"That will never work in our culture!"
John Baldoni, one of the world’s top leadership gurus, points out that:
- knowing what your employees really think is integral to cultivating good ideas, and,
- reporting back on the impact of employee ideas is the key to getting more good ideas.
Fair enough…but surfacing employee thoughts and sentiments is one thing. Turning them into a tangible plan of action is quite another.
In fact, tons of great ideas are destined to be non-starters because we often don’t understand the process and barriers to acting on them. We didn’t realize this, but it turns out that Rypple can help to uncovering barriers as well as solicit ideas.
Here’s an example:
The other day I watched Kevin Schlabach on RyppleTV. Kevin’s a project coordinator charged with driving innovative ideas and thinking at his company. Kevin talked about using Rypple to solicit feedback and new ideas.
What was unexpected was that Kevin was using Rypple as a platform to uncover barriers to implementing ideas – cool!
He described how people were providing focused, constructive feedback on new ideas, but they were also appending their feedback with comments like:
“your idea is good…but it would never happen in our culture!“
NEVER happen in our culture you say!? Now we’re getting somewhere!
Not only had Kevin been able to identify a good, actionable solution to a problem, but he now had:
- the basis for asking follow-up questions to drive his good ideas forward
- a tool that would allow him to find out what people REALLY thought about the barriers associated with them by asking things like:
- “Why won’t the idea work in our culture?”
- “Who do you think would object the most to this idea?”
- “What would we have to do in order to bring this idea about?”
We love hearing stories of users like Kevin, but more importantly we love learning how we can help people and organizations use feedback to really drive themselves and their businesses forward.
Thanks Kevin!
