Make space for new ideas with TRIZ by stopping unproductive activities or rigid behaviors. Invite everybody to generate new ideas with 1-2-4-All. Ask all participants to identify what they can do immediately, what their 15% Solutions is, and then invite them to help their peers expand and enhance their own 15 percent in a Troika Consulting session.
You can avoid many of the traps that turn transformation initiatives and innovation projects into failures: the lack of a clear and common purpose, overall and for every stage of the initiative; inadequate engagement and participation; voices that are essential but not included; frustrated participants and nonparticipants; resistance to change; groupthink; nightmarish implementation for a disproportionally small impact.
A comprehensive design is a series of basic designs (see Design StoryBoards–Basic) linked together over a period of time. The design unfolds iteratively over days, weeks, months, or sometimes years depending on the scale of the project. Small cycles of design operate within larger cycles, scaling up and out as the initiative proceeds. You can easily include more people and more diversity in the design group for larger-scale projects. You can reflect the twists and turns in a transformation or innovation effort by a careful and ad hoc selection of participants (including unusual suspects since they are often the source of novel approaches).
Participants can gain insight into their own pattern of interaction and habits. Helping Heuristics make it possible for them to experience how they can choose to change how they work with others by using a progression of practical methods.
Heuristics are shortcuts that help people identify what is important when entering a new situation. They help them develop deeper insight into their own interaction patterns and make smarter decisions quickly. A series of short exchanges reveals heuristics or simple rules of thumb for productive helping. Try them out!
This structure enacts LS Principle #5, Practice Self-Discovery Within a Group
In Options Place, participants propose and lead their own breakout sessions instead of following a preset agenda. This unleashes people’s creativity and invites them to attend sessions that match their interests. When given the freedom to shape the agenda, participants become more engaged and take greater ownership of solutions, which leads to greater commitment, action, innovation, and follow-through. In this way, Options Place brings to life LS Principle #6, Amplify Freedom and Responsibility. This structure works well for large groups.
Practice deeper listening and empathy by experiencing the same stimulus from two perspectives. Partners sit back-to-back and first listen individually to a short piece of music, noticing their internal experience through body, emotions, and thoughts.
They then describe their experience to each other in detail before listening again — this time through the lens of their partner’s description. By shifting from “my experience” to “your experience,” participants practice perspective-taking, empathy, and disciplined attention.
This simple structure builds the micro-behaviors that strengthen understanding, improve collaboration, and enhance the quality of insight gathered from others.
A few individuals set up stations where they share a challenge and a consultation question. Often the challenge is directly or obliquely shared by others in the group. As small groups of consultants move from one station to another, their size makes it easy for people to connect with the client and visa versa. Clients learn how to ask productive questions and consultants learn how to be more effective coaches.
With Caravan everyone can quickly learn how challenges are being addressed and how new approaches might be adapted to their own situations.
With this facilitation technique you can immediately include everyone regardless of how large the group is. You can generate better ideas and more of them faster than ever before. You can tap the know-how and imagination that is distributed widely in places not known in advance.
Open, generative conversation unfolds. Ideas and solutions are sifted in rapid fashion. Most importantly, participants own the ideas, so follow-up and implementation is simplified. No buy-in strategies needed! Simple and elegant!
This structure reinforces LS Principle #1, Include and Unleash Everyone.
You can help a group move from either-or conflicts to both-and strategies and solutions. You can engage everyone in sharper strategic thinking, mutual understanding, and collaborative action by surfacing the advantage of being both more integrated and more autonomous. Attending to paradox will reveal opportunities for profound leaps in performance by addressing questions such as: What mix of integrative control and autonomous freedom will advance our purpose? Where do our needs for global fidelity and consistency meet the needs for local customization and creative adaptability? This makes it possible to avoid swings in strategy that are frequently experienced by many organizations. This structure enacts LS Principle #6, Amplify Freedom and Responsibility.
You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference.
15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change.
With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape. This structure enacts LS Principle #6, Amplify Freedom and Responsibility.
In Creative Destruction, groups imagine how to achieve the worst possible results. By asking “What must we stop doing to make progress on our deepest purpose?” participants can have fun, courageous conversations about letting go. Since laughter often erupts, issues that are otherwise taboo get a chance to be aired and confronted. With creative destruction come opportunities for renewal as local action and innovation rush in to fill the vacuum. Whoosh!
This structure embodies LS Principle #8, Invite Creative Destruction to Enable Innovation
