Get in the Boat

by Pat Bodin

  Motivation: Each color, Red, Blue, Green, desires a different intangible benefit from your product. That means that we need to link motivation to FAB. What motivates them? What is their proverbial “carrot,” what is their desire?

  Risk: In most people’s psyche, there is not only the carrot, but also the stick. Desire is the positive side of action and fear is the negative side. What risks are Red, Blue, and Green people are afraid of? What are their worries? You need to tailor your benefits to their negative emotions, as well as their positive.

  The “MR” part of MR FAB varies depending on your function within the company. Different jobs are going to have different “gains,” factors that drive motivation, and different “pains,” factors that feed perceived risk. The pain and gain of a Red IT tactician is very different than the pain and gain of the Green CEO. Unless you put the correct motivation and risk together with the features, advantages, and benefits, you will not be able to have a meaningful conversation because you will be speaking a different language.

  For example, we all have to give PowerPoint presentations from time to time. If you give similar presentations, you may not want to build a completely new PowerPoint for every session, so you might look at what you have and recycle some of your slides from a previous presentation, when applicable. Of course, the challenge is that each presentation should be built with a certain audience in mind—otherwise you might present Red slides to Green people.

  Any time you build a presentation, you should run MR FAB through your mind: “Whom does this slide address? What motivation is it appealing to? What risk does it raise?” Create or adjust slides and edit text based on that analysis. It helps each presentation to be fresh and relevant to its intended audience. Value mapping is the ability to connect the dots between the Red, Blue, or Green person and what you provide them. You will find MR FAB is a great augmentation to traditional Value Mapping.

  Value Map

  How do you startle your hearers into focused attention so that you can have a rich, robust conversation? You do it with a pattern interrupt. Now, there are all kinds of ways to do pattern interrupts. Humor is one; mild offense is another; shock and awe (but not fear) is a third.

  It is interesting what does not penetrate disbelief: information. Doling out information, with its facts, figures, statistics, and history does not penetrate disbelief. If it did, we would not see the same scenario played over and over on social media: Person 1 says, “I believe that xyz is great and I’m glad that it is happening!” Person 2 sees that and responds, typing back, “No! Xyz is terrible! Look at this website backing me up! Read the data! View the statistics!” Person 1 shoots back their own website data and no one changes their minds. Transmitting information, information, and more information does not convince people. Why? Because people already have too much information. They rarely want more content—especially content without context. That will fall on deaf ears every time.

  Green strategists may be in a constant state of disbelief, but they desire to have faith. They want to believe. Annette Simmons, a keynote speaker and author, says that “People don’t want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith—faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell.”39

  The question is, how do you bring your hearers to the point of faith? How do you move them from not-believing to believing?

  One method is value mapping. (We’ll talk about another method later.)

  Whenever you are going to communicate with somebody, you must use a pattern interrupt to get past the part of their brain that wants to discard what it doesn’t find important and worthy of attention. Value mapping is a systematic way of doing that.

  Let’s make sure we keep things straight:

  • Value chaining is connecting the dots from Red to Blue to Green. In the coffee example, it is connecting dots from the bean to the French press to the aroma.

  • Value streaming is diving into a process to understand it, improve it, and impact the operations of the whole organization. This is where the precision of the organization exists.

  • Value mapping is working to understand someone’s job, gain, and pain before you try to get them to buy into a solution.

  A value map has two components: the customer profile and the solution map. Together, those make a value map.

  Customer profile

  Why is a customer profile important to communication? It is important because if you do not understand someone’s job, what they count as a gain, and what pain they want to avoid, you will not speak to them in a relevant way.

  Let’s say you want to get buy-in from the head of sales on a project. Talk about programming, routers, and digitalization and you’ll be ignored very quickly. The head of sales is not concerned about those things because that’s not their job.

  Additionally, knowing their gain and pain is important. The easiest way to determine gain is to ask one question: “What does a good day look like?” Meaning, “What things must happen for this to be a good day at work for you?” You will hear various answers. Maybe, “Higher-ups think that my work matters.” Or, “I receive a promotion for excellent performance.” People define gains differently.

  Also ask, “What does a bad day look like?” Most employees can answer this question easily. Their workload is overwhelming, clients are upset, partners aren’t cooperating, and their attempted solutions keep failing.

  In Chapter 1 of this book, we discussed a booked called “The Phoenix Project”. There are a few characters in the book that align very well to the concepts of “Get in the Boat”. As discussed in chapter 1, Brent Geller was an incredibly talented tactician, but struggled with priority and relevance. He was also unhappy and struggled with his place in the organization. He was the Red person. The most important character of “The Phoenix Project” was the protagonist Bill Palmer. Bill had been working in mid-range systems which had become the back waters of IT. These systems were no longer the star of the IT show, but they were always operational and Parts Unlimited needed stability. At the request of potential new board member, Erik Reid, they promoted Bill to VP of IT Operations. Eric is Bill’s mentor and forces Bill to face the challenges of managing an IT organization head on. Bill is Blue and through his struggles he confronts many IT failures, dysfunctional behaviors from the C-Suite, and through it all successfully navigates the IT organization to relevance and ultimately saves the company.

  The other important character in the book is Steve Masters. Steve had been an operator most of his career and for the past few years had been the CEO of Parts Unlimited. He was unsuccessful in this role, partly due to sea-changes in his industry, but also his inability to move from Blue to Green. If you needed to navigate this organization and to provide solutions that would resonate, how would you do it?

  The first step is understanding the people and what makes them tick. We use customer profiles to do this.

  This first profile is for Bill Palmer, the head of IT for Parts Unlimited. The right segment of the profile contains his job description, while the segments on the left hold gains and pains. Read through Bill’s profile to get an idea of what he wants to achieve.

  The second profile is for Steve Masters, the CEO of Parts Unlimited. You’ll notice that his gains and pains are at a different level than Bill’s. Why? Because Steve is Green while Bill is Blue. Steve is a strategist who is constantly thinking about the company as a whole. Bill is charged with executing IT projects.

  You want to communicate well with others in your organization. You want to know how to influence them. To do that, you must figure out their job, their gains, and their pains.

  Solution map

  You need someone to buy into your proposal. Since you have taken the time to identify their job and gains and pains, your next step is to develop a solution map.

  The last chapter of “The Phoenix Project” narrates an IT initiative called “Project Narwhal,” which was an upgrade to their Material Requirement
s Planning (MRP) solution. Parts Unlimited had outsourced their MRP solution, but now they needed to perform substantial upgrades. Bill Palmer (the head of IT) and Steve Masters (the CEO) decided with their teams that the best solution was to break the contract early and insource MRP. Then they could upgrade the data center and integrate the MRP with the order system.

  Here’s the solution map for Project Narwhal.

  The solution map answers the question, “How will this solution provide value and fix our problem?” For Bill Palmer, Project Narwhal helped him regain control over a crucial asset. That problem solver relieved his pain of not having control over outside vendors. Project Narwhal also caused other leaders in the business to esteem IT more highly. That value driver links to Bill’s gain of having IT perceived as a core competency.

  For Steve Masters, Project Narwhal drove profitability (a gain) by matching competitor capabilities and offering the customization features customers desired (value drivers). Regaining control of the MRP application and infrastructure (problem solver) averted the risk of the company being broken up—and of him losing his job (pains).

  The value drivers of the solution link with the gains of the people involved, and the problem solver alleviates their pain. That is exactly how a value map is supposed to work.

  To sum up, a value map has two components: a customer profile and a solution map. One is a profile of the person you are trying to work with to understand their need, and the other is the solution you propose. You “map” the value driver to the person’s gain, and you map the problem solver to their pain. That’s value mapping.

  The value map provides the content and context for a meaningful conversation or, in order words, a great message or story. A good message or story is one of the best pattern interrupts and is one of the best ways to positively influence your business leaders.

  Messaging

  Good communication and messaging can make sense of chaos. Have you experienced any chaos recently? IT personnel are best friends with chaos; functional leaders are, too. Good communication makes sense of chaos by establishing structure to our messaging. Inside messages, people have a role and a purpose. Good communication can bring down barriers and everyone loves a good message.

  Once you have the proper perspective, understanding that you are not a lone wolf but a team player, you will want to seize opportunities to communicate with Green and Blue people. The form of communication that will be most beneficial to you is telling good stories. As a wise person once said, “In a complicated world, whoever tells the best stories wins.”40

  What do I mean by “telling good stories”? I don’t mean creating works of fiction but conversing with your colleagues through humor and compelling antidotes that will bring them to a full state of engagement. They will no longer be bored by our tech speak, but fully involved in our meaningful conversation.

  It would be nice if we all had a natural knack at delivering messages that resonated. Sadly, though some of us are naturally excellent storytellers, most of us are not. I’m decent, but I’m certainly not as skilled as many others. For “the rest of us,” how do we effectively communicate in a way that helps us persuade others?

  English has never been my strongest subject. Although I never enjoyed writing essays, the “three-point essay” format got me through the school requirements, following a specific method to get my message across until it became more natural. Messaging is similar in that we non-experts need a simple methodology to get started. Then, with additional practice, we will gradually improve the more we do it.

  As you think about preparing your own messages, here are a few questions that will provide you structure to communicate in an interesting way.

  Who is your audience?

  Every message has an audience. Earlier in this book, we used the CAT tool to evaluate what people of each Color care about; you can fill in your audience’s profile with those results. The details you choose to include for an audience of Red tacticians are necessarily different from those you include for Green strategists or for Blue operators.

  Why are you communicating?

  We have many potential motivations. Are you trying to influence your audience toward a course of action? Are you endeavoring to build team camaraderie? What are you trying to do?

  What is the risk?

  Most people react to risk. Do we know our audience’s risk? That is where the CAT tool is very useful. If you are communicating to one of your senior leaders, their risk will be financial or compliance based. When messaging, confront the risk of the audience head on. Mitigate that risk, so they not only know you have a workable solution, but that you care about what concerns them.

  What is your role?

  What is your role in the conversation? Ask we discussed earlier, it is critically important to be interested, not interesting. Be an active listener. Decide if your role is to motivate, negotiate, or convince your audience. Our role should direct the type of questions and arguments that we will make.

  Where is the conflict?

  Most people believe that conflict and tension are bad things, but the reality is that conflict is an incredibly useful and needed tool as a catalyst for change. While avoiding interpersonal conflict, we must demonstrate the tension in our message, which is really just an illumination of what is going on under the surface. This allows us to motivate or convince our audience to work with us on a solution to the problem. Without the tension, the audience may not be as engaged as you need them to be.

  What is your big idea?

  When you are delivering a message, it needs to contain a central thought that matters to your audience. This is the theme of the conversation. Are you trying to help a Green person grow their business? Then that is your big idea! Are you trying to help a Blue person improve a process? Then that is your big idea! Your big idea must be clear and it must matter to your audience.

  What is the emotion?

  Messages that appeal to our emotions will resonate and be remembered. Emotional messages are meaningful.

  Conversation Example

  Here is an example of a conversation you might have, with notations illustrating the tools we have been discussing. In our example, George is the managing director and John is the head of technology:

  John: “Hey George, thank you for your time today. A couple of weeks back I asked you, “What does a good day look like?” [know your audience] You told me, “A good day for me is when our company flawlessly executes the integration of our acquisitions and streamlines our processes and cost and we are able to report top line earning growth and higher than expected profitability on our company’s analyst call at the end of the quarter.” [what is the risk] You then let me know that this hasn’t happened in over four years. Our entire IT leadership took this to heart. If we continue to be out of step with you and your business leaders, this poor performance will not only continue but worsen. [what role, why are we communicating]

  “We’ve determined that acquisitions change our company’s business model and that given the volume of acquisitions, we need to radically improve the on-boarding of these new company resources and capabilities. We believe IT can IMPACT the goal of rapidly on-boarding these new acquisitions through two new initiatives: end-user computing and data center consolidation. [big idea] Our end user computer initiative would make sure that these newly acquired employees have all of the tools they require when they need them. We would reduce the current time to provision workspace environments from two weeks to four hours. Data center consolidation would provide integration of all of these data center assets 10 times faster than we have historically delivered.

  “George, so far, are we on the right track? I just want to make sure to validate our assumptions that we made through examining our business model and business processes.” [emotion]

  George: “Absolutely! This is definitely top of mind for me! Continue.”

  John: “We have two new projects that underpin these initiatives. The first project is Virtu
al Desktop that provides instant access based on user credentials to all authorized applications wherever our newly acquired employees reside. This project allows the end user to be in any part of the world, which is something we feel is important, given our global growth. Also, they will be able to use any device to securely connect to our environment. If we acquire a company in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, our new employees will be operational as soon as the deal closes.

  “The second project is a data center cloud project that consolidates all of our data and application resources into one, virtual facility. This will allow our newly acquired application resources to be integrated into our existing environment within days – not months. George, I’m sure you remember how long it took us to integrate with the new Japanese acquisition – forever. [conflict] With our new system, we would have improved the on-boarding of that new company by six months, which is 10x faster. George, the good news is that these changes will be done with the same budget that has already been allocated for this year! I know you and our CFO had planned to reduce our overall budget, but we think that these changes merit keeping the funds where they are. What do you think?”

  George: “Outstanding! What I love is that you directly connected the dots from the risks of our business to the technology projects that we need to mitigate those risks! I also love the fact that you are not hoping for these results but declaring them ahead of time – that’s what we need from you! How did you change?” [emotion]