At the end of this post is a great video of Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, talking about how it all started out as a hunch.  I’ll bet you’re working on something right now that might have a breakthrough if you tried out one of your hunches.  Here’s my hunch story and then the video of @ev.

In 2004 I had to get eight thousand overworked middle managers to schedule a training day they hadn’t asked for, show up for that training 2-3 months later, and not cancel, reschedule, or mysteriously “get the flu” when the day arrived. If even a small percentage of them no-showed or rescheduled, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Either my company would wind up running make-up sessions for free to fulfill our contract, or the client would have to pay extra because the original sessions hadn’t covered everybody.

My buddy Jason Gore and I locked ourselves in a room all day with two of our clients to figure out how to make this work. For hours on end we talked ourselves into and out of various options.  We tried mandated attendance dates – seemingly high control but also high risk of no-shows.  What about letting everyone pick their own date?  Not practical, e.g. if all eight thousand wanted to attend on the same day. It was one of those meetings where after the first few hours your brain starts to feel like mush and the whiteboards are covered with increasingly meaningless sentence fragments (“initiative vs. yield!!”). Outside we could see the parking lot emptying, and the options for buoying our dwindling blood sugar were vending machine potato chips and Oreo three-packs. We called it quits for the night, convinced we’d tried every possible approach and that they all had some fatal flaw.

Around this time I’d been reading about complexity theory and self-organizing systems like markets. In a distracted, rambling tone I wondered aloud to my boss Phil whether there was some connection between complex systems and our training scheduling problem. We were driving through Virginia at night and I think I literally said to him “I know this is too crazy to actually work but…what if we established some kind of ‘market’ for the seats in the training? Like if we gave everybody some kind of token or something, maybe with provisional training dates, and if they didn’t like it, they could just find someone else to trade with. That way we don’t have to figure it all out, we just set up a little ecosystem of sorts and let them figure it out.” In his typically wise and laid back way, Phil neither dismissed the idea nor insisted that I immediately resolve every detail of it. We continued our drive and leisurely conversation until we got to our hotel that night.

The next day, something like a market was exactly what we settled on to solve the scheduling problem.  Of course there were more hair-raising turns to actually get all the players to buy into that idea and make it work.  We needed a big chunk of time in the company’s upcoming Departmental VP meeting to hash out the schedule.  But we found out that meeting was scheduled for the next day.  And the VP’s knew nothing about the training yet.  We had a matter of hours to “sell” the VP’s on the training, get onto their packed meeting agenda, and find out when would be a good time for a few thousand of their staff to take a day away from work.  No problem! The company had gone from 2,000 employees to 20,000 in a few years and, yeah, ‘time for training’ was a laugh-in-your-face kind of concept at that point.

As we sprinted through our power-schmoozing of the executives and their all-important assistants, I thought ahead to the VP meeting the next day.  I remembered the advice of the facilitation gurus who’d mentored me at Interaction Associates.  They’d taught me that for any complex group problem-solving, you had to focus everyone on one shiny visual at the front of the room, and not let people space out flipping through printed handouts.

I realized that if we had each VP staring down at their own copy of the training schedule, the meeting would likely fall apart.  I could imagine the scene, heavy with the pregnant silence of unvoiced skepticism (“What the hell’s this training for anyway?” “You mean every single salaried employee’s gonna do it?” “The whole company in the next three months??”) I pictured them quietly turning pages until the first one finally said “Yeah…I don’t think these dates are gonna work for my department.”  I knew if those words were spoken, we’d be sunk. One objection would be followed by another and another until we were kicked out and told to “think it all through again from the beginning.” The VP’s could sit back, content in the knowledge that their hard-nosed realism had prevented what had obviously been a train-wreck in the making.  If they were lucky the whole idea might just go away without further disruption to the real work of managing their phenomenal growth.

Fast forward to 1 am that night, the scene of the final hunch. To prevent “training date organ rejection” I had roped my client Julie into helping execute another of my “I know this might seem weird, but….” ideas.  I wanted the visual training schedule at the front of the VP meeting to be big.  Like, airplane-hangar-wallpaper big.  We were at the local Kinko’s getting them made up and laminated, so punchy that I’m sure the copy crew thought we’d been out partying.  I think we had to put the back seats of the car down to cart them out of there.  But the underlying message we hoped the huge graphics would convey was “Getting everyone through this quickly and cheaply is a shared task. If you don’t like your dates, the solution to that problem is to trade amongst yourselves.”

In the end, all these hunches paid off and it worked. I’m sure you guessed that, given that I’m using this story to illustrate my point.  But don’t just take my word for it, listen to Ev talking about how Twitter started off as a hunch:

Now it’s your turn.  What are you most passionate about right now, and what’s your hunch that’s “so crazy it would probably never work?” How would you start to act on it? Who can support you, and how?

I like the tweets from @RedStarVIP on Twitter. This morning I saw one that said “The Art of Execution” followed by a link. That topic teaser sounded generic to me, but because it was from redstarvip I clicked.

I’m looking forward to a conversation with a client tomorrow. He’s a very bright, committed guy and we’ve done excellent work together in the past. But there is one catch, and it’s in the way that services like mine are often contracted. Here’s what I mean.

Tell me if the following conversation rings a bell for you, whether you’re on the client or the consultant side.

Client: “We have an executive retreat coming up and we’re looking for a facilitator. You come highly recommended. Would be you interested? Are you available?”

Consultant: “When is it?”

Client: “Next week.”

or

Client: “We need a one-day team-building workshop for twenty people. What would you charge and when could you run it?”

One of my favorite versions of this was at a prestigious international investment bank in London. This was years ago when I was just starting out, and most of the people I worked with were support staff: IT, Marketing, Legal, HR, etc. My business partner was proficient at getting us meetings with prospects who might want some training for these groups, and I would be wheeled in to uncover the real need behind the training request.

After the opening pleasantries in a room high overlooking London, we encouraged our contact and the executive sponsor to describe what they wanted. Flush with enthusiasm, they described a day-long session for about 200 support staff, using words like “stimulating,” “motivational,” and “thought provoking.” Good food and a nice venue were also important. As the description was winding down, our contact remembered an important final thought. “Oh, and it has to be fun, that’s really important.” “Yes,” chimed in the executive sponsor. “Fun. Very important.”

I asked whether anything like this had been done before. “Oh, yes” we were told. They had had trainings in prior years from representatives of the best-selling business authors of the time. I won’t name names, but these were the people whose books I was reading to get ideas. I was impressed and a little daunted at the shoes we might be asked to fill.

“And what results or changes did you notice after those events?” I asked. There was a pause for thought. The two of them exchanged inquiring glances. “Well, nothing specific really,” said the executive sponsor, “but the seminars were very popular. Everyone really enjoyed them.”

As I say, this was still early in my career. I winced internally at what I knew I was about to say. “What if I suggested giving us a small team to start with, instead of going straight to doing an event for these 200 people? After all, we really don’t know much about their work or their challenges, and I’ve seen trainings miss the mark on that basis before.”

Encouraged to elaborate, I warmed to the task of turning a potential sale of several tens of thousands of pounds into something that would net us far less. But I knew it would be better work.

“Rather than having us give a generic message to a large group who we don’t know well,” I said, “what if you gave us a team or a business result that you wanted improved, and we used that as a way of getting to know you better. You’d come out with a problem solved or a more effective team, and then anything we did for the group of two hundred would be more relevant, more realistic and practical.”

Another pause.

“Well, now that you mention it, there is one team that could do with a team-building session.”

Now we’re talking, I thought to myself. An actual business need, something they want to improve. Even so, we were still inside a paradigm where an ‘event’ seemed like the answer.

The conversation went into a creative mode from there where we talked about the team in question, their challenges, and how it would help the business if they had a breakthrough. I’ll spare you the verbatim replay, but we left with an agreement to interview everyone on the team, including some of their internal customers, and to then reconvene and decide if a team-building event or some other action would have the biggest impact.

Note – This was the last time I left a contracting meeting without asking the following question:

“Often when we interview a team there is feedback for their leadership, in this case the two of you. Are you open to hearing that information if it comes up?” This is of course one of the most important points of leverage and I now always ask this.

In the end, the team interviews themselves were 80% of the needed intervention. It turned out that members whose performance was undermining the group work product almost unanimously wanted to be in different roles. The two leaders also needed to align on the feedback they were giving team members, and to give that feedback more regularly. One member needed to be put on a performance plan.

So we wound up solving their problem with no need to ever have a team-building event.

Bottom Line: Don’t think in terms of holding events to get outcomes. Focus on the outcomes you want, and then interview some key players before you decide whether an event will deliver your ROI.