Posts Tagged ‘ideo’ Blog Index

Last week we hosted the second meeting of the Rypple Learning Collaborative. Spearheaded by John Foster, IDEO’s Head of Talent and Organization, we spent an exciting afternoon at Pixar’s headquarters together with nearly 40 innovators and thought leaders from top organizations and academic institutions, including Mozilla, Facebook, and Stanford University.

One topic that resonated with me was the idea that feedback is a journey, not a specific event. The feedback we ask for, and get, will evolve as we develop and as our priorities change.

My insight: people are more effective in reaching their objectives when they get ongoing feedback based on their work and goals.

Why? Because when feedback is part of our day-to-day lives, we get used to receiving it. This puts us in a better position to act on the feedback because we become less distracted by its implications.

Most of us are constantly on the look-out for indicators to let us know how we’re doing at work. If we’re not used to regularly getting feedback from our peers, bosses, etc., we’re more likely to think to deeply about the meaning of each piece of feedback we get. We end up spending more time interpreting the input, discussing with our friends, etc., than we do actually acting on it and using it to get better and help drive results.

Infrequent feedback is a big distraction. Consider the annual performance review, for example. Why is it so stressful for so many of us? Because annual appraisals force us to squeeze as much information as we can remember into a single event each year. Due to its infrequency, the appraisal event becomes the indicator of our value to the company. That’s challenging to take in all at once, and particularly unpleasant if we disagree with the assessment. We’ve got to break this habit – we’ll all be better, and happier, if we do.

Fostering a journey of continuous feedback requires an understanding that each piece of feedback received is not in itself the sole reflection of how good or bad you are. That’s a big step for most (myself included), but we need to do our best to keep this rule in mind: creating a habit of regular feedback will make us more receptive to feedback. This is how to start a journey that will be more fruitful for you, your team, and your organization.

Tags: business development, constructive feedback, continuous feedback, facebook, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, ideo, John Foster, Mozilla, performance review, Performance Reviews, Pixar, professional development, Rypple, self-improvement, Stanford University

Business Development

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We’ll be bold if you’ll be.  We’re talkin’ to you, HR Technology Conference attendees…

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!

Tags: Bill Kutik, business development, Enterprise Software, Freemium, HR, HR Tech, ideo, John Foster, professional development, Workplace

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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In August, we held the first session of the Rypple Learning Collaborative at Mozilla’s new HQ in Mountain View.  In addition to Mozilla, we had participants from Method Home, Pixar, The Federal Reserve Bank, Kiva, Littler Mendelson, Electronic Arts, the Stanford d.School, Facebook, and IDEO.

We hope this collaborative learning effort generates some new insights and ideas that help people do a better job asking for and giving feedback.  So, we spent much of our first time together  sharing our direct experiences with people giving and receiving feedback and generating a list of observations about what seems to work and what doesn’t.

We framed our discussions with the idea that feedback involves not only the person asking/receiving and the person giving/providing, but a “crowd” of people around that pair.  Traditionally, much of the attention given to this topic is on the mechanics of the interaction between the two obvious players.  We included the third role to push our assumptions with a social systems view.

We all shared stories describing real feedback situations to help us recognize some patterns in real behavior.  Once we get a good picture of how people actually behave (not how they should behave), we will try to uncover what works well and what causes people problems.

An early insight from our shared stories is that it makes a positive impact on a feedback exchange when a person is ready for it.  That is, when a person is asking for feedback, they seem to be more able to handle it well than when a person gives it.  So this prompts the question, “What makes someone ready for feedback?”

Our next step is for LC members to begin conducting feedback experiments within their organizations.  From these experiments, we will expand our observations and gather more ideas to push our thinking.   We’ll start posting them in a few weeks.

Tags: Electronic Arts, Experiments, facebook, Feedback, ideo, Kiva, Learning Collaborative, Littler Mendelson, Method Home, organizational development, Pixar, Rypple, stanford, The Federal Reserve Bank

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John is head of talent and organization for IDEO, where he leads internal efforts to help the firm stay at the leading edge of design and innovation consulting.  John also works on IDEO client projects to assist and guide organization design components.

I’ve just starting working on a new project with the folks at Rypple. You may have heard about them recently as they are getting some great coverage from traditional media like The Economist and Business Week, and blogs like ReadWriteWeb. We’ve been using it at IDEO and finding it very useful.

One thing I love about their approach is that it’s free for individuals, which makes it very easy to, well, just start using it. And once you start using it, you get nearly immediate benefits, so you are likely to keep using it. These benefits are summed up well by one of their CEO users: “Those who learn fastest win.” Rypple helps you learn faster.

But when you consider “pushing” Rypple into an enterprise context, there are some important issues to consider:

• Cultural implications: How do you get more people to use such a tool without corrupting the self-directed ethic? Are there unique cultural issues when a person asks for feedback within each organization?
• Group dynamics: Is it possible to use the information discovered by the individual for more than personal awareness? Can you use it to assess groups of people on engagement or decision making?
• Performance management: Could it be used to construct learning or performance goals that effect performance evaluation? Is it possible that this platform could supplement or even replace other enterprise tools used in employee assessment or (dare I say it?) performance management? We think so. In fact we don’t do performance management any more. I’ll post more on that another time.

So I’m very excited to announce that we’re launching the Rypple Learning Collaborative (the LC). Recently co-founded by IDEO and Rypple, we expect to publicly announce some very interesting member organizations as soon as we’re able. The LC will be an exclusive set of forward-thinking organizations that will work together in a design process to explore and share their experience of Rypple in the enterprise context.

• What are the goals? The LC will push the boundaries of giving and receiving feedback in companies. We will help each other get better at this important capability. These ideas will also feed into Rypple for further product development where appropriate.
• What does this mean for you? Feedback is an integral part of every successful business, yet it is very illusive and difficult to cultivate. Learning to listen to the ideas and opinions of those around you is a critical step toward high performance. The LC will be exploring these topics and sharing them so that people everywhere can benefit.
• How can I get involved? I’ll keep you posted here on what we’re doing as the whole thing unfolds and we welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback. If you’d like to be more involved, possibly as a member of The LC, please contact me.

Tags: ideo, Rypple, rypple learning collaborative, the LC

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