(re) Imagine! Tom's collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, so the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned.
Good Morning Folks,
When customers approached us before we went back into the Outsourcing business as Future State Outsourcing in 2010, they were fed up with the status-quo: Onsite Outsourcing as usual.
Though a great idea at its inception, Onsite Outsourcing became complacent and less innovative over time. So we set out to re-invent a business my co-founders had essentially invented. As our successors to those businesses, merged or got acquired, providers had become big, bloated behemoths incapable of making fast decisions and innovating, it was clear that customers wanted something different. Something more. And we (re)Imagined it.
Had I known of Tom Wujec back then, I could have described the process of (re) Imagination as being akin to he telling me how we make toast.
Filmed June 2013 at TEDGlobal 2013, this short TED talk that since has been viewed millions of times, showcases a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems, and like many of these design exercises, it kind of seems trivial at first, but under deep inspection, it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things.
Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.
The simple act, Tom describes, of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes. What's really important to know is that it's the conversations that are the important aspects, not just the models themselves. And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes. So, one example is from an organization called Rodale. Big publishing company. They lost a bunch of money one year, and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice. And what's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business, systems upon systems, they reclaimed 50 million dollars of revenue, and they also moved from a D rating to an A rating from their customers. Why? Because there's alignment from the executive team. So Tom's now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization, and on a site that he's produced called drawtoast.com.
Tom's collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, so the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned.
So next time you're confronted with an interesting challenge, remember what design has to teach us. Make your ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth celebrating. Here's Tom:
Thanks to TED and to you for listening.
Have a GREAT Day,
Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer
Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.
About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the third consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment