Transcription
(uplifting music)
Welcome to the session titled "Decision Making at Scale with Wicked Problem Solving." My name is Grisha, I'm from the Miro team, and I'll be our MC today for the next hour.
Just as we wait for some people to rejoin, a couple of organizational points:
This session will be recorded, and we'll distribute it after the session. We'll also reserve about 15 minutes at the back end of this hour to host a Q&A with Tom. The link to Slido will be put in the chat in Hopin, so please follow this link and ask your questions as Tom presents. At the end, we'll go through the questions.
Tom Wujec is a technology pioneer, TED speaker, entrepreneur, writer, and facilitator who helps people solve complex problems and create wickedly great outcomes. As a former Autodesk fellow, Tom has developed award-winning software serving a wide range of creative industries. He has worked with more than a hundred companies on four continents to find ways to solve their unique challenges. As an author of six best-selling books and creative design thinking business tools, Tom uniquely brings together the worlds of emerging digital trends, business transformation, and creative collaborations to help you do business better.
So just to kick off the session, the problem with navigating a crisis is that most of us don't face it every day. When one starts, we don't know how to handle it, and we don't know what to begin with. In this session, Tom will share with us his amazing framework for how to handle the crisis, the framework for taking the team through the Crisis Curve.
And over to you, Tom.
- Great. Well, thank you so much for the introduction, and I'm really thrilled to be here to share some of these practices on how we navigate complexity and uncertainty. We're living in a time of unprecedented change, and we don't need to go through that, but it's important to think about the impact of some of the changes that we're seeing in the world.
The changes in economic growth and decline, the changes in global health, the increase in uncertainty. Every one of us faces our own set of crises. As a business leader, the type of crisis that we would typically tackle is a change in revenue, a change in the structure of our business, or changes with the needs of our customers.
As a team member, the kind of crisis that we typically face is working in a new normal, where we suddenly have fewer team members to work with. The nature of work itself is changing because we're all working remotely. Essentially, how do we collaborate more effectively?
I think now, as work and home life come crashing together in unprecedented ways, many people are feeling a sense of loneliness and despair, and just new types of feelings that we haven't needed to navigate previously. All of us are thinking about the nature of the future ahead of us.
So these are so-called wicked problems.
So what's a wicked problem? The term was first defined in 1963 by a couple of researchers. There is a complex definition, actually a 10-point definition for it, but I think it can be largely boiled down to a few qualities of problems.
One is that they are really complicated; there are lots of parts. Secondly, there's a great deal of uncertainty with them. But deeper than that, there are also inherent dilemmas, Catch-22s. Do we invest in safety, or do we invest in opening up our businesses, among many others? Plus the ambiguity. But wait, there's more. It's emotionally charged, deeply chaotic, deeply biased, and so on.
More and more problems that we face in life and business have qualities of wickedness in them. So what this session is about is how do we tame these wicked problems? In the process of doing this, we build fundamental skills that we all need for business: the ability to be more agile and to be more innovative.
Agility is largely about seeing situations as they are, clarifying their meaning, and responding with a deft hand. Innovation is largely about identifying the problems and opportunities that really matter and systematically exploring a wide range of options so that you can land on bold steps. These are now essential 21st-century skills.
What I've had the good fortune of studying over the last, I guess, three decades now is learning from the lessons of design thinking, lean, agile, and a variety of other methods, including building advanced technologies.
Just a bit of background really quickly: I have been working at the leading edge of technology for the last few decades with a number of organizations, built a bunch of software that visual artists use around the world. I've written a number of books, as you've heard, that explore the nature of the decisions that people make to disrupt their industries.
I've had the great privilege of working with amazing organizations to help them untangle and unravel their wicked problems, and their not-so-wicked problems as well.
You're really familiar with this. I'm sure you've been in design-thinking sessions and are familiar with the practice of making ideas visible and making work visible. For the last few decades, I've been studying how this works, and it seems to me there is an opportunity for us to apply these principles, which often have been relegated to the world of design, lean, and agile, to other modes.
Now that we have amazing technology from Miro, by the way, I wanted to say about 20 years ago, I tried to build some software that was Miro-like and failed abysmally. So I so appreciate the incredible technology that Miro has produced. It's just a fantastic tool, and our team uses it extensively as a collaboration and problem-solving tool.
So how do we solve complex problems? Well, it boils down to really, I think, four fundamental lenses looking at problem-solving, and that's what we're going to cover in our time today.
The first is studying the power of plays. What's a play?
Second is developing core skills. What are those core skills?
The third is designing and running plays, and the fourth is applying them so that we collaborate at scale.
So again, taking some of the best principles that I'm sure many of you are really familiar with and experts on.
Let me ask you a question: Have you ever been to a design studio? A company like IDEO or inside of a BMW or a Google lab? What's common about them? What do you see?
Well, generally what you see is a lot of this: a lot of people around large boards doing something. So what is it that they're actually doing? Well, they're thinking, they're creating, exploring, but if you kind of peel back the activities, they're doing three things.
They're asking questions, really focusing their attention. They're showing, not talking, so they are making ideas visible. And third, they're performing actions. They're not just talking; they are building visual and other types of models to represent information. They're doing this typically in time-bound activities, and that means time that's 20, 40 minutes or so.
There's a chance of completing the task.
When you really look at these activities and compare and contrast what Nike does, what P&G and Unilever and other organizations do, they work in plays.
So what's a play? A play is a time-bound activity that has three components: it's got a key question, it's got some type of visual, and third, it's got some activity—something for people to perform.
Organizations that use plays are typically way better and more effective than those who don't.
Let me give you some examples of plays, ones that I'm sure you're familiar with and have perhaps done in the past.
So say you have the question, "What's important? What should we do? What should I do as an individual?" All the tasks that I need to perform.
Well, there's a play called a Priority Map. Super simple. Sticky note and organize ideas just by your tasks, put them onto a board, and then go through a process of moving and sorting them into different categories.
You're familiar with the categories from Stephen Covey: urgency low on one side, high on the other, and then importance low on one side, high on another. That simple physical act reinforces mental actions to figure out different classifications, different areas of work.
So that is an example of a simple play. You might think that's pretty basic, and that is a simple play.
A more complex one, which I'm sure you've also done, is a Journey Map. What is it that our customers experience over time?
Taking that question and going through a process of collaborative mapping to essentially create a series of rows, a series of columns, and then map out the experience of customers and your ways of responding to them over time.
This has many benefits, of course. We can see a lot of things that... blind spots, we can see issues, and we can better understand the needs of our clients through the full ecosystem of our business.
Visually, in person, it typically looks like this—very large screens—and digitally, it can look something like this through a Miro template.
Of course, we can take that same structure, the same activity, and the same visualization, but have a different question.
So for example, "How do we create and capture value?" You have different labels, but the activity is pretty much the same, so you get a different result.
Okay, so that's a play. A play is like a Lego block; it's a building block to construct more complex problem-solving and collaboration sessions. They're really built... they apply the underlying principles of creative collaboration and are relevant to each of the kinds that I think all of us face during this time.
So that's the power of the play.
What are the skills that they're built on? Well, you've already seen them. The World Economic Forum did a survey not long ago that asked, "What are the top critical skills for this decade?"
Here they are. I'm wondering what you think are the most important. Which one would you put at the top?
This is what they would put: complex problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking.
I'm wondering now, in this age of COVID, if cognitive flexibility would also make it into the top three or four.
What's been amazing looking at the leading design thinkers and technologists—people who have disrupted industries, who've created the next generation of products and services, movies, and films—is that they seem to have not just core skills, but meta skills.
So what's a meta skill? A meta skill is a skill that allows you to improve other skills. Here are three that I think are really critical for us to cultivate if we're going to tackle wicked problems.
They include leading with key questions. So taking on what people naturally do in asking questions, using questions really strategically as a method to be able to understand, to frame, and so on.
Second is to make ideas visible. Translate information from a verbal form or an analytical form into a visual form that creates a shared picture of the current representation, the current reality that we'd like to look at.
The third is to engage with forward steps, and that is giving people tasks—time-bound tasks—that cause them to create a shift in thinking, a shift in feeling perhaps, and a shift in action to get people to align together.
So that's really critical. When we combine these three together, kind of magic happens. We get really great plays.
Let's spend a couple of minutes looking at each of them.
Excuse me. It's allergy season here in Toronto. (clears throat)
So leading with key questions: why would you lead with a question?
To do that, let me tell you a story.
Excuse me. (clears throat)
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted a very famous painting called "The Nightwatch." It's one of the most famous paintings in the world. It represents a moment when militia rode forth to protect their city of Amsterdam.
The painting was slashed a few years ago. Someone with a bread knife cut it in 11 places. The curators took it off public display, and they knew it was going to take a few years for it to be properly restored.
So they decided to engage their museum visitors. They asked their visitors, "What would you like to know about the painting?"
They left postcards, and first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of postcards rolled in with questions about what people would like to know about the painting. Here are some of them.
When the painting was brought back four years later, the curators did something really interesting. They created two galleries.
The first gallery was just a gallery of questions—the top 50 questions and their answers. Visitors would come in, take a look at the painting, probably look at the questions, and then could wonder and go, "That's interesting."
Then they would go to the second gallery, look at the painting, and then go back to the first gallery, which is not what they were supposed to do.
They came back, looked at the painting, and did this over and over and over. The museum curators were rather astonished to discover that before the restoration, people typically looked at the painting for two minutes and 30 seconds. I think the number is two minutes and 34 seconds. Museum curators can be very analytic.
But after the painting was restored, museum visitors looked at the painting for 24 minutes and 40 seconds. That's almost 10 times longer.
So why? What happened?
The painting itself didn't measurably change; it was the mindset that changed. When people were filled with questions, they observed more, they looked more, they leaned in more, and that's one of the powers of questions.
Questions activate imagination. They turn on our brains. It's like they turn on a circuit, and our brain is not willing to stop until that question is actually resolved.
A friend and colleague, David Eagleman, who's a neuro researcher, says if you put a picture of—or even better, an animation of—a brain in your presentation, your audience will be five IQ points smarter.
So I think that's it. So you're welcome. Actually, that's not true; he said seven, but I didn't want to raise expectations.
The point is that we can use questions strategically.
So how do we do that? How do we find the right questions? How do we guide with questions? How do we probe questions?
Well, there are frameworks for questions in every discipline, whether it's lean or agile or engineering. For tackling the wicked problems that we have in life and business, there are lots of good frameworks.
Here's one of them.
One is beginning with "What's your vision?" This is typically one that senior management and senior leaders would look at.
What's important to us? What are our principles? What do we stand for? What are our values? What's our strategy? How will we invest in order for us to be successful?
What's our business model? Where do we make money? What is our offering? What's the nature of our products and services? How do our customers relate? What are our processes? What's our structure?
These are some, in fact, there are a variety of others.
Bear with me as I switch.
There are plays to tackle each and every one of those.
So what is our vision? There's a fantastic framework that's drawn from agile, where you clarify the needs of your customers. Who are they? What exactly are the jobs that they want to have done? What are their aspirations?
What's the nature of the entity that you're serving, and what do you actually deliver? Unlike your competitors or alternatives, how are you different and better in various ways?
One can sticky note these. By the way, this is something that can be done individually, but it's better when a team does it and organizes it in a collaborative way.
These single exercises can create two statements, two vision statements that create clarity, engagement, and alignment.
It's a powerful tool to get people lined up together.
I won't go through the rest of these plays, but what's really intriguing here is that very often the output of one play can become the input of subsequent plays.
Plays that are a little more tactical, a little lower down, more in the how as opposed to the what and why can support and feed.
Much of the work that I do with many of my clients—from small to medium to very large organizations—is to create a visual logic that threads these together, to connect these together.
So how do you generate these questions? What are the frameworks?
Well, in fact, there's a whole range of framing questions, and here's a sample of a deck of them where you can use these as reference points.
We're going to make many of these available on Miroverse. I'm very excited about that.
These tools are ways to turn on or kickstart the brain, so it's really active thinking about the problems at hand.
That visual logic is really critical for tackling complex problems. Because when we don't use the visual logic, when we don't take advantage of making our strategy visible, we can get into problems, into issues.
What happens in times of change—and we'll be covering this in the crisis map—is there's an inconsistency between different frames of reference.
In times of change, we need to refresh our strategy, refresh our understanding of the needs of our customers, and refresh our understanding of how we profit, how we generate revenue in the world of business.
I think for senior leaders as well, different frames include these.
We are now living in an age of conundrums, dilemmas, and Catch-22s. There are plays to help unravel those as well. Many senior leaders are struggling with getting clear about what are the ethics, what are the external forces that shape the value?
We are living in a time where ethics are changing; they're continuing to evolve.
What's our personal morals? What do we stand for? Has that evolved? Is there a contradiction between the two?
As a senior leader within my organization, what's my role for hiring, firing, managing money? How do I reconcile these together?
Again, these are really valuable and useful tools to be able to untangle and unravel the complexity.
Making ideas visible—that's the second core skill.
Let me start with a quiz here.
Okay. What state is missing? (whistling)
Anyone?
Okay. Let me ask you a question again. What state is missing? Upper left-hand one in there that Washington actually gave a keynote not long ago, actually, when we were doing keynotes, and someone yells out Nevada. Probably not from the United States.
So it's not just cheating. I'm just... Here we have this complex list, and here we're just seeing a map; we're just putting it into a picture.
Well, that's just the point. When we process information visually, we can make more sense, and we can process information more quickly.
I'm just going to skip over this now.
It turns out there's a whole visual language that we can build on and organize information visually. In fact, the better we are as visual thinkers, the better we can organize and structure content in a variety of ways.
Sometimes it's useful to put information in the form of a systems model, swim lane, as we've seen a canvas, we've seen several of those, to organize information through fish bones, squiggles, visual metaphors, arrows, visual maps, even flowcharts, and much more.
These are super useful tools to be able to make sense of that.
In the same way that there are tools for questions, there are also tools for making ideas visible.
So really understanding, using different types of tools like the good old favorite two-by-two matrix and how you can apply it. Sometimes they have different questions, different activities to solve as different two-by-two matrices.
Again, Lego blocks. Or you might use a blobject, which would help you organize different amorphous topics in different ways, or a mind map, and so on.
One of these core skills is meta skills: the ability to think in systems, to be able to take information of varying forms and put it into the appropriate visual format.
So we best understand the world as it is and as we would like it to be, from an abstract as well as a tangible level.
There's something that I'm kind of surprised about with many of the clients that I've been working with now: the importance and usefulness of making emotions visible.
What's that about?
Well, essentially, it's a way for people to open up and have a tool to make more authentic conversations occur.
Here's an example of a map where people simply drag sticky notes onto the simple map. There are richer ones with more nuanced emotions.
What it does is it gives permission for people to begin to share how they're feeling and what that feeling means for the organization, and how to make it tangible and persistent.
That's really powerful because what that does is it shifts the conversation to a deeper level. If you're feeling one thing, different team members are feeling others; there's a way to connect together.
The underlying, remember this is a play, the question is, "How are we feeling?" Here's a visualization, and the action is to open up a bit more.
These are again powerful tools that, again, I was a little surprised to see that this is something that more and more organizations are looking forward to.
Okay.
So we've covered leading with questions, making ideas visible, and then engaging with forward steps.
Why do you do that?
Here's a puzzle I'd like for you to do mentally.
You're on a riverbank, and you have to transport a fox, a rabbit, and a cabbage to the other side. Fox, rabbit, and cabbage.
Okay. You both can only hold one person. Left alone, the fox will eat the rabbit, and the rabbit will eat the cabbage.
What are the steps you need to take to get everything safely across?
This is not a wicked problem; this is a solvable problem.
I'm going to give you 15 seconds to try to do it in your head. Try it. You've got a fox, rabbit, and cabbage, and move them across.
So many of us find that... Let me begin that more time. Do my allergy water.
You'll find that this is not so easy to do. Part of the reason is the limitations of working memory.
Working memory, which is our inner theater, has a limited amount of time of nodes that it can handle inside of it. Even though we feel that it's vast, when we give it simple or complex tasks, it quickly fills up.
But when we make ideas visible and use, in this case, something as simple as sticky notes, it actually becomes trivial.
Because we're offloading the cognitive cost of keeping it in our head. Instead of trying to juggle information in our head, we put it into a form where we are performing a different physical and mental action.
So that's the solution or a solution to the problem.
In the same way as we tackle, "What's our mission? What's our vision? How do we feel?" The act of physically making a representation, an activity, is part of the core outcome.
In fact, it turns out there are a whole range of activities.
Sadly, in the world of virtual work, we spend most of our time sitting and talking, but we still have this opportunity now to be able to draw, to post notes, to write, to cluster.
In fact, do much more of what design thinkers do.
Okay, get there.
Which is to really analyze problems from many points of view: imagine, calculate, observe, and study.
It's the combination of these activities as part of plays that deepen our activity.
Okay.
So that makes sense.
These core skills are leading with questions, making ideas visible, and guiding with forward steps, engaging with forward steps.
So how do we kind of put these together and design and run plays?
We all have a process. This is one fairly simple process of tackling problems—small, medium, large—as well as the wicked problems.
Each is deliberate, and that's part of the point.
In many of our problem-solving sessions, people would just go, "Okay, here's got a problem. What are we going to do?"
By making it deliberate, again borrowing from the principles of what expert innovators and design thinkers perform, the process becomes explicit.
We identify, which means giving the problem a name or statement, a problem statement.
Secondly, we diagnose the problem. There's a process for that. For those of you who are really geeking into this, it's about framing the problem, identifying the great frame of reference.
It's about identifying the pressures that are bearing down upon it.
The third is to understand the structure of the problem. Is it a decision to be made? Is it a crossroads? Is it a dilemma?
There are ways of diagnosing it.
Third is then to design the play. Selecting the number and the kinds of plays that you string together like Lego blocks to organize your way through, and then to run the play.
Engage people through questions, through making ideas visible, and guide them through tasks to lead to a resolution.
This is a framework that seems to work from everything from developing corporate strategy to helping manage cash flow to much, much more.
When we design, there are actually two ways of doing this primarily.
There's a top-down method and a bottom-up method.
The top-down method is where we have an existing set of playbooks. The good news is that every discipline has its own set of playbooks.
Design thinking, for example, has a set of plays. Agile methodologies have their own set of plays. Lean methods have their own set of plays.
Even though their focus is a bit different—design thinking is about identifying problems, agile is largely about solving problems quickly and collaboratively, and lean methods are really about creating, identifying value and creating that value and pulling it through the system, eliminating waste—they all use plays.
In every case, it's a highly iterative process.
When organizations get plays and become more adept at the discipline of plays, each of these methods becomes more powerful.
Again, the plays are for observing, ideating, prototyping, and so on.
I won't go through the details of those, but we have them as part of our play map.
It's been really fascinating that when you look at the world through plays, many business functions can be converted into plays.
That means adding a discipline that you can use loosely or very tightly to tackle a pretty broad range of organizational challenges.
As you've heard, I've had the good fortune of working with many organizations to tackle their wicked problems.
Visually, it can be pretty complicated and pretty rich.
This is a three-day session that one of my long-term clients had, where we literally mapped out every part of the business and then strung them together.
You may have noticed that it was in Spanish, which is interesting because I don't speak Spanish nor do I read Spanish, but I understand systems.
I understand the underlying structure, and with a simultaneous translator, I could work together with the team to create a systems model that represents their business and help them tackle their dilemmas.
So there are playbooks, and Miro already has amazing playbooks for many activities.
What about when you don't have a playbook?
What if, for example, a virus jumps from one species to another and some weeks and months later shuts down the global economy? Where's the playbook for that?
There isn't.
So what do we need? We need to design our own playbooks.
How do you do that?
Fundamentally, there are three basic ways.
First, you figure out the frames of reference that you need to solve.
Second, you need to tame the qualities of wickedness.
Maybe we could talk about that in the Q&A; I'm not going to go into that now.
The third is to create some kind of... introduce a narrative or a structure to help you coordinate it.
Typically, a structure that is beneficial.
There are lots of structures, but one very good one is called the Crisis Curve.
Those of you who are familiar with Miroverse may have seen the Crisis Curve just being introduced, I think it was last week.
What does the Crisis Curve do?
Well, it guides individuals, teams, groups, and organizations through different phases of intense change, which is what the crisis is.
The crisis is the immediate change in the situation. Stabilization: how do we get our grounding and our footing? Restoration: how do we create a new normal? Is there a new normal? What does that look like?
Then how can we grow?
Crisis, again, is about figuring out the kinds of plays that are relevant to you and your organization that address the immediate short-term challenges.
Stabilization is about beginning to create some sustainable way of survival.
A third is restoration, which is about developing and refreshing your vision. You need your longer-term plan.
Growth is painting a picture forward.
This is a framework, and again, many of my large clients have adopted this or similar frameworks.
What it does is it provides hope. It provides structure. It provides a way to navigate uncertainty, even though it's fully uncertain.
So Miro, that's my cue to go to the Crisis Curve.
Again, those of you who are so inclined to sustain this, there's a Crisis Curve that you can see here and play around with.
One is empty, and the other is populated. Essentially, it's about living in intense change and reflecting on the types of questions that are relevant.
These are ways to kickstart some of the framing questions that will help you select the plays.
By the way, one good way of thinking about framing questions are the ones that are strategic and the ones that are tactical.
Strategic is about the why; it's about the what.
We also need to think about questions that are focused on the organizational as well as our own needs.
Yes, something that we've all seen in our Zoom COVID world is that the separation between work and life has largely been eliminated.
We bring all of ourselves to meetings, into business, more so than ever before.
Some of the strategic organizational questions that you may want to consider are the ones listed here:
What's our noble purpose? What do we stand for? What's our strategy? How do we stand out? What's our business model? How will we win?
Again, these are fundamental business questions that help us anchor and orient ourselves.
What about the tactical? How do we make work? How do we deliver on that?
Well, these are just a sampling of some of those questions.
What about strategic personal questions?
Well, these are equally important, I think now, because we're in this time of crisis where everything kind of blends together.
There are great questions to ask here, both tactically and personally.
Here's an example of how you might want to play it out in a crisis map.
The four broad phases help coordinate your work and then think through what's changing in the world.
So what really is changing?
We often begin with the impact, like, "Oh my goodness, our sales (indistinct)."
Get really good drift analysis of what is actually changing.
Using the two-by-two matrix and collaborating, pick the right kind of matrix that's relevant to you and your organization to get an accurate picture of what's changing.
This particular one is the size of change and duration. You could equally pick some other framework.
What's the impact of the change?
Here you begin to think about what are the shifts that it will have on you now at large and the likelihood.
It's kind of figuring out a risk map. Triage is really critical.
So what must be done now? Each of these, of course, can be turned into their own plays.
So that's some examples of the crisis map.
Stabilization: we talked about how are you feeling?
This is really a powerful tool. I would encourage you to try it.
What's our recovery plan?
Systematically exploring different aspects of business.
We can draw from frames there.
What's our target? What do we think the future will look like?
Is it going to be a slow recovery, medium, fast, mixed recovery?
If so, how do we prepare for each of those scenarios?
That's another set that we can use.
Moving to the restoration: hopefully, there's time to reflect as we're doing now and reflect on what worked, what didn't, to renew our purpose and our strategy.
Again, we talked about that and then think about how we might change.
Again, I showed an example in a different visual framework of how that change might look like.
Finally, what's our growth?
How do we move forward and create a clearly articulated statement of change?
What does success look like for us?
So that's an example of how to use plays to tackle some wicked problems.
This is useful for some organizations; this crisis curve.
If you're in the cruise line industry, maybe not so much. You'll probably have a very different organizational curve.
Again, this is not applicable to every crisis.
That's one of the practices of figuring out what's the narrative structure to organize your plays.
So, an example of bottom-up activities.
How do we bring this all together to collaborate at scale?
There's lots more to this as well.
One thing that I've learned and spent a lot of time studying is what's the front channel and the back channel of collaboration.
The front channel of collaboration is what we see and hear and share visually.
It's what's on the large whiteboards; it's what's on the Miro boards and other shared surfaces, and that's really critical.
As a problem solver and as a modern leader, the ability to create clear, accurate visual representations of problems and opportunities, and the ability to deliver clear instructions that people work within the framework and adjust them as you go along is critical.
But the real work that happens is the back channel.
It's what people are thinking, feeling, and what they're actually doing.
When you're working in a room together, you can pay attention to the back channel, pay attention to the body language, where people are looking, the syncopation of tones of voice, the head-nodding.
All of that are critical factors to get a team to orchestrate the best possible solutions to help them get to deep work that only they can do.
Deep, valuable work that gets harder to do when we're all talking through—someone said, what was it called?—when we're all talking through a straw.
I can't see you as an audience, but if in person, of course, I would be able to interact in different ways.
We need to be able to cultivate our ability to read the back channel more fully.
I think that's emerging to be a really critical skill.
I'd like to sum up in a couple of minutes saying that how do you scale for change?
I think it's in every industry, whether it's architecture or whether it's consulting, whether it's film visual effects, there are three big levers that we get to move.
The first is people: investing in skills and investing in the mindset and creating a safe environment for people to be able to collaborate more effectively.
I believe that many of the sessions that are here in the... it's been about really cultivating better environments.
Second is process: how do we stage work together?
Develop the methodology that helps us tackle our difficult challenges.
And of course, the tools: what are the tools that we can bring together?
It's really about opening a growth mindset, investing in cultures and in skills to foster organizational agility and innovation.
Investing in really great digital tools, developing playbooks—not just individual plays, but actual playbooks—to get people to work at their very best and the very deepest.
Then to invest in the agile infrastructure to create really what's next.
That shift, I think, is really critical.
For those said, I'm super excited to announce that we are launching a wicked problem-solving toolkit.
You can get more information about it in the vendor's area.
It has a bunch of tools and comes with a couple of books and three index cards.
What I'm so excited about is that we've integrated the training, the five hours of video, and the 40-some odd exercises.
It's going to build these skills directly with Miro, and it's really great.
So we've got as long as I want to say about it, but I'm super excited.
Again, if you're interested in learning more about these methods and getting access to these tools for sets of questions, dozens and dozens of different kinds of plays for different kinds of meetings, I encourage you to check it out.
So we're doing the Apple thing, which is pre-order your iPhone, pre-order your wicked problem-solving toolkit, and you get a hefty discount.
That's all I'll say about that.
So with that, how do you tackle wicked problems?
Essentially, you learn the power of plays.
You turn the best fundamental, deepest practice that lean and agile have to offer and turn work into concise time-bound activities.
You build on core skills: leading with questions, making ideas visible, and engaging people with actions.
You design and run plays. Sometimes it's a simple, short play that lasts two minutes. You draw a sketch and illustration. Sometimes it can last 20 minutes. Sometimes it can be a full three-day workshop.
Then you collaborate at scale.
Bring to there the changes in people's processes, in training people, and then building the right kind of toolset.
With that, that's how you tame wicked problems.
Let me pause there for now, and I think we have time for questions, and I'm looking forward to fielding those questions.
If I know the answer, I'll tell them. If not, I'll just make something up.
- Tom, thank you very much. It was original content, lots of stuff, very useful stuff.
Again, audience, if you're interested in details, you can go to the vendor booth and check it out.
I'm really looking forward to seeing these templates on Miro. It's exciting.
A couple of very practical questions for you, Tom.
So when you design a... when you... hello?
- Yep, and I'm listening.
- When you design a particular session, what factors do you consider for allocating time, the depth, and worth for properly designing the session? What influences the depth of discussion that time like you did?
- So, I mentioned there were several factors. Let me just go to the slide here, and so you have a visual reference to track it. Bear with me for a moment.
Essentially, there's a set of planning tools, which we make available to help you think through the... to diagnose the problem.
I don't have a detailed slide of it right here now, but the first is to figure out what are the ranges of problems to tackle.
My particular method is I draw it out.
This was a tool called sketchbook. Here, it was actually a drawing for a workshop or talk, actually, it was a workshop that we ran with a global executive group.
I drew out who was there, what the goals are, what the needs are.
Again, I won't go through the details of it.
Develop a visual.
I ask a series of questions, which themselves are plays.
The first set of plays is, who's going to be in the workshop? What are they currently thinking, feeling, and doing in regards to the problems to solve?
On the other side of the V planning template, what do you want the people to think, feel, and do?
I have a client, a large technology company, a group of 20 senior executives, and we have a limited time, so I actually have to work to their time.
I'm now formulating who exactly is there and what are the areas of responsibilities and what... in order to get alignment within the group.
We can create a sort of online picture of that.
The second framework to figure out the kind of plays is so much practical: how much time do we have? What is the urgency of the problems?
How much impact do each of these people have?
That helps select the plays.
Third is to look at the struggle. Are there truly dilemmas, Catch-22s that people need to unravel, which typically take much longer because there's emotional charge?
Or are there simple decisions to make where there is a predefined set?
So define the underlying structure and then choose those plays.
The short answer is to figure out who's there, what are the conditions, and what the overall outcome is, and then design the set of plays to make the shift in people's mindset from the current to the desired state.
It was a fairly long answer to a short question, but I hope that answered it.
- Yeah, that was useful. They are good insights.
Just continuing the discussion, when you design the session, what are the typical roles in the team that you see that you need to assign?
Is there a particular set of roles that you would like to see in the team?
- So they kind of... they vary from one session to another.
It's a bit different when we're working physically.
I'm just going to talk about digital tools.
The critical thing now is to keep people engaged, to get people leaning forward and actually physically involved.
In some of the sessions that we do, larger sessions, we bring physical and digital tools together.
In the back there, you see a board; there are stacks of cards that we distribute to people, there are writing and sticky notes, and so on.
A key role is to ensure that people are actively participating, not doing this.
Because we're not getting the deep engagement.
In terms of roles, when I'm working... when I end up in one room, I can manage it.
But in a single... when there are 20 people online, I can't.
I get people to help engage and to text, to make sure that people are actually involving in... or helping out with the back channel.
That's one task, which is to offload what a facilitator typically does to a more distributed ownership model.
In some types of plays, we become really specific with the type of who does what.
In a six hats type problem-solving, people rotate through different types of thinking metaphors or they're thinking of approaches.
In a more design thinking approach, there will be people who will be doing more building and more technical work and so on.
In a longer session, those roles typically are identified.
We kind of create a map of who's on, what are your superpowers, and what are you going to... what are the best things that you can bring forward in this particular session?
Again, a longer answer because I think each problem-solving session has its own charms.
As a modern problem solver, I think we need to not take a cookie-cutter approach, but to see the meeting itself as a system, and our goal is to create the best outcome.
That means creating... ensuring that people feel comfortable to do their best work.
There's a little bit of art and a little bit of science to that.
- Just continuing on that.
As a facilitator, if I facilitate a problem-solving play with the team that is in a state of crisis versus just a regular time problem-solving, have you seen a particular competence or skill coming through from the people that are in the state of crisis that is particularly valuable for problem-solving?
As a facilitator, how do I identify, how do I bring it forward and maximize the value of it?
- Yeah.
Let me just shift gears here just to illustrate what that looks like.
We've talked about meta skills, and there are different kinds of questions, it turns out.
Let me just zoom here.
Each kind of question reflects your ability to pose and create space to answer the question, which is really critical.
In some cases, the skill is about—and there are broadly three critical skills, I think there's actually more, but for now, three.
One is the ability to figure out what's the problem, right? What's the frames of reference?
Is this a cultural problem? Is it a cash flow problem? Is it et cetera, et cetera?
Going through an analysis to help figure out the mechanics of the problem.
The skills that are required there are systems thinking, to be able to take a problem, analyze it into component parts, and then put it into a picture or a model that reflects the world as it is.
Some really good questions to be able to tackle that.
A second core skill is to help navigate a team through.
In other words, go from an opening, middle to an end.
There's a set of opening questions that kind of will bring us in, there's questions to help us propagate through, and there's questions that help close.
By the way, the underlying skill is something called creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.
Creative abrasion is about welcoming a marketplace of ideas, different ideas, and allowing that to happen.
That's from Pixar; that's a really powerful tool.
Creative agility is the ability to work with them and figure out how to make sense very quickly.
The third creative resolution is about how to create alignment.
The third key skill is being able to probe and use questions again, definitely to be able to connect with people, to understand, to help challenge.
Probing questions often are the most valuable; that's where senior consultants typically... that's where they earn their value, earn their key, because there's a set of questions that you can ask that are about figuring out what is the... are you really connecting with people as we talked about before?
Allowing people to really state how they're feeling and what's going on in their world.
Another set of questions is to get clarified: "What exactly do you mean?"
There are action questions.
There's questions to help build understanding.
So there's a set of questions that represent the third key quality.
To summarize, framing to figure out what's the right problem, navigate to help people guide through, and then third probing, which has largely been connecting, clarifying, and helping create the conditions for the best possible answer.
Again, I'm scratching the surface of it.
We do quite a lot of this work in the program to help show how to ask and answer these questions.
So let me pause there for now, and if we have room for one more question, a quick one, I'll answer it within... I'll answer it in seven words. (chuckles)
- Let's try a one-minute question.
Another practical one.
What are the practices that you have seen overused or misused the most?
Maybe specifically in this shift from the offline world to the digital remote team play session.
- I think the biggest thing is that we do more push than we do pull.
Sadly, which is what I did, but this is the nature of a keynote.
Normally what we do in a workshop is pushable pushes, delivering information, and not creating room or opportunity to perform, to engage in ways... engage in plays.
So that's one key area.
I think also what happens is each of us have favorite filters or problems to solve and ways of solving problems.
I have a good friend and colleague who has a method that he's developed that is just really amazingly great for solving certain kinds of problems.
He really likes to use it for every kind of problem.
Some people love to buy tools.
Some people love lines.
Some people love to ask questions.
Some people love to do an analytical approach.
I think a modern problem solver draws from... picks the kinds of plays that suit the problem.
In other words, you choose the type of thinking that is relevant for the problem.
You develop a strategy for your strategy.
Having it externalized, turning it and creating yours, whatever system you use, gives us the ability to stand back and figure out what's appropriate.
We all have our own blind spots; we have our own favorites.
My wife says I do a two-by-two for just about everything, which of course I drew a two-by-two to explain it.
We all have our own preferences.
So I would say be mindful of what you love to do and take a look at what else is available and try to introduce it.
- Thank you, Tom.
This was amazing.
Thank you for the presentation.
Thank you for the tour of your home office.
I really enjoyed it.
The audience presentation is recorded, and it will be redistributed.
I highly encourage you to visit Tom's booth in Hopin and check his materials out.
Thanks, Tom. Have a good day.
- My pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Stay safe, everyone. Bye-bye.
(uplifting music)