Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Copy Cat: Learning Through Observation

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Is there a competitor or colleague that does something you admire? Is there a small pang of jealousy or envy in how another firm does what it does? Rather than lament it, embrace it.

We can channel our impressions of others into benefit if we transform our envy or observations into actions. This is a technique called Copy Cat.

Copy Cat is a simple technique that can be done as part of a monthly review and fit in with your regular strategy and sensemaking sessions. This technique allows you to focus learning on aspects of a competitor or peer’s behaviour and activities that you would like to learn from and maybe copy. Copy Cat is a form of appreciative inquiry. It works by focusing our attention on specific qualities or actions that we can adopt in our organization and practice.

How to be a Copy Cat

Copy Cat involves systematic attention and review of specific organizations and activities you admire or wish to copy. This is a technique based on the psychological concept of modelling and self-efficacy. Copy Cat begins by identifying those individuals, organizations, or groups that we admire or wish to emulate. It may be specific persons or it may also be behaviours or practices.

After we identify what it is that we wish to model, the next step is to begin observing the person/organization/behaviour/practice we are interested in. Literal observation, use of artifacts (e.g., articles, news stories, word of mouth, or marketing materials can all help. Your data gathering should be systematic, but it does not need to be comprehensive.

The next step is to engage in sensemaking. Sensemaking is a social process that allows us to make meaning of what we find. Bring together all your data, share it with those involved (this can be done independently, but is far more powerful in a small group), and make it accessible to everyone involved. Sensemaking helps us to ask questions about what we see and what it might mean for us in our work.

We use Copy Cat to see how others’ actions might apply to our work. Copy Cat provides guidance on what to do and how it can be done.

Applying Copy Cat

When we systematically, attentively watch others using Copy Cat we begin to consider how what we see can apply to us. This is where our design skills come into play.

We ask the following questions:

  1. What resources are employed in these actions? Do we have them?
  2. What knowledge or skills are required to do these activities?
  3. What circumstances are present in these actions? Did they help or hurt what was done?
  4. What outcomes emerged from these actions and can we tell what they are?
  5. What might this look like if we did those actions? What do we need that we don’t have?
  6. What negatives might emerge from these actions?

Copy Cat allows us to dissect the core components of someone else’s actions and consider how we might apply those lessons to our work.

By taking time to do this — we recommend spending 2-3 hours per month on this activity — some distinct benefits can be revealed.

  1. We sharpen our observation skills
  2. We begin learning more about our market
  3. We open our eyes to new ways to do something and the constraints others operate in
  4. It engages us in reflective practice about what we do and why
  5. It keeps us active in our market
  6. It builds systematic learning and praxis into our organization
  7. We enhance our curiosity and use it to channel energy in our organization

This simple method can have enormous benefits for an organization and helping build learning, innovation, and engagement in your people and your market. It requires little in the way of specialized tools and only a small amount of time.

If you want help building this into your learning and innovation practice, let’s talk. This is what we do and we’d love to help you do it, too.

Photo by Jonas Lee on Unsplash and Max Baskakov on Unsplash

Do You Need a Chief Learning Officer?

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Innovation is learning transformed into value, by design.

– Cameron Norman, Cense Ltd.

Organizations develop c-suite level roles because of a recognized need for focused strategic action and attention toward a particular aspect of their operations. Finance, Operations, Technology are just some of the areas that have developed into C-level roles and offices in many businesses and non-profits.

What about learning? As with many c-suite portfolios, learning touches everyone in an organization and serves as the fundamental mechanism for resilience, flexibility, and innovation. It’s curious that this role doesn’t exist, which is why we developed it ourselves.

A Chief Learning Officer is someone who is responsible for advancing your organization’s understanding of itself, its innovation activities related to its strategy, and its impact.

Why a CLO?

If your organization is substantially affected by changing markets, social and cultural changes, environmental and health threats, or shifts in human or technological resources, you need a CLO.

Learning is about ensuring you’ve got the sensory capacity to take in what is going on around you to monitor activities inside and outside your organization and within the market. It blends together monitoring and evaluation (M & E) with strategic foresight so you can see what you’ve done, where you are, and where things are going.

A CLO is responsible for not only ensuring you have M & E and trend data but that you use it. The CLO ensures that evidence is brought to the table to guide strategy and support innovation — which is learning transformed into value, by design.

Combined with foresight data, this also means ensuring that your organization calibrates its strategy to suit its needs, changing conditions, and ensures its operations and direction is aimed at the future, not the past. As ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said about why he was so great at his game: he skated where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

The CLO role focuses the organization on these insights.

Building on Strengths

Lastly — and just as importantly — the CLO is responsible for fostering a culture of learning within the organization. This involves ensuring that the talents and skills within the organization are recognized, that staff are provided with the opportunity to share what they know to increase the capacity of the organization as a whole, and that new knowledge, skills, and insights are brought in from the outside.

This job is about knowledge and skills integration. It’s about getting the return on the investments made on people, processes, and innovation as a whole. It’s getting the very best from your best.

Best of all, any organization can do this and create this role for themselves and place learning on the same level as other c-suite priorities as we enter an age of transformation and change. Be ready.

If you want to establish a CLO office in your organization or want a fractional CLO to serve in this role, contact us. Our CLO service is designed for this and is aimed at supporting organizations in becoming their best through learning.

Uncovering Layers of an Innovation’s Impact

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Revealing Many Layers of Impact

Innovators — those seeking to take an idea for a product, service, or policy and make it real — usually have a pretty clear sense of what they are trying to achieve with their innovation. This is the primary purpose and may reflect where the innovation achieves the greatest impact. But is this all it does? Could it be doing much more? 

Evaluation can play a key role in revealing where an innovation achieves more than just its primary purpose and can serve as a means to uncover layers of impact that can demonstrate various returns on investment (ROI) and open up opportunities for further exploration and exploitation of resources. 

Innovation typically involves considerable investment in time, energy, money, and attention and an evaluation can help showcase the return on investment in unexpected ways. Let’s consider something like an event — a learning conference — as an example to illustrate this layering of impact and how evaluation can aid in revealing these layers and supporting innovation. 

Change or Impact for Whom?

A look across many conferences finds relatively consistent language in their purpose that includes mission phrases like:

to inspire…, to educate…., to connect…, to showcase…, etc..

Among the first roles an evaluation can play is articulating the theory of change explaining why something is intended to achieve an outcome. A look at the phrases above is likely to prompt questions in an evaluator like: for whom are these to happen? Is the effect expected to be similar for most people? What are the means that people are using to showcase products (e.g., knowledge) and for the audience to engage with content?

These are some of the questions that an evaluator might ask from these initial goals. For an evaluation of a learning event, this might translate into metrics like: 

  • Attendance including details on those in the audience (e.g., professional background, previous participation, basic demographics)
  • Number of sessions taught and description of those sessions (content)
  • Overall satisfaction with the conference (including session content, speakers, food and drink, format)
  • Self-reported learning outcomes from participants
  • Financial details: Profit, loss, and expenses; sponsorships
  • Registration information (e.g., online vs. in-person, timing, categories, etc.)

This is a pretty standard set of metrics. We see similar evaluative outcomes across educational programming in different contexts. These might work well for simple purposes, but it only provides a small amount of what it could yield and for innovation, going beyond the usual is one way to separate a new idea from a successful one. 

Looking Differently at Outcomes & Impact

An outcome looks different from where we sit in the system that surrounds an innovation. Consider the role of the design of physical space and how that influences outcomes and shifts our understanding of impact. 

A common seating format at conferences is round tables in front of a stage (‘Rounds’). This is usually done where there are meals served and for that purpose, the format works well for everyone — except most of those in attendance and the keynote speakers. Rounds are ideal for serving people including the setting up and clearing of dishes. They are generally lousy for talking with people because, with the exception of speaking with one other person, an attendee must either turn their back on another person to speak to someone else or speak over or past someone. 

Rounds show high positive impact — efficiency, ability to monitor, reduced errors — for the catering staff. This might be an important outcome for a conference, although probably not. Consider how this format might enhance or degrade the impact of things like the keynote address or the networking expectations of individuals in attendance. 

Consider some other potential impacts:

  • It gets people away from their families and friends (this could be positive or negative).
  • It pulls them away from work (it gives them a break, provides an incentive, it adds to their workload, disrupts the teams they leave behind, or all or some of these).
  • It provides supports conference centres and organizers.
  • It creates connections between people like connecting with ‘old friends’ and colleagues; sustains a connection to a field of practice or discipline; re-affirms a mission; instills a sense of perspective at how much a field changes (or doesn’t) over time; instills a sense of alienation of a field or peers.  
  • It generates or maintains employment in a region
  • It’s a tourism and prestige generator. 

These are all possible outcomes and are a sample of what additional areas of impact that a learning event might influence. This is for illustrative purposes, but should still provide some ways to show how an innovation (service, product, or policy) might have additional outcomes and impacts that could emerge through an evaluation. 

Expanding the Field of Vision

Service Convention Sweden 2018

Consideration of these additional outcomes might reveal an opportunity and can more fully demonstrate the impact and potential ROI. Asking different questions can also help prioritize what kind of outcomes make the most sense to optimize the design of your innovation. 

Conferences like the one pictured above have optimized for creative thinking within a traditional learning structure by including a poet who composed a unique work summarizing each talk, a (literal!) gallery walk showcasing a prominent local artist’s work (Lars Lerin), and hosting a series of interactive conversation sessions over coffee and snacks.  

For Service Convention Sweden and others like it the outcomes might include the standard ones and a deeper look at the new professional connections made (and followed up along with the material products generated from them), the application of the lessons learned, and the integration of learning into organizations by those participating sponsors. 

Evaluation is not just about the obvious outcomes when deployed in an innovation context. It can demonstrate not only whether an innovation is achieving the expected impact, but the reach of that impact outside of expectations.

And isn’t innovation all about exceeding expectations? 

This is the latest in a series on Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage. This series looks at how evaluation can be used to support innovation in service design, product development, and policy implementation. For more on how to do this and any help with it, contact us at www.cense.ca/contact.