An Intensive Debate Session to Remember

If you weren't so lucky as to choose the New Services & Business Models Summit Intensive Debate session on The New Era of Service Provider Innovation Thursday morning in Orlando, ask anybody who was there--you missed a session to remember.

Tal Givoly facilitated a unique (from my experience) discussion that definitely fit the billing of "thinking outside the box."  The session had to be seen and experienced to fully appreciate how it was conducted, but I will give you some flavor before the pictures and video are available.  I also hope that Tal can share the blizzard of creative ideas that he drew out of the attendees.

The session started out with an unusual and puzzling room arrangement:  a "horseshoe" crescent of tables up close to the projection screen and a series of round tables around the room, but with few chairs.  Tal, not being the shy type in the first place, immediately swept around the back of the room where a few of the audience were trying to stay below the radar, relentlessly rousting them from their rear echelon position up to the front tables (they were 2-3 deep by the time he was through).  Tal then quickly swept around the room counting off 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 repeatedly to designate which "team" each person so called out would join.  The five teams then were sent to the round tables to quickly brainstorm one of 5 questions concerning industry insider versus customer perceptions, as well as team 5 (my team) listing opportunities missed by the industry.  He then quickly came around the tables and set us on the task of listing the entrenched assumptions that led to the lists we had made.  Finally, we were to quickly winnow our lists to the top three.  So far, the exercise was not too unusual, thought rapid fire (those of you who know Tal know what I mean).

The next stage is where things got quite interesting.  After one member of each of the 5 teams read out their consensus lists, each person was given a blank sheet of paper.  We were asked to write down one or more ideas for new services that would be "out of the box" innovations for industry players.  Next, much to everyone's surprise, we were all instructed to ball up our sheet of paper and throw it into the center of the horseshoe semicircle.  We all then waded into this "pool" of paper balls and picked one out at random.  This process continued for several rounds, thus exposing all of the audience to multiple "blind" brainstorm lists (sort of like a Delphi board).  Finally, we were each given a pad of yellow stick-on notes and instructed to write down the three most interesting ideas from the last paper ball we had collected from the pool.

When we all had our three sticky notes, we were instructed to draw a two dimensional matrix, one axis of which was ease of implementation, the other being potential for growth.  We were then to place our three notes on the matrix where we thought they belonged.  As soon as we were done, Tal projected the matrix on the screen and prompted us to bring our notes to the screen and stick them where we thought they fit.  This caused a panic for the convention A/V guy that his screen was going to be destroyed, plus the stickies wouldn't adhere to the rough surface,so he was eventually calmed down.  Much to the relief of the A/V guy, the creative juices were flowing freely by that time, so several of the audience came up with the idea of putting two flip chart easels in the path of the projector, thus showing the matrix on the paper, to which the notes readily stuck.

Much to my regret, it was at this point that I had to leave the session 15 minutes before the end for an unavoidable appointment, so I didn't get to stay for the "punch line" of the whole session.  When I did catch up to Tal later, his briefcase was buldging with all of the crumpled sheets and I know he recorded the entire session on his fancy new HD digital video camera, so you'll have to wait until the movie comes out to see how this ended (I can hardly wait myself).

If there are any others who also attended this lively and unique session, please weigh in with your impressions and comments--that's what these blog areas of the Community are all about.

All I can say in summary is you missed a good one!