Introducing...
Hi, I'm Jon - I lead Chimnie, the future of real estate and Step Zero®, a data innovation consultancy. Formerly, I was 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 job is to study dysfunctional market dynamics through listening and invent fixes.
Sharing: Drop me a line if you need a speaker on Innovation in Data. Otherwise, I design & run an immersive "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 innovation leaders from Nike, Coca Cola, Pfizer, Caterpillar & Philips join us to candidly talk about their insight, learnings & failures. Ask for Alina at Gemba if you want to join us.
Join the waitlist
Next VR retreat: May 2022 (afternoons)
Pricing: £5,995 + VAT per participant
Doing: My team at Step Zero® are a group of listeners who help clients to identify and implement disruptive new uses of data. To date we have worked with leaders at organisations including: The UN, Nike, J&J, Tesco, Kraft Heinz, Unilever, AB Inbev, Pfizer & Adidas - to bring decades of experience in data, branding, innovation & product design 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))
