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by Beth Tener, New Directions Collaborative

Brainstorming is a classic method for getting a group to generate ideas. A topic is suggested, people speak up with their ideas and suggestions, and someone writes them down. The technique is so commonly used and assumed to work, I was surprised to learn that research shows this technique is actually not effective. Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius says, “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

So, how can we upgrade brainstorming to better access the wisdom of a group? And, for those interested in how to create effective networks and collaborations, how can we design this part of meetings to generate the most benefits to a network?

One simple technique, from Liberating Structures, is called 1-2-4-All.

Here’s an overview of how it works:

The group defines, or facilitator offers, an open question  to explore.
Each person takes five minutes to write their ideas down.
People pair up and share their ideas. At this point, they may find some common themes, a new idea may emerge from the conversation, or their ideas may fit together in a complementary way.
Each pair joins another pair to discuss the ideas and learning in a group of four.
Everyone returns to a discussion in the large group.

This simple technique overcomes the shortcomings of traditional brainstorming and generates the kind of benefits desired from networked collaboration. For example:

1-2-4-All is a way to access the inherent power and potential of a diverse group.When I conducted it with a group recently, a participant said she was struck by how the other pair of people took the question in a totally different direction than she had. The process helps surface the range of divergent thinking in a group. With access to multiple points of view, we gain more perspectives and can see where our own thinking is limited.
A traditional brainstorm process gives preference to the voices of those who are extroverted, comfortable speaking up in a group, have positional power, think quickly, and process their ideas by speaking them out loud. We get less access to the ideas and thinking of introverts, those less comfortable speaking in a group, or those who need silence to think. Power dynamics or low levels of trust will limit some from speaking up in a brainstorm.
This process greatly amplifies the potential for emergence. Any time you bring two people together or four people together, you have the opportunity for some new or better ideas to emerge from the combination. Consider the math on the potential for emergence for a group of 20 people. Brainstorming in the traditional way, the group has one conversation as a whole. With one conversation, most of the time 19 people are listening to one person talk. Using 1-2-4-All, here’s what you get:

20 individual ‘conversations’ where people can think and reflect on the topic before they are influenced by others in the room.
10 paired conversations
5 groups of four conversations
1 full group conversation
With the grand total adding up to 36 conversations. Consider the potential for richer learning and combinations of ideas in 36 conversations versus 1 conversation with the full group. And this can all be done in 15 to 20 minutes!

People using this technique often note how the quality of the conversation has a greater depth because at each stage people have really thought about and considered the issues. With that foundation of having time to personally reflect, each conversation can be more informed and considered.
In every meeting we want to build the relationships, trust, and exchange among people, which the smaller conversations enable in a way one large group conversation does not.

In building networks and collaborations, the aim is to design activities that generate multiple benefits, as my colleague and network weaver Janne Flisrand illustrates well in this blog, Optimizing Network Design. Upgrading how we brainstorm provides a simple way to generate many more benefits in the same time. Another great method is World Café, as I discuss in this blog on The Multi-Dimensional Benefits of World Café.

In one of those welcome serendipities, as I was finalizing this post, via Facebook, I discovered this article about how the Innovative Coworking Spaces of 15th-Century Italy provided the rich environment for the Renaissance’s entrepreneurship and creativity. Those working in these spaces “conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services, and even of seeing the world.” This quote makes the point well:

“The coexistence of and collision among these diverse talents helped make the workshops lively places where dialogue allowed conflicts to flourish in a constructive way. The clash and confrontation of opposing views removed cognitive boundaries, mitigated errors, and helped artists question truths taken for granted. Today, we often recognize the need for these kinds of illuminating conversations without really making space for them in our organizations, either because organizations are too afraid of conflict or because people are simply too busy to try to expand their understanding of each other."

Beth Tener, Principal of New Directions Collaborative,located in Exeter, NH. Beth is a facilitator and strategy coach who works with collaborative initiatives that bring together business, government, and the social sector to address complex challenges, such as transitioning to a clean energy economy and revitalizing communities. Beth can be reached at (617) 939-3601 or btener@ndcollaborative.com.

by Mike Bellamente

Back in the early aughts, circa 2004, the term social media was born thanks in part to a revolutionary new platform called MySpace.

Since then a lot has happened.  

If you’re in your 40’s (like me), today’s social media landscape often provides more questions than answers, and regularly leaves you scratching your head in curious wonderment (or wonderful bewilderment).  How can a person remain relevant, let alone a business, with so many social media outlets to choose from?  Which ones do I need to keep updated and current in order to effectively engage my audience?  At what point does managing social media begin to offer diminishing returns? 

For the business community, many of these questions can be answered by what message you’re trying to convey and to whom.   Moreover, a company’s social media strategy should be in lock-step with your overall marketing and sales strategy, and therefore, should be beholden to the same level of metrics and data analysis to determine whether the resources devoted to managing social media (both human resources and financial) are providing an adequate return on investment. 

While it used to be enough for a company to take a scattershot approach to social media, rapid changes in the algorithms and revenue generation models of platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have turned the once soft approach to social media into a cold, hard science.  No longer is it simply the sheer amount of posts that will keep your company in the public eye; on the contrary, blindly posting irrelevant material is more likely cause your profile rankings to tank.  

To that end, I have put together the following bullets that will hopefully offer some insight to this ever-evolving space that can be the source of ongoing frustration to the uninitiated:

• Begin with Benchmarking:  if this your first crack at developing a social media strategy that suits your business, start by assessing what competitors in your industry are doing and replicate their success and avoid their failures.  
   
• Identify your Target and Aim for the Middle:  if your target demographic is business professionals aged 35-50, developing a Snapchat channel for 15-year-old high-schoolers will get you nowhere.  Getting that micro-second of attention span from people who will actually buy your product or service is difficult enough, so it is more than worth your while to research which platforms your potential customers are actually using from the outset.
   
• Budget Matters:  whether you’re a mom and pop restaurant or a $10 million-dollar company, have an idea of what you’re willing to spend on the front end and stick to it until you have enough data to make an informed decision on how to proceed, which brings me to my next point…
   
• Data Drives Decision-Making!  While you may have a grandiose plan in place on January 1 that you think will serve the company well for the entire year, you’re probably wrong.  Don’t be afraid to assess the fruits of your labor on a monthly or quarter-by-quarter basis and be willing to pivot quickly if the data tells a different story than your expectations.  Be nimble.  If something appears to be working, double down.  If something’s not, scrap it and dedicate resources elsewhere.
   
• Be Genuine in your Approach:  regardless of what kind of business you’re in, your BRAND is meant to tell a story that elicits a reaction.  Don’t be afraid to push the envelope of creativity and thought leadership.  It is more admired to stand for something, than nothing at all. If you step back and find that the language and tone of your social media messaging is banal and “salesy”, your intended audience will probably become loathe to hear what else you have to say. 

• Developing a Following Takes Time:  don’t be discouraged if you’ve decided to launch a new company profile on Twitter and you only garner 30 followers in the first month.  If you’re not tweeting as much as POTUS: A) that’s probably a good thing and B) it’s going to take a while to develop a dedicated following.  Keep in mind though, once you convince a person to follow you or like your stuff, they will likely remain a follower for life. 
   
• Interconnectedness and the Beauty of Recycling:  content is king, as any social media guru will tell you.  The key, though, is to make sure any original content is adding value and that your optimizing that value by sharing it in multiple locations.  If you feel you have knowledge to give to the world or simply a fresh perspective on a timely subject, turn it into a blog on your website, then add it to your newsletter and share it across your social media platforms.  Because people digest information in different ways, this gives one piece of subject matter multiple lives, each time driving traffic back to your website or specified landing page.  If you feel you don’t have time to share your own perspective, there’s nothing wrong with inviting thought leaders to write guest blogs or even sharing content that already exists, so long as you credit the author and maybe even give them a shout out.  People like praise, especially when it’s directed at them.   

So, there you have it in a nutshell.  The unsolicited ravings of a forty-something on a subject that could probably be better interpreted by his 5-year-old daughter.  Hey, you asked for it. 

Oh wait. No you didn’t.

Mike is the owner of the Green Alliance, founder of PeakAdvisory.Co, and idea guy behind the forthcoming Naked Bullfrog.

by Andrew Winston

Every manager (or consultant) who has pitched an initiative under the banner of “sustainability” has faced the same question nearly every time: what’sthe business case?

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with the question. Business is all about allocating some form of capital, be it financial, human, or organizational. So it’s not unfair to wonder what the return on the investment might be. But usually, when executives pose the question about sustainability initiatives, they’re asking about the business case in the narrowest sense: Does this thing pay back, in cash, within some short payback period (1 or 2 years)?

Maybe, in trying to answer the business case question narrowly, we’re overlook something critical about what motivates the decision maker. Or we miss how much the world is changing. Perhaps it’s time to inject the moral case into the discussion and say, boldly, “This is the right thing to do.”

Let’s face it: given the constant attack on our rights and democratic ideals happening right now, companies – some of society’s largest institutions – are finding themselves in uncomfortable territory. The moral position of a company and its leaders individually are facing more scrutiny. The conversation in executive meeting rooms is not just about shareholder value anymore. Will we defend LGBT rights or protect immigrant employees? Will we continue to tackle climate change, the human and planetary crisis of our time? These are not idle questions anymore.

I will write much more about the macro-level question of the role of business in society over the coming months and years. But for this discussion I want to rethink the specific question about how sustainability professionals and managers make the case for social and environmental action.

So, back to the nitty gritty. Do we have the right arguments for why we should invest in sustainability projects? Let’s consider four broad buckets of initiatives – three that create value for the business and one that’s more about value for society – and explore how (and when) they create value:

(1) short-term financial wins that meet all hurdle rates;

(2) clear financial wins, but with longer paybacks;

(3) investments that have less certain paybacks in cash, but create indirect (yet real) and internalized value, such as improved employee engagement, increased customer loyalty, greater license to operate, brand building, or risk reduction;

(4) projects that create externalized value for stakeholders and improve the shared commons

Of course these categories are not mutually exclusive – any of the first three will create externalized value as well. But for most projects there’s a core bucket of value. A simple lighting retrofit would fall mainly in group 1, for example, while employee volunteering, or providing water infrastructure for the community around a factory, would be mainly group 4 activities. Something like auditing and raising environmental or social standards in the supply chain, or investing in circular models, could hit all four areas, but would hit bucket 3 hard.

For each bucket, the business case we make should vary.

Category 1 is trivial, and the cash benefits of, say, eco-efficiency projects are now broadly accepted. Of course there’s always competition for capital, even between projects with quick paybacks, but it’s not hard to make the case that these things save money.

Category 2 requires more finesse. You can make the case for bending the rules on the hurdle rate for strategic reasons at times. Or, more frequently with sustainability projects, we get these through the system by shifting the conversation to category 3 value and point out that, by the way, it will also save cash, but later.

So category 3 is where so much of the effort lies. I’ve sacrificed many trees (and digital bits) writing about the importance of recognizing internalized value, even if comes in ways we can’t measure it perfectly. We all make the case that environmental and social initiatives can reduce risk, drive innovation, create employee engagement and loyalty, build the brand, and much more. That case is strong. Most large companies have realized that just considering the attraction, retention, and engagement of talent (especially socially-minded Millennials) can justify many investments in social and environmental progress.

But let’s look at category 4, the “save the world” value bucket that I’ve mostly avoided during my career. A new, challenging political environment is making me even more philosophical about why business should act, or even why a business exists.

Here’s the nub of it. Consider the following benefits a company might create: employee happiness, being a good member of the community, solving a customer need (the original, and some would say only, reason a company exists), and, yes, making sure the polar bears survive. Aren’t these things good in their own right, regardless of how or when they create business value? Maybe this kind of query falls in value bucket three-and-a-half, between the cracks because it begs the question of what value is.

My mini existential question was partly spurred by an interesting article I read recently in the Guardian. Focused on “why time management is ruining our lives,” the essay laments our obsession with personal productivity and talks about creating life balance and having more free time. In the article, John de Graaf, a founder of a group called “Take Back Your Time” challenges what I would describe as the business case for life balance: “People argue that more time off might be good for the economy, but why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy?”

It’s a great point. And it’s a good question to ask about all our efforts to improve employee engagement, connect to purpose and meaning at work, or drive sustainability in business. Why should everything that supports general well-being for people touched by a company – its employees, customers, supply chain workers, community members, future generations, and so on – have to be put only in economic terms?

The time may be ripe to broaden how we talk about sustainability and bring in a moral dimension. Consider one of my favorite sustainable business stories from 2016. After North Carolina passed the absurd “bathroom bill,” some big company CEOs sent an open letter to the Governor saying the law didn’t reflect their values. Companies are increasingly standing up for LGBT rights, and in the last week, for immigrants (bravo Starbucks for pledging to hire 10,000 refugees). A somewhat cynical interpretation would say that companies just want to stay in the good graces of a segment of their customer base. True, so there is some business logic. But it’s also clear that many of these companies and their executives just felt it was the moral thing to do.

I’ve talked to senior executives for many years about why they care about sustainability. And very often it stems from a personal journey. They went to the rain forest, or their children asked them about their work and their legacy.

So am I saying we should abandon the normal business case and stop focusing on how much value sustainability creates for business? Of course not. We should absolutely talk about the cash payback and all the indirect and hard-to-measure internalized value. But perhaps we (or at least I) have gone too far to counteract the “green equals polar bears” view of the world. Depending on the audience or particular executive, it may be time to throw in an element of “hey, this really is the right thing to do and your kids will be proud.”

Yes, the traditional business case will still be critical, particularly in public companies. But it might play the role of justifying something a leader wants to do in her heart anyway. Given what behavioral psychology tells us about the “confirmation bias,” this is how many decisions are made anyway.

My bottom line is this: how we make the case for sustainability needs to vary depending on the category of initiative (from slam dunk in cash terms to indirect value to “other” and societal value), the situation (a CFO presentation meeting vs. drinks with your boss), and a reading of the people involved.

But more and more, I’m wondering if a combined logic of “good for business” and “good for the soul” will work best. I welcome your thoughts.

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(Photo credit: Flickr, Joel Duggan)

MEMBER FEATURE: ​A conversation with Michael L’Ecuyer, Bellwether Community Credit Union (pronounced phonetically Lek-wee-air)

With the arrival of mobile phones it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that we were ever beholden to a telephone that was plugged into the wall at home.Most things change and evolve over time, but it’s fun to learn about ways in which they stay the same too. We were happy to talk with Michael L’Ecuyer, President and CEO of Bellwether Community Credit Union, a company whose history goes back to 1921, when the company was originally founded as the Telephone Workers Credit Union of NH (TCU).

Employees of Bell Telephone Systems, independent of their employer, created TCU solely for the “promotion of thrift” among its members which was limited to NH phone company employees, their families, and retirees. We learned that credit unions have a philosophy of “people helping people”, and that TCU is the second oldest credit union in the State. In fact, the very first credit union ever established in the United States was started in Manchester in 1908, and is still thriving under its original name of St. Mary’s Bank Credit Union. St. Mary’s was created in an effort to give the thousands of immigrants who were coming to work in the textile manufacturing mills in Manchester the ability to save and get credit. As a side note, today you can visit America’s Credit Union Museum on Notre Dame Ave. in Manchester, which is located in the original building which housed this first American-based credit union.

TCU was run by volunteers in the early years, but in 1965 it hired its first employee--Richard Mahoney-- who was promoted to President of the credit union in 1976, a position he held for 25 years. The credit union continued to operate under its’ original membership charter (telephone workers) until the AT&T monopoly on telephone service was split up in 1982, which drastically changed the structure of the telephone industry and subsequently the Credit Union’s ability to grow. At this time, TCU’s charter was updated to include the communications industry as a whole, providing some relief to a declining base of potential members. Michael came to work at the credit union in 1998, and was elected to follow Richard Mahoney’s legacy as President/CEO in 2001. (You may find it interesting that, although Michael’s career has been focused in the banking arena, he was first attracted to the FBI. It just goes to show we all have a diversity of interests.)

In 2002 the charter was changed again to what’s referred to as an “open membership”— allowing membership to anyone who lives or works in the State of NH. For the first time, TCU was able to offer its’ products and services to anyone in the entire State, thereby providing a necessary economy of scale to allow for the increased technology expectations of 21st Century consumers. To more accurately reflect the community they were serving the company was renamed Bellwether Community Credit Union in 2005. Today they have 3 branches, 90 full time employees, 34,000 members and over $455M in assets. Bellwether Community Credit Union (BCCU) is a cooperative, non-profit organization whose goal is to provide real benefits to its members. Michael spoke of two things that have remained consistent throughout the years— their focus on providing value to their membership and their goal of maintaining high service levels. Their desire to deliver what their members want when they want it drives them to excel in remote delivery channels such as mobile, online, billpay, etc. As cases in point, they were early adopters of electronic statements and had an e-statement program well before it became mainstream and were one of the first to offer remote deposit capture.

Service to their members is top priority, but service to others has also been an integral part of the organization. Bellwether is a huge community advocate, encouraging their employees to volunteer for organizations that have meaning to them individually and following that up with monetary support. At last count, Bellwether has a variety of active roles in over 60 community-based organizations such as Make a Wish NH, Home Health & Hospice Care, and Chambers of Commerce to name just a few. Michael says that giving back to the communities is a fundamental part of who they are. He encourages everyone at the executive level to participate in community service and further supports it throughout the organization. The benefits are many—Michael believes he has better executives because there is great personal reward in serving others, as it broadens their horizons, experiences, and perspectives. It’s a true win/win for both the employee and the organization which provides further positive impact on the community. Employees are proud to work for a company that is focused on community. In order to demonstrate their support of community involvement, Bellwether implemented a program which allows each employee one paid day per year to volunteer for an organization of their choosing.

When asked why he joined as a member of NHBSR, Michael’s answer was “MV”. Those would be the initials of Michelle Veasey, who serves as inspiration for many to join. Michael looks forward to getting to know more NHBSR members and to have the opportunity to partner with like-minded organizations in an effort to benefit the communities we live in.

Michael welcomes the chance to speak with anyone about Bellwether Community Credit Union or any other topic. He can be reached by email at: Michael.lecuyer@bccu.org or by phone at 603-645-8181. You can also learn more about Bellwether Community Credit Union at https://www.bccu.org/.

Please help us welcome Michael and his team at Bellwether Community Credit Union!