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Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Engagement Officer at Information Architected.
Today IAM Talking Lean Everywhere – small i to BIG I Innovation with Ken Shropshire, Director of Continuous Improvement from AstraZeneca.
Lean Powers, Activate!
Ken and I met each other when I was involved in an innovation challenge engagement in early 2012, and Ken was leading part of the charge in taking a Lean look at innovation opportunities internally.
For this interview we caught up roughly 6 months after the first wave of innovation challenges had closed out. Part of the staging of innovation challenges that we worked on, were specifically targeted using a set of Lean lenses, namely, the “7 Wastes of Lean” – applied to both flow, in this case, process/information flow, and in individual or organizational behavior. The 7 Wastes are: Defects, Overproduction, Inventory, Extra Processing, Motion, Transportation, and Waiting.
If you aren’t familiar with Lean, the traditional view, and history of Lean, comes from the manufacturing world, and the primary flag waver of Toyota and their Toyota Production System. It’s a large toolkit that is over 60 years old, and continues to expand out of manufacturing, into many areas of business life.
Focusing Innovation through Lean
Looking through a “Lean lens” at these types of waste in any business, you can remove the obstacles that cost your business in time, money and effort, that ultimately impact your time to market, your customer satisfaction (shipping defective products, for example), employee engagement (if they’re overburdened with work that THEY can see is not useful, but that’s demanded by management or regulators for example), etc..
In our case, while we were working together to “think outside of the box” for AstraZeneca, what people don’t realize, for innovation work, is that creating a completely blank slate for innovation, more often paralyzes your employees, than it will free them to go and “innovate.”
In our work together, we did a wide variety of interviews with employees in many different roles, and one of the filters we ran those interviews through, were in identifying where we could TARGET specific innovation challenges, by using the 7 wastes to identify those opportunities that may be easy wins, to get engagement and involvement, and that also were mentioned time and time again, especially across roles and departments, which helps create extended team opportunities.
As an example…
If we look at “overproduction” as one of the 7 wastes, and a behavioral twist, that translates into issues like:

Micromanagement
Many procedures
Transactional focus
and Destructive Politics

Which sounds a lot like “business as usual” for big companies… except that by using specific examples, and the language of Lean, we were able to carve out targeted, “judgement neutral” areas to engage real employees, up and down the org chart, to own up to issues and co-create fixes. From an engagement (as in “employee engagement”) standpoint, it worked extremely well to help focus their efforts.
The Double-edged Sword of Tenure
In the context of this engagement, when we were doing employee interviews, we ran into employees who had been there for 30 years or more. In many ways, it’s very easy for long-term employees to become part of the problem from a lean perspective. They’ve been IN the system so long, it can be hard to see the wastes of lean, and think constant improvement/innovation, and yet many of those employees seemed to really embody the best of both long-term employees AND constant innovators. Their input turned out to be invaluable however, as they had been around long enough to be able to point out long-standing issues, and yet not have to be responsible for solving them.
Much more – but take a listen to this interview, and you will find out more about how we approached this work, and where

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Engagement Officer at Information Architected.
Today IAM Talking with BJ West – he is a writer, filmmaker and graphic artist, and has worked on some of the best selling computer games of all time including The Sims, SimCity 3000, The Sims Online and The Sims 2, as well as some of the worst selling games – although the world of games are a topic we will address in a separate interview.
He was the editor of “Fog City Nocturne,” an anthology of original detective fiction, as well as contributing two novella length stories to the book. He has written numerous screenplays, including his adaptation of Keoni Chavez’s short story “The Smiling Man,” which he produced and directed as a short film in 2007. He is the Owner of Kelp Entertainment.
In this interview, we are talking about his Kickstarter project, launched in early 2012, the Story Forge Card deck – which you can still purchase outside of Kickstarter, at storyforgecards.com.
All the World’s a Stage – But are you Telling the Story?
My interest in BJ West’s Story Forge project had several dimensions to it.

Physical props as creativity tools, are something that I use in my own work, whether as an individual, or in team exercises, and innovation card decks in particular, I’ve found incredibly useful.
Crowdfunding as a phenomenon, particularly for non-technology oriented projects (tech projects being the primary Kickstarter project), are great examples of how to address the non-obvious crowdfunding projects that are out in the wild.
BJ’s background in game design provided a hook into gamification, although we’ve tabled that discussion for a later interview.
The much more extensive than usual video presentations that he put together for the potential “presumer” (pre-buying consumer, or crowdfunder), are great examples of the level of previewing of the final product and more importantly, many ways it can be used. Showmanship is vastly underrated.

In this series of crowdfunding interviews,  we are looking into what drives entrepreneurs to lean on the crowd to power not just the money, but the energy to spread the word and engage their own networks in making a project come to life.
And simply because “all the world’s a stage” does not mean that we are all equally equipped, or that by choosing to leap onto the Kickstarter stage (as one crowdfunding platform example), is going to guarantee your success.
If you are going to understand how to tell your story most effectively, whether for a crowdfunding project, or to seek venture capital, or to get internal funding for a new initiative within your organization, are you ready to tell your story in a way that finds it’s mark?
What better way to learn, than to listen to someone (in this case, BJ West) who’s offering is explicitly about creating better stories, and to hear how it unfolded before, during and after the crowdfunding pitch?
Pre-engage or fail…
To a certain extent, any crowdfunding activity, or for that matter, any marketing, sales or delivery of goods or services, is ultimately “owned” by the crowd.
Crowds and the individuals in those crowds, are buried in a sea of information glut, just as we all are – and as BJ West describes in this interview, while word of mouth helps to power the positive and negative feedback loops of your engagement, he easily spent at least 2 months finding and pre-engaging his potential audience, wherever they currently lived – in many different “storytelling tribes.”
Some people rebuffed his attempts to introduce himself into conversations, seeing it as “too commercial” to the discussion, while most others saw his conversations as outreach to fellow storytelling members, whether scriptwriters, game designers, novelists, marketers, or other roles[...]

Today, the topic is Employee Engagement, and what engagement means from several perspectives. 
Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Architected.
Today IAM Talking with Robb Webb, the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) for Hyatt Corporation, and who has been described as the “Culture Guru” for Hyatt Corporation, in Talent Management magazine (see article at TalentMgt.com).
Big E Engagement vs. small e engagement – what is it?
Robb’s take on engagement is that there is a divide between Big E Engagement, which in his experience has a “programatic” feel to it. Big E Engagement is a process of engagement that may happen once a year, in a set period and with specific metrics attached to it, more formalized and “rare” than a constantly running process.
Contrast that with small e engagement, which is a more “in the flow” engagement process that happens every day of the year, with a constant pulse check of employees to understand how they are engaged, what is or is not working, and adjust more in the moment and immediately, than with a potential delay of months or years.
“Change is a door that you can only open from the inside.”
In this interview with Robb, he made the interesting point (which is obvious and perhaps stunning in hindsight, the “Curse of Knowledge” that the Heath Brothers talk about), that engagement isn’t necessarily just about employee engagement. Engagement is what happens (or doesn’t) when any two people come together, whether that is an employee and a manager, employees as peers, employees and customers, etc..
Are you empowering ALL of the potential people in or around your organization, to be as engaged as possible?
For customer-oriented industries, like the hospitality industry, are your employees (teammates) empowered and engaged in solving problems on the spot without management oversight?
If not, what’s the impact on your customer’s perceptions of the company and it’s products and services?
If so, what are you doing to provide both flexibility for your employees to solve problems, while spreading best practices and worst practices across the organization?
Comments or Questions?
There is much more in this interview on Employee Engagement with Robb Webb, CHRO for Hyatt Corporation – and I highly recommend you take the 18 minutes or so to listen in for some thought-provoking ideas on why employee engagement matters, and how you can get involved in BEING engaged, whether you are a manager, employee, or anywhere within the organization.
If you are interested in employee engagement, register now for a free 30-minute consultation on whether the scenarios you’re looking at are the right targets for successful employee engagement.
Any public questions, comment below, and we’ll answer and discuss together.
Listen now!

The post IAM Talking: Employee engagement, BIG E vs little e – With Robb Webb, Chief Human Resources Officer for Hyatt Corporation and Dan Keldsen first appeared on Information Architected.
The post IAM Talking: Employee engagement, BIG E vs little e – With Robb Webb, Chief Human Resources Officer for Hyatt Corporation and Dan Keldsen first appeared on Information Architected.

Today, the topic is Employee Engagement, and specifically, about Gamification. 
Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Architected.
Today IAM Talking with Kevin Werbach, an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, as well as the co-author of the new book on Gamification, “For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business.” For more information on the book and Kevin’s gamification related work, head over to GamifyForTheWin.
Can you design for behavior? If so, why? And why not?
Gamification provokes negative reactions from some people – and in this interview, we discuss why that might be. Is it a matter of defining the space properly? Knowing the levers?
From Kevin’s book, “For the Win,” there are four core questions he recommends that a gamified experience should look at BEFORE trying to gamify.

Motivation – where is the value in encouraging behavior?
Meaningful choices – are the target activities you’re considering, actually interesting to do?
Structure – can the behaviors you want, be modeled through a set of algorithms?
Potential conflicts – can you essentially avoid conflicts that would “game the system” of an existing motivational structure – regular payroll, bonus structures, etc..

Even for evangelists (such as Kevin and I), being honest about where gamification is appropriate and useful, is key to nurturing what is still a relatively early discipline (or set of cross-disciplines, as we’ll discuss in a moment).
21st Century Behavior Management vs. 20th Century Behavior Management
Given the long involvement in research and work in gaming and game-related areas that both Kevin Werbach and I have spent, it was heartening to find that overlapping our backgrounds popped out many of the deep links across disciplines that I was looking to expose. Highlights of that conversation:
Dan Keldsen:
“There’s this whole movement, where we’re really trying to understand behavior, motivation… and what actually gets people to do things, other than just hoping that they will do things. […] whether as marketers, or as managers, or as parents […] why should people want to do this, why isn’t whatever we’ve done to manage our employees, or to do marketing, good enough? Why should we Design for Motivation?”
Kevin Werbach:
“It’s a very good question, and one piece is that we’re not necessarily saying ‘throw out everything you’ve done in the past, it’s all junk – we have this magic new secret that the kids these days have learned playing video games, and it’s going to change everything.’ One thing that we do very explicitly in “For the Win” and in the other work that I’ve done in gamification, is try to be thoughtful and serious about this and not just be hyping something because it’s the hot new thing. I think ultimately that’s counterproductive.
It turns out gamification done right ties into very well established research in psychology, strands in marketing, strands in management… but what’s interesting is that the people in those communities, generally speaking, don’t understand or appreciate the power of games. And conversely, the people that understand games, don’t understand those other things.
There were some fascinating things at this symposium we had (a year and half ago or so), where we had some of the world’s most renowned game designers there, and psychologists, and business experts and so forth, and they all kept saying, ‘Well, we understand what you just said intuitively, in this area, but no-one who does game design actually knows these psychologists, and the marketers, and so forth…’ and so we[...]