Steve Neiderhauser

When we came back to Paris...

It’s amazing how much you can learn about design by studying a single sentence.

Consider this sentence from Ernest Hemingway.

“When we came back to Pairs it was clear and cold and lovely."

Roy Peter Clark provides an illuminating analysis of the sentence and why people are drawn to it.

The last half of the sentence has three or four design concepts. I enjoy seeing the power of three used in a unique way.

 

How to Learn Design Concepts

The book Mastering Leadership compares the reactive and creative leader. When the reactive leader is put under pressure he reverts to outdated methods: command-and-control, cost cutting….  That’s why organization transformation will never happen with a reactive leader.

When I look closely at reactive leaders, I notice they have little or no design experience. Most of them don’t even have knowledge of design concepts and are not curious enough to learn.

Dan Pink got it right in his book A Whole New Mind. People should be studying music, design, and storytelling to enhance their creative and design skills. After all, we're living in the Age of the Artist. 

Just last week, I took Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat (STC) Story class. She is a successful author and excellent teacher so there were lots of great design concepts that I took home. This is my favorite. The STC story blueprint has fifteen beats. When Jessica prototypes a story, she uses only five of the beats. Here’s three of the five beats.

• Catalyst
• Break into 2
• Midpoint

Another key design concept is that the five prototype beats are single scene. Many of the other fifteen beats require multiple scenes and they are not included in the initial prototype. Like Design Thinking, this story prototype technique is an iterative process.

What we have here is a double reduction. First, we select only five beats for the story prototype. Second, all of the five beats are single scene beats. This is a simple and effective prototype design.

This double reduction sauce will inspire you to cook up your next story, or design a better business.

Book Review - Creating Intelligent Teams

I posted a review of Creating Intelligent Teams by Anne Rod on Amazon and also wanted to share it here. Please note that leadership is an inner role of the team… A crazy important concept when markets are rapidly changing.

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Management gurus tell companies to create self-organizing teams and let teams decide how to develop products. So if you’ve ever wondered how to lead a self-organizing team, you’ll want to read Creating Intelligent Teams.

The book focuses on creating high-performing teams and introduces the five principles of relationship systems intelligence (RSI). In a minute I’ll share my favorite RSI principle… before I do let’s discuss the book.

What’s the first RSI principle: Each relationship system (team) has its own unique entity.

When a team comes together a resilient, energetic force is created that the team taps into. So when you read and believe in the five RSI principles you raise your awareness to the point you can develop skills to reveal the system to itself and take advantage of the system’s generative properties.

In addition, the five RSI principles equip leaders with a mental model to access, align and lead to higher performance. Leaders are encouraged to let go of ego and trust the collective “we."

To access a team system, the authors provide practical exercises at the end of chapters. For example, they teach you how to use constellations to reveal the system to the team. Simply ask yourself, What would an experiment look like? Then try one of the exercises and see what happens.

What’s my favorite RSI principle? The team has the answers. See RSI principle 3: Relationship systems are naturally intelligent, generative, and creative. When people believe in this principle, it allows teams and leaders to trust the team system to find the answer.

I know of no other book that focuses on how to lead intelligent teams. If you want teams that innovate and respond to changing markets, this book hands you the keys to the system.