Coaching Executive Mindsets — The Conversation Factory

I am obsessed with culture, change and transformation…and always puzzling over how it really happens.

One thing I know for sure: Forcing change, telling people to change, doesn’t make it happen.

I think there are two ways to profoundly facilitate change. One is:

💫 ASKING PEOPLE QUESTIONS THAT SHIFT THE CONVERSATION.

When I talk about Conversational Leadership in my book, Good Talk, this is what I mean: We can transform how other people think, not by telling them how or what to think, but by framing and fostering a new conversation.

The other way is by:

💥FACILITATING EXPERIENCES THAT FOSTER AN “AHA” MOMENT.

This means, for me, asking a series of questions, and making space for conversations that bring people into a new mode of thinking - the other side of an “a-ha”.

This is why I love to say "an experience is worth a thousand slides" We can throw a thousand slides at a group and never see the shift we want to foster.

Recently, my friend Jeff Gothelf did a lovely write-up of an experience I led for one of his clients, one of my favorite exercises: The vase and flowers game. It's always thrilling to see one's impact through someone else's eyes. My reflections and his reflections are both linked here.

Back in May, I offered a free workshop to subscribers to my Conversation Factory Insiders group walking through this exercise and a few others. I'd love to have you join that conversation...we meet every month to learn and grow together!

I’m so grateful Jeff came on the show to reflect on his journey, how key partnerships and relationships have been essential to his success, and to share some of the most powerful questions he asks leaders to shift their mindsets and thinking.

Support the Podcast and Get Insider Access

LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES, AND RESOURCES

Forever Employable by Jeff Gothelf

Becoming Forever Employable

How to Inspire Creativity and Innovation with One Simple Prompt by Jeff Gothelf

"Intuitive UI" is Not a Feature by Jeff Gothelf

The Big Lie of Strategic Planning by Roger L. Martin

Minute 7

There's something really powerful about having an accountability partner, right? There's the sense, especially if you're self-employed, or a consultant, or a freelancer that you've got to do it all by yourself.

And you don't. But, if you can find someone who can function, not only as a friend, but as a colleague and as an accountability partner, it makes a tremendous amount of difference. It really starts to force you to challenge your own thinking. And frankly, just to commit to certain things that you would probably have let drag on forever. And so it's super powerful.

Minute 14

For me, I've found that in my teaching, it's been a series of prompt questions that prompt them to think differently. So for example, one of the big questions I ask these days, especially when I'm talking about objectives and key results, because organizations are so focused on output to get them thinking about outcome. One of the big, most powerful prompt questions I ask is. "What will people be doing differently when we deliver the app, the service, the feature?" Whatever it is, because they never think about that, right? There's such a fixation on delivery that, just prompting them to think about the next thing. Okay, what happens then? What will people be doing differently if we do a great job?

Minute 17

And so with this traditional top-down thinking where it's like, "Well, I'm the boss. And so I have the answers." Will just make a vase to hold flowers and people will get as creative as they can. But at the end of the day, it's going to be a container that holds water and flowers.

It might be decorated. It might be hexagonal. It might be round. Right? But nevertheless, it's going to all be sort of variations on a theme. As soon as you say, "Come up with a way to experience flowers." Boom. Right? You've taken off the constraints. You said, look, our goal is to get people, to have this type of amazing experience, figure out the best way to do that. And so there's a couple of things that happen there. Number one is you've sort of taken the blinders off and you've expanded the space for people to come up with ideas and they will do it.

Minute 28

And one of my favorite pair of questions that comes from Roger Martin, legendary business professor and author. And he wrote an article in Harvard Business Review in 2014, called the Big Lie of Strategic Planning. In that article, he boils down product strategy into two questions. Where will you play? And how will you win? Right? And to me, those are fantastic prompts for any team, including a design team, right? Where will you play? What's the market segment? What's the target audience? What problem you're solving for them, right? Why would they care? And then how will you win? And I guarantee you, if an executive gave you those two questions and you came back with "intuitive UI," they would puke on that. And rightfully so.

Minute 34

It's the same reason why I wrote the book, right? I wrote the book not just to share my story, but because I believe this is the future of professional development and career. I believe that taking control of the narrative, telling your story, owning your brand, and then creating a reality where you are continuously attracting opportunities towards you is the future of careers and career growth. And I know there's a ton of people who want to do this. They face a tremendous amount of obstacles sometimes self-imposed, sometimes not.

And so the hypothesis here is that I can create a community of like motivated individuals, where they can find feedback for their work, accountability to get their content done and published, and mutual amplification where they can kind of help each other out. And so, in a sense, it's a self perpetuating cycle of folks growing together, helping each other, and essentially taking steps together towards becoming forever employable.

MORE ABOUT JEFF

Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond.

Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centered design.

Most recently Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Daniel Stillman:

Hey Jeff, thanks for making the time for this conversation. Welcome to the Conversation Factory.

Jeff Gothelf:

My pleasure Daniel. It's nice to be producing conversation in the factory, manufacturing conversation.

Daniel Stillman:

I know, I feel like there should be a sound of the hammer on the anvil.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right. Machinery and the backgrounds churning out conversations.

Daniel Stillman:

That was by the way, one of the first logos I made for the Conversation Factory, was an Anvil and a hammer. And then it was a factory with voice bubble clouds. And then my friend was like, "Are you trying to say that the conversations are pollution that comes out of [crosstalk 00:00:38], got to work on that visual metaphor." And so we did. So Jeff, you require no introduction, but if people are completely unaware of who you are and why you're important, can we put you in context?

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah, I'm important because I fathered, and parent two amazing girls.

Daniel Stillman:

Love it.

Jeff Gothelf:

That's why I'm important, with my wife, of course, not by myself. Couldn't have done any of that stuff without her. Professionally, I co-wrote a book called Lean UX with Josh Seiden. In fact, I co-wrote that book three times with John Seiden, once in 2013, once in 2016, and once again, in 2021, this is our third edition, which is very exciting. It will be out later this year. I've worked as a designer and a product manager and a team leader and over the last decade or so. I've been working as a coach, a consultant, a keynote speaker, and a trainer teaching companies, how to build great products and teaching leaders, how to build the cultures that build great products. And that's kind of how I spend most of my time these days, although in recent days. Just from the comfort of my home office, more so than anywhere else.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. And we're going to talk a lot about the leaders and culture thing, but first I want to take a step back because I think what you and Josh have is very special. Maybe it's just me, if you've ever watched Lord of the Rings.

Jeff Gothelf:

I have.

Daniel Stillman:

One of the things I love about Lord of the Rings is just guys crying together. They're just like, "We're here. That was hard. I love you. Let's keep going." And it gets me every time I think guys need more friends, men need men friends, and you and Josh have something really special. You are deep collaborators.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. We've been working together for 12 years. I think I met him in 2008. That's roughly what we estimate to be. In New York city in some design leadership, networking thing. And then I ended up on stage at various events with panels and things like that and I was like, "There's that guy again." Every time I looked to my left or to my right, I was like, "There's that guy again." And it worked really well, and we worked both well.

Jeff Gothelf:

The reason why we work well together besides just sort of just getting along generally speaking. I think there's a couple of things. One is we have complimentary qualities, like a yin and yang as opposed to sort of identical quality. So for example, I am, "Well, let's just jump out of the airplane and figure it out." Right? And Josh is like, "Before we jumped out of the airplane, can we just like, at least look and see what we're flying over?"

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right? "Is it land, is it sea?"

Daniel Stillman:

Does it have a rip cord? Is it attached to a parachute?

Jeff Gothelf:

Right. Is there a parachute.

Daniel Stillman:

Right.

Jeff Gothelf:

And the nice thing about that, there's a lot of that tension both in our professional relationship because I'm eager to ship stuff and he slows me down a little bit, which is good, it comes out better. But then I also sort of, he would sit on it forever and never ship it if it wasn't for me. Right? So it's, I pull him out of the airplane with me at some point, let's just ship it and see what happens. That's hugely helpful. Hugely helpful because it allows us to not only get stuff out into the world, but get stuff out into the world that is a decent quality. Right? And I think that goes a long way.

Jeff Gothelf:

The other aspect, I think that's really helpful in our relationship is we are super comfortable and look, it takes time to get there, let's be honest. But we're super comfortable being very honest about situations that arise in our dealings together that one of us deems as unfair, or unfair I guess, it's never dishonest, but it's more like "Hey, listen, I did a ton of work on this thing. Right? And I really think that I should get a slightly bigger cut of the thing." For example. I have no issues being like, "Okay, I did most of the work on this." Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Right.

Jeff Gothelf:

And he'd be like, "Yeah, you did, and that's okay." Right? Or that type of thing. The other day, perfect example of this. We teach together all the time.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

And so sometimes he wins the work and sometimes I win the work, but we always bring the other end to teach the course because we built the course together. The videos are both of us, that type of thing. Recently I closed a particularly demanding client. And it took a long time to bring the client over the finish line, lots of procurement, lots of big company, procurement stuff to go through it again. Normally, I don't even think twice, I'm like, "It's a 50/50 split." That type of thing. But the other day I was like, "Look, Hey, I brought this client over the finish line." I was like, "This one was work." It was like, I reeled this one, this was a big one. Right? Like I reeled this one in for a while.

Jeff Gothelf:

And three hours later, a nice bottle of Mezcal shows up at my door. Right? Literally three hours later. Right? It's stuff like that, that that has really helped us be super successful together. And I think generally we like each other, we get along and we have similar interests and we're both like steely Dan, which is, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's the truth.

Daniel Stillman:

I mean, the ties that bind.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right.

Daniel Stillman:

I think what's interesting about this and I'll just highlight this. When we think about culture, this kind of powerful, paired relationship and give and take, yin and yang of let's launch, let's check is a really important and powerful polarity. And I think it's really great that you have it in your work. And I feel like everyone should look for that in their work.

Jeff Gothelf:

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Jeff Gothelf:

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. I just want to celebrate that. And so my own experience of coming into that relationship was electrifying. When Josh called me and said, "Hey, we would love for you to do a set piece." You wrote the blockbuster Design Thinking, Lean and Agile, medium posts that became a book. And I was really glad to... Even though, design thinking is not the core of what I do anymore. I was like, I'll be honest. I'll just say this out loud. You guys threw money at me. You're like, "This is what we know it costs, and come and do this thing." And it made it very possible for me to jump in with both feet and take your attitude of like, "Oh, so we did some slides. Okay, what do we need?" Like, "Oh, here's my favorite thing." And just be part of that party with you too, is really easy to enter into that.

Jeff Gothelf:

Lovely, that's great to hear. Look, I think there's another aspect of the success we've had together is that we know where we're good, and we know where we're less good. And we know where others are better than us. There's ego. I mean, there's ego and everything, but there's not so much ego that we can't say, look, I could stumble my way through a design thinking workshop and Josh could do the same, but Daniel's good at this. And he's done this a lot, and he's better than us. So let's bring him in. Everybody wins.

Daniel Stillman:

It was fun. So here's the thing I want to roll back because Lean UX, and I don't think this is a great secret, but sense and respond was a sense and respond to people saying Lean UX. We want our bosses to be reading, thinking, being part of this conversation and sense and respond was like, "Here, CEO's read this." And so the main reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you was if we're trying to create these cultures of learning and excellence in these most important ideas in innovation of design thinking, lean and agile, how do we get the executive leadership team, the senior managers to think differently? And my theory is an experience is worth a thousand slides, right? We can sit with them and say, "Here's all the slides and here's all the case studies." but there's an opportunity to get in the room with them and to give them an eye-opening experience that changes how they think.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. Look, to me, that's the most powerful thing that you can do. I think that there is a mix though, right? There's a little bit of a case to be made, and it's not a big case, and it's not a complicated case because I've had these conversations with executives. The case being, you are in the software business so Sense and Respond, the book, the first half of the book makes the case that you're in the software business, right? That's how you scale. That's how you compete. Technologies would drive success these days.

Jeff Gothelf:

And then very, very quickly to make the case. That's that says, "Look, here are what the top performing tech companies, here's what they are capable of right now." It's such a powerful, say for example, Amazon ships code to production every second, right? Every second, when we wrote Sense and Respond, it was every 11.6 seconds. Today, it's every second, right? That is such a powerful statistic and it typically terrifies an executive, right? Because they know how long their organization takes to get new ideas out into market.

Jeff Gothelf:

And so saying, "Look, you can't manage your business in this old-school way when you're competing with organizations." Everyone has the same capabilities available to them today, to be able to get ideas into market as quickly as you can create them, right? As quickly as you can. And so that plus the experience then of saying, "Look, come into the room with the customers, come watch them use the thing." Just anything at all should in theory, motivate some kind.

Daniel Stillman:

I don't know if you can hear the subtle sigh in Jeff's voice, where it should, and so facts are one way to wake people up, like giving them that like it's every second and then there're feelings.

Jeff Gothelf:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Daniel Stillman:

Which is, watch the customer feel their pain. And then hopefully they get some insights out of that. And I guess I'm a big proponent of, and I've seen these discussions in some of the communities that you and I are part of. Like, I used to play blank game with these folks to teach them about this. How do I teach this blank concept to people now? And I don't know, what are some of your favorite ways of getting groups of people to open up their eyes to a way of thinking that's important to you?

Jeff Gothelf:

For me, it's less about games. I don't know that I've ever successfully incorporated games into. I mean, I've done it a couple times, done what you might call it, that Pictionary game with Post-it notes where you draw the picture and then you write on top of it-

Daniel Stillman:

Oh, visual telephone?

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. Visual telephone. That's what it's called. Yeah. I forgot what it was called.

Daniel Stillman:

It's hard to play online, but possible.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yes. That's a great one for showing how handoffs and how communication mutates through series of handoffs. For me, I've found that in my teaching, it's been a series of prompt questions that prompt them to think differently. So for example, one of the big questions I ask these days, especially when I'm talking about objectives and key results, because organizations are so focused on output to get them thinking about outcome. One of the big, most powerful prompt questions I ask is. "What will people be doing differently when we deliver the app, the service, the feature?" Whatever it is, because they never think about that, right? There's such a fixation on delivery that, just prompting them to think about the next thing. Okay, what happens then? What will people be doing differently if we do a great job?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right? And then, okay. Then what are people doing today, right? And where's that gap and why does that gap exist? And so you're sort of leading them down this path. I do it with questions, less so with games, but that to me, those are the kinds of prompts that at least open up new ways of thinking about the work.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Finding a really, really directed question. And I feel like there's sometimes it's the logical sequencing of the question where you say, you don't just say, what will people be doing differently? You start with, what do you want? What are you going to make and dot, dot, dot, let's think about the real impact, let's not leave that out.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yes, exactly.

Daniel Stillman:

The reason I wanted to have this conversation with you is because it was really eye-opening for me and always really nice that the vase and flower exercise resonated with you and seemed to reveal some deeper truth about the questions of design, and what are we designing. Capital D design versus lowercase D design. And I want to peel apart some of those layers with you in this conversation, what did the, the question of, are we making a vase versus a way of experiencing flowers open up for you? What was surprising about it to you?

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. It's amazing to me having seen her in action a few times now, how powerful, again, a simple prompt, right? The change in the prompt can make people think about this and it showcases the power of creative, like how much creativity lies in an organization. Right? And how much creativity do you unleash simply by changing the prompt?

Daniel Stillman:

Right.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Jeff Gothelf:

Daniel Stillman:

Right.

Jeff Gothelf:

It might, it might be decorated. It might be hexagonal. It might be round. Right? But nevertheless, it's going to all be sort of variations on a theme. As soon as you say, "Come up with a way to experience flowers." Boom. Right? You've taken off the constraints. You said, look, our goal is to get people, to have this type of amazing experience, figure out the best way to do that. And so there's a couple of things that happen there. Number one is you've sort of taken the blinders off and you've expanded the space for people to come up with ideas and they will do it. Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

You made it safe and okay for them to do this. And so they will do it. That to me is amazing. The variety and diversity of ideas that come up are incredible. Right? You can eat the flowers, you can make them digital. People will come up with a thousand different ways to do this. And then it always brings us back to this continuous learning and improvement and agility conversation. So, we've got creativity, we've got innovation. And then it brings it home because it says, "Okay, great. We had 50 people in the room. We have 50 different ways to experience flowers, which one is the best one?" Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

And how do you know? And that again comes back to that prompt. What will people be doing differently if we give them the ideal way to experience flowers?

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Jeff Gothelf:

And so, to me, it's such a powerful shift in thinking. It not only changes kind of what the teams do, but it actually explicitly creates the safe space for creativity to take place, which does not exist with, make me a vase.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes. Yeah. I feel like what I've seen and some of the cultures that I've practiced it in, people do it. And they say, "We are told, we are given so many just do projects. Just go do blank." But then they find out there's much more behind the request. And so doing this exercise with the executive leadership teams, I've been prototyping this recently, it gives me an opportunity to say, "This is what your people are doing. They're telling us, they think you're asking for them for questions over here on the vase side. And I believe you probably have a whole host of ways you can ask them for what you really want. Sometimes it's okay to say, "Yeah. Give me a hexagonal vase that holds flowers, but probably what you need most of the time is, I wanted to find the outcome, not the output. I want the experience, not the object."

Daniel Stillman:

I think for me personally, I think in terms of changing a culture of an organization to be more human centered, I noticed when people draw a vase, is it's a vase. Sometimes there are flowers, mostly not. When you draw a way of experiencing flowers, there are people there's action. There's emotion. There is life. There is an experience. And it's like, what's a vast foR? A vase is for experiencing flowers, but we don't picture the person. And we don't picture the emotion. And that to me is that's one of the uh-huh that I like to give people is like, "This is what we are really trying to do. The outcome is the human experience.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. That's a really great observation actually, that you see they actually put the people into the creation, right? Like you, you see faces, and bodies, and eyes, and things.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. It tickled me that you were like, "This says something about design." What does design mean to you? What's important about, and why do you value design? What's important about design?

Jeff Gothelf:

It's interesting. Everybody suffers at the hands of bad design. And everybody knows when they come across it, everyone's frustrated by it. Just the simple things, perfect example, right? So I've got a smart TV and that smart TV-

Daniel Stillman:

So smart.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right. The smartest TV. And that smart TV runs all the streaming services. Right? We've got Netflix, and Amazon, and HBO, and Disney. We've got all the streaming services. I have one remote control for the TV, right? The remote control literally functions differently for every single one of the streaming services. Right? And to be clear, it works best in Netflix. Right? When Netflix is the service that's running now, everything's sort of, the universal remote works, how you'd expect it to work. Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

With prime, it's a disaster. with Disney, you have to exit the service once you've selected a movie that you don't want to see to come back to the top. Right? That's designed, right? That's thinking about the experience, right? We sit down in the evening right now and we're like, "Hey, should we watch Amazon, Disney or Netflix?" I'd say at least half the time we choose Netflix, just because it works better. Right? Everything just is easier to use from every perspective. It just makes it more compelling to use the service. To me, that's design.

Jeff Gothelf:

You've not only solve the problem for me. You're not only providing some kind of an experience for me, but you've thought through how to make it as efficient, as simple, and in the right cases, delightful for me to use that service. And the net result is outcomes, right? The net result is out of three services, 50% of the time we choose Netflix. And then 50% of the time, which is the other two, one of the other two. So they're sharing a percentage, right? And that's incredibly powerful. That's what it means to me.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, and I think with the implication that I'm hearing there is in the context of this exercise, experience, we can say you're a technology company, and that is true, but we are also, everybody is an experienced company. Andy Pauline's is not here, so we have to say it for us, right? Everything that you think is a product is probably a service, because people experience your product over time. People experience your product in a larger context. Even of what you make is pants, people still see it on the rack. Look at it, look at the tag, reverse it. And you've seen this, right? Sometimes you can't read what's on the tag.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right.

Daniel Stillman:

Another company, the tag and you're like, "This tag is a journey. I've been transported into the world of Gore-Tex by this tag." Gore-Tex tags are amazing. They designed the hell out of their tags. They've made it an experience. And I think to me, this is the soul of design. Design implies an experience for a person that we are designing for. And if we're not thinking about them, what are we doing here?

Jeff Gothelf:

I recently wrote a blog post called Intuitive UI is Not a Feature.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Jeff Gothelf:

And like many of my blog posts, they're born out of some recent client-based frustration, right? Where inevitably I've been doing a lot of products work lately and a lot of products strategy work with some clients. I've been challenging the clients to write good product strategy work. And literally, I'd say at least half, if not three quarters of the product strategy work that I've done recently, has at some points come back from the client with a declaration that they will win the market with an intuitive UI.

Jeff Gothelf:

And I'm like, "You've said nothing." Right? "You literally said nothing" Because I guarantee you, you're not going to set out to build an unintuitive UI. Right? "You're not telling me a thing. You haven't done the work. You're not going to deliberately build an unintuitive UI." It's not to say there aren't crappy lies out there. There's a ton.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes, but they're not doing it on purpose.

Jeff Gothelf:

But they're not doing it on purpose. Right? And so this idea of intuitive UI is an abdication of design leadership, frankly, and design work. And it's risk to good design actually making it into the final product. Right? I would much rather have you bring an opinion that says, "We are going to win the market by having one click shopping." Right? At the very least you've got, you've got a sense of what that looks like. Right? We are going to have the shortest possible mortgage application form, something along those lines, right?

Jeff Gothelf:

That is a far more compelling product strategy than intuitive UI and that's design work. Right? That's you doing the design work to say traditionally, mortgage applications are 17,000 steps long and people inevitably drop out, 98% of people drop out before they complete it. Right? So we're going to solve that problem.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right? You're not going to solve that problem with an intuitive UI. You're going to do design work. You're going to do research work, and you're going to determine, right? What the optimum number of questions that you need to ask to make that a successful process. And again, it may not be the shortest possible process, because people might be like, "Well, I only answer three questions. You're going to give me a mortgage based on three questions?" Right? Somehow the legendary IDO Betty Brocker story, right? Like when they made the cake mix. They're like, "Wait, I don't add an egg. I don't do anything." And so now you've got to add egg-

Daniel Stillman:

So it's nothing.

Jeff Gothelf:

Right. But now that you have to add an egg, it's a much more legitimate product, right? That's design work, that's research work. And to me, it manifests in how you define the problem that you're solving and your hypothesis for solving it.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. And to me, I think this question of vase, which is a product, a commodity, a go-do in a way of experiencing flowers, which is experience, diverse thinking, being intentional about what we are, as executives giving them the eye-opening experience that they can ask better prompts of their communities, their employees, their teams, their organizations on purpose. That's their job.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. Right. And look, if you're an executive and someone hands, your product where it says, intuitive UI, you give that back to that person. Right? But that's your job. Your job is to recognize that they're not actually saying anything. Right? And again, to me, I love like when it comes to this kind of stuff, sometimes, believe it or not, sometimes some of the best prompts for design thinking come from non-designers, right?

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah.

Jeff Gothelf:

And one of my favorite pair of questions that comes from Roger Martin, legendary business professor and author. And he wrote an article in Harvard Business Review in 2014, called the Big Lie of Strategic Planning. In that article, he boils down product strategy into two questions. Where will you play? And how will you win? Right? And to me, those are fantastic prompts for any team, including a design team, right? Where will you play? What's the market segment? What's the target audience? What problem you're solving for them, right? Why would they care? And then how will you win? And I guarantee you, if an executive gave you those two questions and you came back with intuitive UI, they would puke on that. And rightfully so.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, the problem is, its incomplete thinking. So, to the prompt you asked earlier is like, "So that what?" An intuitive UI, so that people can do blank in order to accomplish blank. It's just like, "I'm giving you a vase." It's like, "So what?". "So that I can put flowers into it and it's hexagonal, so it can fit into corners. And that's how we're going to win because our vases fit into corners."

Jeff Gothelf:

Right.

Daniel Stillman:

Cool. Great. Now I can tell you thought a little bit more deeply about what you think this thing is and what you think it does.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. And it's amazing right there. All these things come together, right? We've got all these different design thinking and jobs to be done, and OKR, and all kinds of things.

Daniel Stillman:

I know. Jobs to be done just snuck in there. Right. I think it's-

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. Exactly. There's a guy named Bob Moesta. Bob Moesta, he was an associate of Clayton Christensen and he's one of the big jobs to be done, authors and advocates. And there's a story. I think, again, as a HBR. I read a lot of HBR. I think it was an HBR as well. And where he talks about how there were these builders who were building new townhouses and they were struggling to sell them. And they couldn't figure out why, because the townhouse had everything in it, big ceilings, multiple bathrooms and hot tubs in the master suite. And so Bob and his team came in and they were trying to figure out what the job to be done for these home buyers were. And what was interesting was the communities that were being built, were for older folks.

Jeff Gothelf:

And these older folks come with furniture. Furniture they've had with them for a long time, especially these dining room sets. And they were kind of big. I used to drag these things around too, I believe believing when I was younger. These big dining room sets and they didn't fit into the living rooms of these new construction town homes. And so the target audience, the job to be done, was not only to buy a new home, but to buy a new home that actually allowed them to bring in the furniture that made it feel like a true a home for themselves. And they couldn't because the living rooms were too small for these sort of old school, giant dining room sets.

Jeff Gothelf:

And so again, it's a design conversation. It's a research conversation. It's a customer centered design thinking conversation, like jobs to be done. It's about understanding what you're solving for and how you're going to solve for it.

Daniel Stillman:

Yeah. Well, I feel like we only have a little bit of time left, so I want to make a, it may sound like a needle scratching across a record sound that some kids won't even know about.

Jeff Gothelf:

You may be asking yourself, how I found out, how I got here?

Daniel Stillman:

But I think all the questions you're asking yourself about the community building for forever employable, all will revolve around these same questions. And I also imagine that Money Networks is like that townhouse, right? Where you're like, "Why can't I do blank? I want to be able to do blank with these people. They bought it. They've built a software product that enables you to do certain things and not others." And you are not trying to build a vase, you're trying to build a way of experiencing flowers. You want people to come together and have real conversations about their professional growth. And you have to do it through technology.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah.

Daniel Stillman:

So I'm just curious, to me, I think community building is something that everybody needs to work on. We were talking about this in our check-in on Monday, building community for ourselves in all sorts of different ways and also building community for others that we benefit from in various ways. Like I have a community facilitation, Friday, and I learn from the safe space that I've created for these folks. I learned from them every time they try something new and it pushes my edge and I have a group of people I can prototype with.

Jeff Gothelf:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Daniel Stillman:

Why are you building this community? Why go to all of the effort? I will share with you a Twitter thread that talks about how these types of communities that you and I are both trying to build are the hardest things to build, bar none.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. It's the same reason why I wrote the book, right? I wrote the book not just to share my story, but because I believe this is the future of professional development and career. I believe that taking control of the narrative, telling your story, owning your brand, and then creating a reality where you are continuously attracting opportunities towards you is the future of careers and career growth. And I know there's a ton of people who want to do this. They face a tremendous amount of obstacles sometimes self-imposed, sometimes not.

Jeff Gothelf:

So I don't have to do this by myself, right? I don't have to do this alone. I have someone I can bounce an idea off of. I have someone who will help me amplify this. I don't have to beg the community for retweets. People just kind of do this because that's what we do for each other here. That's my hope, is that people find inspiration. They find that accountability to get the work done, they find feedback for their work, so that it gets better. And then ultimately some support for getting the word out.

Daniel Stillman:

It's really interesting. One of the phrases you just used is one of Dave Gray's way of defining culture, the way things are done around here, right? What are some of the challenges you feel like you're facing as you establish norms, and culture, and language around this, inside of this group of people?

Jeff Gothelf:

It's going to be tough. It's going to be interesting because for people who aren't used to blogging every week, for people who aren't used to tweeting every day, for people who aren't used to being on stage in front of others, there is a tremendous amount wrapped up in each one of these ideas that they want to put out there. And so, if I'm new to this and I come in, and join the community. And I share a piece and the community rips it apart, and then I share another piece and community rips that apart, I'm out of here, right? I'm not getting any value out of this.

Jeff Gothelf:

There's a real risk in the challenge is to build a safe space where people can feel comfortable sharing, but also somehow miraculously are really good at critique. That part is part of it is still missing for me, like how they will miraculously all get good at critique and feedback. There are certainly rules of the road, right? No one has any dumb ideas, et cetera. That to me is a big challenge here.

Daniel Stillman:

Oh my God, it's a universal challenge. I literally just posted, because actually this came up in our conversation on Monday, the ending of Ratatouille where I'd actually know this it's Peter O'Toole is the voice of the critic. And he-

Jeff Gothelf:

Anton Ego.

Daniel Stillman:

Anton Ego. And it's a wonderful quote about how the job of the critic is easy, but that we all have to become friends of the new. And I posted a section of the video and I tagged... I don't know if you've read Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor's book called Discussing Design. I had them on the podcast a couple of years ago. I think it's so important to have a culture of critique and to have a framework around critique. I'm always a big fan of Rose, Thorn, Bud, because you said, "Hey, here's what I like. Here's what I don't like. And here's some potential that I see." Having a framework, I mean, you didn't ask me for advice. I'm giving you some anyway.

Jeff Gothelf:

No. It's good. Thank you.

Daniel Stillman:

Adam and Aaron were the whole book about it because the big myth they were trying to bust was like, "oh, critique is not just fancy feedback. It's being really intentional about the..." I mean, what I'm using my language, it's designing the conversation to say, "Here's what I was trying to solve. Here's the type of feedback I need back. Don't tell me about the colors." Right? And this is where I feel you've probably taught this a hundred times inside of organizations. I know.

Jeff Gothelf:

Sure.

Daniel Stillman:

Being intentional about how we ask for help is nontrivial.

Jeff Gothelf:

It's not. It's not, I hope and I have expectations and we'll see how it goes.

Daniel Stillman:

I think you're also like to bring it back to our first conversation. It's almost like you're hoping to create more Josh, Jeff pairs.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah. That would be amazing. If people could find their sort of their yang. Right?

Daniel Stillman:

Right.

Jeff Gothelf:

Into their yang or whatever it is. Right? That would be amazing. To me, that would be a tremendous success that people can start to build those kinds of groups and do that. That's what I hope. And it's going to take some stirring and amplification from us as well, but I'm optimistic.

Daniel Stillman:

That's awesome. Okay. So my new final questions are, what are your uh-huh's from this conversation? What are you taking out from this conversation?

Jeff Gothelf:

That's a good question, actually. My uh-huh's are that framing your requests with good prompts is key to getting the answers that you want and for opening up new perspectives.

Daniel Stillman:

Yes.

Jeff Gothelf:

And I think the other benefit of framing the questions correctly is that you actually create the safe space for the best possible answers to emerge. I think that's a thing that permeates everything that we've talked about here today. So those are the two biggest takeaways for me.

Daniel Stillman:

It does. You connected it all. That's amazing. I agree with you. That's a big uh-huh for me as well. It is our job to dial in, to ask for the conversation we want to have. And I think that's true from an executive in the middle of an organization, and also inside or outside, it's okay to ask for what you want and to frame it up, how you need. And then you can get what you need.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yes. Exactly.

Daniel Stillman:

Is there anything I didn't ask you about that I should've asked you about?

Jeff Gothelf:

No, I think it folks want to join the community. They can go to becoming.foreveremployable.com and that's about it really. That's all good stuff.

Daniel Stillman:

Well, I like the becoming. That's nice, because there's foreveremployable and now there's becoming.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yes. If you go to foreveremployable.com, you'll find everything about the book. And if you go to becoming.foreveremployable.com, you will go to the mighty network.

Daniel Stillman:

That was my last, last question, which is where should people go on the internet to find you? So I'm glad we addressed that.

Jeff Gothelf:

Super easy. Jeffgothelf.com, foreveremployable.com or LinkedIn. Lots of activity there these days.

Daniel Stillman:

Jeff, thanks for making the time to have this conversation with me. A lot of great things that we unpacked. So I'm glad you made the time.

Jeff Gothelf:

Yeah, this was great. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

Daniel Stillman:

End scene.

Jeff Gothelf:

Excellent. And wipe.