This is a powerful strategic planning tool which focuses on what’s strong, not what’s wrong, to create positive change that sticks for individuals and teams.  It has four key stages, and is driven by which ever change agenda you are working on along with positive core at the heart of your organisation.  To find out more, take a listen to my podcast interview with FacilitationStories.  It is the process I use when I facilitate team away days and always gets rave reviews!

Time To Think is a radical approach to listening and a way to promote deep independent thinking.  It has been developed by Nancy Kline and her faculty using 10 ‘Thinking Environment’ components.  I have been learning and practicing the technique for a year or so, and have been amazed by it’s power to create deep insights and change in the thinker.  It is deceptively simple, based on the promise of no interruption, and a listening technique which uses ‘considerations’ to give the thinker the prompts they need to explore their waves of thought and examine their assumptions.  I am working with a small group of women who are offering this time to think to each other, on the understanding that we are all learning about it together!   Do get in touch if you’re interested in joining us (it costs £30/month and includes a monthly group meeting and a Slack group to share intentions).  You will also experience it if I work with you as a facilitator, coach or consultant.

Lean Canvas  is a great alternative to traditional business planning, using a more flexible ‘agile’ model to think about how you will solve customer problems and add value.  One of its central ideas is that in order to get noticed at all if you’re starting up or developing a new service you have to be solving a problem that your customers are already searching (and paying) for a solution to.  This video by it’s creator Ash Maurya takes you through a simple 20 minute exercise to complete a first version of the canvas, thinking about your customers, their problems and your value proposition.

This is an excellent way to lift your head above the parapet and visualise what you want to be, have and do in the future.

Grab a pile of magazines, a piece of card (A3 or A4 size), some scissors and glue and flick through finding images which appeal to you.  Don’t over think, just cut lots out and put them in a big pile.  Then go back and prune a little, which ones represent your biggest priorities, in terms of what you want and how you want to feel?

Create your board, and place it somewhere you can see it every day.  You’ll notice how many of your goals you move towards or achieve over time, and how positive it makes you feel to spend a few moments looking at it each day.  Your kids might enjoy making their own boards too

Pinterest is available too of course, if you prefer to do it on line!

The Wheel of Life is a powerful tool for understanding and managing all the personal as well as professional priorities you have.  Score your satisfaction level on each area of your life.  Imagine what a 10 would look like, and what a score of 1-2 more on each segment would look like.  Give yourself some realistic, measurable and time limited actions to make changes in the two or three segments that feel most urgent.

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Jim Collins in ‘Good to Great’ argues that companies (including those with a social mission) that do best are hedgehogs: they have a piercing clarity about what they are deeply passionate about, what they are best in the world at delivering and the resources that drive their engine (what their customers and stakeholders pay for and support).  Where those three areas intersect is where you have the greatest chance of success.  If you’re starting out it’s a good idea to think about how others see as your key strengths.

This is such a critical job to do when you are a start up, and so many of us don’t do it or don’t listen to the answers we get, because we’re too wedded to the solution we’ve already dreamt up.  To really understand what your customers want, start by asking 10-15 people who you think might be your ‘early adopters’ (first customers and champions) the following 3 questions:

1. Do you have [the problem I am trying to solve]? If they don’t, they are not your customer!

2. Tell me about the last time you had [the problem]?  Get lots of details from them about how they tried to solve the problem, how much they paid, what was good or bad about the solutions they tried?  If they didn’t try to solve the problem, they are not your customer; if they didn’t pay money to try to solve it  they probably aren’t your customer either

3. What would your ideal solution look like?  Does what they describe sound like you’re what you are proposing?  If not, can you ‘pivot’ your model?  Would you still feel passionate about delivering that solution?

The golden rule is not to ask people who already know your start up idea in detail.  People will nearly always be polite about the idea, even if they would never hand over money for it in reality.  Their past behaviour is a much better predictor of what they will do in the future.

After your first round of interviews is it time to think again about the problem you’re trying to solve? or who you are trying to solve it for? Does your solution need to change to reflect their ideal solutions?

Once you’ve made any changes to the problem and customer segment you want to target, go through the same exercise again.  Face to face is usually invaluable to start with.  The exercise has created so many ‘lightbulb’ moments at the Parent-Cubator.  Investing time going through this cycle a few times, saves so much time in solutions that don’t get any traction.

Once you have identified the customers whose ideal solutions fit well with the solution / proposition you are working on, you need to create 2-3 detailed personas so that you can really understand more about these potential ‘early adopters’

We really like using empathy mapping as a tool for building up these profiles.  Draw your customer in the middle of a piece of flip chart paper, give him or her a name, an age, an ethnicity, a role or job, a family if they have one.  Then start to imagine a typical day.  What ‘jobs’ does she/he have to do, in the widest sense e.g. to earn income, feel good about herself, entertain herself, help others, for their physical environment? With that in mind try to fill in this template

A value proposition template is an excellent way to test out whether you have a clear, concise and compelling statement about how your product or service will help your ideal customer get the ‘job’ done. Use the information you have gained from customer discovery interviews and your empathy mapping exercise to try out a few versions of these statements, and ask your early adopters for their feedback.