The full transcript of my conversation with Dan
This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.
Daniele: Hey Dan, such a pleasure to have you here today.
Dan Levy: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Meet Dan
Daniele: My first question to you is, when you're joining a birthday party, how do you usually present yourself?
Dan Levy: I would say my name's Dan and my spirit animal is a bear and it's way past my bedtime.
Where are the beers? That would generally be the pata. But if you were to ask me in a professional context, and I try never to go there if I'm at a party, say my name's Dan, I'm in the business of innovation, that means I help organizations figure stuff out that they don't know how to ask, and they don't know where to go.
And that involves whether they're trying to figure out what the future of their product, service, company, industry looks like, and I work with them, or my company More Space for Life works with them, to figure that out. to figure out the questions that they're trying to look for to discover new opportunities for growth which result in some form of innovation or a better service or product experience of some kind.
Dan the bear workshop facilitator
Daniele: And so I'm very interested about the bear. Why the bear for the spiritual, a spiritual animal?
Dan Levy: Oh, it's because of my dad. My dad is Harry Bear. He was Harry Bear. And I've always liked the bear. I just like it. It's fierce and it's cuddly.
Daniele: Okay, like the double side of it.
Dan Levy: Double side.
Yes. Like being a dad. You have to be lovable, but you have to be fierce at the same time. You still have to have your dad discipline. And as a workshop facilitator, as well, as somebody that collaborates a lot, you have to be cuddly, you have to listen, you have to be the, that great...
Big presence in the room, but also in the great big invisible presence of safety, let me just emphasize. But sometimes you need to be a bit fierce to keep things moving and to bring everyone back to task.
Daniele: I love this bear analogy because often, when I do workshops, I feel exactly the same emotion, which is sometimes you are the bear in the fact that You're here showing this is structured.
It's going to go well, and it's like reassuring and stuff, like you take your deep professional voice, and sometimes it's like more mama bear, which is like going to take the one who's crying and say, Hey, it's going to be okay and maybe protect the person from the nasty guy who just said a very bad word.
Thank you. Harsh comment and being mama bear, you cuddle and you fight back, and you create, you try to create, to bring back also the family together and say, hey, this wasn't nice, let's talk in another way,
Dan Levy: Yeah. So I take that one step further and I'm going to complete it.
I'd try and be pooh bear, because pooh bear approaches things as a beginner, in the beginner's mindset and simplifies things. Because as We go in and we deal with very, especially from human centered design, very complex problems. And often, that means that we have to negotiate some form of bias, some sort of political agenda, whatever that might be.
And often we might be working with people that aren't familiar with working in this space, which means that they're not going straight to solutions, they're problems, and they have their own language with acronyms and stuff. So as Poober, we have to come in as the innocent and with the beginner's mind.
We have to simplify things and also promote that level of vulnerability in the room to help encourage people to share. And open up. I'd go Pooh Bear, for me anyway, that's
Daniele: the lead. Pooh Bear that's... As, I'm not a native English speaker. For me, it sounds like poo bear. Which means poo like poop or what is this a fake?
We need the Winnie the Poo.
Dan Levy: Winnie the Poo. Okay. Good to know. Winnie the poo. Okay. Okay, so there's the Cartoon guide and Yeah, and there's a great book called The Tale of P. Let's start there with the first book. Recommendations. Perfect. The Tale of Poo. It's one of the most amazing books and one of the first books I ever read that come.
Got me on my headset and an understanding of spirituality.
Daniele: And may I ask you, because from what I've seen and I've read you, you are quite experienced workshop facilitator. Yeah. You little bit, you're quite at a at a high level. And as I'm also dabbling in worship facilitation, I'd like to.
to maybe spend just a little time knowing what's your approach, what's the way you're making it a bit different than others maybe? Because, we all have a bit of a style going on. What's your kind of signature move, your element That, that people say, Oh, this is a workshop made by Dan, it has that flavor.
Dan's workshop signature moves
Dan Levy: All right. I gave one of my signature moves away, one of my special moves away on LinkedIn the other day, which was the Elmo. Elmo is the, I like to. Have a level of familiarity in the room. So I use ELMO enough. Let's move on. It's like a danger word, which kind of takes it to that brink of always going to be a bit saucy here by introducing a safe word or a danger word and then bringing in ELMO and then using it as an acronym.
It just confuses people and also lowers the level of stakes because I find that, again, going back to complex problems, high stakes, they spent money to bring all these people together. How do you lower the stakes and promote that vulnerability? The flavor or the thing that I feel that is a more space for like workshop.
Is that we like to provide a double dip experience when
Daniele: we go back.
How to create psychological safety or create the double dip experience
Daniele: Okay. I want to know more about the double dip. What is a double
Dan Levy: dip experience? Okay. Double dip means that when you're with your family and friends, you feel comfortable enough to take a potato chip or a stick or vegetable or whatever it might be, and dip it in a hum.
Or whatever the dip is, eat it and put it back in and dip again. And everybody in the room's doing that and there's no worries. They don't worry about it like the slobber or whatever else, what they've eaten or anything related to COVID. They love each other and they have that trust. And that's something I try.
And more space. The more space kind of method is to try and make that level ground. And it doesn't matter hierarchy, role, whatever that might be. We want to create a double dip experience. So people feel they come out of a workshop or some sort of program with us and they're energized, not exhausted.
Daniele: Great. And how did you create a double dip moment? Now, is there things that you have changed in your way of doing the workshop or doing the preparation that promotes this, ah, okay, now I'm not in the usual workplace? This is a different moment. How do you create this shift? Because it can be very political work, usually work is quite political, quite structured, and suddenly going from structured, political, alternative to, I can just double dip and it's okay.
It's quite a shift. How do you manage to, to make that
Dan Levy: happen? With any product or experience where you've, where you don't think about behind the backstage and you get bought into that experience based on the simplicity and the effortlessness of, doesn't matter if we need to change tact, whatever, We know that person's got this, that's really the magic, that's where the magic actually happens outside of the workshop or the the construction.
And then when we're in there, it's like jazz. There's a framework, there's a beat, there's a steady beat, but it doesn't matter because we can go off in whatever direction and I can give people that confidence knowing that we have a scope in terms of our discussion. Nothing's going to be lost.
Everything's going to be captured. The way we go about the activities, the narrative of the conversation or whatever it is guided. The flow of energy between people is always managed. But even to extremes, I was in a workshop last week where things got very heated and people kept looking around at me wondering when I'm going to, when I was going to tell it, but I can, I don't know when you're, when you're in that flow and in that mode.
Semaless and improvised workshop experiences
Dan Levy: Like being a parent, you do things that are quite natural, that you don't think about, and after the fact, you're like I didn't really think about that. That's awesome that how that kind of just happened. It's almost like a reflex. So hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea. But really. The construction and the heavy lifting happens outside, just like the iPhone.
It's beautiful on the outside. The experience is seamless, but you know it's had a hell of a lot of work to get to that point where you just press a button or whatever it might be. There's a hell of a lot of work, as like for your videos, for your content that goes into creating something.
Simple.
Daniele: And, it reminds me of of my brother. My brother is a jazz musician, so it's a lot of, improvisation and when we, when I was next to his room, it was a nightmare because then I learned what is. Free Jazz and what is improvisation. It's not improvisation. It's a nightmare of training.
The guy eight hours a day was doing like da. And, and learning specific ways to transition from one place of the piano to the other. And once I was like, but mate, why did you do that? Isn't improvisation, just coming on the spot, listening what the other guy does and doing it.
when I was saying something interesting to me, which was... You can only do that when you have a library. of things you already have tried and know, and that you have, that you are really good at. Because then, the guy just says, does something on the trumpet which is pa pam, and you say, okay, with pa pam, I can do, I have all of these boxes that I can use, and I'm going to use this one.
But basically, this happens at such a speed, that it feels like improvisation. But in fact, it's high. Those is of learning, which then make it possible that people are just like, okay, now I'm just going to throw section B, 44 it's in there and and a good workshop for me feels a lot like that, which is, On the spot, people feel like, oh, this is magic.
The guy improvises it's awesome. And you don't know, first, the years of practice who are behind it. And also the months, weeks, hours of preparation of thinking, okay, the schedule has to be this, the energy level here. We have to make this transition so that it happens. Oh, there is this political person in which we need to take care especially well.
Oh, there is this danger here that I know they told me. There is this word, which is a trigger word in the organization. And I have to learn to use another word to speak about that because when I speak of branches, it makes people think about the merger, which is not the goal today. So we're going to speak about shops and I have to relearn that word, which is quite interesting.
Dan Levy: Yeah, and also whilst that's going on, through that level of mastery, like going back to your brother, he knows that he's got the framework of the construction of the piece that he's playing, just like the framework of the structure of the workshop, allows you that freedom. Because then you're at that next level of mastery where...
You're not necessarily thinking about time or anything like that. You're like how do we get from A to B or how do we get to this specific, hit this beat to get to this part of a conversation or get people focused here? And it's just like little things that you might be a little bit subtler, that you'll do to get that response.
Just like the little things that he'd do. will be subtle, but will have such a neat impact in regards to how people react or have that experience.
About More Space For Light
Daniele: And so what are the experiences that you design with your company? So a workshop is one part of the work you do is, are you mainly focused on workshops?
Are you, do you do basically all of it? Do you go up to implementation? So if you're speaking about innovation where is this kind of your specialization? Where do you start?
Dan Levy: Where do you end? Okay, that's a really good question. We really focus right at the start. Right up until prototype. From a product perspective, right up to prototype.
From an org design perspective, right up until proficiency. We might help, and this is why we focused our efforts now. We're helping organizations basically Build their innovation capabilities. So from a product perspective, we help all the way through to prototypes. That could be like on a project or a program. We're focusing more now on capabilities. How can we help organizations?
Figure out how to mobilize teams and update and create processes. to be able to support new opportunities for innovation within the organization. And that would might end all the way through to training. We might come in as a a team or I'm working at the moment on my own within an organization as an innovation leader.
in a fractional capacity where I'm coming in supplementing a gap and helping the team learn and build their capabilities as well as plugging in their capacity and a capability. gap within their organization. And that's really interesting because two of the things that we really want to be able to two of the things that we really want to be able to help organizations with is a level of accountability.
So that goes beyond the session or a workshop or some form of interaction to ensure that whether that's we're going to make this change to our organization. We're going to, we're going to help our stakeholders, customers, we're going to realize this new opportunity in the market all the way through to actually making it something tangible in the world to sustainability and that's the way we work and the types of Thinking that we are bringing into organizations.
We don't want to be the owners for that. We want to demystify. Just like what you do with all your service design videos, all your content. We want to make it relatable and accessible to everyone. Everyone there's no black magic in what we do. It just means you've just got to think a little bit differently.
And that's tough, but it's, as Jake Nape says, creativity, and that way of thinking is like a muscle. You've just got to keep working on it. And so that's really the space we're in at the moment.
Accountability in consulting
Daniele: I like your notion of accountability, how it adds something. Looking at that space, of consultancies coming to help, often there is this feeling sometimes of.
Oh, we're just a consultant, we come, we bring what we have to bring, not our responsibility anymore, and and I like here how you, at least from my understanding, it's, you're saying, yes, we come in, we try to bring all the capabilities, demystify but also create a sense of responsibility of what's happening, which is, This is not just theater.
We're not just going to throw out ideas on a wall and stick it out, what we decide is what we're going to do. And if we're going to do that, we're going to be serious about it, and this kind of accountability is something which is extremely powerful if you can bring it as an external person.
How, how you can say this... It's something that will be done and it's not just an exercise in in team building where, oh, it's fun and it's exciting.
Dan Levy: As a business owner, somebody that like running more space, somebody or a company that invests. with us to help them. They've made a big decision there, obviously, that they're trying to do something differently.
So for us, from our point of view, we want to make a difference. We want to go in and we want to help them get to a great outcome. I'm not just saying that, like that is what I believe. I'm really, in my pitches, usually I'm like, I just want to do the work because I, it sounds super exciting. It sounds cool.
And this is why More Spaces exists. So I can. Work with cool people and do cool stuff, very simple. And that comes back to our values of helping people and being able to ensure that it isn't just theatre. What is the takeaway? What things can we make change? And there's been occasions, like we're not perfect, there's been occasions where we've gone in and worked with organisations and, it felt like that.
The tiny things that make the biggest impact
Dan Levy: However. Revisiting that organization, maybe six months later or going through the organization and coming back to the team. There'll be like half a dozen or two insights or something that's really stuck and made a change, always. And they're the things you don't even know. It's crazy.
Daniele: Indeed, it's often the things that you don't think at first, which are then often the parts that people just...
remember and have the most impact off and it's quite interesting.
Dan Levy: Yeah, like an outcome of a workshop program or an outcome of an innovation program could present an opportunity. That is enacted on. However, that thinking and the decisions and the knowledge learned and the skills and the capabilities would be applied to an infinite number of different, whether small or big decisions that have made a difference to that organization.
And that's an intangible outcome that's very hard to measure
Daniele: often. That's like the one time I had one of the worst workshops I made, where I was like, Oh, this. Basically, you feel, ah, it went to shit, but I did my best and you think, okay, it's part of the game. You can't be always doing something great and and you're learning, which is good.
And a few months later, one of the participants came to me and said, Oh, you know what? Through the methods that you shared with us, now I was able to better take care of my mental health because now I know how I can show to, how I can put out all what I have in my brain, which is worrying me. I'm starting to classify it and to make order with it.
And she was like, Oh, this was something which was so useful. And you're right. Okay, this was unexpected because the goal of the workshop wasn't that, but as you say, it's like it trickles in other parts. And that's like often the part that is a bit invisible. And when we get this this blessing of seeing, that people reveal to us months later, Oh, this is what, how we use it now.
It's always something which is
Dan Levy: quite powerful. It's amazing. It's amazing. Going back to that Elmo example I mentioned earlier. So I posted that on LinkedIn. Because I just thought it was something that could be helpful and somebody got back in touch and they said they used it. And then they asked me for a little bit more clarification.
And that's awesome! Like, how good is that? I managed to make a difference and help somebody use something that they've never seen before. That's awesome. That's cool. And like you said, even down to the personal stuff, where you don't know, because often... You're focusing on the objective, the flow, all the rest of it, but everyone's carrying their own baggage and their own narrative and whatever happens, they've got something else that is on their mind that is a distraction from that, that they'll take something away.
The good stuff
Daniele: And and I think this is a great transition for us because I'd like to explore this chapter, how to better understand the people you serve and see what are tiny bits that you felt, Oh, this resonated with me, like in the workshop example, where someone says, Oh, this Elmo part, this resonated with me and I'm using it and it and I maybe use it in another place.
Dan Levy: Yeah, absolutely. So there were some great things and there were some things that I thought could be reframed. And I think that comes just from my mindset. But I'm going to directly answer the first thing, the thing that really stuck out to me:
The good stuff: summarizing what people say
Dan Levy: it's principle number 308. Summarize what I said so that I can disagree with it. And often... I've done it already here. People will say things, and usually it's the thought bubbles like right at the front of their mind, right on the tip of their tongue, they'll say it, and if you just note it back, note it down, sorry, and don't give it a playback of some description or something, you will only get face value.
It's almost like when you ask those five why's. To figure out what level of abstraction, what level of altitude you need to go, when you present or so what you're telling me is that, you use, I say, I'm going to just give you a playback and repeat the steps because as you express here, it's great because people get to they get proof that you're actually listening to them, but they also get to hear what they've said, which gives them the opportunity to respond to it, to change it, to deepen certain parts.
And to some degree, I feel like it gives you permission to interrogate it because you get that confirmation from them when they say, yes, that's exactly what I said. And then you can say, could you give me an example, or tell me how you felt when, or want me for a time when, etc. So that's something that really resonated for me.
Daniele: And it's definitely a powerful thing when, I'm working in a country which is multi language, which means that we often work, in three or four languages, three languages at the same time. That's like a usual thing. And in this context, which are culturally very diverse.
Having this thing where you can say, this is how I understood it in my words, is a really good check in just for also the kind of cultural biases and cultural understanding of it. Yes, you got the idea but you missed this important part. And it's ah, okay. So please, can you explain that to me?
Because there is a language thing that I didn't got here. So can you maybe reveal that, and it's. It's it helps just to avoid the mistakes of thinking, oh yeah, just the Winnie the Pooh example, where you said, Winnie Winnie the Pooh bear, for me it was like Pooh bear, I was like, bear?
Why
Dan Levy: is he talking about
Daniele: Pooh? Why is he talking about that? He's ah, Winnie the Pooh, okay, the thing of the kid. Okay, Now I know what you're talking about.
The good stuff: Don't blame people
Dan Levy: I'll tell you something else as well that really resonated with me was principle number 306. Blame the context, not the people. The only thing I ever blame, Daniele, is the boogie. I never blame anything but the boogie. I don't believe in blame. And I try and instill that with the people that work with us and the people we work with.
So that's team members. Getting rid of blame. Blame is, it's like a full stop. It's really hard to move past blame. However, I really like how you framed it around the context, not the people.
Adapting to the speed of organizations
Dan Levy: And what I find and you might find this similar as well as other practitioners. that go into an organization is that when we step into an organization, whether they're giving us something to go away and do, or we're going and integrate within their organization, we have to adapt to their rhythms.
Generally, an organization won't move as fast as us because they have an org structure, they have processes, they have different permissions, they have different people that have to be put in and spoken to, etc. So we're finding this, for example, with the project we're working on at the moment where The speed isn't what we thought and I was having a conversation with somebody on the team that was a little bit concerned that the lack of momentum or the thing, the delays, etc.
have, caused, have been detrimental to the project. However, I reframed that with them and I had a conversation. I'm like actually. This has given us an opportunity to question our approach, to look for those gaps and be more thorough in what we're doing, whether that's in terms of our research, whether that's the people we're speaking to, to gather those insights, whether that's the training, is there an opportunity here where we can bring other people in to train.
I guess where I'm coming from is... Always look at a challenge or an obstacle as an opportunity. What can we, how can we over, how can we use this to our advantage? So I think that was a really good point.
Daniele: My dad is a psychologist and he's got something quite weird about speed, which I think relates quite well to what you're saying, which is that...
We have to adapt to the speed. For example, when he told me this story, which is quite strange. When he gets new patients in he goes and goes to the reception and shows them which is the room where they're going to have the session. And usually what he does is he says to people, Oh, just, go forward, and he's behind them.
And he points them, it's the door just at the end left. And what he uses that moment to is just to synchronize himself with the speed, the way of walking of the person. And so basically he's trying to feel, okay, where's this person at, you
Dan Levy: know, okay. Oh,
Daniele: she's very energetic, okay. I need to go.
Okay. Now I feel a bit more, the body is giving me a bit of the emotion, of where she is, or if it's someone who is very depressed, and who was a bit more okay, this is very difficult, and say, and he's trying to get there to feel that. Because it helps him also to then obviously empathize better with the person because he had a few of the emotions, he felt how it was, and then he can also, you reuse that in the session and speak it up.
It feels that there is something that is tense, even if people don't spoke about it, he can go back to, oh, in the reception area, when, as we were working, I felt there was something stressful, buttery. Can you maybe share a bit about that? And I think there is a, here potential for us to do a bit of the same, as consultants coming in our organizations at first to take the same speed and say, how does that feel for us?
, oh. And then being able to speak about that also is it okay that this, that it is the speed is the problem, is it not a problem? Do we wish we will be faster to, are we, how can we use it as an opportunity?
Dan Levy: Yeah, sometimes that's very hard. But again, that comes down to the mastery, the experience, that takes time.
In a workshop, we'll intentionally put in energizers, not just to set the context of the type of conversation we're going to have, but also to test, like, Where people are at in terms of their mindset. How far will they stretch? Will they take risks? So it's, yeah, it's really, it's these little subtle things.
The bad stuff: Negativity
Dan Levy: I've got a few more notes. Cool. Let's go on then. I'm listening. All now this again comes from the word blame doesn't fit in. I hate that word blame. I never try and use it when I can. I found that some of the framings in some of the principles.
Look at the negative as opposed to focusing on the positive and, for example, principle 307, ask me what I hated about similar experiences. So here, I feel, to me, rather than I've never been one to believe in, oh I've gone all, I've gone all, I've gone all furry. Never been one to believe in focusing on weaknesses.
I, I've been aware of weaknesses, but I always believe you should push to your strengths and look how you can supplement your weaknesses by bringing on other people. Whatever that might be, as well as professional development, but this question in particular asked me what I hated in past similar experiences, especially you used it in the context of a manager, tell me about a manager, something the way that they supervise me, that kind of rubbed me up the wrong way.
The way we reframe this is by asking. How can, how do you work at your best? Give me an example at work at your best. What are the types of things that slow you down, that prevent you from being your best self, from preventing you from effectively communicating? So it's more just, it's getting to the same outcome, but it's just a different way of framing that.
The bad stuff: speak to the customers of the competitors
Dan Levy: So the other one that I was a little bit concerned about was speak to your customers of your competitors. And I don't know about you, but what I always find is getting organizations to speak to their customers is almost like gold standard already.
But getting them to speak to the customers of their competitors is it's just like, how do we do that when we can't even get to our how do we get to our own customers? And we recently worked with an organization on a competitive review and we were trying to be a bit sneaky in that competitive review because we wanted to figure out how does the customer, how does the company service the customers?
What are they saying? Who are the types of customers they're going for? And we did things like contacted support presented issues and things like that. And then looked at what they were doing, their images, their social, those things like that. So I think like when you offer that piece of advice, particularly I agree with the sentiment in terms of learning.
But I believe there are other ways in order to get an idea of what your competitors are doing and the sentiment of their customers. And I feel like it would be helpful for people I don't know if you found using Reddit, you, things like that, to be able to see, like for example, here we went on lots of forums to see what people were saying about competitors.
So there's other ways where you don't have to directly talk to people. You can get how they serve their customers, their customer service, what their FAQs are, who are the people that are represented on there, what are some of the reviews. What are the Reddits, like you can get enough of a picture, not great, but I think that's really, how would you react to that?
Like what you seeing
Daniele: from that? So there, there are two ideas that you're sharing and and I will put one as a bookmark to come back, right? For right after. The first one is this notion of should we frame things positively, negatively? Both, this is the one that I'd like to bookmark to come after.
And then there's this very practical thing on.
How to find out what the customers of your competitors feel?
Daniele: How do I get to speak with users, people who use a service which is in mind, but which is similar to in order to learn? And I think one thing that you mentioned here, which I deeply agree with, is this fact that, people already share a lot. Online.
So it's quite easy these days if you're using X or Twitter or or other platforms, forums, and this kind of stuff, go and watch and search, for very emotional terms. I'm pissed, I hate this, or this was great, best time ever, and looking at these very high emotions either very low or very high and looking at, okay, what's happening?
This is stuff that back in the days when I was designing websites, I always did when I said, okay. We didn't have that much budget for user research, but we knew we could spend two hours searching on internet something, and so when we were working with a museum, I told, I said, okay, let's just go and watch all the reviews about Disneyland and all of this stuff, and what people say.
And we learned very practical stuff, hey, what people hate usually is they go on the website. And they don't know right away if it's open or not. And what they wanted to know is it open now today? It's I'm looking at Disneyland now. It's okay, this changes our way of showing the schedule.
Today is open. Today is closed. It's like this kind of little stuff, or we will be open in three hours. It's like this little information changed it. And. It happened because we were interested in learning the experience of the competitors. And I think there, there is a lot of learning. How you do that, then, obviously, there are maturity levels, sometimes you don't even have time to do proper user research.
And going for something like that is great. Sometimes you have the budget and then obviously you spend it more on the actual users, because you think there is more to, to learn. And sometimes people are like very experimental and say, Hey! We have a bit more budget. We have a bit more time.
Surprise us. And then you can, good, that's maybe a place where we can go to the next level and say, hey, let's let's bring in some users from other services and and see how their experience is, and what, why do they like it so much, and this is stuff that we can learn
Dan Levy: from.
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. There's other ways. Like you just mentioned Twitter, you've only got to put, I think product X is the worst ever. And you'll get a thousand people that will just say you're talking rubbish. And then you can build up some sort of rapport and learn and deep dive from there.
But yeah, you have I think going back to the word you said, have to be creative.
Daniele: Indeed. And so that's really the thing is often with these elements, it's most, I would assume your most advice that is given. Mind included, always needs this translation to your specific area, culture, time, budget, constraints, where you say, okay, the idea is not so bad, doesn't apply, but what does it, how does it inspire me to go further?
And I think this is usually the question is, which should be basically the question we always have when we read whatever we read or interact with someone is like, Not so much do I disagree or do I agree with it, but how can I use it to work further in what I'm trying to do, you understand?
Sometimes there isn't.
Dan Levy: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it might even be people that work for the company or whatever that you're talking to that use the competitive product, or they might have family that
Daniele: do it. Yeah, indeed. Because people, are not as how can we say that? They are not married to products like they are married to their wife, which means they had previously other girlfriends, other products, and and we can't speak about that.
It's okay to speak about your exes, and that's one thing we can
Dan Levy: do also. We're living in a new world now, that doesn't count.
Framing questions positively
Dan Levy: You wanted to talk about the product positive framing as well. Yeah,
Daniele: indeed. So your way of seeing it, you're saying. I think that framing it positively brings more more value.
Is that
Dan Levy: correct? Yeah, to me, I feel you learn more about what assists and helps people work to become their best self than the things that they hate. Again, you're getting into that whole blame, that person did this, that person did that, and what you're getting is a subjective response based on their own narrative that they're carrying.
What you want to learn, if you abstract the problem, what you're actually asking you're actually asking, how can I ensure that you can be the best version of yourself? That's what you're asking. And that is the information you'll learn is how you can support them get there, as opposed to, Oh, I won't look over that person.
I won't ask them this. I want to be able to promote the behavior that will be able for them to be able to perform
Daniele: at their best. It's quite interesting because to me, I'm playing devil's advocate because I that sometimes. I see value sometimes being on the very negative side, and then I will do the Swiss guy, which is bringing back the news aspect, but playing the devil's advocate first is for example, one thing that I've learned, which is very powerful and that I've seen is where people working on strategies, for example, and saying, okay, we, we have to do our local strategy and they have to say their position.
We are this or that. Yeah. And one of the best examples I've seen of a positioning was made by a local church, which said something like we are this church for families, blah, blah, blah. And then they had one line, which said, we are not a club, which if churches. is a very interesting positioning because often churches is it's something which is quite closed.
It's oh you come in and you're part of the club, but you have to adapt to, you have to adapt to the club and it takes ages to become part of it. And they're saying quite strongly, instead of saying we are welcome to everyone, which many people say, they're using the negative.
To express, we know we know we have a problem usually, which is this one, and we're trying to fight that problem. Doesn't mean that we're not we're focused only on the negative thing, but they're reinforcing it with the fact that often people react very strongly to the negative, and they use that negative sentence to say, oh, this is important to us by framing it in a negative way, which is, which to me
Dan Levy: feels very interesting.
But that, okay, I'm going to counter and say that's strategy though, isn't it? It's about making choices on what they are and what they aren't. And they've quite obviously included some parts of their strategy in there, but I would have I would argue, going back to the focus on the person in terms of them performing their best work, they would say what their strengths and how they want to work and how they don't.
In that, this is just, in the context of asking somebody the best way that they work, I wouldn't focus on that. But in the context of presenting in terms of we do it on our page, we are not agile coaches. Yeah, indeed. We are not going to come in and be like, why aren't ants for your organization?
This is what we do. So I don't know if they, I don't know I'm sure people will give their opinion whether what we're talking about is a little bit different or, yeah, I'm not too sure. I'm not too sure. But I always try and frame. For positive, once I have an understanding and for positive, I can build a narrative around that in regards to what, why, where are the gaps, or what, why have you made that decision?
What does that mean?
Daniele: So from what I'm understanding is... You're making a difference, which I find quite interesting, which is saying when we're speaking about individuals, framing first the positive will lead to better results, like asking about what are the strengths, what are what's your best work, like when we're in in, in the personal, that's.
So this is what's going to be a very good shift and you're saying it's not like this how you say that flower power thing where we say, Oh, we never speak about the negative, but instead it's a interpersonal, indirect relationship that often leads to better results and sometimes when it makes sense, for example, when we're speaking about, Hey, our company does this just to be clear, this means that we don't do that.
Then. It's quite powerful as a translation to make sure that people understand where the positive is
Dan Levy: going. Yeah, and also it's trying to move away from the subjective and be objective in regards to, my manager was nitpicky. I'm just sticking to that. My manager was this, blah, blah, blah. It's, you're saying, this is how I do my best work.
These are conditions that help me. And these are some of the things that don't. So I'm taking it away from my manager. I'm just depersonalizing it. And and for me that's the from a strategic point of view, I always go back to Roger Martins. Strategy Cascade, what's your winning aspiration, and it's not what isn't your winning aspiration, it's what is your it's just that one thing, because you could be, because you've got to get rid of all the noise to get to that one thing.
The noise informs. What you're, what you are and what you're not, to me anyway.
Daniele: It's a it's this kind of thing. I think to me, what I like really much about these questions is the very emotional part, the part about strong emotions often, are totally biased, but the, but we work with biases, and revealing the strong emotions often then has, creates an interesting conversation.
What was the best day you had at work? It's okay, this isn't, this was the best day. What was the worst day you had at work? This was the day. It was the worst. And playing with these high emotion often reveals that you can then play with the, both with the positives, meaning like if someone gives you, I think this is something that you do quite well, which is if someone gives you the negative, oh, my worst day was when this and this happened.
Oh, does that mean that What you need to have a great day is this. Yeah, absolutely. Ah, okay. I understood you right. Or if someone says, Oh, the best day I had at work when I had only focused work, and I could just spend four hours working very strongly. And you can say, Oh, okay. So does it mean that small interruptions, having Slack messages and stuff, that's the kind of workplace that makes it hard for you to do your work, your best work?
Absolutely. Ah, okay. Now so I think it's quite interesting, to counterbalance it with with this opposite emotion to double check if it's if there is a right understanding.
The bad stuff: Give a number to create a reaction
Dan Levy: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I also have I've, I feel this one's really important. And it was to do with Principle number 310.
Give a number to get reaction. And you talk about your struggles in regards to figuring out if they've got a budget. What I've found is that... We can, the first thing you need to do before you even talk about money or anything like that is make sure they're the right person to have that conversation with before anything.
And something that I've learned over time, because like the money conversation from a creative is really hard because we're constantly questioning what's our worth, where are we see it, all the rest of it, are we providing value?
Resources for better pitching
Dan Levy: There's a great resource Blair Enns. He has a podcast called Two Bobs.
He has Win Without Pitching, a book, and Pricing Creativity, two books. Absolutely amazing. And David C. Baker as well, his co host, really good. And something that I've learned is a framework called BANT. B A N T. BANT looks at Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. And you can put them in any order you BANT,
You're really working out how big the need is for the organization and then, before you get into the budget conversation, is really, do they have the authority? The timing as well with need, timing and need really gives the forcing function. But before you get into the whole money conversation, check you're talking to the right person.
And if you're not... Bring in that person, because otherwise, it's a waste of time. Honestly, because nine times out of ten, they might be the person that's talking to a few different companies, or they they're just getting information. You really, when you're ready to have that, Budget, like when you're ready to talk about putting a proposal in, because proposals aren't cheap.
If you think about the time, the effort, and that's emotional as well, you put in to present to organisations. Especially when you're competing against other people, it's a pain. We've made it a policy, we don't compete unless it's a special circumstance. I hate proposals. I'm quite happy you're going on record to say that.
There you are. Horrible proposals. But if you can talk to the right person, it also means you can build that relationship, and you can start figuring out whether that is the problem that we're solving or not, and you can start a process of running some form of informal dialogue. Look at the BANT framework.
So that's Budget, Authority, Need and Timing.
Daniele: Awesome. I think it's a very good resources for people interested in the conversation about money, which is definitely not an easy one. And that gives like a very good structure to think about it.
Dan Levy: I was just going to say there's also spin as well, so spin and band, they go together.
There's also a book called Same Side Selling and they have a really good framework that you can use for quadrants. Yeah, so there's really good tools
Daniele: there.
Thanks so much for these elements. And I think that are really helpful to, to realize that it's not just about the money. It's also before being able to ask these questions.
Sometimes need to be able to reveal other elements. Is this the right person? Is it do they have a need? Do they don't have a need? Where are they in in their journey?
Asking about numbers outside of budget conversations
Daniele: And, the, this question of the number is something that personally I found interesting outside of only just budgets. For example, when someone asks you, oh, can be very work related thing, but also a personal thing where it's oh, could you help me just a little bit on that?
It's okay, sure I have 30 minutes, like playing with the number and then saying, Oh no, I meant two hours. Ah, okay. So now we are, now we're talking, because often people have a bit of a hard time, translating what they mean and how big it should be, and it's quite interesting to me to see that when you give a number back, and the estimation can be totally wrong, it's if it says that, tell me, Oh, Daniele, I'd like to interview you. Oh, great. How long do you think it's going to take? And say, ah, I
Dan Levy: don't know. It's
Daniele: okay, maybe just 30 minutes. Oh no. It's going to be, it's going to be much longer. Two hours. Ah, okay. Now we're talking. Now we know what's the emotion or, what's the feeling.
And I think sometimes people need that. And it goes beyond numbers. This is something that I've learned a lot. Numbers serve as a prototype, and they can serve as putting something where people can have a reaction. And sometimes when people are very blurry about this kind of stuff, Having a number is a good prototype, but also just saying, oh, maybe we do it like that.
Would that be great? And then people can say no, that's shit, because this. Good, now we're working and building on something and we can. Yeah, exactly. We can do something.
Dan Levy: Yeah, exactly. And that comes back to the conversation we were having before in regards to the kind of the framing of the question and trying to gather that information, you're not really trying to work out what's wrong, you're trying to build the scope, the constraints.
Resources to go further
Daniele: I know you're a very curious man, so I'm quite interested. Are there resources that you think would be very interesting in addition to the book where you think, oh, these will be good pairings? I often say it like that, it's like a book.
It's is it like a wine? You don't take it alone. You take it with something else. Is there something else that you'd recommend? A book, a template, an author an expert or anything
Dan Levy: else? Okay I've given some references already, so that's like Blair Ends, ian Altman wrote Same Side Selling, so that's very much from a sales perspective. In terms of the service design. I'm not pandering to you, but you've got so many resources out there. This is the third book that you've written now. The Service Design Principle. What's it number four or three?
Daniele: This is number
Dan Levy: four of the series. This is number four. I've read the, I've read two of them then.
I've been following you for, God, before COVID. No, COVID yeah. And I can see you're consistent, you've got programs, things like that.
Communities to follow
Dan Levy: I feel that you, there's plenty of communities out there as well that you can join. There's the Mural community Miro have a community as well as Invision.
We're part of their design league community, so I'm learning about what's happening over there and on their Slack channels.
There's also Butter. Butter I feel remiss if I didn't mention Butter. They've got a great forum and places that you can seek out this information.
Tool: Sessionlab
Dan Levy: We use Session Lab in terms of workshops and planning our workshops.
Yeah, they're brilliant. They've been there for... for a while. And but yeah, that would be where I'd be going.
Job to be Done Framework
Dan Levy: If I was looking in terms of understanding people, Jobs to be Done Framework with Jim Kalbach, who's also a great jazz player as well. And back to our, Jim is the most generous, beautiful human being I know.
Future of Now Podcast
Dan Levy: On our page, we've got A list of references on there from when we were doing the Future of Now. If you go in the footer, it's got a Future of Now link. And there is a guy called Christopher Noessel on there who works at IBM. He is one of the cleverest and smartest design practitioners that I know of. So creative and also one of the most amazing dads I've ever spoken to as well.
This man transformed his house for Halloween into Diagon Alley. So the kids went round the house. But he's just, he does a lot of future installs, massive geek into all his sci fi. There's also I could keep going and I'll get, and yeah yeah. I'm going to stop there because I could just go. Look at the guests there and there's some great resources and books that you can jump off of
Daniele: as well.
Indeed, for the curious ones, I think a lot of your episodes of the podcast, had really great guests in there, and I think people just looking at the names, just even if you just do that and Google the people, you will find that already a lot of resources, and obviously if you want to go further, just watch the episodes, and then you have the full view on it.
Dan Levy: We paused it last year, and we're actually redesigning something else which I'm not allowed to talk about. So we're coming back, we're coming back, and I'm really excited.
Daniele: Thank you so much for all these resources. I think people will have enough in their reading lists and and then their bookmarks for the next year, which is a very good thing.
Get in touch with Dan
Daniele: If people want to get in touch with you what would you recommend to
Dan Levy: people? Go on to LinkedIn. I look very different. I've got slick back hair, back then. It was a pre COVID picture. But yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, Dan Levy come on our website, morespaceforlight, come and say g'day.
But apart from that, yeah, LinkedIn's the main place. That's where I do most of my damage. I'm always hiding in plain sight.
Daniele: Thanks so much for spending the time today with me for the conversation where for me, again, it was such a conversation, Like when you speak with a friend in a bar about a book, it's at the end, you learn much more than the book taught you, because it's the conversation that reveals stuff, and the whole conversation about the positive, the negative, how you play with these emotions, was something which I found especially interesting, how we can also use the counter emotions to reveal if we understood well.
I think this was really really deep and interesting. And also learning from your workshop skills at the beginning was also something that was deeply interesting,
Dan Levy: thank you for having me. It's been a delight to share. And if you disagree or want to add to anything, please get in touch.
Daniele: Thanks so much. And have a lovely rest of the day. Take care.