Posts in the ‘Learning and Training’ Category Blog Index

Do you know what your team really thinks? Get feedback today!

Effective leaders ask questions, discover blind spots, and learn continuously. Start by asking your team a quick question: “What’s one thing I can do to be more effective in my role?”

In today’s video you’ll learn how to:

1. Ask a focused question in 15 seconds
2. Get ongoing, honest feedback from your team
3. Clarify feedback with anonymous conversations

Engage your team by asking for their feedback. You’ll learn and succeed together.

Get feedback today!

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

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While browsing the web this morning, I came across an interesting blog post, How to Get Hired at a Startup on WorkAwesome. Jason Cohen, the author, makes some very interesting points about getting hired at a startup.

Here are Jason’s five tips:

1. Approach it like getting married
2. Do your homework
3. Your personality, intelligence, and cover letter is more important than bullets on a resume
4. Engage the company beforehand
5. Be “proactive,” not “reactive”

In my opinion, the most important point is number 2, Do you homework. Before going to the interview, visit the company’s site, learn about the product or service, and most importantly, signup, and use the product!

Number 3 is also a very important point. Jason previously wrote a post teaching how to write an engaging, professional cover letter.

Checkout Jason’s full post on WorkAwesome, and follow him on Twitter.

Tags: cover letter, Feedback, hired, homework, Jason Cohen, job, jordan satok, proactive, resume, Rypple, startup, workawesome

Marketing

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The Harvard Business Publishing agrees with our belief in power of one thing.

In the post To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing, Peter Bregman describes how he  lost 18 pounds in one and a half months. He did it by focusing on cutting down one area of consumption.

…I asked myself: what’s the one thing I can change that will make the biggest difference in my calorie consumption? Everyone has one thing.

We often draw parallels between going to the gym and getting feedback. Everyone knows that these two activities are good for you, but not everyone does it.

Certainly some diets are healthier than others. But in terms of losing weight? No diet was better than any other. Because all diets work through a single mechanism — they restrict your calorie intake. People lose weight when they eat less. If that’s true, then the best diet is the simplest one

It doesn’t matter what one area or skill you choose to focus on, as long as you’re dedicating all of your focus to it.

Typically, people overwhelm themselves with tasks in their eagerness to make a change successfully. But that’s a mistake. Instead, they should take the time up front to figure out the one and only thing that will have the highest impact and then focus 100% of their effort on that one thing.

Don’t try and do to much at once or you will fail. That’s why Rypple only lets you ask one question at a time. Getting feedback on one question makes improvement much more realistic because you’re focusing on one area at a time.

If you’re going to work on a weakness, never choose more than one.

Great point, and something that we truly believe.

Tags: change, Feedback, habits, Harvard Business Publishing, learning, lessons, one, Peter Bregman

Community Marketing

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It goes without saying that learning, in all its many forms, is the key to staying ahead. Learning what’s working, what’s not, how to fix things, and so on. In a classic HBR article from 1994 titled “Good Communication that Blocks Learning“, Chris Argyris provides some ideas on how people within organizations can learn more effectively. He shows how “double-loop learning” (where you ask follow up questions to get at what lies beneath the surface) is a better way to learn, and how “good” communication (not being entirely honest in the interests of being polite or not rocking the boat) gets in the way (despite it generally being well-meaning)! In addition to getting into the habit of asking followup questions, and encouraging honest responses, you can also use Rypple to help you ask followup questions, and help your team provide you with honest responses.

Chris first wrote about double-loop learning in the mid-seventies. He’d observed how people within companies typically engage in single-loop learning, where they’d ask one dimensional questions to uncover one dimensional answers. Rarely did people probe beneath the surface with followup questions to uncover the reasons, motives, and so on. His favourite example is that of a thermostat which simply asks, “Are we at the preset temperature?” (single loop learning), and never asks the followup questions, “What is the appropriate temperature?” “Are we using the right source?”, “Are we adjusting in the right way?” and so on.

An example of single v. double loop learning in a software development process. Let’s say that your team decides to “clean up” your app, does some extensive testing, discovers a series of bugs, comes up with fixes, and implements the fixes. If you stop here, satisfied with the newly fixed code, then you’ve demonstrated single-loop learning. If you then dig deeper and ask, “Why did these bugs occur?” “Are the tests the right tests?” “Are we setting out to test in the right way?” and so on, then you’ve demonstrated double-loop learning. The former is good enough, but the latter is what helps you leap-frog the competition. If you’re only ever asking the former question, then problems may fester for far too long, and be more expensive or difficult to fix down the road.

However, double-loop learning does not always occur within teams. Why? Chris says there’s a social and a psychological reason for this. Socially, most of us hate to be the one that opens Pandora’s Box, rocks the boat, or comes across as negative. Instead, we’re encouraged to think positively, motivate others, be considerate of others’ feelings, etc. While being positive is great, in some situations, it can dramatically hurt your team. The psychological reason that blocks double-loop learning is that whenever a problem involves a threat or embarrassment, we take of our objective/rigorous reasoning hat, and instead engage in defensive reasoning – essentially justifying our actions or blaming others, rather than objectively looking at problems and solutions.

So next time you face a problem, don’t be afraid to dig deeper. The problem you face may just be a symptom of deeper problems. Ask followup questions.

And encourage those around you to be honest. Let them know that you’re not going to hold it against them for being honest. If your team is hesitant to be entirely honest for fear of not being polite/considerate/rocking the boat/you name it, try using Rypple to gather anonymous responses from your team (and of course, once you get feedback, ask follow up questions). People tend to be honest when they use Rypple since the anonymity helps people avoid being seen as too negative or as rocking the boat. And since the feedback can only be seen by the person asking the question, there is less embarrassment involved. We’ve also seen another benefit in several companies. Teams that start using Rypple find that people feel more comfortable giving honest face-to-face feedback! And when that happens, then you can be sure that you and your team will be learning a lot more effectively than before.

Tags: Chris Argyris, constructive feedback, decision support, Development, feedback is fundamental, habits, learning, lessons, office environment, People, professional development, Questions, reflection

George Babu is responsible for Corporate Development and IP at Rypple. Prior to joining Rypple, George spent the last several years working on a variety of technology and intellectual property-related projects with both Research in Motion (RIM) and Bereskin & Parr, one of Canada's leading IP law firms. George holds B.A.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently completing his JD and MBA degrees, all at the University of Toronto. Given all that's on his plate, George doesn't sleep all that much!

27480 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Flearning-by-following-up-and-encouraging-honesty%2FLearning+by+following+up+and+encouraging+honesty2009-10-07+18%3A05%3A28George+Babuhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2F%3Fp%3D2748

I’ll start this post off with a plug – read Donald Norman’s book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. It is about the psychology and physiology that underlies interaction with things you use every day; why some work well (are usable), and others do not.

This post was inspired by Norman’s excellent book, as well as the long overdue arrival of hot weather here in Toronto and the string of dry days that has allowed my motorcycle to re-emerge.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with a motorcycle’s interface: you steer with handlebars, left hand works the clutch, right hand works the throttle and main brake. Typically, secondary functionality is assigned to the left hand – turn signals, horn, highbeams etc. Normally, turn signals are a switch that can be pushed to the right to signal right, pushed to the left to signal left and clicked to cancel. All of this can be done with your left thumb.

Why does this make sense? Well, except for when you are operating the clutch, your left hand is free to move about and operate those controls. The same cannot be said for the right hand – you need to keep the throttle at a constant position in order to maintain a constant speed. More importantly, you really want to be ready to operate the brakes on short notice, so you always want that hand ready to get off the throttle and grab the brake. You don’t want your right hand to be preoccupied with operating secondary functions when a Mac truck pulls out in front of you.

My bike, a BMW, implements a different model. A left turn signal is initiated by the left hand and a right turn signal is initiated by the right hand. And the signals are canceled by an entirely separate button….located on the right side!

Photo by Peter Boden

What’s wrong with this?

1. It’s inconsistent with virtually every other motorcycle. Any user coming from another brand will need to relearn how to use the interface.
2. It doesn’t consider the physiology of the user. Although there is some sense in having left things controlled by the left hand and vice versa, each side of the body is controlled by a single hemisphere of the brain so more brain needs to get involved to signal an upcoming turn. Getting more brain involved at highway speeds can be dangerous since it takes it away from being aware of the road. Furthermore, the right hand needs to be considerably more dexterous in order to maintain a consistent throttle position and maneuver appropriately to operate the signal/cancel buttons.
3. It’s dangerous. I need to move my hand away from the main brake lever to signal a turn. If it takes even half a second longer to get back on the brake, it can mean an extra 14 meters traveled at highway speed. That’s most of the way through the Mac truck that just pulled out!

So why did they do it this way? The only thing I can think of is the adage that ‘Interface is Brand’. They’ve been doing it this way for a long time, and it has become a recognized element of the marque.

What can we learn?

1. Never discount the impact of the familiar. You may have come up with a theoretically better approach, but if it differs from the familiar it will have acceptance challenges.
2. Always consider human physiology. For computer interfaces, this includes visual perception, hand/eye coordination, motor memory, and short term memory capacity.
3. Always consider the interaction you are designing in the context of the user’s task. Nothing is accomplished in isolation from other tasks, so you need to be sure that your design cooperates with everything else your user needs to be doing.

The design of everyday objects isn’t limited to motorcycles! I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have about the interaction design of things you use everyday.

UPDATE: Aug 14, 2009 – There is an interesting and active discussion on this posting going at at YCombinator. Check it out!

Tags: bmw, controls, customer outreach, danger, decision support, design of everyday things, doet, don norman, ergonomics, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, human physiology, motorcycle, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, team review, turn signal

User Experience & Usability

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I’ve been thinking a lot about user engagement lately, which might be why Nike+ Experiment article in last month’s Wired caught my attention. Although the article only briefly touches on the topic, there’s a lot that can be learned by studying very successful products. I’m going to head out on a brief tangent to take a look at three valuable lessons, then circle back at the end to look at how you can apply their Magic Number to your own applications.

For those not familiar, the Nike+ is a sensor you put in your shoe that pairs with compatible iPod/iPhones to display stats about your run or cardio, play motivational music, and upload stats to your NikePlus.com account for analysis. The article is part of Wired’s Living by Numbers feature, which covers technology’s pretty remarkable ability to provide tools for tracking every detail of your life and using that data for constant self-improvement (sound familiar? ). Nike would love for you to buy a pair of their Nike+ compatible shoes with a sensor pocket, but you can also use Nike+ with any shoe by duct taping the sensor to the top of your shoe or buying a special pocket that attaches to your laces.

There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in there about the Apple/Nike collaboration on the iPod/Nike+ sensor and where it came from, including:

• Nike is compiling rich data about more than 1.2 million people running on their sensors. They’ve collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories. This real-time data about runners has never been gathered before and is shedding all kinds of insights into the habits of that population on an international scale (e.g.: people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa in wintertime, the average run is 35 minutes). Air Miles and other loyalty programs work on the same principle (although their rewards are arguably much less valuable): aggregated data has value greater than the sum of its parts.
  • Lesson: look for patterns that might unexpectedly emerge when you aggregate smaller pieces together. They can often inform your product design decisions much more strongly than individual data points.
• Hard data and a real time feedback loop have turned the adage “people hate exercising” upside down. This is revolutionary for anyone who builds a product in a space that people need but don’t necessarily want (versus something like chocolate, which everyone wants but doesn’t need). Technology is great at reversing long held paradigms (Wikinomics, the Long Tail, etc.), and this is no exception. This is technology mediating one human behavior (couch potativity) by leveraging another (ego flattery).
  • Lesson: you can motivate people to do surprising things when the payoff is big enough, and it’s hard to get bigger than ego. Add features inspired by the world of video games to your product as a powerful carrot.
• Simple, easy to use products will always kick the ass of complex, product rich beasts. The Nike+ doesn’t include GPS or heart rate sensors, two of the most common features in other running accessories. Although most people might think those are indispensable must-haves — and Nike is thinking of adding them in later versions — the product has outsold almost everything in its market without them.
  • Lesson: KISS! Keep It Simple Stupid. In the words of Antoine De Saint-Exuprey: “You know you’ve achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.“

The most interesting statistic for me is the Nike+ Magic Number: 5. To quote from the article:

Nike has discovered that there’s a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they’re massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they’ve gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

Here’s where we come back to user engagement. All products have a magic number — a 5 Runs equivalent — but figuring it out can be tricky. Consider this engagement model (note that all curves are approximate and not based on real math):

A quick guide:

• A: the first exposure a user has to your product. Their engagement (or awareness) is zero until that point.
• A – B: their awareness grows as they hear about your product on Twitter, see news stories about it, spot your ads in Wired, etc.
• B: user’s first actual experience with the product. They are fully engaged during this experience so make the most of it!
• B – C1: engagement degrades immediately after they stop using the product. C1 is an arbitrary point at which you can still make them a permanent user.
• C1 – D: engagement eventually returns to basically where it started at as they slowly forget all about you.

Man is that line ever depressing. But all is not lost! Consider the crazy wave coming out of C1. For most products, particularly web apps, you can turn the sinking Engagement ship around by taking action at each C point, be it a Facebook “You’ve been bitten by a vampire!” notice, a Flickr invitation to add your photos to a group pool, or a Rypple from one of your colleagues. Sustaining engagement means routinely drawing users back into your world with carefully designed touch points, timed to arrive before they drop below a C point. Nike uses the social features on NikePlus.com as that draw: emails that Nike misses you, challenges from your friends (fastest 5km run, most km over 20 days, etc.), and the ability to have your friends and family cheer you on to goals you share with them.

Let’s take a look at the curve from a Nike+ user’s perspective:

I’ve made their A-B curve a little steeper to reflect Nike’s and Apple’s combined ad budget. C1 through C5 here are basically your first five runs, interspersed with reminders from NikePlus to keep at it. Based on the article, the curve takes off sharply after that as people become heavily hooked on the stats.

What’s Your 5 Runs?

Think about your product or application. What’s your inflection point from casual to engaged users? My instinct says that it needs to be a simple number so that you can actively drive users to it; you can expend a lot of resource if you know you only need to get them to their fifth run. We’ve been spending some time figuring it out for Rypple and we have a few ideas around the number of Rypples you send, the number of replies you receive, the quality of the advice, etc. We’d love to hear from you: share your 5 Runs below. There’s value in learning from each other. Let’s discuss!

Tags: customer outreach, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, five runs, habits, nike+, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, team review, wired

Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

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“Those who learn fastest, WIN

When Dave Spofford, a Rypple user and CEO of Invoice Insight, shared these words with me back in May, I didn’t realize at the time how totally profound they were.

Imagine, you’re a company looking to build your brand, reputation, and provide innovative products and services in a market rife with competition and emerging technologies. Maybe you’re an individual looking to differentiate yourself in a sea of talent or take that next step in your career. Or maybe you’re an entrepreneur, looking to slay a few Goliaths as you build your business.

Regardless of who you are or what you’re trying to achieve, the bottom line is that if you are able to more quickly assimilate knowledge and execute on it faster than those around you, you’ll get ahead quicker than they do. Simple? Yes.  But the concept is no different than that of an Olympic athlete looking to break a world record,  animals looking to survive in the wild, or a challenger looking to best a culinary master in an episode of Iron Chef (love that show!).

So how do you get that knowledge in the first place?

You seek it out! You ask for it. You triangulate signals. You query anyone who can lend even a piece of the insights you’re looking for!

When working with our corporate clients looking to leverage Rypple feedback within their organization, I often get asked, “…so what types of thing should we be encouraging our people to ask for feedback on?“. To which I respond, “Simple! Complete this sentence:

We/I could ‘win’ more, if we/I only knew ________“.

Fill in that blank, and you’ll know exactly where to start.

Here are some examples from around the Rypple user community.

“We could ‘win’ more, if we only knew…

• …what our customers feel most differentiates us from our competition.”
• …if the training we provide our people is adequate.”
• …who the thought leaders in our own organization were.”
• …what our people love most/least about working here.”

I could ‘win’ more, if I only knew…

• …the skills I need to develop to take my career to the next level.”
• …how to better position the value of my services.”
• …the personal strengths I should leverage more in my role.”
• …what people think I should stop, start, and continue doing in my job.”

So the next time you’re in the market for feedback but aren’t quite sure where to start, follow this simple 4-step recipe.

1. Ask yourself, if you could learn one thing that would help you learn and execute faster, what would that be?
2. Request feedback (using a good question) to uncover the insights you’re looking for
3. Use that feedback to take action…and win!
4. Repeat step 1.

Tags: Feedback, learning, Rypple, winning

Product & Community

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The phrase “learning is work, and work is learning” means a lot to us at Rypple.

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.

Tags: Feedback, knowledge, learning, Rypple, work

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

10500 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Flearning-is-work-and-work-is-learning%2FLearning+is+work%2C+and+work+is+learning2009-06-23+18%3A13%3A07Daniel+Debowhttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.rypple.com%2F%3Fp%3D1050