N-of-8: Back to basics

It’s a good time to recalibrate our tools.  In this post, I will address the basic questions about N-of-8.

What is N-of-8 ?

A creative facilitation model using a diverse group of 8 individuals

Who does N-of-8 ?

An innovation team led by a trained group moderator

When is N-of-8 used?

• Customer insight and involvement: to engage key opinion leaders who will most influence future practice. 
• Product claims and messaging:  to see how your story can be told from multiple viewpoints. 
• New product and service creation: to help brand teams understand and compare current usage – and then create ideas to solve known customer problems, and even expose new ones. 
• Mission and strategy articulation: a way that leaders press forward and convey the big picture.

How N-of-8 is different:

Not just for “coming up with ideas,” but also for assessing and planning to put them into action

Where is the difference of N-of-8 meaningful to the brand?

Opportunity and structure to create new processes, products, and services

Why is the difference of N-of-8 relevant to the brand team?

Innovation outcome can be measured in financial results, marketing differentiation, and image acceleration

The elements of an N-of-8® story

As I’ve often written in my articles, story development is deliberately interactive, allowing us to establish a dialogue with customers and hear it in their own words.

In my use of this qualitative, iterative N-of-8® process, we present three stories in customer listening groups of eight physicians. Customer response and participation is key in this process.

The stories are presented in raw, “unpackaged” format in order to gain the most valuable customer input. This means they are simply typed on a page – not an ad, brochure, or commercial.

Each story is divided into main components (headline, introduction, claim, call to action, etc.). They must be crafted as a narrative, not simply a recitation of bullets points. So there are the components of good stories: setting, characters, action, conflict, hero, resolution, and sometimes, even a moral.

Conflict is essential to these stories. Author Robert Penn Warren said, “No conflict, no story,” and my experience has led me to agree.

When, considering the angles for the three different stories, you make them deliberately distinct and appropriately provocative.

For example, for a new biologic treatment for a rare disease, you might begin with these three angles:

1. Patient Impact

Content: awareness of the disease, their feelings about it, and their current usage of treatments

Tone: emotional Voice: second person “you”

Reference: research data from patient organizations and disease societies

Close: you can count on us, so make Brand your preferred medication

2. Speed of Effect

Content: process of care, action of agent

Tone: urgency

Voice: third person “it”

Reference: cause of symptoms, mechanism of drug, dosing levels, clinical trial data

Close: what role could Brand play in helping you feel better faster?

3. Functional Living

Content: connect with condition and problems it causes, easy to understand how drug fits into lifestyle about it, and their current usage of treatments

Tone: authoritative Voice: first person “we”

Reference: ethnographic research of impact on activities of daily living

Close: treat at first sign of symptoms

I've doing many N-of-8® groups in the past few months, and have more planned in several countries this summer.

3 basic elements of a personal brand story (and the basis for your own N-of-8 personal brand development)

Purpose, truth and action are three basic elements of a brand story. Beyond brands, these are three fundamentals of a personal story, too.

So as our teams at Stinson Brand Innovation are working on several new N-of-8^® brand story development projects these days, it’s also a good time to analyze our own stories.

Let’s take a close look at these three elements:

1. Purpose is the thing in your life you will fight for. It is the ground you will defend at any cost. Purpose is not the same as “incentive.” Rather, it’s the engine behind it. It’s why you have energy for some things and not for others.
2. Truth means your story should conform to known facts. Ask if your personal story is a work of fantasy, a lie you tell yourself, or reflects your biases and prejudices. Maybe you’re sidestepping parts of the story that are obviously untrue because they’re just too painful to confront.
3. Action is to engage, to achieve extraordinary depth. It’s more about energy than just time. The difference between full engagement and multitasking is not incremental. With the one-foot-in, one-foot-out level of engagement characteristic of multi-tasking, a startling number of things, all relatively inconsequential, get achieved in a short time. Consider this quote: “A distracted artist will not produce anything of real worth. An entrepreneur with scattered thoughts will not come up with solutions superior to the competition’s.”

So all good stories must have purpose, truth and action.

Here are several questions to answer when creating an energizing story for your personal brand.

Purpose

• What is my ultimate purpose? (Or, what is my company’s ultimate mission?)
• What am I living/working for?
• What is my defining principle and goal?
• What makes me do what I do?
• What is the one thing I would do, even if I had to walk through fire?
• What would I work for, even if there were no pay?
• How do I want to be remembered?

Truth

• Is the story I’m telling true?
• Is this truly my story, or is it what I believe it should be?
• Is it grounded in objective reality?
• What assumptions am I making, and are any of them faulty?
• What am I white-washing to make myself look better?
• Is my private voice in synch with my public voice?

Action

• What actions will I now take to make things better?
• Which habits do I need to eliminate?
• Which habits should I begin to breed?
• Am I an observer or a participator?
• Are my actions filled with hope — the belief I will succeed and that the change I seek is realistically within my grasp?
• Does this story inspire or influence others into action?

In fact, why not convene your own N-of-8^® personal brand development group with trusted friends, family, or colleagues to help shape your story.

8-balls in an N-of-8®? Why involve troublemakers in your big project.

Involving others in your projects and initiatives counts among the central tasks of a manager. Of course, you'll need the usual suspects: people who care about and will be affected by an initiative, who have relevant knowledge and expertise, and whose authority the work touches.

But also include troublemakers -- people with diverse points of view, those who are resisters or detractors, says change consultant Richard H. Axelrod, coauthor of You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done.

You'll devise more innovative solutions. And it's better to have troublemakers using their energy inside the initiative instead of stirring up angst about it from the outside.
Besides, when troublemakers see their concerns taken seriously, they may turn into instrumental team members.