we are gonna go into part one of a two-part series
called Shaping Up Work That Matters.
And this is based on the Shape Up book by Ryan Singer.
And we can post a link to that book
in the chat here in just a bit.
This technique, it's gonna empower every member
of the organization to be an innovator.
And I remember when we implemented this here at Brilliant,
that it sounded like a really big project
and it sounded a bit complicated.
And when you get down to it,
it really does help you simplify.
And there was a hurdle for me in this,
is that I was trying to architect the solution
and it wasn't meant to do that.
That's not how it works.
It starts with an overview.
Do you remember that, Dion,
when the team, you walked each one of us
mistakenly through that process?
I did, I remember it well.
Yeah, Jenny.
Yeah. Well, thank you.
So what we're doing is,
there was a company now called Bootcamp,
before it was known as 37 Signals,
a software engineering company.
And they were a remarkable company
because they came up with a way
to very rapidly create solutions.
And for anybody who actually,
and this isn't just for software,
this is for anything, any innovation of any kind,
but it came out of a software world,
one of the most complex industries.
And one of my degrees is software engineering,
so I have some appreciation for that.
And I just loved Brian Singer.
So he provided a free book called Shaping Up Work
That Matters, the title of this talk,
and to give him credit for that.
And I think there's a free PDF that we have.
We could probably drop that in there
or link to it for you guys.
It's a lot to go through.
I'm just, as always, we pull out the one key idea
and bring it home to you
so that you can use it immediately.
So I wanna take a second
and just give you some key thoughts around this
and just talk through,
what exactly are we talking about
with Shaping Up Work That Matters?
So I wanna share four concepts with you,
and then I'm gonna talk about the three phases
of shaping up.
So I'm talking about four concepts, then three phases.
And just as I'm getting organized here on my screen,
what I'd like to say is,
here's where we're gonna land with this.
When we're done with this,
you'll be able to look at any project,
no matter how complex it is,
and figure out the starting place of that project
and break it up into thin slices.
And think of like, if you were gonna eat a loaf of bread,
you wouldn't just take the whole loaf,
put butter on it, if you put butter on your bread,
and then put some jelly on it
and then try and eat the whole thing.
Yet, most of us do projects like that.
And how many of you have found out
that you started a big project,
you had this ambitious idea,
man, I'm going to build out something,
I'm gonna build some product,
or I'm going to come up with a whole new filing system
or a way of organizing my Google Drive
or whatever the big project was.
And then you get into it.
And so what do most of us do, right?
You may have heard of the traditional way
of solving projects.
The project is let's figure out all the requirements
that we need, right?
Don't write this down,
because it's the wrong way to do this.
All the requirements that you need.
And then we're gonna take all those requirements
and we're gonna design a full solution
for all the requirements.
So let's say there are 20 major requirements,
and now we're gonna build a solution
with those 20 requirements.
And then what we're gonna do is go and build the thing.
And when we're finished,
we're gonna go and test it and roll it out.
And the whole process is gonna take four months.
So we get through the four months process
and guess what happens when you finish the project?
You find out that of the 20 original items,
half of them are gone.
The company doesn't need them anymore.
You've changed.
And here's the other problem.
As you were going through the process, what happened?
You learned what the customer actually wanted.
And so what the customer actually wanted
was something pretty simple,
but we wanted to design the whole thing.
And so we referred to this in the industry,
Michael Dell coined the phrase, boil the ocean.
Don't do a boil the ocean project.
And we've talked once before about the problem
when he nearly killed Dell computer,
did an amazing talk on the idea that what nearly killed Dell
was when he built the one computer that can do everything.
This computer, man, it had every,
you didn't need another computer after that.
Well, it was so complicated, so big, so vast,
nobody bought it.
So the issue is you can end up with,
you can end up with trying to solve a problem
and in the process get so far behind.
Another shocking idea is that if you look
at technology projects in the United States
that are over $50 million,
these are very serious, big corporate projects, right?
If you look at every project over 50 million,
it's interesting that over 80% of them fail.
That means tens of millions of dollars get wasted, why?
Because by the time these big corporate projects
have come out and they take 12, 18 months,
sometimes several years, by the time they come up,
the business has moved on.
It doesn't even need half those features.
Now you have a massive advantage.
So what shaping up work that matters comes down to
is the idea that you take the tiniest thin slice,
like the thin slice of bread.
In fact, if you can make it so thin,
you can see through the bread slice, that'd be good.
You take the tiniest thin slice
and then you learn from that.
Then you do another thin slice
and then another thin slice,
because what's happening?
Firstly, you have a lot of quick wins, which is good.
Secondly, you go through a very sharp learning curve.
So that's the first big idea.
So the first big concept is that
if we're gonna shape up work,
we want to get down to a few key ideas.
If I'm looking at a project,
here's a couple of things I'm thinking about.
So here's a completely contracultural,
what one wouldn't expect to be a key.
And that is, instead of working an estimate,
I think I'm going to,
we're gonna look at the whole project
and I think it's gonna take three months.
Instead of doing that, which is what a lot of us do,
we do it in reverse.
We start with an appetite.
What's my appetite for this project?
So I'm gonna use a super simple idea, excuse me,
of let's say I want to clean the garage.
If my appetite is, I have an hour.
If the garage is in a real mess,
I might look at it and say,
look, my estimate, this is a six hour project.
We don't start with the estimate,
we start with the appetite.
So first step one is I start with the appetite.
What's my appetite?
I have an hour.
Okay, the next question is how much is this idea worth?
So, it's amazing how many times in engineering and software
or in any product development,
how many times we build things
that shouldn't actually really exist.
We build them because we can,
not because they should exist.
Or we do some system or we add some HR plan
or we add something in.
The question is, what's the idea actually worth?
And the way to help us get to the bottom of it
is if we ask the customer.
Now, by the way,
I'm not just talking about external customers.
If you're building that,
if you're HR and you're building something for the team,
or if you're a finance person
and you're building a financial report
for the team managers,
go to them and ask them this one question.
If I could change one thing that would help you
in this report or whatever, what would it be?
What one thing can I do that would help you
narrow the problem down to the thinnest possible slides?
And it could be as simple as,
could you put it in a bigger font?
Got it.
Could you put it in a half a page?
Got it.
Could you collapse these categories into this?
Too many categories I can't see.
That's where things like the rule of three came from.
Well, if I can just see the three main numbers,
I can see which dials to turn to run the business
or my division or my team.
So that's the first idea.
So when we're looking at this thinnest slice,
the next thing is we want everybody in the team
to be able to do this.
This isn't for product designers.
This is for everybody.
It doesn't matter what your role in the company is.
This is for everybody.
As I explained before,
you can use it for cleaning your garage,
building something at home,
architecting a new or any sort of new design.
So what we're doing is we start off by doing this
as we're targeting risk.
And we're targeting risk because what we're doing
is we're avoiding not getting bogged down.
It's a lot of times projects get stuck.
I don't know how many of you have half done projects
at home or you have half done projects in the office
or you just had projects and then we stopped them.
We started another one, stopped that one,
started another one, stopped that one.
The reason for that is somewhere along the line,
you discovered something or it had more risk than you.
you expected. So what we're trying to do is get a sense of
the risk up front. Now, if I'm trying to do the whole loaf of
bread, the entire boil, the ocean, it's very, very difficult
to estimate the risk and the potential areas in which you may
get stuck. But if I take a thin slice, if I take a tiny piece,
my chances of getting the risk sorted out, and knowing that
I'm going to actually complete it becomes gets really high. So
brilliant, as I've shared before, we've completed over 38
projects, and they've never been an hour late. And I'm going to
explain exactly what I mean by that. What if your organization
could do projects across the board, everybody's empowered to
do it, you know how to do it, you know how to pitch it to the
team, and you know how to present it to the team when
you're finished, and almost never are you late on any
project. Every every team leader is going, yeah, I'll pay for
that. So this, this point where we've reached in our 16 weeks of
being together, this is a big pivoting moment for us in our
training on the edge. This is the point where we're going to
tell you what to do with your deep work. So if you drop got
behind on your deep work, and I know many have that's normal as
we're learning, get it going again, get your four hours a
week going because we're now going to tell you what to do
with your deep work, or more precisely, you're going to tell
you what to do with your deep work session. So as we go
through this idea, what we're going to do is we're going to
build a project in such a way that we mitigate the risk,
figure out the thinnest slice. And then we're going to show how
you're going to set expectations with your team and with yourself
before you even start, you're going to figure out what's known
and unknown. And what's going to happen when we do this is we're
going to go through a couple of key ideas. So the first key idea
around this is we want to figure out the thin slice. And then we
want to do a very high level design, we refer to it as a fat
marker design. Now, we call it a fat marker design. Because if
you think of a whiteboard, and I've got a huge fat marker
that's so fat, I can't write words with it. And I start
drawing boxes and squiggles, and another arrow and a box and a
squiggle. It's so high level, I just want to see how the big
pieces come together. And we do this because what it does is it
starts to sift out where how the design should be. And I'm going
to give an example here in a second. So when we do these fat
marker designs, we're keeping them super rough. We're going to
I'm going to give you a template here in a minute towards the end
of the session. And in this template, you can fill out about
a page and a half should take you 15 to 20 minutes to shape up
a project goes quickly. And with this template, you would be able
to do a very rough design. And you do enough for the fact that
it's sort of solved, you can see that it's solved, but you haven't
gone into all the detail. So for instance, imagine that you
were just the designer, and you were doing a quick design, and
you were explaining to somebody else who's going to build it,
you're going to okay, so we're going to build a shed, it's
gonna be have a door, it's gonna have a window over there and a
door, and then you write a little squiggle, and there's a
roof and off you go. There's one room, it's got a, you know, it's
got two windows and a door. And at the back, it's got some
shelves and fat marker design done. And then somebody else
will go and do proper drawings, proper detail design. That's not
what we do. When we start a project, we do it super high
level, we solve it. And then we say, this is the appetite. This
is a two hour thing or a two deep work session thing. This is
this is what's included. This is not included. And if the project
goes badly, I'm going to cut this out. And if it goes well,
I'm going to add that in. Okay, I'm going to go through it many
times. So don't worry, if you feel a little bit lost, just
hold on here, we'll get there in a second. The main thing I want
you to understand right up front, is that if you shape up
work that matters, you know, we use the illustration before, and
it's what it fits here. The client comes and says, you know,
I need a car. Can you design a car? And you go, sure, we got
engineering, we got this, we can design a car. But if you took
the thin slice and really press the customer and found it
exactly what it is they want, it turns out that they have two
buildings, and there's a big parking lot, and they want to
drive from the one building to the other. And you go, well,
don't really need a car. What if we what's the thinnest slice of
motive?
transportation we could give you, how about a skateboard?
So the client's a little bit, you know,
not excited about the solution,
but you say, look, how long have I got?
Well, you know, I need it yesterday.
Well, I can give you an answer.
I can give you a solution by tomorrow
and we build you a skateboard.
If we build you a skateboard,
then we're learning and we find out,
well, it keeps falling off or it's hard to stay on.
So then we add handles to the skateboard
and they get tired.
And so, you know,
we put a little motorized battery on the skateboard
and then it's like a little motorized thing.
And then after that, maybe it, you know,
becomes more like an electric bicycle
or maybe it becomes a motorcycle
and ultimately it becomes a car.
What started off as, I need a car.
Now, what might happen is when you get to the motorized,
you know, bicycle, the customer might say, perfect, I got it.
It's all I need.
So how many projects we get ahead of ourselves?
So here's what we're gonna do.
I'm going to show you what it physically looks like
when we shape up projects.
And then I'm going to go through the components.
So to make it super simple for ourselves,
hear it brilliant,
is we invented a Notion template.
Does anybody use Notion?
Anyone else besides us?
Everybody use Notion?
Yes, no?
So if you don't use Notion,
we have a PDF version for you,
but Notion particularly,
once you connect with Notion,
you get addicted super fast
because it's like,
becomes the source of truth of everything.
So I'm not here to talk about Notion.
So I'm just going to talk for a minute about,
so what I'm going to show you is in Notion,
but that particularly doesn't particularly matter.
It just makes it simple and quick.
So let me share my screen with you
and then we'll go from there.
Any initial questions before we get going?
Okay, so again,
the idea is not to boil the ocean,
find the thinnest slice,
try and figure out what's the idea actually worth,
figure out your appetite,
do a very high level design,
figure what's included and not,
figure out what could you add if it goes well,
or would you cut out if it doesn't.
Let's go through the process.
Now, normally we would break out into teams
and we will have a shorter breakout time.
So let me explain to you what I feel
will help you the fastest.
In my experience,
every time I've taught this,
I found everybody has to do this once
before the penny drops.
So I'm going to do it with you.
And the idea is that you're going to go this week
and shape one up yourself.
And next week, we're going to do hot seats.
We're going to take your designs,
put them up on the screen,
and we're going to talk about, did you get it?
Did you make a mistake?
How did we make it better?
So don't go and build a project or anything,
just shape it up.
And it should take you 15 to 20 minutes.
So that shouldn't take you too long, right?
So let's go through and let me share with you a little bit.
So there's my little example of the car,
you know, the not so happy customer.
So let me go through and share with you
what a shaped up project's like.
So in Notion, we have a very simple little project list.
And what we do is when I'm going to hit new template,
and I'm just going to show you how we do a project.
So I'm going to create a project,
and it's going to be called my new project.
And of this new project,
I'm getting it ready to pitch it to the team.
And now what we've done is we've added
all our people's names in there
so we can see everybody's names.
So I'm going to use myself and Jenny.
We'll do this project together.
And what we're going to do is we're going to set up
our appetite.
Now the appetite is how much time,
notice that it doesn't go past six weeks.
If it gets past six weeks, the slice isn't thin enough.
Now, how do I know how many weeks it takes?
Very, very easy.
If I'm doing one deep work session a week,
that's four hours a week.
And I estimate, I think I've got four hours.
I'm starting with my appetite.
What do I want to commit to this project?
So let's say we've decided that the project
is to clean the garage.
We're going to use a very simple idea.
And I just want to spend one session doing this.
So I'm going to say one week,
because it's going to take one deep work session.
So the pitch date,
so I'm going to pitch this to the team next Monday.
And since I said it will take a week,
it's going to end on this day.
By the way, you can just do this in a PDF.
We've got a PDF version.
don't have notion. So here's the idea. I start with the appetite, set a date and
time measured in deep work sessions, because we know you have other work to
do. But we also know you have time for it, because you have deep work set up,
right. So I'm going to have one deep work session here. And this one deep
work session, this was long. And I'm thinking, what problem am I solving?
Well, you can say I'm cleaning the garage, but that's a bit general. What
specifically is the problem? What's the actual value? Well, I can't get both
cars in the garage, I can only get one in because the other one's cluttered
and got stuff. So the problem I'm solving is get you know, two cars into
the garage. So I want to get two cars into the garage, that's the problem. So
what's included? Well, what's included is, you know, cleaning, cleaning,
there'll be some cleaning, there'll be some organizing of sorry, noising,
there'll be some other other items, what's not included, I'm not going to
build a workbench, I'm not organizing my my, you know, my workbench, I'm not
changing, I'm not going to finish other projects that are sitting half done in
my workshop, I'm not, and I'm saying all that I'm not going to do. So fat
marker design, if I had an ability to draw it right here, I would draw a
little picture, I'd have a garage, and I draw two little cars in the middle.
And now I'm thinking, will it have, will it have shelves on the side? Yeah,
maybe we can include shelves, I'm going to go back and say I'm gonna, I'm
going to build some shelves. And so on the shelves, not selves. And we're
going to build some shelves on the side. And I'm just going to pass stuff
out. And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to have a whole lot of stuff. So
I'm just going to draw a squiggly little design. So I have a rough
drawing, what's the actual deliverable? Now, maybe the deliverable for you, if
you're doing a report, or you're going to go and do research, you're going to
go and figure out if something's, you know, viable for your company, or a new
technology, should we use notion, you know, whatever it is, you might, the
deliverable might be a document, maybe a document with recommendations in it. In
this case, the deliverable is the ability to park two cars in the garage,
without, you know, requiring incredible skill or cameras or something, it's got
to be open enough to easily park two cars, that's the deliverable, can I park
two cars in the garage after four hours, that's that's the deliverable. And
here's now we call risks and rabbits means risks and rabbit holes, where
could I get stuck? If I start over designing every little thing in the
garage, I get too involved in the detail, or maybe in my research, I do
too deep research, I my research gets carried away. How would you expand or
add to the solution if the project goes well, well, if it goes really well, I
might, you know, clean my, my workbench, I may organize the, you know, the
shelves in some specific way. But if it doesn't go well, what would I cut out?
Well, I won't build the shelves, I'll drop the shelves, if I don't have time
for that, and I'll just stack it in the corner. Okay, so now that's the whole
pitch. That's the whole thing. It's got boundaries, appetite, problem I'm
solving, what's included, what's not? Section B, high level design, and what's
the deliverable? What is it when you're all done? What do we get? Do we get a
document? Do we get recommendations? Do we get a piece of software? Do we get,
you know, an example of notion working for our company? Do we get whatever? And
then the risks and rabbits section is just about where the risks how can I get
stuck? What can I do things go well, what extra stuff can I add? And what
could I cut out if it doesn't? Super simple, right? You got it? Okay, then I
pitch the team. That's all D is just, and when I pitch the team, all I do is I go
to the top, and I just read this, what I've just got here. Any questions around
this? So Jenny, I'm not checking, tracking the. So let me show you an actual
project. So here's an actual project that somebody in our team did called
Gen Z TikTok launch. So we want to launch a TikTok channel for Gen Z. And
so the boundaries were, we were going to do three deep work sessions, one deep
work session per week. So the appetite was three weeks, you can see at the top
says three weeks, three deep work sessions. Two, what problem are you
solving? So we want to translate key concepts at Brilliant for the next
generation. And we're going to, we're going to create three sample scripts
and three videos as a proof of concept for TikTok.
That's the problem we're solving.
In other words, get it going and show
we can take concepts at Brilliant
and translate them to a younger generation.
What's included?
Three one-minute TikTok videos made on an iPhone
with written scripts.
And we're going to coordinate those scripts with Graham,
who obviously controls all the content here at Brilliant.
And what's not included?
So we're not going to add special prophetic words,
activation notes, or any other little elements.
We're not adding any video production, no fancy stuff.
We're just not including all that.
We're just going to pick up an iPhone
and do three one-minute TikTok videos.
OK, so what's the deliverable?
Three TikTok videos with three scripts.
That's the deliverable.
There's no rough design, so it wasn't applicable.
There was no little drawing here.
OK, how could we get stuck?
Trying to cover too much content,
trying to make the videos perfect.
That's how we could get stuck.
How would we amend the solution?
In other words, if things went well, or sorry,
we could add more videos or cut them down.
What things could we cut out?
We can drop down to one script and one video.
And the pitch to the team was just
to get in front of the team and just read these things.
The exact way I just read it to you, that's the pitch.
OK, so how does this all work?
So this is how it works.
When I look at, we have a simple little box.
And so anybody has an idea, is listing all these ideas.
They keep a list of all their ideas
in these simple pitch documents I just showed you.
At Brilliant, we pick one day a week called pitch day.
So to the leaders, I want to suggest
that you pick one day a week that's your pitch day.
And let's say I've just had my, we just
did my garage example here.
And I've decided it's just going to be me, not Jenny.
And it's going to be one, there's the project.
So I've got it ready.
Now pitch day at Brilliant happens to be on Tuesday.
So Tuesday is pitch day.
So if you have a stand up call or whatever,
you can take a few minutes to listen to all the pitches
from your team.
So let's say I want to pitch it for this, and it's every week.
So every week at, let's say 2 PM, we do pitches.
So I'm putting the list.
So everybody who wants to do their projects,
just drag them here.
And we're getting ready, we watch all the pitches.
When you finish with the pitches and we
approve it, the team interacts, asks questions,
helps create clarity.
Here's the cool thing.
At this point, everybody knows what it is you're doing.
Everybody knows, and you've set expectations.
If things go well, I'm adding this.
If it goes bad, I'm taking that out.
And this is what includes, this is what it doesn't include.
You've really thought at a high level the design,
what it looks like, and we're ready to go.
Now it's in progress.
The minute the pitch ends, the minute that pitch is over
on Tuesday, it immediately goes into,
I'm going to choose the TikTok one.
Now it's in progress.
As we come up towards the end of the week,
it gets pushed into being presented,
and now people present their pitch, and we're done.
And when it's finished, it goes into archive.
So you say, what's hold for?
If you miss your deadline, you cannot touch that project
for six months.
Why?
Because we're building a culture that we do exactly what we
say we'll do, when we say we'll do it.
And the integrity of that has to be huge.
So what that means is, if you're putting your pitch together
then you're not 100% sure you're
going to have your add extra deep work sessions in,
and build some buffer in there.
You're not going to do that and then go on vacation
and come back, oh, you know what?
I forgot I was on vacation.
Fine, that project goes into hold.
In the history of Brilliant and all the three years
or whatever we've been doing this,
we've never put a single project on hold, ever.
And not a single project been an hour late.
Now you know what I meant when I said that.
Because when you are pitched on Tuesday,
if it was a three week project, then three Tuesdays from now
you're going to present that project on pitch day.
So pitch days is for the start of a project,
but pitch day is also for the end of the project.
Now this is really important.
So I want to speak to the CEO, leaders, founders
for just a minute.
But I also want the rest of you to hear this.
What?
this bring to you as a leader and as a team of leaders? Number
one, it's going to bring you a rapid amount of innovation. So
instead of having big boil the ocean projects that are risk and
cost and capital, and you don't know if you can redevelop your
whole new, never have time to do all these little projects from
organizing your Google Docs to your filing system to doing
better counts receivable to what all these different
projects. Now, everybody can look at their own work, they
can create, you've released your team to come up with their own
pitches, and to innovate super quick. If you do the whole,
we're going to take three months, six months, whatever,
set a bunch of goals and then go after those. The downside of
that is the innovation cycle is too small. Right? So for
instance, it's too long. And to quote Elon, the one who
innovates the fastest wins. So here's the bottom line, if you
want a massive advantage, this whole concept will take your
whole company to the next level, because now you're innovating
every few weeks, something new, something new, never let anyone
do longer than a six week projects too big, they didn't
slice it enough. So I'll, so Jenny, let me just ask you a
couple of questions, if you can unmute. Sure. You dived into a
horribly complex project called sales tax based on every state.
And I bring this up because it's boring. It's horrible. You had
to do it yet. So you were deeply excited about doing this
project, right?
Yeah, not at all. So how can you remember how many slices it took
before you finally got it implemented?
Yeah, I believe that it took six slices. Okay, this is before I
figured it out. Yeah.
And if you can remember, I know, I haven't prepped you on this.
So just a memory, if you how many? What did your first slice?
What was it about?
It was painful at first, because sales tax is this huge looming
topic. And there are repercussions if you don't get it
correct, right. And that was the information I was getting. So I
continually because this was one of the very first slices that I
did with you. And I kept trying to solve it to the end, I kept
trying to go to implementing sales tax, implementing sales
tax, and you kept bringing it back, no, what is the problem
that we're solving. And the very first problem that we solved
with that thin slice was determining what states we had
nexus in, I would have not started in my thinking, I would
not have started with that small of a slice. But what it did was
it broke this project down into manageable portion sizes, to
where I could accomplish the task at hand, and I could do it
efficiently, effectively, and know that, that we were doing,
we were being compliant with what the government was
requiring.
So what was keen what Jenny just said, guys, is that she didn't
take the project and divide it into six sections. That's not
what we're talking about. She did the first one. And when she
learned, it became obvious what the next slide should be. And
when she did that, she learned and she became obvious what the
next. And by the time she got to the fourth one, she would not
have seen that at the beginning of the first one. Because now
her learning had grown. And if you do online sales, you know,
this is very complex. This is 2018. It's very, it's very new.
The states are figuring it out. And they got all these rules.
And it's complex. And you know, and suddenly, Jenny was learning
things and coming back to me and saying things like, do you know
that if we download something like a PDF, like we just doing
with you on this training, if we give you a PDF, and it's
downloadable, we have to pay sales tax because something left
us and landed on your computer, even though it's digital. And if
I charge you $10 for that, we'd have to pay taxes, but only if
we reach certain boundaries in each state has its own rules. So
something complex that very few people at the time actually
understood, well, even some of the top professionals in our
industry didn't understand very well. So going to top experts at
Deloitte and other people, we could not get this thing
cracked. Yet Jenny cracked it with no background to actually
close to zero interest purely because she cared about getting
us compliant. Right? So it wasn't necessarily a passion
project, but it was one that needed to be done. Some of you
could fix these little projects in your in your company and
dramatically upscale the impact that the company's having. If
you reduced accounts receivable, you know, if counts receivable,
if you got a 60 day accounts receivable, and you brought down
30 days, you would change the economics of your business, for
sure. If you could get it down to 15 days, if you could improve
some customer service element, if you could bring some
automation to customer service. So I'll give you another I'll
give you a six week version is another six week version. We
introduced two and a half years ago, we introduced artificial
intelligence, so that you could get immediate answers on all
your questions around our content is brilliant. And it
would answer the same way as Graham would answer it. And we
invented this thing called the brilliant bot. And we partnered
with a big AI company and we thin sliced it. And in the
beginning, we took super thin slice and I say we it was
myself and Michael. And when Michael and I did these tiny
thin slices, each slice, we learned what the next slide
should be. So if you get a little overwhelmed, like I don't
know, that seems like a lot you haven't taken a thin enough
slice, get it so thin and maybe your slices I want to take four
hours and I want to figure out what the problem is. I don't
even 100% know what the problem is. I just know there's this
isn't working. But I just want to take a moment and figure out
what the problem is. The next slice can be, okay, here's some
recommendations, or you're the three people who do this well,
or yes, three products that could help us. And then the next
slice would be implement that. So maybe you're doing, you know,
because we're on such vast, vastly different industries, I'm
trying not to give specific online type solutions that we're
doing. So if you're if you're putting if you're going through
this, I want to say to you, as you as you do this project, as
you thin slice it, presented to the team, use your deep work
sessions to do it, come back and present to the team. Once you've
done one of those, you'll be off to the races, you'll be
unstoppable. Because now you're suddenly like, okay, I got it.
For the company, though, the the rate of innovation just picks up
dramatically, where, and for the third thing that the company
gets is nobody has to manage you to do it. Did you notice how
simple the project management was, we just dragged it from one
thing to another. Okay, that was our notion. But you could do it
however you like you can put on a spreadsheet wouldn't matter.
Could just drag the square on the switch spreadsheet would be
the same. Right. Let's see. We have a question from cake
construction group there.
Hey, Dion, it's Tyler. I've got a I might have missed this
earlier. I came in a touch late. But can you if we're if we're
thinking at a high level, you know, we don't have all the
answers. Can you give some parameters or some understanding
what the pitch response should look like from a team? Like?
Does that make sense? Like what? What should the what should the
team be looking for? Or say back to the thought or the idea?
Yeah. So there's two reasons I'm having you pitch to the team.
One is what it does for you. And what it to is what it does for
them. What it does for you is when you're forced to talk about
something before you started, you get really clear brings your
own clarity. And you you get good, you know, you know how it
is you. It's vague in your mind, but you explain to someone else
gets all the clearer. That's the one feature. The other features,
the whole team now knows what you're doing. And somebody might
say, hey, I have a similar project, I'd like to join you on
that, or that may connect with my project. Now we're starting to
coordinate projects organically, rather than through a system
that we all serve. Now the system serves us. We flipped it
around, because what's happening is now we're saying, or like
somebody says, man, I've done that kind of project before in
another company, we may say, hey, I'm going to use you as a
consultant on this, can I use you as a consultant. So now you
have an internal consultant that you're bringing in. And so the
team can participate. And here's the cool thing, when you finish
and present your project, our opportunity to make you the hero
of that project. Yeah, look what they did. And everybody knows
they heard what you said, you came and delivered, you did what
you said when you did said, guess what it does for your
reputation. This, after you've done three, four or five of
these, we all know, you know, you're the person who does what
you say when you say, and so we start to build deep integrity in
projecting. So this interactive process is designed to get the
feedback of the of the team. Now here's what, here's what you
asked me, what kind of responses should you get from the team? So
let me be very precise. I think you should get three types of
responses. Response number one is, love it, get some
clarification.
cool. The whole team's like, thumbs up, let's go. Second response is, hang on, that doesn't
seem to have immediate bearing on where we are right now. Seems like, you know, I'm not
sure this is the most immediate thing. What's the, and so they're really challenging you,
what's the real value of this to the organization? And that's okay. That's good. Because maybe,
you know, you're doing something that's too, it's not immediate value. And they go, man,
if you, you know, what if you changed your pitch to something else? Or what if you adjusted
it this way? Or what if you tackled it? That's fine, you can still delay the project because
it hasn't had thumbs up yet. So the clock hasn't started ticking. Three gets a little
more subtle in is, if there are 10 project pictures, but we only have time for three,
then we do what we call bidding. As a team, we bid what's the most valuable of these three?
Which are the most valuable three? And we pick those three, if we can't do all of them.
So sometimes,
I definitely, we want to build a culture of innovation, but making sure we're focused
at the right time for the right season, for all the right things. I mean, definitely seems
like that would be some good feedback.
Yeah, so what you're getting to is this, what you don't want is this isn't just a, like
a blank check to go and you know, go and study underwater pancake weaving or some other irrelevant
topic that has nothing to do with the universe. We're not talking about that. We're talking
about really bringing a contribution to the organization. Oh, I've always wanted to know
about internet marketing. We're a construction company, we don't do, we don't sell online
products, whatever you get. So exactly. I give extreme examples, but it gets more nuanced
very, very quickly. You're going to, but the discussion and dialogue that you're having
at that point is huge. It's so, it's so educational for the company to do this together.
Great question, by the way, I really appreciate it.
Robin has a question, Dion, how long is the timeframe on a pitch? Is it five minutes or
an hour? You know, we found, we did, what did we do yesterday? We did two pitches. That was about
eight minutes, nine minutes together. I don't think it was more than 10 minutes. Yeah. They
go quite quickly, but Robin, they can go long if suddenly we run into a problem. If there are
smooth pitches, pretty straightforward. I found that the longer you do them, the shorter they get
because everybody knows the story. But when you first do it, you can actually get into quite a
lot of dialogue around, you know, is this useful? What does it do? What's the real value?
It's teaching the team to be bold and to ask tough questions to the person doing the pitch.
So I would say practically in the beginning plan, it could be 20 minutes, maybe longer
if it gets really technical. Again, it's all about patience. It's so worth the investment
though, because once you got the machinery running, it takes time. I would recommend to
each of the leaders, have everybody, including yourself, do at least one pitch in the next few
weeks. Everybody do one. Here's what will happen is you'll quickly cut to the chase of what people
know and they don't know. You'll quickly catch on to what's in their head, what they've always wanted
to do, what contribution they always wanted to make. Ben, did you ask a question there a second
ago? How many projects do you typically pitch in a week? It varies. I would say some weeks there
are no pitches. Some weeks there are, what's the most we've had, Jenny? Can you remember? Three,
four? I would say three or four, but I think it's three. I think it's three. Yeah. Yeah. But we're
a smaller team. So at 100X, we're a much bigger team. So we had many more pitches. So here's an
exercise I did at 100X. I didn't do this at Brilliant, but if this helps the leaders as you're
thinking through this, what I did is we did a group project together. That's where I got the idea for
next week. So what we did is we had everybody right there and then build out their pitch together.
Okay, everybody, fill in this first thing. What problem are you solving? Blah, blah.
What's your appetite? What problem are you solving? And we literally walked through every step of it
together. And I was handling questions interactively from the team. When they were finished,
they had to do a quick pitch to each other. So I teed them off in twos. They pitched each other
quickly. And then I had them present to the entire team. Now, that whole process took about two hours,
but that was worth 35 people. It was 35 projects. We sat there and listened to 35 projects,
one after the other like this. And
I mean, people got so excited.
Like, man, I've always wished we could fix that.
I'm so glad you're doing that, you know, can I help?
So it produced enormous enthusiasm
and a lot of energy in the room.
Yeah, now I see, you know, Bruce, are you there?
I see Bruce is on the line here.
Yeah, I'm here, just on my phone, yep.
Yep, I know that you've done a lot of shaping up
and projects yourself.
Is there anything you wanted to weigh in on
that you found that's very effective?
Yeah, ours is a little bit different
because we're kind of coming from agency world.
So we are also shaping client projects.
And so what we've done is we've always let the,
whoever's paying for it essentially decides.
So in our team, if it's internal team stuff
or our products, then typically I make kind of
the final call on the bidding part of it.
So we don't really have our whole team.
I mean, we all comment on it and we can all weigh in
on ideas, but as far as that final say,
or else it tends to like, we end up doing a lot of things
that aren't like mission critical.
So either it's me or sometimes we have Caroline
on our team who's doing product,
who's much closer to the clients and all that.
So again, we're more of a technical company.
So it's a little different than maybe this, I would say,
but it's been, we've used it for about three years,
I think, and it's been phenomenal.
We actually changed our entire agency to just match
the price, like our, all of our pricing and products
just match and mirror the shape up process, so.
And I know Chris, you've interviewed Ryan Singer yourself,
right, didn't you have him on one of your?
We did, yeah, we had him on our podcast, yes.
Yeah.
Okay, so I bring that up to say that there's a lot
of flexibility to move this in the direction
that most serves your company.
So what it's gonna look like for you guys
at K Construction is gonna be very different,
maybe for, I'd look at Brilliant or very different
for Noah, it's gonna look very different
in different contexts, which is all fine.
But what the core idea is, get everybody innovating,
everybody pitches the team and everybody knows
what everybody else is doing.
And we have time to focus and prioritize which elements.
Now, if you want to, to the leaders, you may wanna,
you may wanna review some of the people's pitches
before they do them, if you think they're gonna,
might be a bit off the first few times.
So at Brilliant, I physically sat with every single person
and did their first pitch with them.
And I did it because I wanted to make sure
that their first pitch was a success.
I wanted, I was setting them up for success.
Now that's a lot of effort, but honestly,
if you're taking more than 15 or 20 minutes
to put a pitch together, you're overthinking it,
you're putting too much in the design,
you're starting to create the solution already.
That's not the idea here.
Okay, so here's what I wanna suggest.
I think everybody's got the links and so on in the app.
There is a Notion template,
if you actually want a Notion template,
or it's just a PDF, if you want that.
And I would suggest that everybody put a project together
and then next week, I'd love to do hot seats.
Does that sound good?
So hot seats will be, I might pick one or two projects
from Brilliant just to get it going,
but I'd like to give you as much feedback
about your project as possible.
And because it's in, like we did at 100x,
being able to turn to different people
and right there in front of everybody,
help understand what we mean by these subtle points.
And once you see it, it sounds complicated,
it's actually super simple.
Once you get it in your head, you go,
oh, this is really easy,
I'm just answering these questions, this is straightforward.
Does anybody feel like this could be doable?
Yeah?
Okay.