Leading Innovation & The Silence Experiment

Coming out of the August break, we’re starting autumn with a double header. Balanced Team and the Agile Experience Design Meetup are joining forces to present two great talks. First, we’ll hear from Sense & Respond Press’ author Ryan Jacoby on Leading Innovation. After that, Chris Corriere, visiting from Atlanta, will lead the Silence Experiment, a workshop where we’ll build artificial limbs for refugee amputees in total silence as a meditation on how and when we communicate.

This evening of learning and conversation is for practitioners who want to stimulate their minds and re-imagine how to build teams that are productive, efficient, creative and produce innovative products.

Agenda

6:00 - 6:30 Arrive / Mingle / Network
6:30 - 7:15 Leading Innovation - Taking Responsibility for Progress + Q&A
7:15 - 7:20 Segue by Jonathan Berger & Emerson Taymor
7:20 - 8:30 Silence Experiment
8:30 - 8:45 Final networking and depart for a nearby bar

Leading Innovation : Taking responsibility for progress

If you’re accountable for innovation and new product development in your organization, it’s likely your job description doesn’t cover what you actually have to get done. At the same time, you might face headwinds within your organization or with investors. Ryan, a practitioner and the author Making Progress: The 7 responsibilities of innovation leaders, will share advice to help you overcome these obstacles based on his work over the years in the innovation and product trenches. Situations like

Battling the “I’m not sure what they do over there, nice office space though” perception

Avoiding the “hey are we working on AR?” executive cocktail party project brief

Kickstarting post-it note inundated and frozen teams

Surviving to keep working on the most important problems

About Ryan Jacoby

Ryan Jacoby is the founder of MACHINE, a strategy and innovation company that helps its clients Think Big and Act Small. Ryan has been a Venture Partner at the Collaborative Fund, a venture firm based in New York City, and taught in the IxD Masters program at the School of Visual Arts.

The Silence Experiment : Taking responsibility for breath

If you’re accountable for anything in your organization, you have to communicate with others to get things done, but it’s likely your job description doesn’t cover how. At the same time, you might face the headwinds of navigating a bevy of modes: email, slack, ad-hoc conversations, meetings. How do you choose? Why do we privilege some modes over others? Why do we talk? How useful is it?

Let's make products in silence and find out how talking both benefits and stifles collaboration.

In the first half of the Silence Experiment session, teams build prosthetic hands for charity in complete silence, noting on post-its each time they have the urge to speak.

In the second half, we will look at what you wanted to say and what really happened instead. Outcomes are reviewed as a group, facilitated by affinity mapping all the post-it notes made during the session.

We’ll pay particular attention to evaluating our model of collaboration and deep diving on the things people still felt like they wanted to say–did they really? What happened when they couldn't? How did that affect the outcome?

About Chris Corriere

Chris has been working in IT since he was in middle school. These days he’s a full fledged DevOps convert, helping teams focus on tools and culture above and beyond development and operations work. You can learn more about his center of practice at Ecology Computing http://www.ecology-computing.com or read Rugged Baselines for Cybernetic Systems http://www.chriscorriere.com/rugged-baselines-handout.pdf