Introducing...
Hi, I'm Jon - owner of Step Zero® skunkworks consulting and Sssssshhhh, the biggest secret in the world. I've been PwC's British Entrepreneur of the Year, a serial startup founder & the "secret weapon" (apparently 🤷♂️) deploying data science to power ideas in The ZOO, Google's skunkworks innovation team. My day job is to study dysfunctional market dynamics through listening and invent ways to either break the market, go around it or blow it up. I like TNT.
Sharing: If you need a speaker, my EA is taking two more engagements in Q3 2021 (she's the real boss). Otherwise, I design+run an immersive "futureproofing innovation" retreat in Virtual Reality for the board leaders of some of the world's largest companies. Ask for Alina at The Leadership Network if you want to take part - she's dangerously smart and you should meet her regardless of availability:
Next VR retreat: 27 Sep - 1st Oct 2021
Pricing: £5,495 + VAT per participant
Join the waitlist (sold out, extra availability pending)
Doing: My team at Step Zero® are a group of listeners who advise senior leadership on how to obliterate markets to do better for consumers and the web. To date we have spent time 1:1 with leaders from organisations that include: The UN, Nike, J&J, Tesco, Unilever, AB Inbev, Pfizer & Adidas - we bring decades of experience in data, branding, innovation & product bootstrapping, and usually bring friends. Let's grab a virtual coffee if you want free ideas.
Being: If you're curious why brands call, it's because solving problems - the "how" - is table stakes. Finding problems so inspiring that they occupy your team's sleep - the "where" - is the hardest problem on earth. Because finding treasure isn't about how you dig 🐶, it's always about where. So, yes - we give away ideas to the world's most profitable companies for free: just fix a time with Preeti. If we have evidence that you're solving the wrong problem, pay us to define & solve the right one: it's hard. You won't find that at McKinsey... but they're cheaper, so they have that going for them.
Upgrading: Finding the "where" is one thing, but by enduring 2 years of night school 🌙 I explicitly targeted the technical data skills needed to automate & scale treasure maps. With this skillset, Google offered me a blank cheque of time to design and train a team who truly listened to people 👂... and then listened to data... to find the perfect spots to dig: the skunkworks Data for Innovation Team. By consistently driving creative people's biggest successes, you can create an innovation culture that scales, and in so doing lead a decentralised, democratised army of creativity. Being the founder of Google's single largest internal mailing list, "Data Den 🦁", shared & followed by over 14,000 staff was just a fraction of that execution.
Winning: This is how we can get to solving truly big problems, but even the biggest treasure hauls should still feel paltry. Advertisers often struggle to deliver on truly big, but we still had fun creating the silly-but-nice public project work that I can talk about; these remain the focus of my public conversations. My team's real impact consistently came from product development inside Google and from our work with governments - teams in a hurry, who have enough oxygen to breathe for years, not quarters.
Building: In May 2021 I left Google in order to grab a spade, a decade after hanging it up, and start following my own treasure maps again - working on some truly big problems that need to occupy all of my sleep. If you need one lens to change how you see the world, whether you're a CEO driving your mission or a student finding your path, try this: what would happen if you stopped focusing on what you want to do, and started focusing on what to fix? What if everyone felt compelled to grab a spanner 🔧 rather than watching the mechanics? What if we all looked for "where" instead of worrying about "how"? The more you listen, the more you'll hear how much is broken; here's some inspiration to get you started.
Connecting: If you see the value in approaching serious things playfully and playful things seriously, or need to meet a creative, technical & commercially trained leader then email, call or DM me on whatever the kids are using nowadays. Otherwise you can hear more about the public-facing side of my work on this October 2020 podcast by the fabulous team at TheMeetingRoom:
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))
