This is the kind of problem that Chip and Dan Heath write about in Switch. They give concrete tips on how to effect change in almost any context, based on the latest research on behavior, communication, and psychology. Their first bit of advice is that to effect change you need to be very specific about the exact steps people need to take to change.

One example from the book: weight loss. If you want people to lose weight, give crystal clear direction instead of broad, complex behavioral advice. The US FDA food pyramid is complex advice: you should eat so much from carbs, oils, nuts, vegetables, meat, fish, etc.. Contrast that with an experiment from West Virginia, with a single bit of simple advice: instead of buying whole milk, buy 1% or skim milk. This clear change alone accounts for a substantial reduction of overall fat in peoples’ diets. Apparently, one glass of whole milk has the same fat content as five strips of bacon. Ugg.

The same problem arises in management advice on building awesome teams. We feel that human beings are complex and so therefore the advice on how to improve interactions between people should also be. The courses, books, conferences, and approaches to building and inspiring teams are the “food pyramids” of management: accurate, scientifically accurate, comprehensive, detailed… and in many cases useless.

So, in this spirit, I offer you three dead-simple bits of advice on how to make your team more awesome, aligned and inspired. Consider these to be the “skim milk” of awesome teams.

1. Every day, give someone public recognition for specific work.

This is simple, cheap, and very effective. As Ken Blanchard wrote in The One Minute Manager, “the number one motivator of people is feedback on results”.

Pick a time (3pm works for me). Find out what people are working on today. Go tell them in front of other people that it’s good work, and why. If you use email, be sure to CC the team (or use Rypple!). It doesn’t need to be a big huge honking deal. Just say something nice on something specific. And do it every day. Be genuine, be specific and rotate through your team – and people will step up their awesomeness.

2. Every week, meet 1:1 for 15 minutes with every team member.

Sounds so blindingly obvious, no? If you want an awesome team with engaged people you need to … engage with them!  And yet, time and time again we hear about managers who are “too busy” to make time for a simple conversation.

1:1 meetings are like working out; everyone knows you should do it, but they are very often avoided, forgotten and not done. Big mistake. Simply setting the time, and sticking to it can make a huge difference. Just listen (mostly) and talk; it need not be a hugely structured discussion, although that helps. Others can give great advice on what to talk about. My simple observation is that the basic habit of making space for a human conversation leads to all the good engagement, learning and relationships required for meaning at work – and awesome teams.

So, just meet face-to-face at least every two weeks for 15 minutes with everyone who works with you (remote teams can try Skype). This simple bit of advice is very powerful and often overlooked because it’s so basic.

3. Once a month, ask your team a question get their anonymous feedback.

We all have blind spots. Even the most attuned, open manager will have blind spots to team problems that can easily be changed with knowledge. Our blind spots can kill awesomeness, so you should kill your blind-spots. If you don’t know your blind spots (and trust me: you have ‘em), try the Johari Window exercise we’ve previously written about.

Marshall Goldsmith, the noted executive coach, wrote a great article on coaching for leadership skills (“Leadership is a Contact Sport” – PDF). In a nutshell, he found that the biggest single determinant of whether teams experience change in a leaders behavior was frequent follow-up questions. Across trainers, coaches, and companies, the most lasting change was seen in those leaders who simply asked people how they are doing on a repeated basis. It’s that simple.

So, schedule a time to ask monthly. Ask a single, simple question, like “What is one thing that I can do next month to improve how I communicate with you?”. If you can, use a free-web service (like Rypple) to ask anonymously, so people can give you safe feedback.

Learning Workplaces

Learning workplaces are highly motivational. In order to learn you need fast feedback loops. My talk focused on 4 key ideas about learning workplaces:

1. Democratic workplaces must be learning workplaces
2. Learning organizations are inherently lean
3. Traditional performance reviews don’t help us motivate or learn
4. A better way to learn @work

Introducing The Agile People Manifesto

We also took this as an opportunity to launch the Agile People Manifesto, a project to define the key principles behind the agile management movement. We are the facilitators and hosts of the conversation, but we need your voice to make it successful. Join the conversation and help create the manifesto!

Since we’ve been involved with a successful start-up before, people often call us for advice and insight on starting a new company. We’re humbled by the requests and happy to share our experiences. But we realize that we keep getting the same questions. So, we’re going to start sharing answers to common questions and sharing tips that we have found worked for us. You mileage may vary so take this advice with a shaker of salt!

One of the most common questions we hear is: “I want to be an entrepreneur. How do I know I’ve come up with a great idea?”

The short answer is: you don’t. It’s incredibly hard early on to determine if your idea is great. Just about the only sure thing is that your idea will shift and morph as you move through the customer discovery process to find product/market fit.

For this reason, we strongly advise that early on you do not write a business plan.

Why? Business plans are exercises in convincing other people that you have a great idea. You lock yourself in a room, surf the web for stats to explain how big the market is, analyze competitors, and dream up how great your product/service is going to be. Along the way, you end up convincing yourself that you’ve got it all figured it out. This is a dangerous delusion. You have not figured it out… yet. You have simply searched for and found confirming evidence that supports your best guesses.

Instead of spending time trying to convince yourself and others that you have a great idea, we suggest the opposite: You should look for disconfirming evidence that the choice to start this business is a good one. That’s right - try to convince yourself that your idea is bad. If you can’t, your idea might be good. We loosely borrowed this approach from Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice-Structuring Approach (PDF) in his book, The Responsibility Virus. Roger’s approach focuses on making hard strategic decision, and there is no tougher decision than: “do I/we risk my/our time, reputation, treasure and sanity on a crazy idea for a start-up?”.

Why try to prove yourself wrong? So that you don’t waste your time. You want to cycle through bad ideas quickly, refine your approach, and iterate your way to the great idea. Getting drunk on your own kool-aid too early is a big waste of time and resources.

Here’s what we did in the very early exploratory stages – and what we suggest you do.

1. Create a general filter. Narrow down what you’re passionate about and interested in and what kind of business you hope to have. In our case, we knew we wanted: SaaS, low professional services, consumer-ized, freemium, focused on a large demographic shift. Run your ideas through your filter. If they don’t match up pretty well, decide if you want to continue exploring.
2. Do general research. Once you have an idea you like, spend only a few quick days doing general research. We’ll write more about this later, but the best research is talking to real people who know something about the problem you hope to solve.
3. Agree/decide on the 4-5 things that must be true for your idea to be awesome. This is the important part. For example, you might have a great idea to build personal jet-packs. If you were going to choose to start this business a few things must be true. For example:
   • People would want these (I would, btw!)
   • You could get regulatory approval
   • You have access to the technical know-how to design & build them
   • You could manufacture them at a price point a large market would bear
4. Arrange these things that must be true in order of easiest to disprove to hardest. In this case the list might look this:
   • You have access to the technical know-how to design & build them
   • You could get regulatory approval
   • People would want these
   • You could manufacture them at a price-point a large market would bear
5. Try to disprove your first point. Spend time skeptically examining whether you can convince yourself that this fact is not true. In this case, don’t dream about the rocket-scientists you could, maybe, someday hire. Instead, ask pragmatically if you actually have the skills to design and build a rocket pack or know anyone who could. If you don’t, you have disproven a key fact. Therefore, stop searching. Iterate. Move onto another, different idea. But don’t spend the next 5 months building a giant plan for your rocket-pack business, while ignoring the fact that you don’t believe you know how to build it!

The point here is to get agreement about shared facts, and then systematically, and with least possible effort/time disprove them. If you can’t disprove a fact, trying as hard as you can, move forward. If you can’t prove yourself wrong, you might just be onto something!

I’d love to hear what you think about this approach. Please comment/critique/complain in the comments below!

We believe great communities inspire people to be great and that positive feedback motivates people to reach their full potential. So, we built Kudos – a quick, fun, social way for you to recognize the good things your teammates do every day.

We think you should recognize the people who participate and volunteer to make Twestival happen.

In honor of Twestival, we linked Kudos to Twitter and created a special limited-edition Twestival badge that you can award!

Rypple will donate $1.00 to Concern Worldwide for each of the first 4,000 people who sends a Twestival badge. You’ll be encouraging someone AND supporting Twestival just by sending a badge!

Here’s how:

1. Go to https://rypple.com/feedback/#kudos
2. Enter the email address of your chosen Twestival-er and write a short message
3. Click “Add a badge” and choose the Twestival badge
4. Click “Post to Twitter?”
5. Click “Send Kudos”

As an extra-special bonus, you can win prizes for giving Kudos. You can win daily prizes, such as an Flip HD Camera, and, if you give the most Kudos at your company, you might just win an Apple iPad or a trip to Miami’s South Beach!

We hope that Kudos will help you be an even bigger part of Twestival.

But two weeks ago at HRTech in Chicago, David and I heard just that from one of our more prominent corporate users and we couldn’t be happier!

Of course, Rypple isn’t really going anywhere and the comment was actually good news with respect to the impact of social media on organizations. Let me explain.

HRTech is an annual trade show and conference. It’s coordinated by the dean of HR technology writers, Bill Kutik, who moderates a “Cool New Technologies” panel every year. My co-CEO, David Stein, delivered a fantastic demo of Rypple at this year’s session. The feedback from the live audience was super-positive and we got some great feedback via Rypple afterward!

One of our executive users pulled me aside for a quick conversation the day before the demo. He’s the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm who’s been using Rypple for a year.  He wanted us to know he loved Rypple.  Awesome!

Then he said:

“I think you might have a real problem.  I’m concerned that using Rypple might make Rypple obsolete. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed that people are much more willing to give me feedback face-to-face.  They’re willing to talk to me — and to each other.”

To which we said:

That’s the furthest thing from a problem we can imagine! In fact, your observation of “increased feedback” is actually the goal of our service.  Using a social tool like Rypple to drive an increase in face-to-face interaction is precisely what makes Rypple so compelling.

The point is: social media is not simply narcissistic self-exposure online. When carefully and thoughtfully designed, social media can enhance real world interaction (ask anyone who’s been to a TweetUp!). We’ve worked hard to help support and encourage feedback as a social behavior in our customers’ companies because we believe it leads to learning, better execution, and success.

In fact, we’ve found that when an organization or senior executive integrates Rypple into their operation, they do so because:

• feedback, transparency, and communication are important to them
• there is a real commitment to continuous improvement
• what their people think matters.

Great social apps encourage people to develop real, actual social interaction.

If introducing Rypple to a firm filled with smart, high performing individuals made them more open to giving and getting feedback and increased teamwork and collaboration, then we hope more CEOs tell us that Rypple is going to be obsolete!

This week, we’re prepping for HR Tech. Bill Kutik, the uber-analyst,  has selected Rypple as a “cool new technology” for the show.  Sweet!  We get to demonstrate Rypple in front of a large audience.

But, we feel a bit strange about it. You see…. the magic demo can be fraught with danger, the place where your moral compass as a vendor can get warped. Demos and other heavy forms of “push” marketing are optimized to convince buyers why their solution “could be” useful.

That’s not why we started Rypple. We wanted to be bold and build a service that real people want to use and actually find useful.  So, we’ve created a consumer oriented  product for people who happen to work in the “enterprise”.  This reduces training costs for our clients and means that our primary marketing is user recommendations.

It’s all part of a bold business model, called “Freemium“: free for many, subscription for some.   Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net, described Freemium’s benefits best:

[Freemium means]…if the product doesn’t solve [the actual users'] problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. … This also means your product has to rock… If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay.

This approach has worked well. CEOs, trainers, project leaders, doctors, professors, and executives have found that Rypple delivers real results for them, their teams, and their companies.  Amazing evangelists, like John Foster, the Chief Talent Officer at IDEO,  are collaborating with other users to help us make Rypple rock even more.  And, of course, free users are converting to pay users.

Next week, we’ll be spending time with lots of HR professionals at HR Tech.  These are great, hard-working people typically responsible for tens of thousands of employees and many complex systems.  They are used to the dog-and-pony-shows of buying and deploying [gulp] Enterprise Software for others.  It can be painful and we sympathize… Heck, we’ve been there!

That’s why we’ve decided to demo to these pros at HR Tech as users, not buyers.

After all, HR pros want to find out what teammates, employees and mentors really think – just like everyone else!  They also want regular, helpful feedback so they can learn and improve.   By demo-ing to them as users they’ll see that the can try Rypple for themselves or with their teams – for free and with almost no set-up. We’ve made it simple to experience Rypple with minimal effort and red tape.  The service we’ll demo is the exact service you can use, for free, today. No vaporware!

Being bold doesn’t mean being naive.  We know what the purchasing and change cycle are like in large organizations.  But, based on our experience, we believe it’s better for everyone if there are internal champions who have experienced real benefits from Rypple before the buying process starts. That’s what freemium does.

So, HR-tech-ers…. will you be bold and “turn the future into the past“?   Will you be bold and discover useful insights you would not have otherwise learned, so you can advance your own career and make your organization more productive?

We hope so.

See you at Cool New Technologies at  HR Tech!

*****

ps: We’re glad we’re not the only ones who think this way!

Tim did some performance reviews recently and was struck by how much more clear, direct, and productive it would be if they were limited to 140 characters, like Twitter.

I believe I’ve uncovered the manager’s dream!  140 character Performance Review – 30 seconds and you’re out.   What an increase to productivity, to clarity – I mean how could you not be clear and concise in 140 characters.

We couldn’t agree more Tim!   Limiting characters forces people to be clear and concise. No fluff, just direct actionable feedback.

That’s why we built Rypple.  It takes your core insight of easy to create and concise feedback and builds on it to create a useful solution for improving insight, productivity, and performance.  And, like Twitter – it’s fun!

It takes seconds to give useful Rypple feedback.   And, because its so quick, people get more feedback, continuously, which helps people to develop.

We love it when smart people reaffirm why we built Rypple.  Thanks Tim!

We think of learning as something that is deeply connected to the successful execution of our service and our vision. That’s why the most productive and satisfying work we do every day is related to learning. In fact, we believe that in order to enjoy and be good at your job, you have to be learning, all the time.

What’s interesting though is that process of learning becomes much quicker and easier with feedback.

Often when I encounter something new, I want to talk about it with friends and colleagues. Discussing a new idea helps me understand it better because other people’s feedback frames the concept in ways I often wouldn’t have thought of.

But at work, the things that I need to learn about are not abstract ideas. They are tangible. Usually, when I’m trying something new at work, I want to know:

• Did a new approach, idea, or practice result in desired change?
• What do our users and clients think?
• What worked and what didn’t?
• What does our team think?

Courses, books, and blogs are wonderful ways to gather new approaches and specific knowledge. But to really *learn* I need to understand and apply new knowledge in real-life. As a result, I’ve found that my most meaningful learning comes from trying something out and then seeing what happens.

We hope Rypple can bridge this divide by helping people get regular feedback whenever they try something new or when they want to enhance what they’re already doing.

Regular Ryppling is a simple, cost-effective, and easy way to build a repeated cycle of learning into your daily work life.

Rypple is mainly used for its core purpose: getting people specific and useful feedback about their performance at work.

But, we always suspected that our users would find new uses for Rypple beyond our original focus.  I’m happy to say that we were right.  Almost every day someone tells us about a new way that they use Rypple to make them successful.

For example, about a month ago a blogger told me that he’s been using Rypple to help him cure Bloggers Block.  I though – “hmm, interesting.  Not sure how.”  But, given our hectic pace, I didn’t think much about it and moved on.

Last week, as I sat staring at the screen and wondering: “what is there to say?” I remembered that user.  Rather than struggle, I sent a quick Rypple to get some specific and useful ideas.  I asked a group of people I consider to be trusted advisors and included some “power” Rypple users, team-mates, mentors, friends and family.

Within an hour, I had some useful, specific answers on what to blog about.  Wicked! In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing on all these topics.  Here’s what my advisors wanted to hear.

Stories about all the interesting personal interactions you have with prospects and thought leaders.

For sure!  Every day we get calls from companies and people who want a different way to give and get feedback.  These discussion have been incredibly useful to us in our journey and I’ve got a whole bunch of observations to share.  For now the most overwhelming one is:  people really want something different than the traditional model that is out there.

Why you’re not less of a person just because you give better, honest feedback when your identity is not known to the person to whom you’re giving feedback

The social dynamics of feedback are incredibly interesting.  How and why people help each other are definitely a topic we’ll explore on the Rypple blog.

How to make Rypple a “regular” behavior instead of something I do only when something else motivates me… (maybe you should add a feature that prompts me to request feedback automatically but easily)

Great idea.  The reasons that we ask for feedback and signals that tell us when we should (or when it is “ok” to ask) are something that we think about a lot.  And making Rypple a regular part of our users’ lives is of course something we are working hard to do. So, the feature advice is a bonus (good one – we’re on it!) and the blog suggestion is helpful.  Thanks!

…milestones and timelines of the company?

Of course.  We started working on our next project after Workbrain in September 2007.  In February 2008 we had the basic idea for Rypple and started pulling the team, product, and financing together.  We’re flattered that people are interested in the Rypple story so I’ll be sure to post some more background, and some of the lessons we have learned along the way.

How Rypple has been helpful in building Rypple.com (a look inward…)?

Well, this post aside, Rypple has been *incredible* as a tool.  We use it a ton, in many different ways.  We use it personally (“me” questions) and as a team (“we” questions), and with our users.   Each of the uses deserves some discussion.

A post to build community around Karma and  helping others, i.e. “Make 2009, the year for helping others.”

Totally!  Helping other people with some quick, specific and honest advice is a great way to improve your Karma.   And, in today’s tough economic environment the companies that pull together and get the best out of each person are going to have the best chances for survival and growth.

Blog about how people can use Rypple for personal use, or for professional use if they don’t work at a company or aren’t managers.

Great point.  Although we been hearing from  lots of companies interested in implementing Rypple, tons of our users are sole practitioners & independent professionals.  They have got tons of unique needs for feedback – both personally and professionally – and often have a really tough time getting it.  Check – I’ll cover it off.

More about community and how Rypple is useful… talk about new features. Blog often. Also use it to showcase what Rypple employees think and like.

Rypple is absolutely about building a personal network – and reaching beyond to the broader community.  We have a whole bunch of simple features coming out soon that are going to help people realize this vision with Rypple.  As for blogging more often – point taken.  We’re all going to take a turn on the soapbox and make sure that we’re telling the world what’s up at Rypple – and what we “think and like”.

Fun hints at where Rypple might go in terms of ways companies might use it?

But of course!  As I mentioned, we hear all the time about the use and impact of Rypple at companies all over the world.  The stories are amazing and we’re going to do our best to share as many as we can.  There is a ton to learn from “best practices” and we’re going to get them out there.

Think about guest bloggers and invite new members

Yup.   We’re going to be including all of our friends in this space.  We’re lucky to have great advisors, investors, and partners – and we’re going to bring some of their wisdom to you!

I’d also be curious about what you are interested in.  Send me a note or comment with what you want to know about Rypple!

Don didn’t disappoint.  He outlined two key trends that are changing the way businesses are organized: Internet-based, bottom-up collaboration; and demographics.  Don focused on the Net Generation’s entry into the workforce and their use of the Internet as a communication and self-organization platform.

We loved the talk, but wondered:  “How long will it take for traditional business people to really start changing their organizational structures, social norms, and expectations to account for the reality of the Net Gen?”  Will this change occur over the next 12-24 months?  Will it take a few years?  Or will it take a decade or longer? Will it wait for the Net Gen to take on more senior management roles and force business to redesign around Net Gen models of communication and collaboration?

We don’t know for sure, but we think the shift to “bottom-up” is going to happen a whole lot faster than most business people imagine.

When we talk to people about Rypple’s goal of re-inventing performance management and professional development as a bottom-up, collaborative, and self-organizing process that integrates work with learning…light-bulbs go off.  People get it, which is great.

But, we wonder…  how long until the early majority start to get it and change how they do business?

Up until last week, we didn’t think the mainstream population took this stuff very seriously.  Sure, people heard about Linux software being built in a open source fashion, but … hey, that was just a bunch of tech stuff, right?  There have been dozens of stories about corporate wiki-style innovation.  But these were just gimmicks and experiments, right?  And while everyone (not under a rock) got YouTubes emailed and chatted about (and maybe joined) Facebook, most people were cynical when they heard how things are “different” with this generation.

But, this week, the power of bottom-up collaboration got a huge, undeniable, impossible-to-ignore proof-point for everyone in the world.  It will be very hard to write off bottom-up as yet another over-hyped trend. This week Barack Obama was elected president. Yes, he was a great orator.  Yes, he benefited from a huge dissatisfaction with Bush, fear of the economy and desire for change.  But, what is really notable is Obama’s use of technology to massively engage people through self-organization.  It’s ironic that the election of the hierarchically top executive in the land, and the ultimate Commander-in-Chief, would be the public harbinger of the power of a new style of collaborative, bottom-up organization.

As Mark Ambinder noted in June in the Atlantic,

Obama has truly set himself apart by his campaign’s use of the Internet to organize support. No other candidate in this or any other election has ever built a support network like Obama’s. The campaign’s 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors have provided him with an enormous financial and organizational advantage in the Democratic primary.

Don thinks (and we agree) that this self-organization is not going to stop with the election.  As he writes:

In the old style of politics, election day marked the end of typical citizens’ involvement.  They would take down their lawn signs and then passively watch the President run the country for four years.

But young adults won’t be satisfied with politics as practiced by their moms and dads, and this will be one of the biggest challenges facing Obama.  This age group will be exceptionally demanding. They will want to be involved in the act of governing-by debating contributing ideas before decisions are made. They will want an ongoing dialogue with their elected officials, and they know the technology exists to easily make this happen. They will also insist on integrity from elected officials; if politicians say one thing and do another, young Americans will use their digital tools to find out, and spread the news.

This election marks the birth of a political juggernaut that will dominate and transform politics in America. By 2015, children of the baby boomers will constitute one-third of the voting public. They have at their fingertips the Internet- most powerful tool ever for informing, organizing and mobilizing.  And as we’ve seen, they know how to use it.

We think Obama’s improbable election will be the final “evidence” point that convinces the business world that they need to understand the change that is coming to their way.

We’re going to be speaking at the Talent 2.0 conference on the 19th.  Peter Cheese, the head of Accenture’s HCM practice andTammy Johns, Senior Vice President of Global Workforce Strategy for Manpower will be on a panel with us. Hopefully, we’ll have some good conversations about this topic down in Orlando.  We’ll blog a bit more about our thinking when we get back.