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Tokyo, Japan
Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for over 40 years, and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the most recent 17 years, Ron had established distributors in the United States and throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer. More recently, he's begun giving seminars in English and Japanese to people interested in his overseas travels and expanding business overseas. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Authored Comments
After writing this article, I learned of a better method for generating the best ideas from a group of people addressing an issue.
Let me explain. I just completed reading the book INFLUENCIAL MIND, by Tali Sharot. She is a neuroscientist. From her research she learned our minds are always being influenced by our surroundings. Think of the terms “influenced”, “impacted”, “biased” and “corrupted”. As you can see, those words go from good to bad. Whether you agree with someone or not, whenever someone says something to you, you will be affected one way or another. It will change (in your mind) what you think about and what you recall at any given time.
Therefore, in her book, for group decisions, she might recommend that each member write three proposals before having any group discussion on a topic. Let’s take the “WHO” sentence proposal, as an example. Here are some suggested revised steps:
1. Select key Open Organization people who are most experienced in working with current customers.
2. Without them talking to anyone or each other, ask them to list all their customers and then close their eyes and imagine their ideal customer.
3. They should consider why this customer does business with them.
4. It must be a single image of a person.
5. Then, ask them to write a 15-word sentence on a piece of paper describing characteristics of their ideal customer and what that customer desires from us.
6. Next, ask them to put the piece of paper with the sentence on it in an envelope and close it (or put it in a separate file in your computer).
7. After a certain period of time (a night to “sleep on it” or a couple weeks, depending at time constraints), have them make another sentence of the ideal customer without opening the envelope of the first sentence. The reason for this is that what happens to the person between the first writing and the second will affect his recall and possibly new and better ideas will come out in the second writing.
8. Finally, after writing the second sentence, the person opens the envelope and compares the first sentence with the second sentence. He then tries to combine the two sentences for a third, revised sentence. That revised sentence will probably be more accurate for that person.
9. After all the key Open Organization people have their revised sentences, have the first meeting to discuss and compare all their sentences.
10. Ask them first to submit their third sentences when they walk in the door to the group leader who will make a list of them on a flip chart for discussion purposes. The reason for this is that there should be no editing of that sentence. Those sentences should be the starting point.
11. Without being judged, each person should read and explain his/her 15-word sentence on “WHO” their ideal customer is.
12. After all sentences have been presented, then the suggestions given in Bloom’s book can begin. Simply, all the members should discuss and agree on the ideal, combined 15-word sentence.
According to Tali Sharot, if the members walk into the room without any pre-written sentence, the person that presents first will influence all the members, and the decision-making process could be biased. She calls it “group think” which may be based on poor data from a very outspoken person.
Just giving this ability to recall some thought, consider different environments that influence recall. It could be alone right now thinking of the issue. It could be thinking about it several weeks from now. It could be thinking about it within a group of say 3-5 people. It could be thinking about it in a group of 10 people or more. All these situations will influence recall. To make things worse, depending on the relationship with the members of the group, some recalled thoughts could be ignored and never presented.
This method could be applied to all four sentences, and should create better results. On top of that, this method could be successfully applied in a wide range of bottom-up Open Organization decision-making activities, issues or concerns.
Michael, Yes, by getting people together to discuss company focus could be considered a teambuilding exercise which could be a benefit on its own. On top of that, the members will buy into the process, namely more team interaction instead of just waiting for the boss to tell them what to do.