Introducing...
Hi, I'm Jon - I lead Step Zero® and Sssssshhhh ✊ and was previously PwC's British Entrepreneur of the Year, a serial startup founder & ran Google's skunkworks 'Data for Innovation' team, harnessing data science to power customer-centric new product development. My day job is to study dysfunctional market dynamics through listening and to invent fixes by either breaking the market, going around it or blowing it up. I like TNT.
Sharing: If you need a speaker, my EA (Beatrice) is taking four three more engagement(s) in Q4 2021. Otherwise, I design & run an immersive "leading smart innovation" retreat in Virtual Reality for the leaders of some of the world's largest companies; if you need provocation... you won't be disappointed. Senior leaders from Caterpillar, Coca Cola and Philips also join us to candidly talk about their insight, learnings & failures. Ask for Alina at The Leadership Network if you want to join us.
Next VR retreat: 27 Sep - 1st Oct 2021 (afternoons)
Pricing: £5,495 + VAT per participant
Join the waitlist (sold out, extra availability pending)
Just announced: 29 November - 3 December (afternoons)
Pricing: £5,495 + VAT per participant
Reserve (12 seats remaining)
Doing: My team at Step Zero® are a group of listeners who help senior leadership to fix markets, to do better for consumers and to clean up the web through innovation sprints. To date we have co-designed, taught & run sprints for leaders from organisations including: The UN, Nike, J&J, Tesco, Kraft Heinz, Unilever, AB Inbev, Pfizer & Adidas - we bring decades of experience in data, branding, innovation & product bootstrapping to tackle your biggest challenges. Let's grab a virtual coffee to get started.
VR, Zoom & Live Events
I recently had the pleasure to collaborate with the talented team at The Leadership Network; leading a small pilot group to develop & test their custom #vrmasterclass environment. Check out https://t.co/dycr9aSpdD to get a taste of the future of conferencing. pic.twitter.com/sfsmlgsdxq
— Jonathan Francis (@thanfrancis) November 1, 2020
Philosophy
Having worked alongside hundreds of product owners around the world, helping them tackle their biggest challenges, I believe that Step 🦶 Zero just might be their unifying trait.
Picture the mountain of projects that every company says got off the ground... that teams 🚀 feel they got off the ground... but that, in reality, never made it out of a slide deck. This digital landfill is piled high with projects that fell at "Step Zero" - with no output to show from lifetimes of aggregate human effort.
I drive my teams to help product owners to both target & reach Step 1 - a Prototype. Something that you can touch. Share. Get excited about. Whether it's a Rush, a PoP, a Uizard, a Landbot, a toy model - whatever... just not a powerpoint. We don't need to exhaust ourselves with planning, project rollout, PR, scale, support, resource & comms. 100% of effort and focus is on getting to that first build, and for one simple reason - prototypes can inspire people who weren't there at the start. Decks 🚫 don't.
With a special emphasis on the journey from data to decisions, to achieve this I encourage my team to reinforce:
1) building project momentum, 2) growing decision confidence and 3) maintaining stakeholder alignment - three areas notorious for blocking projects.
Awareness of Step Zero has been helping business leaders to get the things they need done, done - and fail fast when decisions need to change. All starting with one small step.
Ice breakers
I represented the British Skydiving Team at 2 World Cups.
I played for the British Chess Team at 1 World Championship.
I speak French & Italian well enough to run a project.
German/Spanish well enough to run for a coffee.
And Python/R/SQL well enough to:
theory = ["somewhat", "randomly", "share", "about", "this", \
"new", "secret", "concerning", "string", "theory"]
reality = [x[1] for x in enumerate(theory) if \
x[0]%2==0 and x[0]!=0]
print(' '.join(reality))
