Tap Your Idea Reserve: Ezra Nanes, AccuWeather, Mobile Innovation Summit NYC 3.21.17
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The document describes AccuWeather's Idea Committee process for evaluating new ideas. It discusses defining ideas and terms, the genesis of the Idea Committee after Hurricane Katrina, and the successful outcomes. The process involves a diverse committee discussing 10 ideas in 10 minutes each, voting on estimated benefit and cost, and prioritizing ideas with the highest ROI scores to present to executives. The goal is to openly discuss and filter ideas to inspire innovation as a startup would.
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Tap Your Idea Reserve: Ezra Nanes, AccuWeather, Mobile Innovation Summit NYC 3.21.17
- 1. Ezra Nanes, MBA Director of Business Development Twitter: @ezrananes The AccuWeather Idea Committee Tap Your Idea Reserve ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 2. How do you decide which ideas to work on? ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 4. How do you decide which ideas to work on? 1. Intros/Definition of Terms 2. Genesis of the Idea Committee 3. How the Process Works 4. Successful Outcomes ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 5. Ezra
- 9. Definition ofTerms • Idea • Value • Decision-Maker • Influencer ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 16. Idea Selection Methods #1 – In-Depth Analysis #2 – Individual #3 – Random ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 17. Consensus Forecasting ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 18. Idea Selection Methods #4 – #1 – In-Depth Analysis #2 – Individual #3 – Random ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 19. The AccuWeather Idea Committee ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 20. Idea Committee - Principles • Group with Undeniable Credibility • Repeatable, Lightweight, Engaging • Safe Space to Openly Discuss Ideas • All Voices Heard • Time-Boxed Discussions • Easy Voting • Capture the Gut & the Details ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 21. • Diverse, Balanced M/F • Represent Different POVs and Parts of the Company • Creative, Passionate, Invested • Credible and Well-Respected • Group Leads, Functional Heads, Subject Matter Experts… Building a Credible Group ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 22. 10 Minutes Per Idea: • Read Idea* - (2 Minutes) • Discuss Idea - (5 minutes) • Vote on Idea - (3 Minutes) * Idea is Read in “Elevator Pitch” Format How it Works ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 23. Vote on Two Dimensions • Estimated Benefit • Estimated Cost Provide Answers to Two Questions What do you like MOST about this idea? What do you like LEAST about this idea? Voting 1 1052 3 4 7 8 96 10 = “Highest Possible” 1 = “Lowest Possible” ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 24. • Calculate Average ROI Score for Each Idea • If ROI Score Above “1” Idea Goes to LOB • A Relative Score • Allows for Ranking and Filtering • Not an Absolute Forecast “ROI Score” ROI Score = Estimated Benefit Estimated Cost ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 25. • Introduction & Recap 10 Minutes • 5 Ideas @ 10 Minutes Each 50 Minutes • Break 10 Minutes • 5 Ideas @ 10 Minutes Each 50 Minutes TOTAL TIME 2 Hours Sample Agenda ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 30. Successful Outcomes • Prioritized, Filtered List of Ideas • Share with LOB • Report to Executives • Seed of an Idea is Widely Sown • Inspiration & Perspective ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 31. “We are a 55 Year Old Startup and must act like it daily.” Dr. Joel N. Myers Founder, President and Chairman AccuWeather ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 32. ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
- 33. ThankYou Illustrations: Jennifer Fontanez-Wexler ©2017, AccuWeather, Inc., Confidential and Proprietary
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone it's wonderful to be here at the Mobile Innovation Summit. I want to say a big thank you to innovation enterprise for asking me back for a second year in a row to speak at this event. I love this conference. We have an amazing group of people here from so many dynamic and cutting edge organizations. As leaders in the mobile space, I know you will relate to the problem I am going to share with you today. We all work with talented, motivated, intelligent people. As such we have no shortage of ideas for what to work on, what to build, what to create.
- But, when you have a large number of ideas available to you how do you decide which one to work on first?
- Well, here’s an example of how a company tackled this problem. Google had a well-known policy called 20% time. This policy allowed employees to devote up to 20% of their time at work focusing on projects of their own choosing that they felt would benefit the organization. Arguably, the most important outcome of this policy is Gmail, one of the greatest and most widely used products of the digital age. 20% Time is an absolutely genius way of solving this problem of choosing ideas – empower employees to choose - but unfortunately its not a practical approach for most companies, and so the problem remains. But why should you care? Well, this is the mobile innovation summit. Our industry is one of what Alec Ross called the industries of the future. The digital and mobile revolution is in the midst of transforming our lives and world. There is tremendous opportunity here and accordingly competition is very intense. We must to innovate to stay ahead of our competition. Ideas are the fuel in the innovation pipeline. None of us can afford to let a great idea, the next game changer, go unrealized.
- Today I will show you how to tap in to your innovation reserve. I’ll start with some introductions and then define key terms of the process. Then I will walk you through the genesis of the AccuWeather Idea Committee the collaborative innovation process that has enabled AccuWeather to capitalize on more of our ideas. I will lay out in detail how the process works, so that you can recreate it at your organization. Finally, I will share the successful outcomes we’ve achieved at AccuWeather giving you a glimpse of the possibilities.
- That’s me hamming it up on the set of a television commercial we shot with our partner Microsoft. My name is Ezra Nanes, and I was recently promoted to the role of Director of Business Development. But for most of my five years at AccuWeather I was head of product and design for all of AccuWeather's consumer-facing digital products worldwide, with an audience of over 1 billion people and more than 200 million monthly active users.
- From award winning mobile applications to leading websites to wearables and emerging platforms to what I like to call the biggest app we ever built - large scale, live data digital signage. This beauty is one of a massive installation right here in lower Manhattan at the stunning Fulton Center, a part of the new World Trade Center. As Head of Product I worked on many many projects, faced intense competition and had access to a large volume of ideas.
- AccuWeather, which you will probably know from our mobile products or from your local television or newspaper or radio, weather forecast, is the world's largest and most accurate weather company. A pioneer in the weather industry, with Superior Accuracy and Lifesaving Impact for more than 50 years.
- One of the most important examples of the work we do at AccuWeather took place before and during Hurricane Katrina. Before this massive storm devastated New Orleans and the gulf coast, AccuWeather issued urgent and dire warnings of devastating impacts – these were issued ahead of our competitors and even ahead of the National Weather Service. AccuWeather’s forecasts and warnings were credited with saving hundreds of lives and were formally recognized by the US Government.
- Now that you know who we are - I’d like to define 4 terms that AccuWeather uses in our innovation process that I encourage you to adopt as well.
- The ideas we talk about today are business ideas. I’m not talking about: hey I have an idea, why don’t we go get green tea lattes across the street. (Although green tea lattes are always a good idea.) An idea as we define it, represents a potential but unproven opportunity to increase the success of the business - these are the ideas we will talk about today.
- When I say value, as in the value of an idea, I mean the sum total of all positive benefits and negative costs. Benefits go beyond revenue to include market share growth, audience growth, competitive advantage, increased profitability or efficiency, team moral, legal protection, or brand growth. Costs go beyond simply the dollars required to take in risk, uncertainty, complexity, distraction, a hit to team morale, legal risk and even time. When we take all of the positive benefits and the negative costs and we add them together we get what I call the value of an idea. And we need to know the value of an idea to know whether we should work on it.
- Next comes the most important person to an idea and that is the decision-maker. A decision-maker is a person who has the power, the unfettered ability to deploy and withhold resources. The decision-maker has the power to give life to or to kill an idea.
- And if you are not a decision-maker you are an influencer. Influencers make up the vast majority of the people in an organization.
- We started with the definition of an idea, but we’re talking plural here. Lots of ideas. Every organization has access to ideas for new products and services that represent potential but unproven opportunities to increase the success of the business. Some of these ideas arise in the context of strategic planning at the highest levels of the organization and are the product of in-depth analysis of market, customers, competition and company goals and mission. In most organizations there is an established process for dealing with these ideas, the decision-maker either decides or is closely involved and we will not discuss these ideas today. However, there exists a vast reserve of ideas many orders of magnitude larger than this strategic few.
- Photo: den-belitsky ThinkStock After all ideas are as numerous a stars in the sky, as countless as dreams. These ideas come from all parts of the organization from the very top to the very bottom, inside and outside, They are the product of inspiration creativity and real experience. These ideas represent a huge opportunity, but how do we decide which one to work on first?
- Let's look at some methods that you might employ to decide which idea to work on. BULLET ONE: In-Depth ANALYSIS I assume that the pain of analysis paralysis is all too familiar to many of us. Of course we both want and need to know the value of our ideas and make data driven decisions, but you simply can’t analyze every idea. There are far too many and the effort required would simply be unrealistic. Kill that. BULLET TWO: Individual – What if you decide? OK let’s think about this, your opinion vs. the decision-maker’s opinion. Hmm. I think we all know this is going to get political. If you don’t know the value, you don’t have a forecast, you don’t have a leg to stand on. Your decision-maker may love your choice, or she may think it’s a terrible idea. Eventually for, any idea worth doing, this moment of truth will happen, and you can only hope that it breaks in your favor. The alternative is pretty ugly. Kill that. BULLET THREE: PICK AT RANDOM What if you take the powerball approach and throw all of your ideas in to a bucket and pick one out at random? Random choice eliminates the politics, but it’s really the same as no one deciding. And when no one decides, the decision-maker decides. And their decision may be just as random as powerball. And worse still, if the decision-maker doesn’t decide then you lapse in to permanent limbo. Either way you are staring down the barrel of a very frustrating situation.
- I personally endured this pain as I worked through these methods, trying to find a way to get unstuck and tap in to our idea reserve. As I thought about the problem I asked myself, what do we do well at AccuWeather? Better than anyone else? Maybe there’s a clue there. And I thought of forecasting. AccuWeather has what is arguably the world’s greatest forecasting team. One of the methodologies used by our forecasting team, which happens to by widely used in meteorology, is consensus forecasting. Consensus forecasting takes the average of a number of forecasts that use different methodologies to create a single forecast. The amazing thing about a consensus forecast is that it is almost always more accurate that the most accurate individual forecast and has lower margins of error because it has accounted for more factors. What if we apply this to our problem of idea selection?
- What if we utilize consensus forecasting and we have a group of people decide? A group approach would alleviate much of the pain we experience with individual or random decision making. Most notably a decision-maker would be less likely to argue with the recommendation of a group of highly credible people that they themselves had hired and promoted. If we could get a group of people together and have them talk over the merits of an idea and could capture their gut-reactions to an idea we could generate a kind of consensus forecast without the paralyzing requirement of conducting in depth analysis of each idea. Another benefit is that consensus forecasting is a widely used and accepted method for generating accurate forecasts. But what kind of group, who would be a part? How would we actually generate a forecast?
- In the next section I will answer these questions, I will show you how we built a credible group and captured their consensus forecast, as I lay out the principles and process of the AccuWeather Idea Committee, our solution to the problem of which idea to choose.
- There are a number of principles that underpin the committee and that I think have really enabled our success. First of course is that we must assemble a group of people with undeniable/unimpeachable credibility within the organization. As I said, I will show you the criteria we used to select our group. Apart from the first point no guiding principle is more important than Repeatability. A committee that meets once and then fades in to oblivion does no one any good, so the meeting – it’s preparation, participation and follow up need to be lightweight and engaging. Your committee members need to enjoy this meeting and they cannot feel burdened by it or else you will struggle to get them to attend. Discussion generates the consensus forecast Anonymous Idea presentation Anonymous Voting It’s a consensus forecast, we want all voices to be heard to get the best forecast. Highly opinionated experts and leaders will generally have a lot to say and as such we need to strictly limit the discussion or else we will get bogged down in monologues and diatribes. That will kill your committee. This is key, we can’t force the group to think too hard. They won’t be able to give you an actual dollar forecast. We want to capture the gut, which is the forecast, and the details which will also be valuable to the life of the idea.
- So, we start with a very special group of people. A group who would be very difficult to argue with, a group whose consensus would be accepted as a decision by decision-makers. First of course is that we must assemble a group of people with undeniable/unimpeachable credibility within the organization. We’re talking about Group leads, subject matter experts, functional heads. We initially targeted a group of 10-20 people. Our first three meetings had around 15 people in them and this amount worked well for us. Many more than that and you’ll have trouble having all voices heard in 5 minutes.
- Here’s how the Idea Committee Works.
- When we vote we do two things: We provide an estimated benefit and an estimated cost and we answer two open-ended questions. We ask Committee Members to vote on a scale of 1-10 using a slider. Just drop it where it feels right. We don’t want them to get in their head about this. We want their gut reaction on these two important dimensions. These will feed in to our consensus. I’ll show you how this works in a minute. And also the great thing here is, NO ONE NEEDS TO AGREE ON ANYTHING. Each person votes whatever they feel is right. Then we ask them to answer two open ended questions – what do you like most about this idea and what do you like least about this idea. This allows us to capture the details, the specifics, the inspiration.
- We take the Votes of all committee members and we calculate the average ROI Score – this is our CONSENSUS FORECAST! Any Idea with an average ROI Score of Greater than 1 passes the Committee and gets placed in priority order and sent to the Lines of Business. The LOBs start with the highest ranked ideas and work down the list. ROI Score serves as a proxy for an actual forecast amount, which frees our committee members from having to come up with a specific dollar amounts for Benefit and Cost, which would be very difficult. The nice thing is that it is a relative score, which allows for ranking and filtering. We are still looking at the relationship between Benefits and Costs, but we see their relative size rather than just the difference of their absolute sizes.
- We hold meetings about every 6 weeks. Not too frequent as to be a burden but frequent enough to keep the momentum going.
- There you have it. The Idea Committee Process. To bring it all together let’s walk through a few simple illustrations. You start with a bunch of ideas with no order, no data.
- You add the data, which is the ROI Score (our Forecast Proxy)
- Then you rank order them by ROI Score.
- Then you draw a red line above the first idea with a score of 1 or below. And then you start at the top and you work your way down the list.
- So, now you see how it works and what we did to make the committee a success. But, what did we get for our efforts. We went from having a random bunch of ideas that we couldn’t work on because we had no good way to decide what to start with, to having a prioritized and filtered list of ideas. Now the LOBs now know what to work or look at first and which ideas to leave alone for the near future. We also have data that we can publish for sharing with executives and decision-makers. This is valuable as it shows that the ideas are not falling in to a black hole, but are being capitalized on. Other positive outcomes we experienced were that the seed of each ideas was planted in the brains of each of the committee members. This is valuable as many of those present will have a part in the idea’s realization. Also, because the idea has been discussed openly and with no punches pulled we are able to capture and share additional inspiration around the ideas and a much broader perspective. It helped ideas have a better start in the world
- Before I wrap up, I hope that this process and the underlying principles will help you tap in to your idea reserve, and I want to share a quote from AccuWeather’s Founder, President and Chairman, and one of most passionate thinkers you will ever meet, Dr. Joel N. Myers. We are a 55 Year Old Startup and must act like it daily. And on that note, I’ll leave you with an example of a really cool product that recently out of AccuWeather’s innovation pipeline.
- I hope this story about the genesis of The AccuWeather Idea Committee has been inspiring to you and that you will take away some ideas for how to wrangle your own idea reserve.
- Thank you so much!!