getting a night in a club, and then multiple nights, then quitting my job and doing that. We became the number one club act, did five national tours, got on MTV. It was a remarkable experience.I figured at that point in your life, if... You can't do that when you have a family and later, so I said, "Now's the time." It was remarkable. It was a very different time than it is right now.Paul Estes:It was back when MTV actually played music on television, right?Parker Lee:That's the only way we got the video on the... They needed content, and it was all they do. It was a running video, quote, "show." So it was their very beginning, and it was a blast. This was in '80, '81, somewhere in there.I did find the love of my life, got married, had our first child. I went out on tour at three months. Came back at six months, and my daughter rolled over in the crib when I walked into the room and started crying. I said, "That's it. I'm out."The next day, I got a phone call from a friend of mine from UC Davis who had gotten a job at Caesars Palace. He had engineered a transition there to be in charge of advertising, entertainment, and PR, and he needed somebody he could trust. He picked up the phone and called me and said, "Would you come down and run the entertainment department of Caesars Palace?" I interviewed, said, "There's no way," and then he said, "You don't get it, Parker. It's the same thing you've been doing. You just need to put butts in the seats. That's the goal. Just a few more zeros after the contracts from what you've been doing." I went, "Okay, I'm in."It was amazing. I was able to take advantage of my passion for arts, and performing, and entertainment. I met Frank Sinatra on my first day on the job, and Diana Ross, Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, Crosby, Stills & Nash, James Brown, et cetera. Some are still alive, some aren't. But it was great. Then I did the special events. Grand Prix auto racing in the parking lot, boxing matches. It was insane.Paul Estes:How did you get from that to really understanding organizations and how collaboration and co-creative working environments unlock innovation?Parker Lee:My passion when I was in school was... and I wrote my own major because that's what I wanted to understand better... was in organizational development, long-range planning, and organizational design. I started studying it. Because there wasn't a program there, UC Davis had a way where you could write your own major. So I was just researching on my own.I said the form of education is actually flawed greatly because it has just rote learning and you just regurgitate back stuff that you're passed passively. I said, "There is a better..." You have to be engaged. Learning is lifelong. Learning is not passive, it's active.I had an idea for a research center on campus run by students that would enable students to get grants for doing independent learning and to do programs that would enhance education and their community and have engagement. I got a grant, one of only two student grants from the federal government, and that program was started. So my passion started in school. I just took a little detour in music.Now, that said, while in music and then I went into sports marketing, I still was studying and watching how do organizations improve, find engagement, do planning, do transformation, change management, build innovative programs. I left that life when... Just like Jerry Maguire, I was a sports agent briefly. I got fired, came back to the Bay Area at the beginning of technology, and started getting into how do you grow small businesses, entrepreneurial businesses. How do you start them, grow them, manage them, do the sales and marketing, do the business development, and do the innovation programs? I've been doing that for now 25 years.Paul Estes:Now, when you look at organizations and the rise of technology and distributed teams, I mean, one of the things we talk about on this podcast often is sort of anti the construct of an organization. Not completely, but it starts to push against this idea of a hierarchical organization. How do you see the evolution of organizations in the work that you do today or from when you first started studying this in college up to today?Parker Lee:Well, it's funny. In college, and you've got to keep in mind, I was in school in the '70s, which brands me right there for the use of alternative ways of getting enlightenment. However, while there, one of the things that came into my brain was organizations are living. They are organisms. They're alive so that they... They have systems, they have processes, they have a life cycle, and they have to have everything moving in an integrated fashion for health and growth. I think that still holds true. There are in fact books now called The Living Organization and other things.So it is seeing them as not hierarchical, as linear, but seeing them as integrated holistic systems-based groups that will thrive in a networked fashion. The infusing of technology in that is what has put it on steroids, where there is the capability of doing this even more effectively now, I believe.Paul Estes:What are some examples where you think in your studies, in the journey that organizations have gotten this concept right? Where they've looked at an organization not as an org chart per se, but sort of a living, breathing network.Parker Lee:I sadly can think of a few on a huge multinational basis that have done it well. There are bright lights of that and pockets of it where they'll start innovation programs, or teams of people operate in a Holacracy or in an integrated team-based approach that is flat, that relishes and encourages experimentation, that uses remote working to its advantage.But I don't know any organizations of the large ones that are doing it. There are many startups that do this. Part of that is scale. It's hard. The larger you get, the more you are building rigor mortis into the organization, just because like a body, it naturally fights innovation, because innovation is like an invasion coming into the well-oiled parts of your body that's invading it. It's finding a way to not make that so it's a negative disruption, but it's a positive disruption, I think.Paul Estes:In your work, what are some of the things that you coach organizations on as they aspire to have a more innovative or co-collaborative environment? Because I've experienced companies saying, "I want innovation. I want all of these things," and then when you actually go to put the program in place, I think to the point you made earlier, it's like an invasion. It is so foreign to the living body of the large organization, that they didn't know what they were getting into.Parker Lee:Yeah, you're exactly right. This comes into our transformation practice, change management, et cetera. It is destined to fail if there is not. There are a few key things that have to happen. Support from the top. If there is no full endorsement and backing and understanding at the very top leadership, executive leadership, it'll fail, because you'll be creating something below it, and it starts to rise and it gets squashed. Either budgets pulled away, people get moved to other areas, and it falls apart. I've seen that half a dozen times. That's number one.Number two, it can't be done by a consultant. The consultant can be the Sherpa or the guide and help, but it has to be organically bred, and developed, and nurtured internally, which means there has to be... And there's another part of it. There needs to be a shared vision. Where are we going? Why do we want to get there? There has to be an understanding of what are the resources required internally and externally to get there. There has to be an understanding of what are the things that are going to prevent us from getting there. Which can be anything from systems, process, technology, talent, any of that. And there has to be a plan. It takes resources to do this. It takes focus and resources. It's like running a campaign that has... It should have a start and a stop. There have to be measures. How do we know when we're going to get there? What does it look like when we get there? How do we know as we're progressing, and measure that?Those are some of the key elements, but most organizations will look at that academically but then can't put it into practice. That's where it will fail.Paul Estes:Sometimes, companies don't know why. When you talk to companies and you outline all of the items that you just mentioned, how many of them actually know the why behind what they're aspiring to do?Parker Lee:The five whys, as we say. Very few. Usually, that needs to be established obviously right at the get-go, because there has to be a case for change. There's a compelling reason. Sometimes, it's external factors. Sometimes, it's internal. More commonly, it's a combination of the two. But that needs to be understood, otherwise, you can't garner the champions or the advocates. That's another thing that has to happen.When you're breeding this internally within the organization, again, it can't be done by a consultant. There have to be people that have the passion, have the understanding, and have the "This is why we have to do this." There has to be a reason to do it. It’s oftentimes our culture, it’s toxic, or it has to be competition coming in, or the world around us is changing way too rapidly, and if we don't, we're going to be ostriches with our heads in the sand. It's usually a combination of all of those, and then clearly seen, so that now build a plan, design a plan.But it's designed by the people in the org. They have to get it. Because it's the context of the organization that drives how you're going to accomplish it.Paul Estes:Now, you talked about the high-level management buying it. So the main leader who's going to give permission for a team to do maybe work differently. Maybe say, "Hey, look, this team's going to work in a distributed fashion. We're going to bring on-demand people into the organization so we can get the expertise that we need to accomplish this goal." How do you educate those middle managers that are going to be impacted? Because now you're asking them to do something new and, to your comment earlier, to do something risky. There's an old saying that no one was ever fired for hiring IBM, right? I mean, just that-Parker Lee:Amen. There you go.Paul Estes:... general idea. So middle managers are not, in many cases, incented to embrace new ideas. What do you tell those groups when you actually go and implement an innovation program from Territory?Parker Lee:That's one of the rocks, one of the barriers that has to be gotten around as you look at the culture of the organization and the decision-making process and governance understanding. There needs to be an acknowledgment from upper management, middle management, and the people that are actually doing all the work that that situation exists. Then you create tools and processes, and endorsements, and systems that will give them an alternative path, and reinforce that, and reward it.It will be different with every organization. Sometimes, it's literally in the compensation system. Sometimes, it's in the technology that's used. Sometimes, it's in the way that they conduct meetings. Sometimes, it's in the actual workflow and governance of how work is approved, and executed, and delivered. All of that is... Again, it comes back to this holistic look at it with the organization determining what those are.What we found, though, it's very few organizations that have the knowledge and understanding. So how do you do that? The how is the most important part. That's where you usually do bring in somebody like Territory or otherwise, that says, "We've done this in lots of places. Here are the best practices. Now, which ones are going to work for you? You decide you embrace it. We'll help you build some of the tools, but you're the ones that are going to have to pick up that hammer and start putting together that new house. It's not us." Otherwise, it doesn't stick.Paul Estes:I want to plug your book because when we first met, I got a copy of it, The Art of Opportunity. If people have not seen the book, it's more of a practitioner's guide to finding opportunities than it is a textbook that I would read. One of the things that stuck out to me is how visual it was.When I was going through the book, it explains to me how to think about driving transformation and change, but in a very visual language. I know you're also passionate about design thinking. Tell me a little bit about what inspired the book and how you think of innovation as it relates to visual thinking.Parker Lee:It's crucial. Humans are visual creatures since cave people. It's how we... You drive, you may find you do everything. Storytelling is one of our core areas. We believe you'll accelerate understanding, clarity, action by having visualization in there.In the book, we have five key principles. One of them is visualization and storytelling. So we practice what we preach in saying, "It will help you get to that goal, or objective, or outcome faster, better." And it brings people along because storytelling is very emotional. It gets to a different place in your brain. Because we believe in that as a core principle, we said, "We have to have the book emulate that." That's why we designed it in a visual way. The table of contents is a reader's journey, so you see what you're going to experience, what you're going to use, and get there.We use that in everything that we do: in how we engage with our customers and our clients from the very first conversation to the end of it, to the deliverables. It's because it's what we believe is more effective and impactful.Paul Estes:It was also a very approachable book, the topics in the book around opportunity and business model. I mean, there were some meaty topics in the book, but the book itself was approachable. Like you said, it took me through a journey that says, "Hey, problem-solving." It was a visual journey on problem-solving, which I found very interesting and very engaging. So if there's anyone who is thinking about innovation and thinking about transformation, The Art of Opportunity is a good starting point.I also found myself jumping into different places and being equally as engaged no matter where I landed. So it was kind of an interesting experience as compared to sort of a standard business book.Parker Lee:By intent, designed that way. It's funny, even one of our senior facilitators just picked it up recently and used it for one of the engagements he had, where he cherry-picked three or four of the activities that are in there. Because he was able to put them together in a very different pattern, but use them to get the outcomes that he needed to achieve. So it's fun that you're able to let people kind of use it in their own context. That was another intent, it's saying, "You may be a startup, you may be a huge multinational. There isn't a prescriptive path. Here are lots of jewels, and gems, and ideas. Put them together in your own pattern."Paul Estes:Yeah, the patterns in the book were, I think, one of the things that resonated with me because I've been in both large companies and small companies. There were a lot of commonalities and like you said, brain food in the book… that made me think… so it's a great workbook.On Territory's LinkedIn page, it states that Territory helps you break free of well-worn yet ineffective or unsatisfying approaches to problem-solving. Help me be specific. What are the ones today or this year or last year that you see next year that are the main challenges blocking organizations from really taking advantage of opportunity?Parker Lee:I believe it's in conducting business in the same way and thinking it will give you the same outcomes. We've had a lot of strategy sessions where they have us do, an offsite or otherwise, and we attack that even in the practice what we preach, where we say, "We are basically facilitating their ability to observe and see the obstacles, the barriers, and the context of the world as it's working, both in the organization and outside them, to then lay a path for what are the critical initiatives we have to undertake for us to succeed." So it is in a combination of strategy.I think the other thing that we're all seeing right now is, with coronavirus, et cetera, a lot of heat and spotlight on remote working. It's how do we weave that into the way of having teams be more effective? One of our core principles is about diversity, and not just in diversity of race or other, it's the diversity of thought and diversity of personality in ways of thinking. That implies team-based. With a more diverse team, you have better outcomes, because it makes the ideas... They become battle-tested, and new ideas will surface. That's some of the other stuff that we try to put forward is bring in a group. Our approach, in what you were describing and what Territory says, is much of it workshop-based, whether it's remote or in person, it's visual-based, and it's taking a different tact on going after the problem that you're addressing so that you'll have a different outcome.Paul Estes:You do both in-person consulting and remote consulting. Tell me the difference between the two.Parker Lee:Radically and significantly different. We are huge proponents of remove the technology and eyeball to eyeball because we as humans thrive on the kind of social aspects of creating ideas and building off of each other, et cetera. You don't always have that luxury. With climate change and with now coronavirus, et cetera, you can't always be in the same place and take advantage of that. So the design of the experience has to change dramatically.When you can be in one place, and I think there are times when it's mandated otherwise, you take advantage of that. When you can't, you can either do the hybrid of a few pockets of people, or one group is in one place and then others dial in, or you have everybody 100% remotely. In each one of those scenarios, you design and architect the meeting differently. There are different roles that are required. Sometimes, for example, when there are more remote working, you need to ensure that there is a scribe, there's a digital manager of the technology that's going on that keeps things going, there's somebody that's taking care of questions and how to order that, there's the facilitation or lead of what's going to happen with the experience, there's the preplanning and how that's done either as a group or independently, and there's the communication of what happens in and then outside of the session. You try to get the same outcome. It's just the process has to be different and designed.Paul Estes:I think you said something really important. Actually, I experienced this earlier this week here in... We live in Seattle. My wife works at Microsoft, and everybody's working from home. For the first two days, she was getting... She's got a team. They work in Azure, the cloud. They were working in the same way that they would work at the office. You could see her coming down, getting kind of frustrated, and then she started to realize, "I need to change the way I work. I can't be in back-to-back meetings from 9:00 to 5:00," and she needed time to get up and do different things. She needed time to write things down.There's a different way of working when you're working with distributed teams. I think many organizations try to apply the way they work when they're all located in the same hallway to a distributed working environment. To your point, you have to adapt the way you work to who you're working with and the modality by which you're working.Parker Lee:Completely right. I just did a post. I'm working in our Work Forward site on writing an article about working remotely and the barriers and the challenges and how to overcome those and get there. It takes a different way of working.Paul Estes:Yeah, and we'll make, we’ll post that in the show notes. Tell me a little bit about the Work Forward Summit.Parker Lee:It came from an... I met with Jim Kalbach from MURAL. We were having a beer in New York about a year ago. I said, "I'm so tired of people talking about the future of work because the future can be achieved right now. It's not about the let's look way out there and maybe we'll get there, or what new shiny little toys are there. It's about taking advantage of all the different tools, and approaches, and resources, and time-shifting, et cetera that exist today."The other thing that I brought up is that you talk with any company, you bring up Microsoft. They say, "The future of work is Teams, and is Surface Hubs, and are in our SharePoint platform." Okay, you're smart. Then MURAL would say, "Well, it's asynchronous, synchronous creative platforms that are in the cloud." Steelcase would say, "You have to have the right physical situation." WeWork says, "Well, it's being able to be flexible and get in when you want. Sometimes together and sometimes apart." You're all pretty children. The answer is it's all of that.Paul Estes:That's right.Parker Lee:That's when we said, "Okay, so how do we tackle that and talk about it?" I said, "Well, Jim, let's bring together a group of smart people that can go through a day of trying to articulate: So what are we talking about here? What does it look like? How might we address it? And how do we maybe create the tools or the ways people can become and activate the conversation at their own organizations for what they might do about it?" That was the genesis of the Work Forward Summit. We held it last... I think it was in October. And came out with, "What does work look like? What are the work activities? What is it today? What can it be? And then what can we do about it to try to make it better?"We now have a site and we're trying to, quote, "build a movement." The people that all showed up, we finished the summit and said, "What's next? What do we do?" They all said, "There's a 'there' there. This is big. We're signing up for being a part of the founders of the movement. Let's make this thing viral and go." So there's a Work Forward site now. Go to workforward.co. That's where it is.We're just starting. I, we, Territory doesn't plan on doing all the work. It is people. Sign up on a Slack channel. We're trying to get new events, and create assessments, and build other tools, and have further delineation of what does Work Forward look like. I'm really excited about it, obviously. You can tell that, right?Paul Estes:I can.Parker Lee:Yeah. But I think there's something there for us because it is making the business of work better. That's what it is. It's not that there's a single answer. You have a passion about the gig economy, which is part of working forward, but it's the sole answer. It's a critical answer, but it's not the only part. We all have a place to play in this.Paul Estes:That's one of the things that I've liked about your work is bringing together both the physical, and the remote, and the various technologies that are all trying to give a value proposition. I like to say often the future of work is here. It's just not evenly distributed. That's how I think about it. Because I run into people that are way ahead of me, and then I run into people that are way behind me, and then I run into a lot of people who are kind of in the same ballpark that I'm in as it relates to adopting technology and really pushing against the standard ways that work gets done.Parker, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me today. If somebody wants to learn more about you, The Art of Opportunity, Work Forward, or anything else at Territory, what's the best way to get in touch?Parker Lee:We have a contact form on the Work Forward site, on Territory's site. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Any of those would be great.Paul Estes:Sounds great. We'll keep all that information in the show notes. Thanks again.Parker Lee:It's been great. I appreciate your candor, your honesty, and your curiosity. Keep doing the work that you're doing.Paul Estes:I'm your host, Paul Estes. Thank you for listening to The Talent Economy Podcast. Learn more about the future of work and the transformation of the staffing industry from those leading the conversation at staffing.com, where you can hear from experts, sign up for our weekly newsletter, and get access to the best industry research on the future of staffing. If you've enjoyed the conversation, we'd appreciate you rating us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about the show. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of the Talent Economy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a professional conversation designer? Listen as your host Douglas Ferguson and his guest Daniel Stillman, the founder of the Conversation Factory and a master facilitator, discuss what it means to be a conversation designer and much more in this episode of the Control Room Podcast. Daniel shares how he got started as a conversation designer and why he believes that everything is an active conversation. He speaks about what he would change about meetings and why having a narrative with an opening, exploration, and closing is essential in a productive conversation. Listen as Douglas and Daniel discuss impromptu networking, the best questions to ask, and the definition of appreciative inquiry. They also talk about meeting mantras and why they are so important. Daniel shares his take on why using sticky notes is so effective in the ideation process and how to translate the practice to the virtual landscape. Daniel also explains how to host a virtual rock, paper, scissors tournament; it's both crazy and fun. Order a copy of Daniel’s book Good Talk, How to Design Conversations that Matter', available now. Show Highlights [00:50] Welcome. [01:02] Daniel's journey as a conversation designer. [04:01] Teaching design thinking to non-designers. [04:48] Everything is a conversation. [07:43] Providing an interface for an important idea for a product. [08:34] One thing Daniel would change when it comes to having meetings. [11:06] A narrative is crucial in conversations–opening, exploring, and closing. [13:19] Closing out daily meetings with precision. [16:14] The power of impromptu networking to make meetings better. [19:23] Impromptu networking is a great way to model the participation that you expect. [20:34] Daniel's favorite questions to ask. [22:15] Appreciative inquiry, defined. [24:23] The evolution and significance of Daniel's mantra. [26:27] Sticky note ideation heightens focus on specific concepts. [29:03] Reading the room virtually. [31:16] Virtual rock, paper, scissors tournament. [34:47] Ways to signal during virtual group gatherings. [35:48] Distributive facilitation and the future of work. [39:23] Thank you. [41:02] Waiting forever is not a good business plan for your company or your wedding. [43:24] Do large virtual meetings need comedians to keep people interested? [44:57] Daniel's book. [47:23] It has been a pleasure. [47:36] Subscribe. Links | Resources Daniel Stillman Good Talk: How to Design Conversations That Matter LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube About the Guest Daniel Stillman designs conversations for a living and insists that you actually do that too. As an independent design facilitator, he works with clients and organizations of all shapes and sizes (From Google to Visa, to name a few) to help them frame and sustain productive and collaborative conversations, deepen their facilitation skills, and coach them through the innovation process. His first book, The 30 Second Elephant and the Paper Airplane Experiment is about origami and teams and yes, it’s as strange as it sounds. He hosts The Conversation Factory podcast where he interviews leaders, changemakers, and innovators on how they design the conversations in their work and lives.   Full Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Douglas: Today on Control the Room Podcast, I have Daniel Stillman. Daniel Stillman is a conversation designer, and insists that you're one, too. He is the founder of the Conversation Factory and a master facilitator. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel. Daniel: Douglas, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Douglas: Of course. So, Daniel, I’d love to just have the listeners just hear a little bit about how you got started. Daniel: So, this is funny because I was thinking about this during our pre-conversation. You and I have known each other for a while, but there's still stuff we don't know about each other. This came up when we were having a conversation last week, where you're like, “I don't know the story behind that thing. You just assume I know that because I've known you for a couple of years,” stuff I've just never talked about. And so you've heard little snippets. So it's just kind of funny because we're friends, and now I'm telling you my story. I don’t know. Just pulling out for a second on the meta-ness of it all. Douglas: Yeah. And as you know, conversations can get weird. Daniel: Yeah, they sure can. So, wait. What was the question again? How did I—what's my origin story? Douglas: That’s right. Daniel: Was there any radioactive spiders involved in how I got my superpowers? I feel like I found my way into conversation design through design. I remember actually seeing an ad in the New York Times back when people found jobs in the New York Times’ job-wanted section. Like, that was a thing. And I remember seeing this job for an exhibit designer, and I was like, this is so cool, because I had a background in science. I had studied physics in undergrad. And this idea of designing science exhibits—I loved going to museums when I was a kid. I grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I went to the Museum of Natural History as a kid often. That's where they would just send us on a rainy day. Like, just go there. And this idea of being able to walk into a space and automatically learn just by being immersed in a space, just like, I don’t know. It kind of tickled me. And I wound up going to design school because they had a studio in science-exhibit design. And so I was super-duper excited to learn how to become a designer and how to design spaces for education. But while I was in design school, what I really learned was human-centered design. This idea that, wow, you can just go out into the world and talk to some people and learn about their problems, and then, make some stuff for them that they like, and then find out if they like it, and then, try it out again, make some test iterations. This was, like, 2005, 2006. The idea of human-centered design and design thinking we're really, I mean, nascent in design at the time. Pratt, where I went to school, was still very much form. We studied negative space and curves for entire semester-long classes. And so this idea of designing for people and designing for needs is what really inspired me. But when I got out of school and I started working in a design studio, what I realized was that I actually had to start designing—I didn't know at the time—but I was designing conversations: stakeholder-engagement workshops to try to pull intelligence out of various stakeholders to understand user needs. And so workshop design became a real passion for me. And so that's kind of how I got to where I am today was I realized that design thinking and teaching design thinking to non-designers was something that was really important. I had this fantasy. I was like, if we all knew the rules to the same game, we could play the game. Let's make something that matters together, right? And that to me are like—those are the rules of design thinking. Hey, let's empathize and understand and define and deliver. That's what I do now is I try to inspire people to be intentional about how they create. Douglas: That’s amazing. So, thinking back to when you were just post school and you were starting to have some of those early realizations that everything was a conversation, can you take us to that moment? And what was it that really clicked for you? How did that make you feel, or what was surfacing? Was there something that wasn't quite serving you at the time and you realized there needed to be more, or was it just an observation? Daniel: Actually, I can—I really remember the moment. I went to an event that my friend Jooyoung Oh was running. She was a design researcher at the time, and for many years she worked at Ziba. And at the time—I can’t remember what she was doing—but she did this workshop where she had us do collages of words and pictures that she had printed out on stickers. And we did this visual collage of “my ideal experience for blank is…,” and “my ideal experience for blank is not…” So she gave us these sheets of stickers with words and pictures on them. The pictures were evocative, emotional, suggestive. And we made these collages, and they became a focal point for a dialog. And I remember doing this and I was like, “Oh, my god, this is amazing.” And it seemed so simple. But we had this big meeting coming up with some stakeholders in the consultancy I was working on, and we were doing this big kickoff for this bug-repellent product, which I probably shouldn't talk about. And I said to my boss, he’s like, “We really need to understand all these different stakeholders and what they really think this thing should be.” And I was like, “Oh, my god, I've got a thing for that.” The language I would use now is “I have a design for that conversation.” I explained it to him a little bit, and he squinted his eyes, and he's like, “Okay.” And I'm like, “Dude, you got to trust me on this. I can land this plane. It’s going to get us good information.” And I remember going into that meeting, and we did this exercise. I remember—I literally remember printing out these sheets of these words and these stickers and these images. And one member of the stakeholder team was an engineer, and the other was a marketer. And there was a word that was placed on the is versus the isn't, in either case. The engineer did not want the experience of this chemical bug-repellent product to be magical, and the marketer thought that the experience should be magical. And so what we had was this conversation about magical and what it meant for something to be magical, and why the engineer didn't want it to be magical and why the marketer did want it to be magical. Magical to the marketer meant effortless, easy, efficacious. Boom, done—bugs are gone. And to the engineer, he's like, “If it's magical, then that means that people don't trust it. If it's magical, people don't understand why it works. If it's magical, people can't understand that it's safe and scientific.” And so just from that collaging effort, which some people would deride as goofy, mood boarding, or whatever, it provided us with an opportunity to dive into this really important conversation, which is, What do we want this thing to be, and what do we want our customers to think about it? And what we were doing was providing an interface for the conversation. If we just said, ”Hey, what do you guys want this to be?” it would have seemed like, I don’t know, one, we didn't know our stuff. But by giving them an activity to do, it pulled ideas out of their heads and put them on the wall and allowed us to unpack a really, really important idea for the project. What is magical? Douglas: That's amazing. I think that is a challenge that I see in so many meetings, where two people are using two different words to mean two different things, or they're using the same word to mean different things. And that's a real problem. And often it is not surfaced, and I think that's where a lot of these visual-thinking tools can really surface some of those things and then gives us an opportunity to discuss it. Can shape the narrative. And when I asked you about one thing that you could change about meetings, you talked about this need to have a narrative for our meetings. And just “we're having a meeting” is a flat story, and you're looking for something more dynamic. So tell us a little more about that. Daniel: Well, you were in the room when our friend Allan Chochinov, at the first masterclass, Facilitation Masterclass, you came to in New York, when Allan talked about, what was it, like, a text expander that one of his students made? Allan was an old professor of mine at Pratt. Now he runs the Products of Design program at SVA. And one of his students wrote a text expander so that whenever you write meeting, it erases it. You literally can't write the word meeting, because a meeting is a meaningless word. A meeting can mean so many different things that it means nothing. What are we doing at that meeting? Are we meeting to sing a song together? Are we going caroling. Let's meet to go caroling. Oh, let's meet to align on a decision. Let's meet to figure out what our options are. Let's meet to plan the holiday party. It doesn't mean anything. And so Allan's idea was if you don't have a prototype, you shouldn't have a meeting. If you don't have an object or an interface or a list, a thing to start the conversation off with, you shouldn't have that meeting. And so I think the story of “let's have a meeting” is just, it's a flat story, but it's also just a super-incomplete story. “Let's meet in order to blank, and let's talk about these three things, and I think that we should have process x, y,  and z  to discuss about them. Here's who can make the final decision. I'm just going to be gathering your inputs.” “Oh, okay, cool. I don't want to come to that meeting if I can't make the final decision.” Oh, interesting. Now we have tension and a cliffhanger for how this story is going to end. If you told people the real story of your meeting, most people might not even come to those meetings, which people don't like. “Well, what if I made my meetings optional? People might not come.” And I'm like, “Yeah, well, make your meetings better, make them matter, talk about something that people really care about.” Douglas: That’s amazing. Also, I think the super power of that is when you realize that there's actually multiple narratives, multiple tracks, and that you might need to divide your audience. If someone's focused more strategically and someone else more tactical, being able to split those things rather than jamming everyone together into the same conversation and creating so much discord. Daniel: Yeah. Everybody’s sitting around a table and talking over each other. And yeah, so this is why narrative is important in conversations, at least this idea of opening, exploring, and closing. Years after people come to my Facilitation workshops, the one thing people remember, they forget most things, but the one thing they remember is this idea of opening, exploring, and closing, and having time to both open or diverge and close and converge and making some time in the middle for something interesting to emerge. And I absorbed that idea from Dave Gray's coauthored book, Gamestorming, just the importance of having those three modes of thinking. And I think having that baked into the process and communicating that to people, it just means that we expect that something interesting and surprising will happen. Otherwise, just make a video. Just make a video of what you've decided and just tell everybody. Douglas: It’s fascinating because Dave Gray talks about the explorer section also being referred to as the groan zone because no one typically enjoys it. But the funny thing is most people, their meetings just consist of explorer. Let's just start exploring when we walk in the door, and then we explore until we have to walk out of the door. And that's really unfortunate if you don't give people that time, that boot-up time. I just recently read a book on facilitation that was talking about—they were talking about it as clearing, which I thought was a really fascinating way to think about an opener, is allowing people to clear themselves and get ready for the meeting to start. Daniel: Well, you’re basically closing before you can open. As we all know, if you don't close, you can't open the next—like, if you don't—and I'm sure you've seen this in sprints, right? If people don't close on day one, mapping the problem, it's really hard to open on day two, finding a target. And if you don't close on a target, it makes drawing a set of solutions really, really super hard. And if you refuse to close on a smaller number of prototypes, it means that your last day of the sprint’s going to be a bear because you test everything. Douglas: Yeah. And we've often talked about how critical closing is in the kind of more macro sense as well, because if you aren’t closing out your everyday meetings with precision, then it's really difficult to align on anything. The real, I think pathological cases, when you walk out thinking you're aligned, but you're not, and so everyone else is telling a different narrative. And you were all in the same meeting, so it should sound like it. Daniel: The cost is even higher than that, Douglas, because internally—I think one of the reasons why people pay an external facilitator, one reason why people hire me and hire you, is to create urgency. “Douglas is here. We’ve paid him. It’s expensive. Everyone stop what you’re doing. We have to focus now.” When people have an internal meeting, their urgency isn’t there. There’s no burning platform, like Kotter talks about. There’s no urgency. And so if you don’t close, you push off decisions. And work is a gas. A gas at standard pressure and temperature expands to fill the space available to it. So time creates pressure, and a sprint or a workshop reduces the volume of space we have to it. And if we don't cap things off or tie them off and say that this is the decision we're going to have, and now we're going to move on to the next phase, it's very idealistic to say these things. It is really hard to do, right? It's really hard to say, okay, well, let's just try this thing, or let's move on to the next thing, even though we don't feel we're ready. I hate doing it. I still tell my clients to do it because it's hard. I know it's important to do, and I struggle with it myself. But if we don't do that, what happens is we wind up working nights and weekends. That's the cost—not seeing our families. If we can close in the time that we have proposed, then we can have the rest of our lives back. Douglas: Yeah, well, it's interesting. You talked about it being hard, but the answer really is to disagree and commit. If we can come together and not rely on unanimity, this desire to have everyone agree, then we can get to a point where there is a decision, we're all going to support it, and we're going to see what comes out. And I think the thing that I try to coach people on is there’re one-way doors and two-way doors. So if it's a reversible decision, then why are we working weekends to get this? Daniel: Right. Having kids is not the same thing as, where should we go for vacation? Where you go to vacation is still a reversible because you've gone and you've spent that money; you've gone on that vacation. But you can always just leave early. You know, you can cancel a vacation halfway through. You're like, “I hate it here. Let's go someplace else.” But it is very hard to cancel, not to get into any politics, but once you've got the kid, it's really hard to cancel it. Douglas: That's right. Daniel: Still not impossible. All my friends who are adopted, it's a thing. But it creates repercussions. Douglas: Let’s shift gear a little bit here and talk about impromptu networking. It is a really powerful way to make meetings better. And why is that? Daniel: Oh, right, right, right. This was my—actually, it’s funny. I was only a light dabbler in liberating structures before I worked with you. I remember looking at the website, and I know many people have had this experience of, this is a crazy place on the Internet. You get to the website, and you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but this looks like the ravings of a madman. And having met Keith, I still actually have that same opinion. It is definitely the ravings of a madman. And I had done things like that before. I had started most of my workshops in my early days with “Grab someone and tell them a story, and then, listen to their story,” because creating energy in a workshop or a meeting is a hard job, and it shouldn't be the job, the sole job, the sole responsibility of the facilitator. As I like to say, it's everybody's problem we're here to solve. It's just not my problem, presumably. If people are here, they're buying into the problem. So starting with a conversation or a story or a reflection about an important component of it is really, really great. Plus, conversations are complex, and so the fewer number of people in the conversation, the less complex it can feel. And so if you've got a group of five or ten or fifteen, pairing up with somebody just immediately simplifies the conversation and makes it more intimate. I was talking with somebody today about this. He used to be a teacher. And this “think, pair, share,” which I thought I invented because it rhymes, and I thought I was clever, this is baked into Harvard University’s education best practices initiative. And every teacher already knows this. Think to grab a partner and talk to them about blank. It's just such an easy reflex. But I see so many facilitators who try to wrangle a group as a large mass of people, and I just don't think it works. You have to be—it takes a lot of strength. This is a total side note, but I love telling this story. Have you seen The Princess Bride movie? Douglas: Mm-hmm. Daniel: Yeah. There's the scene where Fezzik and the Man in Black are fighting as Vizzini is escaping with Buttercup. And they've just climbed up the wall, the Cliffs of Insanity, and they're about to face off. And spoiler alert—Fezzik loses. And he realizes halfway through the fight why he's having such a hard time. He's like, “I haven't done one-to-one combat in so long. I'm used to fighting groups of people. You have to use different techniques.” And I think of impromptu networking as a really, really great group-fighting technique, because it doesn't matter if you've got two people or ten people or a hundred people, you say, “Okay, everybody grab a partner and have a quick conversation about blank.” And then the room is filled with energy that you did not have to create. People are connecting to other people, they're learning from each other, and then it's up to you to do the next thing, which is take that energy and funnel it, direct it, focus it towards the next activity, get people to do something with that inspiration and that information and that connection that they've gotten from other people at the moment. Douglas: Yeah. And we often talk about modeling behavior. And I think impromptu networking is a great way to model the participation that we expect. So we get them at ease with participating and gaining that human connection that they so need. And especially in the virtual world, it's really critical to start setting some of those expectations, because people aren't used to doing it when they're tuning in the virtual webinars and stuff. Daniel: Oh, my god, I know. I did that with a workshop, super-duper early in the meeting. And one of the reasons why I like to do it early is this idea of antifragile openings. If somebody shows up five or ten or fifteen minutes late, they can still float in, weave in to the second or third pairing. And this woman was like, “I knew you would do breakout rooms. I didn't think it would happen so soon.” I'm like, “Yeah, if you show up 20 minutes late to this workshop, you're going to miss something, but you're not going to miss everything. You're still going to be able to get some…” She was able to come into the third pairing in impromptu networking. Douglas: For sure. And impromptu networking only works if you have a good invitation, and your prompt has to be tight. This means that you have to have a good question. So Daniel, what are your favorite questions? Daniel: Oh, man. That's my favorite question. That’s definitely my favorite question. I actually asked that of somebody on a recent podcast episode that I was hosting, on my Conversation Factory podcast. I interviewed Cameron Yarbrough, who has a scaled coaching platform called Torch.io. And his favorite question to ask people is, what are your blind spots? And boy, oh boy, that's a really—I mean, technically an impossible question to answer yourself, but it's a really, really interesting one. He described it as a cone, like a Zen question that is unanswerable but interesting. And so good questions can be like that. I think the other easy, easy question is, tell me a story about blank. Just tell me a story when you last blank, or tell me a story about how you have blanked. Or just go straight to story because stories evoke emotions and empathy. So don't just say, “Tell me a story of when you were at your best.” It's a hard question to answer still, but it's a really interesting one, and it evokes interesting reactions for people. And that's why I think focusing on positivity over negativity is always hard. Douglas: Absolutely. That was the thing I was going to bring up next, actually, was the fact that I'm a huge fan of, if your questions can be appreciative or express gratitude, that can be really amazing. And if you can make people become introspective. So think about a time when you maybe received—what's the best compliment you've ever received? So lovely. Daniel: Yeah. And just to double stitch on that, by the way, not everybody knows what appreciative inquiry is. And it's, when you look at it, if you come from design thinking or the sprint world, you look at appreciative inquiry, and you're like, it can be weird, but you're like, wait, how is this different than design thinking? And the difference is is that you only focus on the positive. And there's this idea that you can, in fact, heal a system and a person by looking at only the positives. And in my book, I actually, I found a story. I couldn't find the truth of it. I couldn't find a direct quote, but people have talked about it, this idea that—I forget the name of the Dallas Cowboys coach—but at one point during a slump, he was like, we are only going to show you your best plays. You know, they tape the plays, and they go back, and they review things. They’re like, look, we are going to review and analyze your best plays only. And it kind of flips things on its head because a lot of designers and a lot of innovators think like, oh, we're problem solving. And so if I'm problem-solving, I have to look at what's broken, and then I have to fix it. But with appreciative inquiry, there's this radical idea that I can find what's working and ask how I can magnify it and expand it. Douglas: Yeah. there's an amazing book called Super Human, and it goes into a lot of super athletes that are doing just amazing things, like free scaling mountains, and the winged airmen—the Red Bull team that just jumps off of buildings and does insane things. Daniel: Base jumpers. Douglas: Exactly. And one of the things that they discovered—and this is a phenomenon in this world—which is there is something that humans have not been able to do for decades. And the first time one human does it, like 10, 15 other humans would do it a day later, because they've shown that it's possible. It just opens up the world of, well, now I can just go to do that thing that I know—I've seen them do it. Now I can do it. Daniel: Yeah. Wow. I love that. That's really, really awesome. Douglas: And so this is similar to your mantra, Daniel: if you don't write it down, it didn't happen. So we need to be able to see it to prove it, and then we can we can double stitch on it. And we have a mantra that's similar: always capture room intelligence. So why is this so important? Daniel: Well, I, first, have to honor my friend Miles Begin, who gave me that mantra years ago, and that was when I first started teaching design thinking to non-designers. That's the whole point is if it's not on a sticky note and it's not on the wall, we can't talk about it. And having that mantra’s really helpful, especially if you have over-talkers in the room, and it's also really helpful if you have “under-talkers” in the room. If somebody’s really, really overexplaining an idea, you can say, “Hey, can you fit that on one sticky note and get it up on the wall? That is truly, truly awesome. That'll be great.” But we used to tell a story about—have you ever watched Mad Men? Douglas: Of course. Daniel: Yeah. So there's an amazing Mad Men episode where—I forget the team. It's, like, Peggy and a couple of the other people stay up all night to bang out some ideas for something. They're drinking, and they're smoking. And they finally have this amazing insight, and they're like, “Wow, that is such a great idea!” And then they go to sleep because they're satisfied. Spoiler alert—they didn't write their idea down. And so the next day, when Don Draper comes in, and Don’s like, “Okay, what’d you jerks come up with?” And they're like, “Oh, my god, we've got this great idea,” and they're looking around their desks, and they're like,  Wait a minute. What was it?” And their brains are just this empty vacuum of space. And they're like, “Oh, my god, we didn't write it down.” And they're just crestfallen. And Don's like, “I understand. That happens sometimes.” It’s one of the few moments when Don decides to be really, really human. Like, he gets it. You didn't write down the idea, and it disappeared. And so I found an old PowerPoint of mine from, like, one of the first design-thinking workshops I ever taught. And there is a scene—we found a screenshot of Don Draper and some other people, just to teach people this idea of, if you don't write down your ideas, they will disappear into the air. And this is long before I knew that conversations had interfaces and that if you use a durable interface for your conversations, not surprisingly, you can have a more-sustained conversation about it. That’s why when you get it on the wall, we can talk about it. If it's not on the wall, I'm just interpreting what I heard, and it can disappear in the air. So one of the great things about design-thinking workshops is that we create this paper trail of insights and agreements when we go from phase to phase. And if you don't do that, we're having a much floofier conversation. So it's really, really important to get things down. And if we're talking about virtual, it's actually really problematic. I mean, I love MURAL, but MURAL sticky notes are not the same thing as real sticky notes, because on a real sticky note, there's a limit to how much information I can put on the sticky note. With MURAL, you can literally write the great American essay on one sticky note and just shrink it down to infinitely small size. So, you're not as limited. We always used to tell people, oh, use Sharpie on a sticky note. That's because a Sharpie and a sticky note create one idea. But it's way too easy in virtual visual capture to put too much information into one sticky note. Douglas: You know, Daniel, that's a big debate: how much limitations did the software put on us to mimic the real world? I think that's a fascinating conversation. Daniel: I would love to be able to switch on real-sticky-note mode. Douglas: Yeah, that’d be fantastic. And I find as a facilitator, where you talked about virtual being more difficult, and this is just one example. There's a long, long list of why we have to lean in more, and it's difficult to be a lazy facilitator, virtually, whether it's we're looking to see how long the sticky notes are or we're making sure that people are connected and having to do troubleshooting and provide technical support. One of the things we spoke about, this notion of helping teams get unstuck and making sure that they continue the momentum as they leave the workshop and they go start to build their vision. And you talked about that being the magic question, just having to look around and just check and see if everything's fixed. This is something that I've talked to Erick Skogsberg quite a bit about, this notion of, from learning the science, we have to consider assessment points. What is our learning objective and making sure we've built in points of assessment so we can understand if we've gotten there. And even if you're not training people, it's important that you build this into workshops because you're taking people on a journey and you want to make sure that they're hitting the milestones, right? What do we do virtually? You and I have talked about this quite a bit, but what do the listeners need to know about virtual kind of reading the room? Daniel: Well, you have to find other feedback loops. And I think that's where—like, when we've set up MURALS for multiple tables, when you put them on separate MURALS, which I know is something you've recommended in the past, especially if you're doing a larger meeting, putting them on separate MURALS reduces the load, but it makes it harder as a facilitator to monitor multiple tables. So it's nice to have three or—if you only have 15 or 20 or 30 people to just make areas for each of the breakout rooms to work, because then you can just see everything that's happening, because while MURAL does have those preview images, as we've argued over before, the preview images don't update often enough for you to get that feedback loop, but it can be really, really simple. I've seen you do this, where you ask everybody to rename themselves in Zoom. And that's pretty meta because you're asking them to give you some information about themselves, but you're also testing whether or not they're engaged and whether or not they are interested. And if you don't see people—if you see people not doing that, then, we don't have anyplace to go because it's like, oh, they don't know how to use the tool, Zoom, and they aren't interested enough to tell you something about themselves in this area. And so it's just finding simpler, smaller feedback loops to make sure that you're moving forward with people with you, if that makes sense. Douglas: Oh, absolutely. And we've been using two facilitators in most of our workshops, with someone dedicated to looking for those signals. So they're kind of keeping a lookout for those things. So, absolutely. And also, just to keep this a bit evergreen, I'm now on the beta for the new rendering engine, so do not have to make multiple MURALS for even larger gatherings now on MURAL, so that's pretty exciting. And after that launches, you won’t have to be in the beta program, have access to that. So I'm sure listeners in the future will be happy to have that. Daniel: I’m wondering why I’m not on that beta program. Douglas: I think you should talk to some friends, Daniel. So with that, I’m super-curious about Rock, Paper, Scissors online. How does this work? Daniel: Well, so here's the thing. Like I say, I, because I think you're referring to a LinkedIn post that I made, where I didn't even think it was possible. I just sort of assumed. And this goes to your sporting-events thing, right? where when somebody does it, then you're like, oh, that's how to do it. And it partially goes against my lazy facilitation principle. But during some of the facilitation masterclass cohorts that I run, we make spaces for people to try out new warmups and icebreakers that they've never done before. And this one woman, Janine Underhill, said, I'd like to try to do a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament.” And I'm like, “Good luck, sister. I'm going to enjoy this.” And she did it. She did it. It can be done. I think what's interesting about it is that simultaneity in remote facilitation is impossible because of the speed-of-light limit. It’s basically an Einstein-Bose condensate kind of a problem. If you and I tried to snap at the same time, we can’t. Even if we said, “One, two, three, snap,” we wouldn’t snap at the same time, because you wouldn’t hear me snapping at the same time. There’s a delay because we’re in between this piece of software. The software institutes a delay, and sound travels more slowly than light. And so we’re never going to have simultaneity. In person, it is very hard to notice that lack of simultaneity, right? When I say, “Rock, paper, scissors, shoot,” it seems simultanous because we're within, like, two feet of each other. But when we are 100,000 miles from each other, and we are on Zoom, we notice it. And what happens is people start slowing down, because we go one, two, three, shoot, as we wait for the other person to catch up with us. And then somebody always throws before the other person, and so it's like—but we don't have a response action time to metabolize that information. And so it's actually a really interesting learning opportunity to talk about how challenging communication can be remotely. But it is totally possible to do it, and it is fun to do it, and it is ridiculous to do it. Everyone should try it. Douglas: That’s amazing. So structurally, when you do a Rock, Paper, Scissors battle, you're just having people start off in groups. Daniel: Yes. Douglas: And then the winners are laddering up to—it’s like a basketball tournament kind of… How do you do all these groups? Are you doing breakout groups, and then combine them together? Daniel: Yes, I will, in the interest of community, I will tell you all of my secrets. So Janine worked too hard at it, I think. She did all the initial pairings. We only had a group of 15, and she did all the initial pairings, and she did the secondary pairings as well, and she did the tertiary pairings. She called out all the pairings, kept track of it all. And that was to her credit. Douglas: She was recording the brackets. Daniel: She was the bracket-eur. My variation is to have people turn off their video if they lose. That's the easiest thing to do is just have people turn off their video if they lose, because then, at least, the bracketing is easier. Douglas: Yeah. Or someone could raise their hand if they're looking for… Daniel: Yes. Totally. They're signaling. And so here's the thing. We could try to do it a perfect way, or we could let the group solve it and see if we can get them to understand everything there is to understand about group communication, because signaling, oh, how do we signal stuff? Okay. How do we start—how do we keep signaling for the rest of our meetings? Okay, cool. And I've seen groups really develop some great habits around, okay, put your hand over your head if you haven't blanked. And so I don't think the bracketing thing—video makes it easier. Bracketing, the problem is, is that I think bracketing can't be done automatically. It's much harder to say, okay, I'm going to claim blank person as my hand-off person. So I haven't solved it. But I also haven't tried to do it with 100 hundred people. I've only done it with 20. And then it works fine. And it's fun. Douglas: Absolutely. Daniel: It's as fun and as ridiculous, if not more so, than doing it virtually. Douglas: Speaking of distributed facilitation in general, you've mentioned to me that it's weirder and squishier. So I guess some final comments for the listeners around challenges, just why is it weirder and squishier? And then, what are you hopeful for? What are you optimistic about? Daniel: I’ve written about this before. I can send you a link to the article on LinkedIn that I wrote. It's called “This Digital Place,” and we have a sense of place that comes for free by being four-dimensional beings. We exist in space and time, and we've had a long time, our entire lives, to get used to it. And we've had 40,000 years as modern humans to evolve for it. We've evolved in it. This is our—you know, [knocks on wood] this physical space is my native place. And so when we go into this digital place, it feels weird because it is literally not natural for us. But those Post-it notes behind you on the wall are not natural for us either. We designed those for ourselves as a tool, and I cannot imagine having an in-person meeting without those tools anymore, in the short decade that I've had those tools. I remember we didn't always have big Post-it sticky pads. We didn't always have whiteboards. We've grown really used to this environment. In the last 10, 20, 30 years, we've created this built environment around our meetings and our engagements, and we require them now. But I assure you, they are not natural. They feel natural to us because we’ve become acculturated to it and to them. And we do not have a culture for this distributed place. We don't have rituals for this distributed place. We are learning them slowly but surely. The example I love to give is, whatever it was, like, maybe five years ago, that guy from the BBC whose kids tromped in in the middle of his presentation—a little girl in yellow, running in like she owned the place. It was hilarious. And the guy was super embarrassed. The mother of the kids was extra-special embarrassed. And I was listening to NPR yesterday, where this woman was welcoming this man on to share a report about something. And he's like, I'm really glad to be here. Blah, blah, blah. And then his dog barks in the background. And the interviewer was like, “And it sounds like your dog’s excited to be with us today as well, too. What’s his name?” And he’s like, “It’s Buster.” And she’s like, well, hello to Buster. So, blah, blah, blah, let’s talk about blah, blah, blah. And it was seamless. It was smooth. She was like, whatever. We're just here, and there's a dog. Nobody cares anymore. That's something to be optimistic about, that we can adapt to this place, that we can learn new tools, that we can learn new rituals and new patterns. The fact of the matter is this is not natural, but there's very, very little that's natural about our lives. And we make our lives. We design the spaces and places where we have the conversations that we want to have. And so I'm pretty optimistic about the fact that our old patterns don't work as well here and that we have to develop new patterns, and that it is possible that maybe we will learn to retain some of those patterns when we get back to meeting in person in 19 months, my current estimate. Douglas: Well, Daniel, I look forward to continuing this journey with you. I agree, there's lots to learn and there's lots to explore. And we won't know for quite some time where these new norms and these new customs emerge, but I'm already seeing some things happen, and I think you and I are doing our best to be on the forefront of that. And so I just want to say thanks for being there with me, and it's been fun learning with you. Daniel: Likewise, man. I mean, a lot of facilitators say, “I can't feel the room, and it's not as good.” And honestly, I was one of those facilitators. Jim Kalbach from MURAL will literally quote back to you, like, the umpteen times over the last three years that I said to him, like, “I'm good, dude. I'm a great in-person facilitator. I'd much rather not compete on a global scale with anybody who has access to MURAL for facilitation gigs.” And we're in a situation where that's no longer possible in person is a fundamental assumption of what I used to do. That is impossible anymore. And I think if we can't adapt, if I can't adapt, if the rest of us can't adapt, we are royally screwed. We have to learn how to do this. And that's one of the reasons why we did the large virtual meetings things together. I thought it was important to push my own limits and say, is it possible to do the kind of big, crazy workshops that we did in person? If they had value—and we thought they did, and I think they still do—then, can we do them here, rather than, I don’t know, wait 18 months before having a bunch of people come together to make an important decision? I mean, honestly, Janet and I are having a long, ongoing discussion about this. We had to cancel our wedding in June. And what to do about getting married, and do we do a Zoom wedding? Will that be fun? Will that be interesting? Will it feel like a real wedding? Or should we wait an indefinite amount of time to bring everyone together to celebrate the fact that we have something good going here? I don't think that waiting forever is a really good business plan for anything, not for a marriage and certainly not for third-quarter top-to-top strategic meeting. I see you're nodding. You’re like, yeah, they should not be putting off those meetings. And I think people are putting them off, or they're doing them really, really poorly. Douglas: Yeah. I think there are two outcomes we've seen the more we explore this with companies. And some companies have the mindset, they have it figured out because they know how to run a Zoom meeting, or they know how to do webinars. Daniel: Right. One to Many—done. Douglas: Yeah. Like, I'm good. So they're just in the camp of, don't realize all the potential they're missing. And then you've got another camp that says we’ll just wait until we can do it in person because they've got caught flat-footed and they know that there's so much missing, but they don't know what to do. And so that's definitely the inspiration for putting together more virtual offerings. And the large virtual-meetings workshop is, I think, really hits the nail on the head as far as a real challenge around, what do we do with large groups? That sounds troubling. But the fascinating thing to me, Daniel, is that there's so much more that people learn. These aha moments can apply to much smaller meetings, but it's the large groups that people are the most confused by, and so that's where we approach the teaching opportunity. Daniel: Yeah. And large can just mean 15 or 20. It’s not hard to break the two-pizza rule, right? It is really easy to break the two-virtual-pizza rule quickly, and most of us don't have Fezzik-level skills when it comes to wrestling with large groups. And we need them. Everybody needs them, I think, especially if you work in a large corporation. But also, I went to a birthday party on Friday for someone I went to junior high school with. And this guy’s sister, who I was best friends with in junior high, she does stand-up comedy. And we did a call on Wednesday for the party, and she’s like, “What should I'd be looking out for, Daniel?” And I was like, “Well, look, it's a lot of people. You need to have an M.C.” And she's like, “Oh, I can do that,” because she's M.C.’d open comedy nights. And it’s like, “You need to have somebody to keep the energy moving and to orchestrate things and to keep the conversation moving.” It's not trivial. I think maybe this is where comics will find work in this new economy. How the Emmys and the Oscars need Billy Crystal and Kevin Hart, maybe these large virtual meetings just need comics, which is an insight you had for the first Control the Room,right? Just bring in some comedy to keep it going. Douglas: It might work a little better in the virtual setting, maybe. We’ll see. Daniel: Yeah. Are they available for me and my team? Douglas: Yeah. Bring them in, for sure. Yeah. There’s also some companies that have sprung up that allow you to rent— Daniel: Llamas? Yes, I know. Douglas: Llamas and perezosos and all sorts of stuff. Daniel: I don’t even know what those are, but… Douglas: Oh, it’s a sloth. Daniel: Oh, okay. Douglas: Everyone's got to have a sloth at their workshop. Daniel: Yeah, but see, that’s just like shiny distraction. Douglas: I agree. And Daniel, you know, I think this is the exact reason why so many people dislike icebreakers and eye openers and energizers, because they just throw them in, with no reason whatsoever, and without a debrief—in fact, I've started to say, if you can't ask, “Why did we just do that,” and have that erupt into a pithy conversation, ask yourself, “Why did we just do that?” Daniel: Whoa, yeah. I agree with you. Obviously, I agree with you. Douglas: So, Daniel, what do we need to leave listeners with? What should they know? And how could they find you, contact info, all that good stuff? Daniel: Well, I'm on the Internet, easy to find, fairly SEO’d. If you Google “Daniel Stillman,” you might find me. If you Google “The Conversation Factory,” you'll definitely find me. I have a podcast. I have a book coming out, by the way, Douglas. It will be coming out shortly, God willing. It's called Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter. They're advertising it as a step-by-step handbook. It's not a step-by-step guide, because I don't think there's a single recipe that could possibly account for all situations. But it is a map to the territory and can help people learn how to form and shape and guide all the conversations in their lives better, from big-group conversations to the conversations that they have with themselves every day. We have a shocking number of conversations with ourselves, and those need to be designed just as much as quarterly action-plan gatherings and off-sites. And so if you go https://theconversationfactory.com/goodtalk, you can find it. You can download some chapters. It’s a thing. You don’t have to pay me anything. You don’t have to buy the book. The first two chapters, there’s a lot there—although somebody has told me that I ended the first two chapters at the right spot, that made them want to read the third chapter. And to that, I have to thank Kellie McGann, who helped me with the editing of the book. Douglas: It is a fantastic book. I've read it several times— Daniel: What?! Crazy. Douglas: —and I think it's really critical for people that are wanting to elevate their meetings and just their interactions at work and at home. It is a fantastic way to step back and look at your dialog in an abstract way so that you can put terms to it. So just like physics is the science of being able to take the phenomenon in the world, how the air moves past you and how your car functions, and you can put equations to it so you can understand it. You can talk about it in an abstract way so that you can reason about it. Daniel has done that for conversations. And if you think about how many conversations we have and all the moments throughout life where conversations are important, you can imagine how relevant this book becomes. And I can't highly recommend it enough. Daniel: It's really, really—it's wonderful to hear you say that. I appreciate you saying it. Writing a book, as you know, is a terrible, terrible thing. I’d never recommend it to anybody. The fact that it's out there and everyone can read it is terrifying to me. You can see what goes on in my head now, and the fact that I had a love of physics, and still do, and a love of design, it's not surprising, hearing you talk about it, I'm like, “All right. Of course. That's why I wrote the book the way that I did.” Douglas: Excellent. Well, Daniel, it's been a pleasure having you here today, and I can't wait to chat with you again. Daniel: Thanks, Douglas. It's always a pleasure. Thanks, man. Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

Maybe it’s not the only way to look at the jobs-to-be-done framework, but it might be the most clarifying way. Jim Kalbach, author of "The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs” suggests you look at it this way…when studying a customer’s job, ask yourself, “How would this job get done 50 years ago?”   The point of this question is the remove the notion that current technology and knowledge does not exist and helps the product manager think about the job without the constraints of modernity. It helps the product look at the essence of the job itself.    The product designer can go beyond the product.    This simple technique helped me understand jobs-to-be-done better. This episode will help you understand better.    More about Jim: The book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/ Jim’s Talk at CS100 Summit 2019:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdBYPX4Lw7M On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/ Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

In many companies, designers do not prepare the product roadmap. We are handed a feature list and expected to just do it. But we’ve all been in situations where we felt that what we are working on just isn’t right. But how do you push back? How do you correctly recognize what to create? Does a hobby runner want a better running shoe? Or do they just want to be faster? Or to lose some weight? If we understand what people really want, we can work on the right solution. A great framework that helps us with that is Jobs to be Done. It promises to identify the customer jobs (i.e. customer goals), prioritize our product roadmap, and help us better communicate with business colleagues. To help us better understand this framework, we spoke with Jim Kalbach, a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He recently wrote a book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which is coming out in early April. We spoke about: Jim’s first encounter with the framework, how he uses it in his design work, and how it can help us drive product prioritization and business strategy talks.

Buckle in, ladies and gentlemen, for some straight talk about the future of work, the nature of the universe and the power of changing systems to change behavior. Today I'm sharing a deep and rambling conversation I had a few months back with Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work and founder of the Ready, an org transformation partner to companies like Airbnb, Edelman and charity: water. He is a cofounder of responsive.org, an amazing community of like-minded transformation professionals. If you haven't checked out their conference, it's great. I co-facilitated some sessions there last year and I can highly recommend it. You should also check out the episode I had recently on asking better questions with Robin Zander, who hosts the conference. http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2019/4/23/robin-p-zander-asking-better-questions I owe a debt of gratitude to Aaron. It was his OS Canvas, published in 2016 on Medium, that got me thinking differently about my own work in Conversation Design and led me to develop my own Conversation OS Canvas. His OS Canvas clarified and simplified a complex domain of thinking – organizational change – into (then) just nine factors. In the book it's evolved into 12 helpful prompts to provoke clear thinking and to accelerate powerful conversations about how to change the way we work – if you are willing to create the time and space for the conversation. Aaron doesn't pull any punches – as he says, “the way we work is badly broken and a century old”. And he figures that “a six year old could design a good org, you just have to ask the socratic questions.” His OS Canvas can help you start the conversation about changing the way you work in your org and his excellent book will help you dive deep into principles, practices and stories for each element of the OS. You'll find in the show notes some deep-dives on the two core principles of org design from the book. The first principle is being complexity Conscious. The second is being people positive. For more on complexity – dig into Cynefin (which is not spelled the way it sounds). And for more on people positivity, there's a link to Theory X vs Theory Y, a very helpful mental model in management theory. Another powerful idea that I want to highlight is Aaron's suggestion that we all have our own “system of operating” or “a way of being in the world” which is “made up of assumptions and principles and practices and norms and patterns of behavior and it's coded into the system.”  Aaron goes on to say that “people are chameleons and people are highly sensitive to the culture and environment they're in. And the system, the aquarium, the container tells us a lot about how we're supposed to show up. And over time it can even beat us into submission. And so we have to change the system and that's hard to do when we're reinforcing things that we ourselves didn't even create,” From my own work on conversation design, it's very clear to me that communication is held in a space, or transmitted through an interface – the air, the internet, a whiteboard. The space your culture happens in is one very key component of how to shift your culture. Check out my episode with Elliot of Brightspot Strategy for more on changing conversations through changing spaces: http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/24/elliot-felix-of-brightspot-strategy-on-changing-conversations-through-changing-spaces Changing your physical space is easy compared with shifting power and distributing authority more thoughtfully in your organization. To do that, we need to shift not just our org structures, but our own OS:  we need more leaders who can show up as facilitators and coaches rather than order-givers. And that takes, as Aaron points out, a brave mindset.  If you want to become a more facilitative leader of innovation and change in your company, you should definitely apply before August to the first cohort of the 12-week Innovation Leadership Accelerator I'm co-hosting with Jay Melone from New Haircut, a leader in Design Sprint Training. It kicks off in NYC with a 2-day workshop in September, runs for 12 weeks of remote coaching and closes with another 2-day workshop. We'll have several amazing guest coaches during the program – a few of which have been wonderful guests on this very show: Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences and head of Customer Success at Mural and Bree Groff, Principle at SY Partners and former CEO of change consultancy NOBL. http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2018/2/5/jim-kalbach-gets-teams-to-map-experiences http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/season-three/bree-groff-grief-and-change Show Notes The OS Canvas Medium post that started it all for me: https://medium.com/the-ready/the-os-canvas-8253ac249f53 The Ready https://theready.com/ Brave New Work https://www.bravenewwork.com/ Complexity Conscious: Cynefin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework Being people positive: Theory X vs Theory Y https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y Capitalism needs to be reformed: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/04/05/capitalism-needs-to-be-reformed-warns-billionare-ray-dalio.html The Lake Wobegon Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon Game Frame https://www.amazon.com/Game-Frame-Using-Strategy-Success/dp/B0054U5EHA The Four Sons as four personalities at work in us:  https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-holidays/passover/which-four-children-are-you MECE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECE_principle Fish and Water:  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/97082-there-are-these-two-young-fish-swimming-along-and-they The Finger and the Moon: https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/i-am-a-finger-pointing-to-the-moon-dont-look-at-me-look-at-the-moon/ also from Amelie! https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/am%C3%A9lie Zen Flesh, Zen Bones https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Flesh-Bones-Collection-Writings/dp/0804831866 Agile https://agilemanifesto.org/ Open Source Agility: http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/6/23/dan-mezick-on-agile-as-an-invitation-to-a-game The Heart of Agile  http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/19/alistair-cockburn-on-the-heart-of-agile-jazz-dialog-and-guest-leadership Lean https://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/Principles.cfm Open https://opensource.com/open-organization Information Radiators http://www.agileadvice.com/2005/05/10/bookreviews/information-radiators/ Asking better questions: http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2019/4/23/robin-p-zander-asking-better-questions Loss in Change:  http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/season-three/bree-groff-grief-and-change Mapping experiences: http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2018/2/5/jim-kalbach-gets-teams-to-map-experiences  

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently the Head of Customer Success at MURAL, a leading visual online workspace for remote collaboration. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix. Jim lived in Germany for 15 years before returning to the US in 2013. While there, he co-founded the European Information Architecture conferences, as well as the IA Konferenz. Jim is widely know for his book, "Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams" Follow Worthix on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/worthix/ Follow Worthix on Twitter: @worthix Follow Mary Drumond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marydrumond/ Follow Mary Drumond on Twitter: @drumondmary Follow Jim Kalbach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/ Follow Jim Kalbach on Twitter: @JimKalbach Get Jim Kalbach's book, "Mapping Experiences" on Amazon

Episode 28 highlights with Jim Kalbach: - What is the difference between user experience, customer experience and marketing - Jim’s background in UX design and how that helped him transition to his role now in customer experience and product education - Remembering that the “grass is never greener” and no organization is perfect in order to have a longer term impact where you work - What is the true secret to becoming a kick ass design leader - The long term effects of even the smallest UX and user research decisions - Experience mapping principles and tips from Jim’s book - Building empathy and understanding for your stakeholders and business to be a more successful designer

Today I talk with Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences, an amazing resource for anyone who wants to help a group of people gain alignment..alignment on what's actually happening in their organization, with their customers, and alignment on where to go next. This season, I'm investigating ideas and tools around thinking alone and thinking together. Thinking together matters because whenever we meet, it's a chance to make a choice...and if our thinking is habitual, based on power dynamics or just plain haphazard, the choices we make will be habitual and haphazard! Great facilitators help groups of people think together in amazing ways...Jim is an ace facilitator and I'm thrilled to talk with him today! If you want to see our faces, there is a video in YouTube of our conversation. As Jim said (to my heart's delight) It's not the map, it's the conversation *about* the map that creates real change. The map is just a durable artifact of the conversation, and lasts longer, communicates better, than a report or slide deck. It's also something people build together, so it gains power from the IKEA effect...people love what they invest time in. We also talked about the powerful draw the idea of "mapping" has for people: It's like asking for a name brand mustard! He got a call from an amazing organization called Hedayah way out in Dubai to do a mapping workshop for former radical extremists to talk about their journeys out of radicalization and into helping others. He Had to figure out *where* in the long journey of the extremist's experience the work needed to be focused...and we talk about how he got it wrong and how it got it right. Some key takeways from our conversation are in the show notes on the conversation factory.com:   1. The Map Frames the Narrative,  but leave it incomplete, creating  a  lean forward Conversation This is one really interesting takeaway from our conversation: Jim is very intentional about how much to do *with* the group, live and in person and how much to build *for* them, through research and his own reflective  process. Leaving it incomplete helps people enter into the world of the map and make it their own. Showing a perfect artifact is *not* the point of these tools. He sees it as a proposal, an opening to the conversation, like a first offer in a negotiation. 2. Alignment is not Groupthink: Breaking the team up helps them work together honestly Jim calls these maps he makes "alignment diagrams" because they help the team see the same world. But the time spent with people in the room isn't about getting everyone to agree on your map, it's about getting everyone's perspectives out and up on the wall and rebuilding the map to match everyone's understanding, knowledge and experience 3. Where to play, how to win: Focus on a portion of the map for clearer insights Hendauah asked him to come to Dubai and bring together former gang bangers, white supremacists and Al Qaida members to talk about and map their experiences. T here's a long arc of that experience...and the organization wanted the focus on a particular *moment* in the journey: Not the radicalization journey, not the de-radicalization journey...but the journey of those who choose to help de-radicalize others. Figuring that focus out took a lot of conversation with his partners in Dubai. The more specific you are about your journey "moment" the more clear your work can be...you can zoom in on what's really crucial...and situate that moment in a larger arc. 4. Map the workshop experience, manage the energy Find an arc and a flow for your mapping workshop: Just like your customers have experiences that you can map, you can map the experience of the team as you think about how they will enter into the workshop, what the flow of energy will be...and always have a plan B: keeping things moving along. Jim talks about shifting the energy and activities between introspective, conversational and game-based.   We also talk about remote workshopping and more!   Links and notes mapping experiences https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Experiences-Complete-Creating-Blueprints/dp/1491923539 Hedayah: The NGO Jim worked with to map the experiences of violent extremists http://www.hedayah.ae/ this book isn't just about software, it's about any challenge with people: brand, customer experiences, social challenges the hero's journey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey star wars and the hero's journey (a fun episode of the ted radio hour) https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/458496650/the-heros-journey being thoughtful about who to bring along with you on the pre-work interviews it's not the diagram, it's the process of building the diagram The chronology of the experience phases  follows a certain logic (although arbitrary), along with tracking Doing/Thinking/Feeling at each moment The 5 Es of Experience Design: A handy frame (two articles I've written about it on medium: https://medium.com/@dastillman/the-5es-and-6ps-experience-inventory-a-conversation-guide-849696b5dc70 https://medium.com/@dastillman/facilitation-means-designing-conversations-24bac966076e Have a Goal at the end of the map, use Verbs Shout out to GameStorming: Looking at Game Mechanics to get teams to work together better http://gamestorming.com To get the team to read the map, get the team to give themselves (ie, their company) a letter grade at each moment in the map How do you keep the momentum of the conversation going? The Map can be the compact, compelling artifact that keeps the thread of the conversation going: A touchstone How can you get from the map to an experiment? Remote can work with the right tools, enough focus and time: Don't try to replicate the in-person experience...but a mapping workshop is a good reason to get a geographically spread out team together. Mural.com is a great tool for this, but you *must* rethink your methods, cycle through your participants and break exercises into much smaller chunks of 3-10 minutes. To get remote to work, weave multiple tools together to give people a multi-tasking mindset *on the workshop*...using chat, surveys, mural and other tools. The remote design thinking workshop with Glenn Fajardo and Kal Joffres with the D.School. https://dschool.stanford.edu/classes/long-distance-design Don 't have mixed remote/located teams: different paces of communication make it very hard The experience map can become a container for the interviews, empathy and notes as the workshop progresses.            

Jim Kalbach, the Head of Customer Success at MURAL, and the author of Mapping Experiences, a book about how visual diagrams and blueprints can help companies optimize their customer experience, joins Kristen to discuss how MURAL maps their customer journey. Jim also shares his advice for companies that want to adopt visual approaches for their processes and customer experiences! There's lots to adopt from this one!

Jeannie exposes unexpected gaps in CX created by transition processes and procedures within the customer journey. Are you creating unnecessary gaps in CX? Who has not had a great experience do a complete 180 somewhere along the way? This often happens during transitions in the customer journey. In fact, experience gaps in these transitions are often invisible from within the organization. Do you know where they are? A great overall experience means not only delivering excellence during every phase in the customer journey, but also zeroing in on the transitions. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you have them all tightened up! This is where gaps in CX are often only visible from the customer’s perspective. “I bet there’s a #CX transition YOU control that you can fix quickly!” -Jeannie Walters Whether transitioning from freemium to premium or sales to usage, happy prospects find themselves scratching their heads and having second thoughts at critical moments. That said, it’s important to understand what’s really happening to them at these turning points! What typically goes wrong, and more importantly, how you find and close these gaps? Don’t make happy prospects lose their enthusiasm over something that can easily be avoided. Jeannie has some classic examples of transitions that cause gaps in CX, so you can find and start fixing them today. Listen in!  Related Content 360Connext® post, Your Process Flows Don’t Know Jack! Customers That Stick® post, Turn Your Customer Experience Inside Out Episode 255: (Tip) Your Org Chart vs. Your Customers Episode 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can UX mapping transform someone’s life? Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Success at Mural and author of “Mapping Experiences,” pondered this question when a global counter-terrorism organization approached him to facilitate a workshop in Abu Dhabi. The users were former violent extremists turned activists against terrorism. Jim chats with Lou about how this mapping experiences translates to social impact. Read Jim’s work on his blog: https://experiencinginformation.com/ Follow Jim Kalbach on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JimKalbach Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

We often talk in terms of silos in organizations, where information isn’t readily shared and communication leaves something to be desired. Another way to think of a team who is heads-down working on the overall journey is to imagine swim lanes. Each department is so focused on their own part of the experience that they might not be fully aware of each step a user has to go through to complete the journey. In this episode, Conor Ward, Head of UX and Design at Centrica & British Gas, tells a story of how mapping out the journey to acquiring a quote for boiler insurance revealed some unexpected insights. Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences, also joins the podcast to share his expertise on the subject of journey mapping.

Jeannie shares tips for understanding customer touchpoints from the customer’s perspective and taking action. Understanding customer touchpoints for what they really are is essential to mapping and evaluating the true customer experience. But common definitions don’t give us an understanding we can act on, and there’s a lot of bad information out there! A watered-down customer touchpoint definition may fit nicely on a page for the general public, but it won’t help you understand what’s really happening with your customers. "Put yourself in the customer’s shoes as much as you can…” -Jeannie Walters Today, Jeannie is giving you her expert definition so you can identify those moments that matter most to customers and take action. User her tips to get started today! Related Content 360Connext® post, Touchpoint Mapping: Discovery, Enlightenment, and A-HA! Moments Customers That Stick® post, Turn Your Customer Experience Inside Out Episode 222: 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert Episode 235: Customer Experience Touchpoint Tips We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Free Webinar On Demand Jeannie is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) who has held highly engaging Customer Experience Mission workshops for larger audiences, and customized ones for clients with outstanding results. Sign up to learn how to start your own Customer Experience Mission for free! Make your mission statement meaningful both to customers and employees Ensure customer-facing employees meet and exceed expectations Turn ordinary processes into a conduit for your mission Steps for creating a mission your team will be proud to get behind Visit CXWebinar.com to sign up for free and check out more free webinars.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is a customer experience touchpoint? Jeannie shatters common myths and shares tips for a more customer-centric and actionable approach. How does a CX pro define "customer experience touchpoint?" Customer touchpoints make up your customer’s journey, but many business leaders don’t truly understand what this means. They are often not understood from the customer’s perspective, and the popular beliefs about how to identify them lure us into a narrow view of the customer experience. Don’t be deceived by the way-too-simple customer touchpoint definition you find in google search, of fall into the trap of thinking your quest for understanding is that simple. Jeannie has been helping organizations understand their true customer journeys for more than 20 years, and she’s here to share the professional approach with you! “Think of a touchpoint as any and every interaction a customer has with your brand...” -Jeannie Walters The customer journey is more far-reaching than you think, and your customers are depending on you to understand it from end to end.  How can you do this? Listen in to shatter they myths and start using Jeannie’s tips today! Related Content 360Connext® post, Touchpoint Mapping: Discovery, Enlightenment, and A-HA! Moments Customers That Stick® post,Turn Your Customer Experience Inside Out Episode 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert Episode 163: When to Update Customer Journey Maps We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Free Webinar On Demand Jeannie is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) who has held highly engaging Customer Experience Mission workshops for larger audiences, and customized ones for clients with outstanding results. Sign up to learn how to start your own Customer Experience Mission for free! Make your mission statement meaningful both to customers and employees Ensure customer-facing employees meet and exceed expectations Turn ordinary processes into a conduit for your mission Steps for creating a mission your team will be proud to get behind Visit CXWebinar.com to sign up for free and check out more free webinars.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeannie shares tips and distinctions for delivering an excellent overall customer experience to those who your digital products and services. User experience vs, customer experience: Is there a difference? Your rock star dev team has created an excellent user experience, so why are customers still dropping out on you? If the product or service you offer is digital, you might say “all our customers are users,” so it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking user experience covers it all. But while they can be similar, there are some critical distinctions!  “A good customer experience model will take every part of that journey into account, including the digital." -@jeanniecw” We’ve seen this many times: digital products that deliver an excellent user experience, while the experience around it needs lots of work! So maybe it’s time to take your developers out of the hot seat and look elsewhere for the answers. Want to make sure your user experience is conducive to the overall experience you envision for your customers? Jeannie is serving up some answers to help you keep these parts of the experience in perspective, and some great tips you can use today! Sponsor Message: Free Webinar March 21st Align your brand promises with customer perceptions and the true experience delivered.   Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We will help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. Jeannie Walters and the 360Connext team help companies across industries and around the globe develop unique and scalable customer-focused missions. And now they're offering the same set of actions to their community for free!   You need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience, and a way to break down the silos that are in your way. Develop a mission around consistently delivering excellent experiences, and make your employees proud to be on board. Visit CXWebinar.com to sign up for free. Related content 360Connext® post and video, User Experience and Customer Experience: What’s the Difference? Customers That Stick® post, Turn Your Customer Experience Inside Out Episode 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert Episode 025: Customer Journey Maps, Justin Zacks, and Amazon 2-Hour Delivery   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently the Head of Consulting and Education with MURAL, a leading online whiteboard for digital collaboration. Previously, Jim has worked with large companies, such as Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, Citrix, and eBay, among others. Jim Kalbach authored #1 Amazon Business Development Bestseller, Mapping Experiences: A Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams.   Key Takeaways: [1:05] Jim Kalbach never worried about what title was on his business card. His focus is on facilitating big-picture, strategic conversations. [3:36] Jim marries the idea of design information architecture with visualizing strategy in Chapter Three of Mapping Experiences. [5:46] Customer-centric thinking is a fundamental shift in the way business gets done. [8:54] Business leaders can use customer journey mapping, or experience mapping, to create a visualization. [11:04] Blue Ocean Strategy gets to the core of why an organization exists, and what value they are creating. [16:35] Organizations must look at strategy as a creative endeavour. [23:36] Unpacking Clayton Christensen's Jobs to Be Done framework. [29:16] Jim Kalbach’s view of Jobs to Be Done has six dimensions and goes well beyond task analysis. [34:03] With business strategy, deciding what you're not going to do is as important as deciding what you are going to do.   Mentioned in This Episode: Mapping Experiences: A Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams, by Jim Kalbach Experiencing Information @jimkalbach on Twitter Praxent @PraxentSoftware on Twitter

Today we’re sharing tips and best practices for keeping customer journey maps current and making them more useful. Just when you think your customer journey map is finished… Changes are happening in your organization, your products, or your customer’s expectations while you work on your customer journey map. Essentially, it's always out of date! A real, working customer journey map is never “finished.” So, when and how often should you update yours? This can depend on the size and structure of your organization, what you’re using it for, and if you’re even using it at all. The customer journey mapping process may be different for everyone, but it’s never easy. It takes lots of time and patience, and it can be quite painful. When the time comes to update, are you going to scrap all that hard work and start over? Protect that invest!  We have expert advice for not only when to update, but how to approach the process to create a customer journey map that drives results. Related Content Customers That Stick® post, The Magic Number in Customer Experience Is Two 360Connext® post, 5 Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes that Lead You Nowhere Free webinar: Demystifying Customer Journey Mapping Episode 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert Episode 025: Customer Journey Maps, Justin Zacks, and Amazon 2-Hour Delivery Sponsor message: Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Collective alignment, shared value, and design thinking.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Jim Kalbach, designer, instructor, and author of Mapping Experiences. We talk about the relationship between design and design thinking, how to get started with mapping experiences, and the notion of shared value as a strategic competitive advantage.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Mapping experiences: The great aligner The strategic function of the activity of mapping experience that I focus on in my book, is about helping organizations to really see the world differently through the eyes of the customer to the degree possible. That's just one tool that helps us do that. It's not a silver bullet, and there's other things that people do, like personas and other types of research, and other types of activity, so I think it fits in with a range of things that we're doing to help us understand the complexity of end-to-end experiences. How is that value perceived by the customers? Sometimes the value that we think we're creating isn't perceived that way. It's really about that outside-in perspective. It starts by aligning to the outside, toward the customer perspective. That's a collective alignment. It doesn't matter if there’s one user researcher, one business stakeholder who has that perspective. Is the team aligned? I talk about two levels of alignment in the book. That one is aligning the perspective toward the customer, but then it's getting on the same page as a team. … I think there are five questions that you need to ask. I recently just wrote a blog post on this. ... The five questions are, what's your point of view? What's the scope? What's the focus? How are you going to structure the information? How are you going to put it to use? Design vs. design thinking Design thinking is not what designers do. I always say, 'Designers design.' Design thinking is a way to apply that type of thinking to other problems, so we use design thinking to solve business problems, or we use design thinking to solve marketing problems, right? Obviously, we use that to solve service design challenges as well. What design thinking does, in my opinion, is it kind of demystifies that magic wand that they think designers have. Designers feel comfortable with uncertainty, I think—you have to be to be a designer, because you don't know what you're going to end up with at the end of the day. To some people, that's kind of scary, and I think what design thinking does is it gives them a framework to feel comfortable. To say, 'It's okay if you don't know the answer. We're going to show you a way that you can consistently get an answer, even if you don't know what that outcome is before you get started.' Shared value: Doing good while turning a profit Shared value is a concept that Michael Porter, the famous strategist, Harvard Business Review professor, literally wrote all of the classic volumes on business strategy. The concept of shared value is something that he pioneered, I think it was 2012; it was articulated in a landmark article in the Harvard Business Review called “Creating Shared Value.” He's thinking about, what's the next thing? What he's saying is companies aren't solely about maximizing profit anymore: it's about maximizing profit and contributing something back to society. He's saying that's where companies are leaving money on the table. It's actually a strategic and a business move—he's saying that we have to not only think about the products and the services that we deliver and what the competitive advantage of those are, but also how are we creating those? Who are we partnering with? What are the materials that we're sourcing with? What's the environmental and educational and societal impact of the way that we do business? You can turn that into a competitive advantage. … I think this idea of moving from shareholder value, maximizing your bottom line, to shared value, how do we maximize the bottom line and contribute back to society—I think that's just a fascinating movement.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Collective alignment, shared value, and design thinking.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Jim Kalbach, designer, instructor, and author of Mapping Experiences. We talk about the relationship between design and design thinking, how to get started with mapping experiences, and the notion of shared value as a strategic competitive advantage.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Mapping experiences: The great aligner The strategic function of the activity of mapping experience that I focus on in my book, is about helping organizations to really see the world differently through the eyes of the customer to the degree possible. That's just one tool that helps us do that. It's not a silver bullet, and there's other things that people do, like personas and other types of research, and other types of activity, so I think it fits in with a range of things that we're doing to help us understand the complexity of end-to-end experiences. How is that value perceived by the customers? Sometimes the value that we think we're creating isn't perceived that way. It's really about that outside-in perspective. It starts by aligning to the outside, toward the customer perspective. That's a collective alignment. It doesn't matter if there’s one user researcher, one business stakeholder who has that perspective. Is the team aligned? I talk about two levels of alignment in the book. That one is aligning the perspective toward the customer, but then it's getting on the same page as a team. … I think there are five questions that you need to ask. I recently just wrote a blog post on this. ... The five questions are, what's your point of view? What's the scope? What's the focus? How are you going to structure the information? How are you going to put it to use? Design vs. design thinking Design thinking is not what designers do. I always say, 'Designers design.' Design thinking is a way to apply that type of thinking to other problems, so we use design thinking to solve business problems, or we use design thinking to solve marketing problems, right? Obviously, we use that to solve service design challenges as well. What design thinking does, in my opinion, is it kind of demystifies that magic wand that they think designers have. Designers feel comfortable with uncertainty, I think—you have to be to be a designer, because you don't know what you're going to end up with at the end of the day. To some people, that's kind of scary, and I think what design thinking does is it gives them a framework to feel comfortable. To say, 'It's okay if you don't know the answer. We're going to show you a way that you can consistently get an answer, even if you don't know what that outcome is before you get started.' Shared value: Doing good while turning a profit Shared value is a concept that Michael Porter, the famous strategist, Harvard Business Review professor, literally wrote all of the classic volumes on business strategy. The concept of shared value is something that he pioneered, I think it was 2012; it was articulated in a landmark article in the Harvard Business Review called “Creating Shared Value.” He's thinking about, what's the next thing? What he's saying is companies aren't solely about maximizing profit anymore: it's about maximizing profit and contributing something back to society. He's saying that's where companies are leaving money on the table. It's actually a strategic and a business move—he's saying that we have to not only think about the products and the services that we deliver and what the competitive advantage of those are, but also how are we creating those? Who are we partnering with? What are the materials that we're sourcing with? What's the environmental and educational and societal impact of the way that we do business? You can turn that into a competitive advantage. … I think this idea of moving from shareholder value, maximizing your bottom line, to shared value, how do we maximize the bottom line and contribute back to society—I think that's just a fascinating movement.

Jim Kalbach is currently the Head of Customer Success at MURAL. He has previously worked in various design-related consulting roles for large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix. Before moving back to the US in 2013 after living for fifteen years in Germany, he was the co-founder of the European Information Architecture conferences and he also founded the IA Konferenz, a leading UX design event in Germany. In 2007, he published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation and his second book, Mapping Experiences, was a #1 bestseller on Amazon in the Business Development section. Jim has a varied professional background. He studied information science and has a lot of experience doing digital product design for agencies and large companies. “Really these visualizations are a way for us customer experience professionals to observe the world, so that we can bring that back into our organizations”. He says that professionals don’t necessarily create the customer experience, as it’s something the customer owns. “We have to understand that and help them navigate because it is actually their journey through our eco system and our touch points.” Jim says it is important to have participations from companies that he works with, open conversations and getting in the problem-solving mindset. “People support what they create or help create.” Jim says having the visualization helps because it inspires people to want to have a conversation, but the danger lies in people focusing on the diagram itself instead of using it as a tool for improvement. “You put it up on the wall and people lean back; you want it to be a lean-in deliverable.” He believes you need to think about how you are going to use the map because ultimately it is not about the deliverable or the document but how that activates change. INTERVIEW LINKS: www.ExperiencingInformation.com www.Twitter.com/JimKalbach “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen "The Innovator's Solution" by Clayton Christensen      

How often do we look at the actions, thoughts and feelings of learners over time to better understand what they experience while they are working, using a learning management system, taking a course or seeking support and help? In this episode, I interview Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams. Jim entered the design world as an information architect and has worked in various design-related consulting roles for large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix. He is currently Head of Customer Success at MURAL.  WE DISCUSS: What a user experience map is and what it can include How to categorize and diagram actions, thoughts and feelings How to identify a user's feelings during an experience How experience maps foster important conversations How Jim got interested in experience maps Aligning experiences to the organization Choosing the right map for the problem Using constraints to understand a problem: point of view, scope and focus Five phase process for mapping Maps for learning experience design Tools for creating user experience maps Mental model maps TIME: 32 minutes RATE: Rate this podcast in iTunes TRANSCRIPT: Download the [Download not found]. RESOURCES: Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach Experiencing Information: Jim's website MURAL: Cool collaboration tool and where Jim works Touchpoint Dashboard: Customer journey management software Get smarter about online learning with articles, tips and resources delivered to your Inbox once a month. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//forms.aweber.com/form/66/775275066.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, "script", "aweber-wjs-v9wwc4idc"));

Experience mapping expert and author Jim Kalbach shares little-known but powerful secrets to leading and executing a successful mapping project. The holistic approach to experience mapping Thinking of creating a customer journey map, process diagram or strategy map for your organization? These can be invaluable tools for growing your business and improving your customer experience. So how can you create useful maps and visualizations that actually help you understand and optimize your processes and strategies? In this in-depth interview, Jim Kalbach outlines the key benefits of creating visuals versus lengthy reports and boring PowerPoints. It is through this understanding that a successful mapping project is executed. Too often, mapping projects become all about the end product. We just want to finish it! But is a true journey map ever done? The success of any mapping project, as Jim explains, is about the process- not the finished product. It is through this process that successful mapping projects lead to critical discoveries, improved communication and exciting opportunities for innovation. Would you like to start a mapping project that gets results? Jim has some great tips on how to get started, get the most out of the process, and use your maps as the tools and resources they were meant to be. About our guest Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently the Head of Customer Success at MURAL, a leading online digital whiteboard. Jim has worked as a design leader with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix. Jim plays jazz bass in jam sessions and combos in Jersey City, where his currently lives. In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly) was release in 2016. He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach. Connect with Jim Jim’s blog Twitter LinkedIn Related Content Jim’s Book, Mapping Experiences Customers That Stick® post, The Magic Number in Customer Experience Is Two 360Connext® post, 5 Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes that Lead You Nowhere Episode 068: Annette Franz, Customer Journey Maps Get Real Sponsor message: Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lou talks to Mariano Suarez-Battan and Jim Kalbach of Mural.ly to discuss the state of User Experience Design, working solutions for distributed teams, and how design leaders can start putting together optimal solutions one piece at a time. Look for Mural.ly to make an appearance at EnterpriseUX in San Antonio, June 8-10. www.enterpriseux.net

The second of our two shows featuring interviews from Interact London 2015. We talk to Jim Kalbach, Vanessa Kirby, Craig Sullivan and Sofia Hussain.

The concept of strategy can be fuzzy at best. And the word strategy tends to hold a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to. Jim Kalbach says that strategy needs to show causality. He defines it as a hypothesis of a desired position, and a belief about how you’re going to succeed and overcome challenges.