I thoroughly enjoyed Shawn Callahan’s Putting Stories to Work in which he describes how to teach companies to use storytelling to improve leadership and support decision making,  I was led to the book by exploring how Amazon uses Narratives (stories) instead of presentations to support meetings and Callahan provides a rich set of examples of… Read More Business Storytelling and Jobs to be Done seem to have a lot in common

I’ve been working with a team of leaders at BNP Paribas in Singapore today as part of a Hyper Island Digital Leadership Masterclass together with my colleague Trechelle Ras.  It’s my first time back face-to-face after nearly 10 months and although we have used many of the ideas from “before Zoom”, we’ve also had a… Read More JTBD workshop tip: “Give your customer a gift”

At Hyper Island in Singapore we are on a mission to keep entertaining our learners as we move from face-to-face to online learning.  It would be so easy to let go of our learning by doing philosophy and become like everyone else; hours of webinars and perhaps a Q&A.  Instead we are doubling down on… Read More A Growth Hacking Game for Remote Delivery

Jobs to be done is a great tool for exploring customer centred innovation.  It asks us to switch from designing what we hope the customer will like, to uncovering, usually through interviews, what individual customers really need in their lives.  These motivations might allow us, for example, to look at the way we search for… Read More Post Covid19 thoughts: we may need to rethink JTBD

At Hyper Island we are obsessed with designing learning experiences that really engage participants in all our short and long courses.  For the past couple of years we have been experimenting with creating new formats and activities that can be used when our courses are offered online and, of course, the current Covid19 situation has… Read More Designing Immersive Learning Sessions for Remote Delivery

When we look at something in detail it’s often hard to understand what is really going on behind the scenes. This is particularly true when exploring complex ideas such as business transformation. I’m finding that pictures (rough sketches) help me start to make sense, and visualising networks of ideas take me further. We need to… Read More Exploring and visualising systems with Polinode

Jobs to be Done continues to play a part in almost every training engagement and piece of client work that I do.  The simplicity of the idea that we can find opportunities for (digital) innovation and transformation by focusing on the customer needs and motivations instead of trying to improve the product, remains attractive (and… Read More The Jobs to be Done Wheel of Progress

Over the past ten years I have been running workshops for large and small companies in many industries including retail, banking, telecoms and education. I’ve seen a change from a general interest in learning more about the possible impacts and opportunities of digital technologies to an urgency to transform businesses in the face of what… Read More Start making small changes towards digital business transformation

I love all the tools around Jobs to be done and yesterday used one of them in a workshop focussing on how understanding consumer motivations provides us with opportunities to innovate.  This tool is called the “hiring statement” and looks like this: I’m hiring X (a solution) to get A,B and C done (functional, emotional… Read More Using JTBD hiring statements to help people learn about customers