Value Creation Forums and NABC Action Plans

"A meeting without an action is a social event." Len Polizzotto

Need

Do you like going to review meetings? No? I don't, either. Alas, it seems no one does. Presenters often use confusing formats, endlessly talk while avoiding critical issues, fail to introduce new concepts, and, ultimately, don't commit to clear next steps.??

Gallup estimates that companies spend about 15% of their time on meetings. More remarkable is that their executives estimate that 2/3 of their meetings are "failures." [1] Perhaps this result is not surprising. [2]?

A new CIO of a major Silicon Valley company called me and said, "Curt, I have no idea what my innovation teams are doing. They seem unable to answer even the most basic questions, and they fail to give me answers I need to justify our investments to senior management."

Shortly later, we held a workshop for the company, and we discovered he was right. Unfortunately, at the start, none of the presentations from his teams provided the answers needed to justify the investments.?

A Productive Alternative

Companies require project reviews, but they must advance progress, teach staff new skills, provide motivation, and create a transparent structure for management to understand the progress made and the people who delivered results. There is a way to achieve all these objectives. They come from holding regular Value Creation Forums.

Value Creation Forums (Forums) focus on the actual work performed, the core issues, and the expected actions to move projects forward. They are meetings where 4 to 6 teams present the status of their initiatives for only 3 to 10 minutes and then listen carefully to feedback from multiple perspectives. The presentation format used is an NABC Action Plan, as described below.?

After their presentations, speakers don't talk back at Forms because arguing is often adversarial, the meetings go on too long, and debates are generally unproductive for others. However, if issues arise, the presenter must follow up and address the concerns before the next Forum.?

Forums are not "shark tanks." Everyone is treated with respect. The goal is for teams to learn, improve, and succeed.

Presentations are short and effective because they focus on the fundamental business issues to be answered, which are too often lacking, misunderstood, or set aside. [3,4] The lack of these fundamentals bedeviled the confused CIO I mentioned above.

No Time?

Teams sometimes complain about holding recurring Value Creation Forums. They say they don't have enough time. That is a serious misunderstanding. First, the responsibility of all professionals is the creation and delivery of value for others, and our workshops prove that few have mastered the basics of value creation. Companies don't generally provide those skills.??As a result, teams lack the skills to be fully productive.??

After holding value creation workshops with over a thousand teams, we typically find that only 25% of the projects under development will provide value. The other 75% are a waste of financial and human resources. In universities and government programs, performance is often worse. And we don't decide that; the teams do after we give them a framework for evaluation.

Given this, how much time does it take to hold recurring Forums? Assuming a 2,000-hour work year and 15% of a company's time spent on meetings, that is 300 hours a year. If, for the reasons mentioned, 2/3 of these meetings are waste, then 200 hours are unproductive each year.???Assuming 50% of the 200 hours are on project reviews, that provides 100 hours a year of available time for Forums.?

If Forums meet every four weeks for 90 minutes, they require 75 hours per year. That is, there is enough time available. Depending on the tasks, Forums can be 60 minutes long, and the meetings can vary in frequency from 2 to 6 weeks. And, if you provide pizza and coke with a salad, you can hold Forums over lunch, which is what we often do.?

The Goal is the Best Performance

By replacing their current poorly focused project reviews with Forums, a company has ample time to teach staff value creation and hold recurring Value Creation Forums. Second, since typically 75% of the innovative activities in companies provide little or no value, identifying and eliminating even a fraction of those liberates even more available time.??

But efficiency is not the purpose of Forms; it is achievement. It is to identify critical unmet customer and market opportunities and then efficiently addressing them to make an even greater impact on customers and all other stakeholders.?

Superior achievement results from Forums because:

• Teams rapidly converge on their critical issues by first focusing on fundamental value creation and business concepts. [5] Projects progress faster and more efficiently because they gain essential input from others. Some projects without value go away.??
• Employees continue to learn new value creation and business concepts based on "learning in the flow of work." This method is a version of "directed active learning," which has proven to be the best way to learn. [6] The staff becomes more capable and valuable.?
• Third, the meetings are motivational. Everyone wants to demonstrate progress and work toward excellence. Increasing success compounds to create even more success. These meetings incentivize responsibility because each person's performance becomes visible to everyone, including management.

NABC Action Plans

Next, I outline the framework for NABC Action Plans (Action Plans), which are logical extensions of NABC value propositions. An Action Plan consists of a:

• Hook:?A short statement describing the purpose of the presentation with a story or other means for gaining the audience's interest and attention.
• Core:?Your complete, compelling, and defensible NABC value proposition
• Action:?What you either want to happen next or what you will do next?

Types of Hooks

There are endless methods and approaches that are effective. I once asked Charles Handy, the brilliant business writer, what he recommended at the start of presentations, and he said,

• "Images before words."
• "A bad picture is often more effective than a good description."
• "Tell stories, even if you have to make them up."

I drew a crude picture of a Segway to illustrate Hendy’s second point.??If you hadn’t seen one before, describing a product that seems to defy gravity would not be easy.??In his last point, he did not mean to make up stories to fool people, but rather ones that bring to life the points to be made.

My friend, David Nordfors, points out that all innovations have a name, a description, and a story.???Your hook introduces these three elements.??Here are more methods:

• Use a contrarian approach … ask rhetorical questions ... make a startling assertion … reference a historical event … tell a story.
• Use the word imagine … arouse curiosity … what if?
• Here is an introduction to an initiative for repurposing land in Brazil. "Every second, a Brazilian rainforest is cut down the size of a football field. That's 100,000 football fields of rainforest cut down each day."

• This hook may be the best one ever delivered: "General, would you be interested in an airplane whose radar signature was the size of this ball barring? We know how to do that."
• Here are a few insights from the book, The Skunk Works. Ben Rich oversaw this famous Lockheed Martin facility. "Knowing that current fighters 'looked as big as Greyhound buses' on radar, Ben Rich would astonish generals by rolling small ball bearings across their desks saying: 'Here's the observability of your airplane on radar.' The air force eagerly signed a contract in November 1977 to begin the stealth fighter before Rich's strange triangular-shaped demonstrator aircraft proved it could even fly."?[7]???????????????

NABC value propositions

NABC value propositions define the four most fundamental questions that we must answer for any activity that has an end-user, whether it is a buyer, partner, supplier, management, or the enterprise:?

1. What is the critical unmet end-user and market Need?
2. What is the unique, compelling, and defensible Approach for the offering with its sustainability or business model?
3. What are its Benefits/costs or value for the end user and other stakeholders, including the enterprise?
4. And why is that significantly better than the Competition and all other alternatives?

Note that if one element is missing, it is not a complete proposition. And, if any part changes significantly, other factors will likely change too. They all interact. [7]

Types of Actions

• "Can I call your assistant for an appointment this Tuesday at 8 AM?"
• "Would you please introduce me to Sam Johnson?"
• "Will you invest $1,000 for a simulation of the application?"
• Can we agree today to sign a Letter of Intent?
• Within two weeks I will next prove that our health monitoring device detects blood pressure better than the competition in 30% of the time.?

NABC The Action Plan for Songbird

Here is a short version of the NABC Action Plan for SongBird, an SRI company championed by one of my colleagues, John Aceti.??Songbird was eventually bought by another company.?

• Setting:?CEO of Songbird to a potential customer with hearing loss
• Hook: "Do you have trouble hearing? You're not alone. By 60, most of us have lost 50% of our high frequencies. I think this little device from Songbird can help you.

• Need: The National Institute on Deftness showed that amplifying frequencies above 10,000 Hz improves our ability to interact with others. Comfortable, visibly discreet, high-quality hearing aids can significantly impact the quality of life.?
• Approach: We offer a disposable hearing aid that has the best state-of-the-art digital sound.???
• Benefits/costs:??Songbird hearing aids come in a range of sizes, and you can buy them conveniently over the counter at Walmart. It costs $1 a day.? Because you throw the units away after 30 days, the hearing aid is made of soft material, which allows them to fit comfortably, securely, and invisibly in your ear.
• Competition: High-quality hearing aids cost over $2,000 and must be fitted by a doctor during multiple visits. Because of their high cost, they are made of hard materials that do not fit comfortably in the ear. Our primary competition is from audiologists selling Eargo and other expensive systems. Our battery lasts over 30 days, twice the Ergo.
• Action: "Would you like to try one right now?"

Beyond NABC Action Plans

Answering the four NABC questions is the start of any new project. An undergraduate student at WPI pointed out, "NABC applies to everything we do." True, but it is only the start. At SRI International, everyone eventually understood the importance of NABC, including the security guards. [8] But other elements must then be added, as shown in the image below, to complete the initiative's value proposition. [9] Eventually, depending on the form of commercialization, the implementation plans are different.??

Forums are focused on business areas of mutual interest. For example, when I was SRI's CEO, Forums focused on specific research areas, types of business, and product development. As needed, we held other meetings. However, the critical insight was that all projects must first addressed the core NABC Action Plan concepts, where most failures begin.

Conclusions

Using recurring Value Creation Forms and NABC Action Plan presentations inevitably results in significant improvements in performance after several months. SRI's transformation from near bankruptcy demonstrates the promise.

Significant improvements have also been seen in universities performing basic research. For example, Paul Westerhoff, a Regent Professor of Engineering at Arizona State University, said that improvements of ten times are possible by using these methods. His metric for saying ten times included better innovative results and the positive impact for the people mastering these skills.

I mentioned the "lack of time" for why some companies don't commit to using these basic value creation methods. But there are other reasons:

• Results are not immediate. At first it takes commitment from leadership when there is natural skepticism from employees about whether it will help.
• It creates organizational transparency, which some find threatening.
• It places an imperative on exemplary performance, which is scary for some.
• Working using these methods is not easy. It is demanding.?

The inherent standard implied from working this way is leadership. But what is the alternative? As Tom Friedman of the N.Y. Times once said about the global economy, "Average is over. Be the best at what you do or go home."?

Working this way requires confident management with the experience and skills to first understand and then implement the method. It takes commitment, belief, and courage to state, "I am committed to this company's vision and mission and to delivering the highest value to our customers; no excuses. We see entrepreneurs doing that, but unfortunately remarkably few managers.???

The good news is that you don't need management approval to use these ideas. My team first learned and used these skills with no specific management support or funding. But bit by bit we succeeded, and eventually I was promoted to CEO where we implemented the basic method across SRI. The result was SRI going from failing for 20 years and close to bankruptcy, to growing three times and creating multiple world-changing innovations, such as HDTV and Siri.??

We were not perfect at SRI. That is impossible; we were just often better than the competition. We even beat IBM by seven years with Siri. That was like David beating Goliath. But, like David, we had a better tool, our value creation methodology.??

References

1. Rujuta Gandhi, "How to Lead a Meeting People Want to Attend," Gallup: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/246314/lead-meeting-people-attend.aspx
2. Jaime Potter, "Why Do Employees Hate Meetings, And What Can Be Done To Make Them Better?" Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaimepotter/2020/02/08/why-do-employees-hate-meetings-and-what-can-be-done-to-make-them-better/?sh=2abcbe4a874b
3. Curtis Carlson, "Maximizing Value by Mitigating Risk," Linkedin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/maximizing-value-mitigating-risk-curt-carlson-ph-d-/
4. Curtis Carlson, "The Main Mistake Innovators Make: The “Big," Linkedin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/main-mistake-innovators-make-big-curt-carlson-ph-d-/Reframe
5. Curtis Carlson, "The Starting Point For All Innovations: The 3 Laws & NABC Value Propositions," Linkedin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/starting-point-all-innovations-nabc-value-curt-carlson-ph-d-/
6. ?Stephen Kosslyn, "Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive," Alinea Learning, Kindle Edition, 2022
7. Ben Rich and Leo Janos, Skunkworks, Little Brown and Company, 1976. See also: Denys Overholser to Ben Rich at the Lockheed Skunk Works "As big as an eagle's eye." https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Ben%20R.%20Rich%2C%20Leo%20Janos%20-%20Skunk%20Works%20%20A%20Personal%20Memoir%20of%20My%20Years%20at%20Lockheed.pdf
8. Curtis Carlson, From Security Guard To Computer Scientist | Franciscus Agnew," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4EGHRwvFmg
9. Curtis Carlson, The Innovative Enterprise: Continuous Value Creation (CVC)," Linkedin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/agile-enterprise-continuous-value-creation-cvc-curt-carlson-ph-d-/

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