Hey everybody, excited to get into this. So, but first a reading from the title slide. So this is how you communicate your idea is the most important part.

My name is Hugh Dillon and I am the strategy practice lead at UDig LLC. UDig is an 80s thing. It's designed to be memorable and I might be the least memorable Hugh you meet or know.

Allow me to illustrate. So I've found when I'm introducing myself that people miss my name the first time. It's kind of difficult to say Hugh loudly.

And so when I introduced myself, I've found it's easier to advance the conversation by referencing one of these guys. If you want to talk about movies, you know, my name's Hugh Dillon, like Hugh Grant. If you want to talk about the Marvel universe, Hugh Jackman.

In healthcare, grumpy about healthcare, Hugh Laurie. It's Dr. House, like Hugh Dillon, like Dr. House. And the thing that gets everybody is I might not even be the most memorable Hugh Dillon you know.

That honor goes to this guy who is a Canadian actor, works with Jeremy Renner, for all you Marvel fans, and works on the Mayor of Kingstown as his latest show. But he's also been a punk rocker and rather inconveniently for me, owns HughDillon.com, which is how I found him. So as you can probably see, like first mover advantage for me has never really been on the table.

And I think that tension is kind of the thing that people miss when we're talking about innovation. When I'm thinking about innovation, normally I'm thinking this is a chance for me to wipe the slate clean and start from a blank space. And I can tell you from a lifetime of experience that people do not have a blank space in their mind when they're being introduced to something new.

And so if we dig into that, that's where I feel like a lot of my mistakes communicating ideas have come from is kind of making that blank space assumption. And so when I've done that, you know, it kind of sounds like this, right? I spent a lot of my time talking about what the idea is, how its features work. And I get responses that sound like this doesn't have a feature I would like or expect, or this is just kind of too in the weeds.

Like what's it, what's it really supposed to do? And don't we already have a tool that does this already? And so I really kind of struggled to get my ideas through. And when I started thinking about it as not a blank slate, I kind of realized, oh, there's actually a better way to do this. And as we've kind of gotten into the last 12 months, things have gotten really kind of noisy because AI is just flooding the zone.

And so you're not ever pitching into blank space in general, but now especially there is AI everywhere. You know, we're all here talking at this conference about AI something or other. And so it is imperative that you get good at pitching into this noise or talking about your idea in the presence of noise.

And so how do you go about doing that? Well, it's pretty easy to look back at how I've been introducing myself all my life to find the answer is you've got to really highlight the differences. Not necessarily get louder than the noise, but cut through it by highlighting how you're different. And you just kind of assume that they are somewhat familiar with everything in those spaces.

So when you're thinking about this idea, it's less about making it loud, and it's more about making your idea memorable. So what we're going to look at today is three ways to make your ideas and the way you communicate them memorable so that you can cut through that noise. So to do that, three things.

Have a memorable concept, have memorable impact, and have memorable artifacts. So we're going to jump right in. We're going to draw it up, and we're going to kind of work our way through these concepts.

So the first thing is, as you kind of get into your concept, you need to kind of start thinking about what makes a memorable concept. And as we've kind of worked through these at UDig, we've kind of noticed a pattern. All of the memorable concepts are different somewhat, but also possible.

So when you're creating one of these, this is you in a, you know, closed room with maybe one or two other people kind of thinking through this idea. I need to be able to describe it in different but possible terms. And so as part of that, we're going to create and use kind of a made-up company.

Full disclosure, this was an AI session trying to work back and forth on what could we use as an example company. So this company is called Overview Aerial. They do a lot of drone-based planning for botanical gardens.

They're extremely specialized. And I'm using this as an example to kind of highlight how to move through a memorable concept. So you are looking for something specialized, but really the exercise that we like to use is something I call known for and yet.

It's a good way to balance that different but possible to get you into a space that we call the adjacent possible. That's not my term. I didn't of where you are rather than trying to push yourself into a space that you're nowhere close to.

For example, I won't be acting anytime soon, especially not at the caliber of the other three hues I showed you at the beginning. It's going to be a while. Give me a decade.

But here we're in the context of a company that already does pilot and topo software for aerial mapping of botanical gardens, and they're thinking about expanding to small farmers mapping disease crops. So it's not that big of a jump for them to go from mapping botanical gardens to mapping small farms. It's in the adjacent possible, but it is different.

It's not botanical gardens. So you have to consider what is going to go into your concept that you highlight as a difference to make the concept memorable. And you do this on a number of things, right? You can work through known for providing aerial planning by display for manual actions, meaning when you map a botanical garden, you're not taking any action from the drone, right? You're just looking at, okay, here's the display that has some issues that we need to go fix, and then we need to dispatch someone to perform some maintenance, right? It could be watering flowers, could be administering pesticides, something, but it's coming back from the flight, and then someone's running out there.

They know exactly where to go. In this case, on small farms, you still could technically do that, but how would the farmer find the space? The botanical garden knows its footprint and everything is somewhat different. It's easy to find the displays.

All of the crop rows on a small farm look the same. How are we going to identify what needs to be administered and get a person back to it, or should we use a person at all? And so when you're thinking through that concept, you kind of create this list of different versus possible, right? Different, we're going to have to figure out how to identify diseased plants, not necessarily a display in the botanical garden, but we are going to be able to reuse the path planning that we would normally use on the botanical garden to map out the farm. The other thing that's different is we might consider as part of this concept that we do want to take action from the drone to address whatever disease problem we see in the plant, so that we don't have to go on this wild goose chase to find which soybean plant we're talking about.

So we need to do a lot of work there that's different, but it's also possible because we have existing software. If we made the hardware right, we'd be able to trigger the action pretty easily from our existing software. So creating this different versus possible list is a great way to figure out how to evolve your concept from something that already exists in people's heads.

What you're trying to get to though is what we call an impact statement, and that impact statement is designed to be remembered as you go through the process once you kind of finish the big meeting. So after you pitch this concept, you're going into a discussion with someone else larger, you're going louder with your idea, and you need to get the impact of your idea down so that you can bring everyone back to it as your idea kind of expands throughout the organization. So when that expansion happens, it's subject to a phenomenon that we call impact drift, which is people start stacking things into your idea.

They start saying, yeah, that's a good idea, except something mutually exclusive. So they start bringing all this stuff in, and if you don't have impact that's crisp, that you can remember and point people back to, you're always going to be spending a lot of time fighting off these, that's not quite what I had in mind, that's not quite it, let's talk about this. So as we kind of get into the second piece, to create memorable impact that you can reference as you move through the project, we build these impact statements.

And the impact statement for overview might be, we want to increase the total number of overview customers by expanding into a farmer segment in addition to our botanical garden segment. So right away, if you got your MBA hat on, you're thinking you're going to grow your company by increasing the total number of customers available to you. Right now you can only sell to botanical gardens, pretty soon you'll be able to sell to botanical gardens and farmers, making your sales easier and higher volume.

The next piece of this is, okay, well, what value are you going to offer those farmers? So that is the next few lines, right? Provide ways to identify disease crops quickly and easily and take precise action with limited chemical volume. So I'm not just going to take a helicopter or an airplane and just blanket your farm in disease killer, right? I'm going to be very specific and targeted, allowing you to work in these smaller spaces where it's not practical for you to have one of those big airborne solutions. So the trick, of course, is while the drone is still in the air, don't require the farmer to go over there.

There's your value proposition plus the impact you expect it to have on your business. And then you might workshop this as you work through the different early stakeholder discussions. So somebody might say, yeah, we like that impact statement, but let's change that last line because it's not necessarily that it has to be in the air.

It's that we just don't want to make the farmer go soybean hunting, right? That's just not something we want to do. And that's a good ad, right? So we bring that back and we say, okay, here's what we want to remember. It's not that we had to have it in the air.

We don't want people thinking it has to be in the air. We want people thinking, I don't want the farmer going on a hunt through the rows of crops to figure out where to apply the intervention. So with that in place now, you're able to go start the project and get working on it.

But things can happen during that process as you do this, where as things start to get going, you start to lose the different pieces of the impact. We're not going different enough. Our value prop is getting watered down.

We're not actually bringing the right things into scope to have the action ability on the drone. People keep saying in the engineering group, well, that's really not practical. It doesn't make a lot of sense to put the tank on the drone.

Why don't we just start with put the action responsibility back in the hands of the farmer? And that kind of kills the idea, right? They're still going to have to run through all these rows of soybeans. They're not going to buy this thing. It's not going to really increase the total addressable market because the value isn't there for them.

But on the flip side, you might have every feature out there being deemed critical, and then it causes the whole thing to be late. And you don't address an opportunity that you see or that opportunity changes, right? Remember, there's all this noise from AI. There might be another company that gets into this space sooner than you.

You already have the advantage right now. So you need to get this next evolution out and tested with your customers before you go any further. And when people are not used to seeing that, they tend to stack all of these features in, right? Like, oh, it also needs to be able to refill itself midair in the tank.

Because what if we run out of intervention ability in the midair? If your impact statement says it has to stay in the air the whole time, that might be something that is really hard for you to corral. So finding the right impact statement is key as you build them to think through how am I going to prevent the MVP tendencies of the engineering groups and the feature stacking and all requirements must be met tendencies from the business side on the different and possible ends of that spectrum, right? So the trick is the last piece to create memorable artifacts. So these are most valuable when you are not in the room.

So now that you've kind of defined your impact and you've got the concept and you need your whole organization to rally around it, you need to create ways to guide the conversation. And the best way to think about this is kind of the way that we've seen people think of these three other famous Hughes, or if you're really unlucky, the other Hugh Dillon, right? When I go to introduce myself, someone new to them, use that to your advantage. My name's Hugh like Hugh Grant.

So you can say, well, here's the existing workflow, but here's how it's different and highlight one or two things. The best tool that we've found for that in the last 12 ish months is a service blueprint. And this is often overlooked.

It's pretty simple, but it's a, it's a staple of service design. And what you do is align the customer journey, the blue part up there with the technical underpinning to bridge what is different and what is possible. So right now you might start with a service blueprint that says, here's how we approach botanical gardens and mapping them out, right? We throw the drone into the air.

We preloaded it with a map of the botanical garden and it figures out the optimal path. And then it brings back a map with the current state of the garden. Right.

And so that might be our three or four steps. This example is from the Nielsen Norman group website. There's a lot of great material on this out here at that website, but it's, it's about an appliance purchase, right? So they visit the website, they check the store, they figure out features, price and availability, make a purchase and go from there.

This is just an example. It's what they teach on their website, but this is what it looks like. The way we've used it in the past 12 months is the same way as kind of like start from somewhere.

That's, what's good about artifacts, memorable artifacts align with what you're already used to seeing and then work the differences out from that starting point. So for here, it might mean this kind of thing for the overview aerial group where it's, you know, pre-flight scouting. And then we have this like step in here where, where are we going to add the intervention tank where we can still, you know, have the drone take an intervention instead of the farmer.

Where are we going to put that? Well, you could see or make a case for if we stopped and slowed down on this for a little bit of time that you might could do it before you fly. After you fly, there are pros and cons do two flights, you know, all of these kinds of things that could go into it. But the point is that you're defining the guardrails visually in the service blueprint to guide the discussion and collect feedback in channels that you want rather than having it just be a blank slate.

And everyone says, here's what the idea is and what it should be and all this kind of stuff. So once you do that, you kind of put that service blueprint in the middle of the different and possible extremes. And then again, work to what people already know.

So you want to connect UX research, UI designs, those things to the top half of your service blueprint because people on the business side won't be able to give you real reactions unless they spend a lot of time with that service blueprint and not many of them have a lot of time. So what you want to do is kind of meet them where they are, speak their language as best you can by showing them this is what it will work like. And then that artifact becomes another memorable thing that gets shared around the organization.

Kind of goes viral, if you will, among the people that are in rooms that you're not in. Same thing is true of the technical side where you're using things like software architecture diagrams or microservice designs or any of those kinds of things to connect to the base layer underneath the service blueprint in the green. So you're saying, hey, engineering team, this is what I think we need to go build.

Is that possible? Not, what do you think about loading a tank onto a drone? Does that sound good? Right? So you're able to kind of corral the different pieces of feedback to say, respond very specifically to this sliver of what I want. Does that look like it will make sense in this particular section of the blueprint? And that works well. And then your job as the person managing the concept is to make sure that these still make sense when you bridge them together, right? So you need a core team that can help you translate between architecture and designs.

From there, that helps you stay on your impact statement. So if you built your impact statement well around a different but possible concept, then you can tie that into a service blueprint, tie that into the artifacts we're used to seeing, and then you can keep your project focused on the impact and prevent that drift we talked about. So that will prevent others from coming in and pulling the idea too far off the axis, preserve the value proposition, and bring about real impact for your business.

So that was it. So remember, you need three things to get there. You need a memorable concept, and we talked about different but possible.

You need memorable impact, a clear statement that articulates the value to your business and the value proposition to your customer base to achieve it. And memorable artifacts, which are things that can communicate the message easily, pre-fill the idea in people's brains, and present for you when you're not in the room. So if you get those three things right, you'll be able to communicate your ideas in a way that cuts through all of the noise that comes from everywhere.

So if you enjoyed that concept and you want to read more about it, there are definitely some things that I pulled from when I was putting a lot of this source material together. The first thing is an article that has influenced me significantly by Jared Spool called The Five Indispensable Skills of UX Designers. They are sketching, storytelling, critique, presentation, and facilitation.

There's a lot to be learned in each of those buckets, but all of those things are ultimately about communication and getting new ideas introduced to others. So a lot of depth there. That's an old article, but a good one.

I love it. The second one is called Draw the Box Smaller, and it's from Jason Linksdorf, and it's a great story of his from when he was at IBM, where he was looking at, I have a great concept, it's really complex, and I don't understand why people won't adopt it. And the answer ended up being just make it look less complicated visually than it actually is.

And service blueprinting plays into that effect, because even though you have all of these complicated microservices and those kinds of things, the boxes around them make them seem very undaunting. They're quite easy to start talking about as a box. So if you keep the diagram simple in the service blueprint, people are more likely to opt into your request to engage or brainstorm or stay open to your ideas.

As we discussed, Nielsen Norman Group has a great definition intro course on service blueprinting. Highly recommend that. And then a lot of our own content at udig.com is around aligning business and technology using these methods.

So if you want to go a little deeper, there's also some material out there for you on our website. So that is it. Thank you all very much.

And again, my name is Hugh Dillon, not that Hugh Dillon.