Personality Poker®

Thought leaders for years have told people what to do. They write books, shoot videos, give speeches, and create online training programs. Consultants on the other hand do all of the heavy lifting for their clients, implementing the solutions. But what if the key to creating more value for your customers/clients – and for your business – requires a different type of solution?

In this episode, I share three categories of support you can provide your clients:

1. Tell me - tell people what to do
2. Enable me - give them the tools so that they can do it on their own
3. Do it for me - implement the solution for your client

As you will hear, the "enable me" category might be the one with the greatest value to your clients and to your business.

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

Marketers will tell you the importance of growing your network. But what if the key to long-term success is about nurturing your network? In today's episode we explore some power of creating deep relationships versus a large number of transactions.

A question I am often asked is, "How can we market our business to attract new customers?" This implies the goal is to get more customers. 

But what if (assuming you have an established business) you already have all of the customers you need? Maybe marketing is not the answer (or more accurately, the question).

I explore a number of different ways to improve your business using the lenses. The ones I focus on this week are:

• #4: ELIMINATE - What if we stopped all marketing efforts?
• #18: PERFORMANCE PARADOX - What if instead of selling to customers, you serve them instead?
• #24: VARIATIONS - Focus your efforts on the clients where you can create the greatest value.

How can you build a deeper relationship with the past customers where you can make the greatest impact? This is quite different than focusing on marketing.

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

Scaling a service-based business isn't easy. Especially if you are a solopreneur who doesn't want to hire employees or have expensive overhead. Short of cloning yourself or working 24 hours a day, what's the solution?

A question I am often asked by my professional speaker, consultant, and training colleagues is, “How can we scale my service-based business without hiring a lot of employees?”

In this episode, we will address this questions by using six lenses from Invisible Solutions that will provide a half-dozen different ways to grow your business - without hiring anyone.

The lenses are:

• #4 Eliminate – what can you stop doing?
• #11 Resequence –how can you change the timing?
• #12 Reassign – who can help you scale - and how?
• #13 Access – how can you create a subscription?
• #6 Analogy –who else has solved a similar problem?
• #34 Variations – how can you treat different customers/clients differently?

Although this might seem like a lot of lenses, this question is so rich with opportunity that I didn't want to shortchange listeners.

I think you'll enjoy this one, especially if you have a service-based business.

Download the lenses from Invisible Solutions

Submit any problems you want me to solve on the show

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

It gets easy to fall into the trap of equating novelty with innovation. But they are not the same. 

Value and relevancy are what matter with innovation. 

In this episode, we explore how to make sure you are solving the real problem. Instead of focusing on your own strengths, identify the needs of your customers.

We also spend some time exploring lens #22: REAL BUSINESS. What business are you really in? Realizing I wasn't in the business I thought I was helped me rethink everything I do.

To illustrate the points, I share stories from Kodak and UPS.

I also publicly announce the launch of The Problem-Solving Institute. 

Enjoy!

The Problem-Solving Institute

My Inc article on why you should not worry about novelty 

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

In this episode, I share three useful tricks every innovator should steal from magicians. Then I share one of my favorite lenses - #24: VARIATIONS.

The three tricks to steal are:

1. Don't trust the brain
2. Start with the impossible solution.
3. Performance is as important as the method.

I also share why simplification is often the best form of innovation. The most complicated solutions is not always the best solution.

Then I talk about lens #24: VARIATIONS.

The premise of this lens is that you should not design your solutions with a one-size-fit-all strategy. Or in other words, design to handle the exception, not for the exception.

Download the lenses from Invisible Solutions

Submit any problems you want me to solve on the show

Learn more about the "Best Practices are Stupid" book where you can read my "Making the Impossible Possible" technique

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

When looking for solutions to your problems, it seems logical to turn to best practices for answers. But what if best practices are stupid? What if they are not the key to innovation or problem-solving and may lead you down the wrong path?

In this episode, we explore three reasons why best practices may be a bad idea:

1. Replication is not innovation - copying someone else will not help you differentiate
2. Context matters - just because it worked for someone else, doesn't mean it is right for you
3. Undersampling of failure - was the best practice really the cause of success, or is it a correlation or (even worse) a coincidence)?

We also explore lens #6: ANALOGY. Although it may appear that this lens suggest we use best practices, it actually means something quite different.

You will never hear the term "best practice" the same way ever again!

Download the lenses from Invisible Solutions

Submit any problems you want me to solve on the show

Learn more about the "Best Practices are Stupid" book

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

In today's episode, we explore how concepts from linguistics can impact innovation. In particular, we dive into the distinction between surface structure and deep structure. Understanding these concepts will help you be better at strategic alignment, innovation, and problem-solving.

We first define surface structure (the words used to convey a meaning) and deep structure (the actual meaning). 

Then we talk about why the deep structure is so important to the development of your mission and vision.

Next we have some fun exploring why jazz is a good metaphor for organizational design. You will even hear me play the saxophone from a speech I gave in France back in 1999.

Finally, and more important to this podcast, we explore the role of surface structure (the actual problem statement) and deep structure (the real problem) in problem solving.

I think you will find this episode to be quite thought provoking.

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

In this episode, we first explore a myth of productivity. Although most organizations are busier than ever and they want to "do more with less," this is often the opposite of what is effective. Instead you want to "do less, get more." Focus on the leverage points of your business and you will get greater productivity.

This is an example of #1: LEVERAGE - what's the one activity that will generate the greatest results

During this, I also explore a provocative perspective: Before you can multiply, you must first learn to divide. I think you will find that there is great wisdom in this expression.

After setting the stage with these philosophies, I use them to tackle a user submitted question: How can I sell my digital product to as many people as possible?

To solve this problem, I use two lenses:

• #3: REDUCE - how can lower our goals to achieve a better result?
• #12: REASSIGN - who else can we involve in our work?

This episode will open your mind and get you thinking in new and different ways.

Download the lenses from Invisible Solutions

Submit any problems you want me to solve on the show

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

In today's episode, we explore how changing just one word in a  problem statement can unleash an entirely new range of possible solutions - including new business models.

We explore 3 lenses in particular:

• #15: SUBSTITUTE - change a word, including but not limited to synonyms.
• #10: HYPERNYM - use a word that is less specific (more abstract)
• #5: HYPONYM - use a word that is more specific (more detailed)

I share a wide range of stories from NASA, book creation, meat companies, and restaurants.

This is a powerful example of how subtle changes can have a profound impact on your solutions. If you really want to better understand how to use the lenses, this is one that you don't want to miss!

Download the lenses from Invisible Solutions

Submit any problems you want me to solve on the show

Search Princeton's Hypernym/Hyponym dictionary

Get a trial subscription to the Invisible Solutions Lens Browser

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.

Today's episode is about a topic that is one of my favorites. 

During the pandemic, everyone keeps asking me, "How are you going to pivot your business?" 

My response is, "I'm not. I'm going to DIVOT."

What does it mean to divot? It means to go deeper into what you already do. Instead of changing direction, give customers a more substantial version of what you already offer.

I think you will find this to be a fascinating and thought-provoking episode.

Learn more, play the game, and unlock your team’s full potential at PersonalityPoker.com

Brought to you by Stephen Shapiro—helping people and organizations create high-performing collaboration, innovation, and teams since 2001.