The d.school class on Business Practice Innovation that Debra Dunn, Kerri O'Connor, Kris Woyzbun and I taught last term focused on treating organizational practices as prototypes. I wrote a bit here about the class and how it would be different from a traditional class. Our first project focused on improving the customer experience at a major airline, the second on improving the company-wide meeting at Timbuk2, and the third on improving the "on boarding" process from employees at a professional service firm.
The shortest project -- yet the one that had the most visible and immediate effects -- happened at Timbuk2. The students observed the company wide meeting, talked to employees about their views of it, invited the top executives to a class meeting at Stanford where -- most brilliantly I thought -- they started by running our class meeting in a way that was sort of a parody of the Timbuk2 meeting (e.g., there was no place to sit, it was unclear who was playing what role in the meeting, newcomers weren't introduced, and there was no food) and then they had the folks on the top team "experience" the suggested new meeting, with people sitting down, with roles and schedule clear, with newcomers introduced, a lot of talk about products and customer experiences, and some good food. The Timbuk2 folks took these ideas back immediately and redesigned the next meeting to incorporate many of the student's suggestions, and a group of employees reported to the students that the new meeting was much better. You should be hearing more about this adventure on this blog, as there is some media interest, and I will let you know if and when the stories appear.
I've written about Timbuk2 here before -- about some wild new products ideas such as the Steve Sleeve and the bags produced with their prototype Lamitorn machine for melting grocery plastic bags and turning them into material for Timbuk2 products. I have also written about how much I admire Perry Klebhan, the CEO. We especially want to thank Perry and the other members of the executive team for letting our students visit and mess around with their company.
Perry sent me an email this morning suggesting that better meetings spillover in other ways too. Check-out this Finger Blaster fight at Timbuk2 that was posted on YouTube yesterday. It is short and funny.
P.S. If you want your own Finger Blasters, you can buy them here. Note that they were invented by Brendan Boyle at IDEO -- here is a cool little film where Brendan talks about how he runs his design group.
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