Professional Documents
Culture Documents
o A-I-D-A: Marketing gurus for years have known that in selling something from an idea
to soda, to cars, people go through these phases: Awareness, Interest, Desire,
Action. You can’t count on people naturally taking themselves through this cycle – you
must escort them.
o Creating Awareness: You can make co-workers aware of your topic in many ways – a
lunch and learn, water-cooler talk, staff meeting presentations, etc. Once you have
created awareness, your topic is on the radar, but it is at rest. It will stay at rest until
you move it along. Your presentation is a long way from being done.
o Moving to Interest: At a base level, people either seek pleasure or avoid pain. Interest
comes from seeing how this topic specifically applies to them.
Burning Platform – the bad things that happen if you don’t act now is possibly
even more motivating and is where you paint a specific picture of the pains
that will continue or start if we don’t implement what you learned at your
workshop.
o Generating Desire: People often make purchase decisions based on emotion and
justify it with logic. To move people to desire, appealing to the emotional benefits often
are more powerful than laying out the logical benefits. Think of the collateral benefits
of applying what you saw at your workshop (morale, better teamwork/friendships, more
time with family vs. working overtime to redo defective work, etc.) Consider a short
case study or story with pictures (vs. a PowerPoint slide with bullets), or a simple
hands-on exercise that proves a point. Fun is an emotion – so is boredom – aim for a
fun, upbeat experience. For every logical reason to implement, aim for 3-10 emotional
reasons.
o On to Action: Lastly, make Action very easy. Don’t just present and say – “I just
wanted to share” or “Anyway – now you know about it – I thought it was exciting”.
Ask for the sale – ask for action – and make the first actions needed either already done
or very simple to do. Ex: “I already made up waste identification forms - we can do
our first waste-walk this afternoon” or “let’s pick an area right now for 5S - I have the
red tags and with some volunteers we can do our first one this week.”….
o Advanced Techniques: Those general tips will take you a lot farther than just passing
a book around and hoping people will get excited and do what’s right. Here are a
couple advanced tips as well:
Avoid the Red Stapler: In the movie “Office Space” one poor worker
had so many changes shoved his way that he hugged his special red
stapler and wouldn’t let anyone take it from him. Until they know
better – some co-workers may be suspicious or even negative toward
you presenting what you saw in a workshop – they’ll see it as “more
work for me” or “I don’t need another change or committee”. Put them
at ease – position any actions as an “experiment” not a “change”. Tee
up proposed actions that will provide fast, visible, and
quantifiable positive results.
There you have it and I hope that helps you to better share your improvement ideas. Now if
you’ll excuse me, my wife has been successful in boosting my Excitement-O-Meter to the
“Act Now” level in cleaning out our garage. Happy change!