An innovation and strategy consultant, Chris Ertel has years of experience advising senior executives of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and large nonprofit. Chris talks about his new book Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change in this Business901 Podcast. I thought this excerpt from the podcast was a great “How to” for explaining his message.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Planning Your Strategic Conversations
Excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe: How should the book be used? Is this, as you said, you get a bunch of talented people together and you create a strategic conversation but could it be used in other arenas? Could it be used in weekly meetings? Should I be using some of the points in it or, how should I use the book?
Chris: I think there would certainly be things you could take a way, after you have a standing meeting and that sort of thing, you would be able to take some things away. Its highest value is going to be when the stakes are high, when you have these complex situations, that’s when it’s going to help the most.
I can give you a reader’s essence, a kind of trade craft that’s involved to, though, from a regular meeting because I was involved in a regular meeting. Recently, somebody brought me in and said, “Hey, can you just help out with this,” and it wasn’t a very complicated situation. I said, “Sure,” and in that situation though, one little intervention that I did that’s consistent with the spirit of the book is they had some survey results that they wanted to share and the survey results were, it was one slide and had 11 questions and each of the questions had an answer against, an average number against it. These were the survey data was from customers of the group who was in the audience, so it was important to them and some of the findings were actually quite surprising. There were some negative findings in particular, that were disappointing and surprising, and they had it just on one slide and they were just going to show the slide and have a conversation about it which is pretty straight forward, and I thought, well, that’s not such a good way to go about that. So, let’s have a little more drama to this.
I had them give each, we had 20 people in the room, we split the room into four teams of five people and each team got one big flip chart with the 11 questions on it and then they got post-its that had the 11 answers, the 11 values and we asked them to match the two. So, it’s to rate them like how do you think we rated with our customers in each of these 11 things. They each did that little quick exercise and that was pretty energetic. And then, what I did at the front of the room was I read the answers, the real answers that the customers gave going from the things that they were the best at to the things that they got the lowest response to. So, that created a moment of drama.
It’s like the first one is like, “Hey, good news. You got 5 out of 5 points on this one. You know, pat yourself on the back, all these good stuff, then the next one, the next one, the next one, then the scores start getting low and there’re some big issues remaining. We touched the last ones, they were very surprised. The people who had the highest scoring team on the matches got 5 out of 11 right. With that we launched a good conversation. What I found in other situations that if you share survey data like that, just cold and don’t make people guess or think about it a little bit in advance, they will always almost say, “We knew that,” after they see it. You need to establish the expectation that they have first and then show the results in contrast to that, for them to really make meaning of it and in this case it was pretty effective.
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