Following from my previous articles on "Culture of Innovation" and "Management Practices that Foster Innovation", this one will cover the application of the Lean Startup concept in the workplace as a means to promote innovation in existing organizations.

Lean startup is a method for developing businesses and products first proposed in 2008 by Eric Ries. The application of its methodology allows startups to shorten their product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. This concept is highly applicable in existing companies as it allows for the testing of new ideas and initiatives in a quick and cost effective manner. Additionally, the method enables a type of effective 'natural selection' of ideas and projects, permitting only the most promising to evolve.

So, what are the Lean Startup concepts that are applicable to existing organizations?

When you have an idea, you actually have a hypothesis. You have a supposition that what you have imagined will solve a problem or will create value somehow. However, the truth is, your hypothesis needs to be tested. And it needs to be tested in a fast and cost-effective manner, so that you can change it, evolve it and also test different hypotheses as many times as you can, so to ensure you have the best idea or solution that will be accepted by the client (internal or external).

Once you have your idea, project or product draftly defined, the first step in the Lean Startup framework is to "Know your customer". And customer can be external customers, internal clients/users or even yourself. 'Know your customer' seems very business 101 but, to this day, I am impressed about how many organizations do not properly understand who they want to create value for. The Know Your Customer step has 2 sub-steps: 1) Define the customer and 2) Understand the customer. 

For external customers, defining your customers means you have to identify, from the marketplace, who are the people or organizations you want to provide value for. It means you need to create a profile of your ideal customer. For an internal customer, it means you need to identify internally who your idea/project will benefit or impact. Let's take an example: let's say you have the idea to implement an online wiki system in order to host departmental policies and procedures in a way that it will be easier to frequently change/evolve them, collaborate upon them and effectively notify all people that need to know them when these documents are changed. In this case, your internal customers are the people who will both need to read the policies and procedures as well as the people who will write them.

The second subitem is to understand your customer. Talking to them goes a long way in getting to know them. Talk to as many as you can, being them internal or external customers. In the tech world, there is a saying that customers do not really know what they want until they see it (check the creation of the first iPhone as example). This is somehow true for finding innovative solutions. However, by talking to people, you will understand their needs. People may not understand exactly what they want, need or will value, but a smart person can understand the customer's underlying needs from talking to customers and they can come up with unique ways to fulfill them.

After talking with and understanding your potential customers, you usually have some additional information to already evolve somehow your idea. In any case, you need to start the Lean Startup loop so you can empirically test your idea in a cost-time-effective manner.

You start by building a very simple version of your idea to test it with your customers. The cost/time effectiveness of building it is key. You want to create a "Minimum Viable Product", something that can demonstrate the main value-adding features of your idea but that does not cost much in terms of money or time to build and test. MVPs can take many forms. An MVP of a smartphone app can be simply some basic drawings of the app interface on paper, so you can show it to your customers and check if they would buy it or if it would benefit them. Zappos, one of the largests online stores in the world, has a famous and brilliant example of use of an MVP. Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, to test the idea that people would buy shoes online, simply took pictures of shoes from his local shoe store and posted them in a quickly built simple website. When people purchased the shoes in his website, he would then buy the shoes in the physical store for the full price and would post them to his clients. In this way, Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business based on the model of selling shoes online. 

In our Wiki policies and procedures example, a quick MVP could be achieved simply by entering into a free trial with an online Wiki software as a service provider, building a few wiki pages of policies and procedures and enlisting a few of your 'early adopter' internal clients to read and update the wiki documents. Their impressions would dictate if your idea would be adopted and/or how it could be improved.

When you have your MVP, you need to empirically test your idea. This means you need meaningful feedback and data. Test your MVP with early adopters, people drawn from your prospective client base that are open to accept imperfections and usually enjoy checking out new ideas. 

Most of the time, you will learn great insights from the feedback stage, which will allow you to evolve/adapt your idea to something that will actually be accepted by your client base. Sometimes you will get good insights for incremental improvements, sometimes you will even change your desired client base, sometimes your ideas will simply be proven not feasible, and sometimes you will find a completely different idea to solve the same problem. In any occasion, you create a new MVP, either evolving or changing the previous one, and continue the loop until you have something with the highest chance of success. The Lean Startup loop will allow your ideas and projects to be empirically tested and evolved. 

The main point of this article is to impress the need for ideas and initiatives to be quickly materialized and trialed in a very cost and time effective manner. People are very good at having ideas, but these are often based on assumptions that often end up not being valid. The era of large business plans with heavy budgets and long development and implementation periods for a project, just to find out that its underlying assumptions were wrong, has ended.

If an organization fosters an environment that allows for any people to lead initiatives, implement them with very little budget and test their hypothesis in a fast and effective manner, many new ideas can thus be tested at the same time by many different people. This is Natural Selection in effect in the organisation. You will foster the spawning of a large amount of ideas, throw them on the environment and the most appropriate/adapted will grow, evolve and prosper in a virtuous cycle that has been proved to create great things.

At Go1, we are constantly trying different ways of doing things. We have tested many different processes and tools to solve internal needs. We just have an open policy for people to try it out and see how it goes. If it gets traction, we evolve it and officially implement it in the remaining of the company. If not, well, we just try a different approach.

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Applying Lean Startup in the workplace for innovation

Welcome to Part 2 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about How to Evaluate Ideas. As an investor, the ability to evaluate ideas is critical to Steve. Not understanding how to correctly evaluate ideas could be the difference between getting your startup up and running, and dealing with a range of problems that could have been easily avoided. In this episode, Steve explains how he goes about evaluating ideas, and gives you some tips so you can improve your thought process.

"G'day Steve Baxter here. I've been asked to give you some advice on how to evaluate ideas. The biggest ideas I evaluate nowadays are investments and businesses. You can probably see at the back there, we've got a couple up on the wall. Look for me on evaluating ideas, I don't tend to evaluate ideas, I tend to evaluate the person first and understand them. 

I want to know that this is going to be hopefully a relationship over many years, not too many years, and so we have to understand, can we work together? are they fundamentally good people who have the right approach to business and I suppose life and people? Then we actually look at the person. We actually look at their skill level. What can they do? what are they an expert at? and there's usually teams, and in their teams what are the relevant skills like?

Then we'll look at the problem they are trying to solve, and right at the end we'll start to look at the idea, their solution to that problem. So, we tend to make the idea the last thing in some respects. We really want to understand the people first."

If you'd like to find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class you can watch his introduction video HERE.

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Learning on the job vs Academic Training

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. This fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

Welcome to Part 1 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about Why ongoing learning is Important. Due to Steve's experience in the Army and in business, he has been involved in a number of programs with very different approaches to training and provides us with some great insight into how you should set up your team training programs.  During this weeks discussion we will be covering areas like keeping your team happy and motivated to give their best performance, improving processes and deviating from manuals.

"So why is training important? Training is vitally important, businesses are made up of people. The Best businesses are made up of the best people, but even the best people have to know what to do day to day. And if you're a founder or manager, it's probably behold on you to give your employees the most valuable feeling that you possibly can. Not only does it make business sense, but it's just a nice thing to do and a better work environment."

"I'm a huge fan of training. I'm a huge fan of manuals and procedures. That doesn't mean you should blindly follow your training, or blindly follow a manual or procedure, but you need to give your staff the empowerment where if the manual is wrong, change it and make it correct. They should never receive permission to blindly go off and do something wrong because it's written down. I'm a big fan of training, big fan of manuals. I spent my first nine years as a regular soldier and they were quite big on training and manuals and that's rubbed off a bit."

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Steve Baxter on Ideas

To learn some more about why ongoing to learning is important, you can also have a look at this fantastic video from Wofford College president Ben Dunlap as he tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 1: why ongoing learning is important

Every organisation is desperate to be innovative these days. The threat of being killed by a young disruptive startup looms at almost every industry, from taxi to recruiting, from accommodation to accounting and so on. Yet, uncountable directives to be innovative coming from the top fail. Many times, large budgets are allocated to fuel innovation-related projects and little is actually accomplished. The quest to be innovative has many misconceptions and extreme challenges, both for large organizations and for smaller ones.

No matter what initiatives have been taken, the first and most important change that has to take place at an organisation that seeks to be innovative, is in its culture. This is easier said than done.

The change and championing of a desired Culture and Core Values has to come from the top. If the top is not aligned to the desired values and not willing to take the necessary actions to see them lived in the culture, your organisation will not be an innovative one and that is it. It might have some springs of innovation here and there, but they will eventually die and the organisation will not evolve well into the future. If you are at the top and reading this article, great, you have the right mindset. If you are not at the top, your first order of action is to make sure you or someone you know can influence and, ultimately, get the culture change buy-in (and true championing) from the top.

Considering that the top is won, a few things need to take place.

The first one is that your organisation needs to properly define the core values that will drive the culture you want it to have. Most of the time, core values are already defined and are known, but they are not really followed or championed. For core values to really drive company culture, they need to be lived by and championed by the leadership. That is why the top needs to be fully into this change.

When you are defining or reviewing your organizational values, make sure the basic ones needed for innovation are somehow listed among them. They are:


Open and honest communication. Ideas feed and grow from each other. It is a condition of their evolution into something successful (Check out the TED talk from Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From below). Additionally, people need to be able to safely expose their real problems and challenges, so that others can jump in with new ideas to help them out. Tools and initiatives need to be in place for people from different departments, business units, backgrounds and interests to talk to each other and contribute mutually in a frequent and effortless manner.

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Accepting and driving change. A large amount of excellent ideas will make no difference in an organisation if the environment does not accept change. People who are change-averse or who are "Devil's advocates" too often need to change or leave. In an innovative organization, there is no space for people constantly putting blocks on new initiatives (check the concept of Lean Startup if costs are of your concern). When hiring, it is important to make a good effort to identify people who will have a natural role of internal entrepreneurs ("intrapreneurs"). People with initiative must be recognized, no matter if they fail. An environment that facilitates experimentation and rewards action is also essential for innovation.

Selflessness and Teamwork, or something aimed at restricting egos that clog the innovation arteries. People who fight to keep ownership of an idea will hurt the innovation process. Ideas need to change and evolve, and this can only be done in a team environment, with people of all types and backgrounds contributing to ideas and mutating them into something better and better. Ideas need to be experimented and, if needed, abandoned, radically changed or even 'pivoted'. It is all part of the process of achieving innovation and whoever holds on to an obsolete idea only to get the credit of it, will damage the organisation and the innovation culture. Ideas are just the seed. Successful implementation and follow through is what really matters.

Continuous Learning. Learning and innovation walk hands in hands. People can only be innovative if they have a diversity of background information and knowledge to build ideas upon. As mentioned, ideas feed and grow from each other. All great minds stood on shoulder of giants. They all studied and acquired previous knowledge of a variety of their predecessors to be able to stitch concepts together, add their own experience, put a spin on it, and come up with a new concept. Knowledge, especially a good diversity of it, is essential to Innovation. Exposure of new concepts, due to continuous learning, always sparks new ideas in people's minds.

Courage to stand up for the organizational values and to withstand possible failure of initiatives. If people, and specially leaders, drop their energy and courage in standing up for the organisational values, the whole effort is doomed. It is everyone's responsibilities to remind each other and their leaders when the core values are not being followed. Innovation needs to be core to the culture, and the championing of the core values are central to the development of that culture.

How to actually make these values come to life in an organization is a matter of another article (and possible course), but here are a few ideas on the topic:

Most of the time, leaders define those core values and try to champion them but what usually happens is that they are often unable to grasp how aligned the organisation is to their core values and what to do about the possible lack of alignment. This blindness usually happens due too many levels of hierarchy, or sometimes by the leader's own inability to grasp the reality, or even due to the lack of tools and data to expose what is actually happening in the organisation. There is a blindness to how people are actually behaving and what is the actual alignment of the organisation to the desired core values. Organisations and their leaders usually lack the ability to see what the culture really is at the moment.

A good, properly mounted and applied Organisational Culture and Climate Survey can answer those questions and expose any incongruence between the desired culture and the actual one. I'll not go into details on how to create one here but if you want to know more about it, please click on this link and vote for the creation of an article or an online course on the topic.

Another matter of importance for creating an innovative organisation, is to have tools and practices at hand that enable leaders to live and apply those values in the workplace. I'll cover this in a following article. Check it out soon here.

Hello and welcome to our very first Master Class!

We are very excited to be introducing our Master Class series, and can't wait to share some great stories and advice from some of the greatest minds in the startup world. Each of our Master Class series will consist of a five part interview covering a range of topics relating to our interviewee, with a different topic released each week.

Our first Master Class is with Steve Baxter. Steve is one of Australia’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, and an active investor and mentor to startups. Steve is an active supporter of Australia’s and Queensland’s startup eco-system, as a founding board member of advocacy group StartupAUS, the founder of Brisbane co-working community River City Labs, and the mission leader for Startup Catalyst. You might also recognize him from his role as a 'Shark' on the television show Shark Tank.

Find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class here:

Over the coming weeks our Master Class topics with Steve include:

Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

The battle between classroom learning and online learning has been raging for the past few years, and with one in four college students in the United States studying online, the times are changing. While this might be a big shift in the traditional education sense, today 77% of companies in the United States offer online corporate training for professional development of their employees.

When you have had all of your training documents in place for many years, why should you make the switch to take your training online? There is a whole stack of benefits around having a learning management system for your business, and today we will dive into five reasons why you should take your training online.

Training your staff online allows for you to create a more personalized training experience. Where in the past all of staff will have completed the same training, as most likely had to sit through material that was not relevant to their position, through an online program you can ensure that all material is relevant to the employee. With the personalized experience also comes a more engaged student, and less time spent completing a program.

How many times have you spent a day sitting in a giant conference room packed full of people for a training session where the main thing you were concerned about was making sure you got to eat one of the few sandwiches that was provided for lunch? Those days are over. By holding your training sessions online, your team can now complete their training from wherever they please. This can mean a massive reduction in down time and associated travel costs, as well as being able to complete courses at a time that suits their calendar.

It allows employees to learn at their own pace

Not everyone learns at the same pace, or enjoys spending a whole day doing a training course. The flexibility of running your training online means that your team can progress at their own pace. This means that they are not rushing through the content to ensure they finish in time, they can absorb the information and leave having understood the topic. Just because the course is online it doesn’t mean that you won’t have help either, if students get stuck they always have access to a coordinator who can assist them.

Due to ease of running training online, it’s not a hassle to run courses for your team more frequently. This is also a great for keeping your content current and running short courses to keep your team up to date with changes in compliance as they happen. Staff can also take additional courses as a part of their professional development that can be held in a company library for all employees across a company to access.

The bottom line for all training programs is the budget. Companies are willing to put a set amount of money into training their staff each year, and you have to make the most of it. With the implementation of a good Learning Management System, creating and managing courses is more efficient that ever, and having the flexibility to train staff remotely and only on the information relevant to them saves everyone time which translates into a huge cost saving.

More more information on online training for your company visit go1.com

5 reasons why you should take your training online

What if every interaction you have had with a client was publicly listed on social media? It’s a scary thought right? Your every word for the world to see! Well to be honest, this isn’t too far from the truth. Social media is defining how companies interact with their clientele more and more and it is proving to be very powerful in making or breaking a company.

Well let’s imagine your expectations were exceeded in your last interaction with a support team. This customer service representative didn’t just fix your problem, they smashed it out of the ballpark! Doesn’t that make you want to tell someone? On the flip side, if you have just had a negative experience, that certainly makes you want to tell someone right? Why put someone else through that negative experience that you’ve just had! Well with social media within a couple of minutes the world can know. This means EVERYONE can find out what sort of company you really are and word travels fast!

So what are you doing to use this to your advantage?

What if I told you providing an awesome experience lies simply with a mindset, seems simple right? Instead of approaching every interaction expecting a problem, why don’t you think of how you can change that person’s day? Instead of just giving instructions or pointing out what to do, go the extra mile and walk them through it step by step. This could be the difference between a negative and positive experience. My suggestion, keep a note on your desk with a simple reminder, “Every interaction I make will be displayed for the world to see”. If you keep that in mind, I can guarantee you your mindset will change. You will even view your clients/customers differently. No longer will you remember them as “that guy with the payment problem” or “the lady who thinks everything is a problem”. You may actually want to learn their names, learn what they do, all of this can aid your interactions.

The defining moment in the new age of customer experience I believe, is going from dealing with a problem, to assisting a real life person. These have two very different meanings and should redefine how you do business.

Whether you like it or not your company is being reflected by every little experience. Every client/customer has a voice, use them to your advantage!

Juliana was anxious. She had jumped from a plane only three times in the last three years. Her friends needed her now. One of the members of their 4-Way skydiving team, in the last minute, couldn't participate in the Brazilian national skydiving competition. So, they turned to Juliana for filling in. With just a few hours of actual team practice, they went over the choreography movements on the ground just before climbing on the plane to perform their first official jump of the competition. They nailed it. At the end of the day, Juliana Sé and the team were Brazilian national champions.

In the same day, on the other side of the world, oblivious to what was happening to my cousin Juliana, I was listening to the audio book "The Rise of Superman" by Steven Kotler. The book is centered around explaining the concept of 'flow', especially among extreme sports professionals. "In positive psychology, flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity". In his book, Kotler goes on to explain the rise of super athletes that are achieving seemingly impossible feats, breaking records more and more, faster and faster, and younger and younger in current times. These extreme athletes are performing stunts and achieving results that the previous generation of athletes deemed impossible, only to be then superseded by the next generation of athletes in a faster, exponential cycle. Kotler explained that these athletes are more and more accessing the state of flow, which enables them to perform perfectly in circumstances that they themselves never practiced specifically for.

But how do younger and younger people are being able to break world records and accomplish impossible feats faster and faster? Kotler mentions that, due to the advances in positive psychology, people are better understanding and practicing how to get to this state. He also gives a hint about the Roger Bannister Effect but, in my opinion, he falls just a little short in disclosing the real catalyst for the rise of super people: online video.

Chris Anderson, curator of TED, perfectly understands and explains the power of online video in breaking barriers and pushing innovation and performance forward (see his TED talk below). Basically, online videos allow for people to publish their feats to millions of others to watch. In that audience, people mirror and evolve from what they have watched and, in turn, publish their own videos. This creates a virtuous cycle that enables rapid evolution of any sport, art or activity. Online video capitalizes on the Roger Bannister Effect, allowing people to erase the mental blocker that deems a certain performance "impossible". It gives people real examples of what can be achieved and helps them trigger and exercise their mirror neurons, so, when they get into flow, they can achieve similar and greater feats.

But what all this has to do with learning and corporate training? Everything. Research on mirror neurons have shown that watching someone perform an activity fires the same neurons that would fire if the person was doing the activity themselves. This means that video examples of a well done activity should be one of the most effective learning tools available for mass training. Chris Anderson observes that our brains have been trained for millennia for learning by watching and replicating, while written or just explanatory teaching has been in effect for just the last few centuries. Video examples have the benefit of capturing the best practices while conveying all the nuances of nonverbal communication, with the added benefit that they can be replayed over and over again. And this is not only tied to extreme sports. It works with any human activity or behavior, being it in sports, arts, business or in the personal arena.

So, to uncover a bit more of Juliana's feat, she had been top in her sport before retiring to raise her son some years ago. She had won several national and international titles in other modalities and also was one of the people responsible for developing the skydiving wind tunnel technology currently used to speed up skydive learning worldwide. The team was also top in their sport, having won over a dozen national and international titles. But Juliana was out of practice and barely trained the movements with her recent teammates in advance. However, her partner was one of the team members and she had watched the practice videos many times just prior to the event, visualising her part in it. When the time came, she got into flow and her body simply knew what it needed to do. And she then became a national champion of another modality that day.

Flow, online video and corporate training

At Go1, we believe in growth through learning. We view education as a life-long endeavour and not something that only happens in a classroom.
We've seen firsthand what continued learning can do for individuals and organizations alike. That's why we are proud to be a part of the industry of learning management systems.


While there are certainly other areas that someone can gain personal growth, the appreciation of ongoing education is a shared quality among the brightest minds and most successful businesses in the world.


Growth as an organization
Smart businesses realize that their employees are their number one asset. Not technology or marketing, but hard-working people who share their vision and commit to bringing that vision to life.
Businesses can't expand without developing systems for training new hires, preparing existing employees for promotions, and keeping everyone up-to-date with the latest information. Training and education systems that once took years to develop and implement can now be organized simply and intuitively with a learning management system.
Not only do organizations get smarter with continued learning, employees are happier. Employees are more likely to enjoy their job when they are well-trained, which keeps turnover rates down and helps develop a sense of community within the company.
Leading organizations strive for constant growth and improvement. If your company isn't growing -- they're falling behind.

Personal growth
No one person knows everything, despite what they might tell you. It would be impossible to ever achieve such a feat.
But there's nothing wrong with trying.
As a team within our own organization, and through observing clients, we have found that a dedication to learning improves all areas of a person's life. Everything you do and create is a product of your mind. Why wouldn't you want to improve your mind?
Constant exposure to new ideas expands your creativity and makes it easier to stay motivated in everything you do. A bored mind is a decaying mind. Most people confuse the effects of aging with the effects of refusing to learn. Your mind stays active and vibrant when presented with new challenges on a regular basis.
Dedication to learning expands your interests and tastes. Learning doesn't have to be so serious all the time, in fact it shouldn't be. Studying new hobbies is a great way to grow as a person and have a lot of fun in the process.
Learning increases your value to the world. Not only are you more valuable in the workforce, but you are more valuable to your friends and family. It never hurts to have someone smart around.
With so much to gain from learning it's no coincidence that the best companies in the world are focused on helping you do just that. It's a win-win for everyone involved.
The world is changing at an exponential rate and learning isn't an option to remain competitive, it's a necessity. Those dedicated to personal growth will always have the advantage. Are you growing or staying the same?

Growth through learning: the Go1 approach

Welcome to the Go1 blog. Helping you to achieve your L&D goals through the latest learning and development insights, trends, and technology.

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