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Setting wheels in motion
Futurist
Joel Barker brings his
Implications Wheel to St. Paul's Concordia University, giving
MBA students a tool for assessing the broad effects of business initiatives
before making costly mistakes.
BY JIM McCARTNEY
Pioneer Press
At first
blush, it might seem odd for a new MBA program to pin its hopes and
marketing on a futurist.
But given
the importance of strategic planning in running a business, it makes sense Concordia University, St. Paul, decided to
showcase the tools and expertise of Joel Barker in its new
program.
Plus,
Barker is not just any old futurist.
He's Paradigm Man.
Barker,
once a high school teacher in St. Paul, launched a new
career in the late 1970s when he popularized the concept of the
"paradigm shift." Such a shift occurs when a conventional method
or point of view is replaced by a new approach, one that frequently comes
from an outsider and sometimes has revolutionary consequences.
Barker
wrote books and created videotapes on the subject and became a management
consultant to corporations, government and universities on how to
understand, prepare for and effect change.
And now
Barker has a tool he hopes will become as well-known in the business
vernacular. He calls this one the Implications Wheel, and he will be using
it in Concordia's MBA program.
Two years
ago, Barker moved back to St. Paul after 15 years in Winter Park, Fla., and Concordia saw
an opportunity to hire him as a visiting professor.
"Joel
has had an association with us — we've been using his videos for 20
years," said Jeannine Kessler, associate dean of
Concordia's MBA program. The first students in the 22-month night program
start Nov. 16. After a three-day, on-campus residency, students will handle
all course work online.
Landing
Barker is somewhat of a coup in business school circles.
Alfred
Marcus, a professor of strategic management at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School
of Management, admits to being a "little jealous."
"As
someone who teaches strategy, I don't find (Barker's approach) totally
hokey — and that's high praise from me," said Marcus, who wants to
invite Barker to speak at Carlson. "I think his tools could be very,
very useful — they are good methods and he is a sharp guy."
Marcus
argues it is extremely important to get business leaders to think about or
imagine the implications of their decisions or current trends.
Last
month, Barker demonstrated the Implications Wheel. In a three-hour session,
about 60 people from Concordia and the business community applied Barker's
tool to a local entrepreneur's patented idea for a bartering system called
HealthBucks. The idea is to give customers incentives to keep fit and
healthy.
By tapping
the minds of a large, diverse group of people, Barker said, businesses,
governments and universities can get a better read on the implications of a
change than they could from assembling the best minds on the topic.
This
theory is similar to one put forward in "The Wisdom of Crowds," a
book by New Yorker staff writer James Surowiecki.
To avoid the pitfalls of group or consensus thinking, Barker and Surowiecki agree that the "crowd" must be
highly diverse and the participants must be allowed to express themselves
in small, independent groups.
The U's
Marcus agreed that this is an important part of the process because the
consensus of crowds can stifle original thinking — or even lead to such
horrors as fascism.
Surowiecki also wrote about the need for a tool to
summarize the crowd's opinions into a collective verdict. Barker says his
Implications Wheel is just the tool.
CORPORATE, GOVERNMENT TOOL
Barker says
he has used his implications wheel for decades at corporations such as IBM,
Merck and Pillsbury as well as governmental entities such as the U.S. Army
and NASA.
"We
did a wheel for NASA on a project they had been considering for a
year," said Barker, who said he could not disclose the nature of the
project. "In three hours, our team had identified a dozen implications
as important as any their experts had uncovered. The director had to start
over in his assessment of the project."
Each wheel
session often generates a cascade of implications. Every group not only
assesses the implications of a change, but also the implications of those
implications — what Barker calls "third and fourth order
implications."
As a
result, the data generated by his tool were initially cumbersome to
aggregate and difficult to score.
But
several years ago, he found a programmer to develop software for
aggregating and scoring.
That will
make it easier to interpret results from the Concordia group's exercise
involving Minneapolis entrepreneur Joel Hodroff's HealthBucks
concept.
The
ultimate goal of HealthBucks is to lower health care costs for employers,
employees and the community.
Patients
would earn "HealthBucks" for achieving various wellness programs
such as quitting smoking, losing weight, decreasing blood pressure,
lowering cholesterol, and attending alcohol and recovery programs.
Hodroff,
founder of Dual Currency Systems, has worked for more than a decade on
using a rewards program to tap into America's "warehouse
of wasted wealth."
The idea
is to offer under-used services or unsold inventory as incentives — in this
case, to get people to take care of their health.
Patients
could use their "HealthBucks" card to go to the movies, health
clubs, sports events and get their oil changed at
under-booked times. Or, they could buy unsold items from a range of
retailers.
SMALL-GROUP WORK IS KEY TO PROCESS
After
hearing about HealthBucks, the Concordia group broke into small groups of
four to five each to address aspects of what could happen when the
"HealthBucks" concept is introduced — from the point of view of
the patient, or in this case, an employee who has just joined an employer's
HealthBucks' program.
Each table
had a person with a laptop to record the various "implications"
agreed upon by the group — and later, to score each one as to how positive
or negative it is and the likelihood of it occurring.
Barker
advised each group to make their implications as specific as possible.
"You
can't be general, because you can't act on generalities," Barker said.
For the
next two hours, each group addressed a "first order" implication
of the change identified by a group including staffers from Concordia and
Dual Currency.
For
instance, one implication — "Program receives bad press because it is
too confusing" — was addressed by a group led by Carl Schoenbeck, director of strategic planning at
Concordia. His group came up with these positive, neutral and negative
implications:
•
Positive: "Blogs form to clarify how to use HealthBucks" and
"HealthBucks organizers resolve confusion by improving
communications."
• Neutral:
"Bad press gives HealthBucks entree to a larger public hearing."
•
Negative: "Growth and interest in the program fades."
The group
then assessed the implications of those implications.
For
instance, while the formation of blogs was considered a positive, it led to
several negative implications such as "Blogs spread misinformation
about the program." But it also led to positive implications such as
"Valuable consumer feedback is created through the online forms."
In the
end, nine groups came up with about 650 implications, Hodroff said.
The
results were displayed as part of a large graphic in which the central
question is in the middle and the implications radiate outward like spokes
of a wheel to each new ring of implications.
The
positive implications show up in red, the negative in blue, and the neutral
in white. Implications that receive high scores either for having a big
impact or a high likelihood of occurring are marked for special emphasis.
"We
were surprised that our HealthBucks system was likely to generate grass
roots involvement," said Hodroff.
Later,
those trained in implementing the wheel will interpret the results for the
client. In the case of Hodroff and Dual Currency, Barker or Kessler, the
associate dean, will do that sometime this month.
LOOKING FOR SURPRISES
One of the
first tasks is to identify the major positives and negatives especially if
any are surprising, Barker said. Then the information is used to help clients
avoid implications they don't want to occur or encourage implications that
they do want. For instance, Barker once created a wheel for a new Kodak
camera during which it was discovered that the camera battery could explode
if heated up too high; as a result, a new battery was designed to tolerate
heat.
For
Hodroff, the process is far from over. He would like to repeat it, on a
smaller scale, to assess the points of view of other players in the
HealthBucks system — such as vendors, employers and health care providers.
Bill Palladino, a management consultant in Traverse City, Mich., has used the
wheel with a variety of clients who are interested in assessing the success
of mergers or product introductions. Palladino
works closely with Paul Slaggert, dean of the
executive MBA program at the University of Notre Dame and an avid proponent
of the wheel.
"Sometimes,
outcomes are not what the leaders thought they would be by unearthing
unintended consequences," Palladino said.
"It forces them to look in a new direction, to think differently about
things."
The
session on HealthBucks was the first of several exercises Concordia will
conduct on a variety of business and community topics. Next up, Concordia
plans an Implications Wheel for this topic: "Should the city of St. Paul own or lease its Wi-Fi system?"
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