Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:56
What were some insights you gleaned from walking around?
Mark Rickmeier: 16:01
So we saw I’d say there were some things that were just good digital transformation, things we could do, manual processes that were out of an eight-hour day for an inspector who’s looking at multiple rail cars and looking for damage and dents and corrosion and things like that. About two hours a day was spent. Maybe 90 minutes was spent actually along a rail car, side by side. The rest of the time was back in an office typing up all their notes, adding in details, uploading photos. It was a lot of manual time, and a lot of that could be done differently.
Now, with mobile technology and thinking about what you can do at the car side, as opposed to having to write it all on paper, go back and type it in. There was also a fair amount of what we call that swivel chair integration, where you have different things in different systems, and they have to manually make sure they’re all up to date. So there’s a, there’s like just some low-hanging fruit ways we can optimize the process. The more interesting things start coming from how can we leverage data better. And so how can we start getting data about the operations of the yard.
And there you’re not thinking about what kind of a system am I replacing. But what kind of new data can I create that allows me to start using AI to optimize things. And so for example, they have — switching is a very expensive process in a rail yard. Switching is where you take a rail car from one train track and line and move it to another. It’s very time-consuming, very labor-intensive, and it’s expensive.
And so if you can reduce switching costs, you can have a huge impact on the efficiency of a rail yard. And right now when they think about what are the fewest amount of switches, you need to move the right cars into the right shops at the right time. And they have a human, probably one of the best outfits in the industry, but it is a human in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of tiles, looking at it and basically playing Tetris. So where do I move cars around to get the optimum work done today? That is the kind of thing that I can do really well.
You know, we think about how can I make recommendations on the right, the best way to optimize my resources. Another way to use AI. We were looking at is more from like an Nvidia perspective where you have computer vision. How can I point cameras at a rail car and learn about what’s wrong by having it automatically doing things like detecting dents, corrosion damage, and then using AI to be able to build up a work order on that. Things that used to take a human eye, a lot of effort.
And then there’s a lot of manual work to build up the work order based on the damage you saw. And everything’s kind of queued up waiting for that job to finish. So we started thinking about what we can start doing, possibly in parallel. How can we speed up the necessary work for the inspector? And we are years, arguably decades away from this being autonomous no one is thinking about.
I want AI to do this all, especially in an industry where there’s so much safety concern and all kinds of security protocols. When you do work on a rail car, you have to make sure you’re doing the right work at the right time. The maintenance is very heavily scrutinized. But rather than saying we’re going to replace that human, we’re just going to make their jobs a lot easier and more efficient. So they have maybe more approvals to do than just raw typing, you know, can we how can we speed up their effort.
And so I think sometimes when people hear I like, oh, AI is going to replace our jobs, AI is going to replace all the humans. No. In this case, we want to make their jobs a lot easier, that they can spend more of their quality time inspecting rail cars and less time like typing up their findings in a document afterward.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:15
Yeah, I mean, not only easier, but more fun, I’m sure. I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s like, I want more paperwork in my day, you know?
Mark Rickmeier: 19:22
Yeah, I mean, I think of doctors.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:24
I mean, that’s a big thing with doctors. Like, I have friends who are surgeons and they’re like, I think I spend, you know, 80% of my day writing up notes, you know, and things like that, you know. So I’m wondering if you have different phases that you think about because you mentioned with the railcar, which is like, I don’t know, the low-hanging fruit phase. And then the next is like really optimizing even beyond what they, what they can do or what they thought they could do.
Mark Rickmeier: 19:56
Yeah, there is a spectrum. We look at this almost like there’s like we call it a data pyramid, but there’s a kind of a spectrum of how intelligent you want or need your products to be. And at a base layer, the most important concept is like how do you have well-structured data? Without that, you really can’t be able to drive more intelligent products. So we were actually we were just at a Gartner conference talking about where is our industry going.
And they had an interesting way of looking at this. These last 20 years we’ve been in this super cycle around digital transformation. Take manual processes and digitize them. So you have a process or an application, or a mobile app or web app that takes something that used to be done manually and do it digitally. Automate as many things as you can.
And that was a huge boost in the economy and a huge boost in efficiency for operations. That is coming to an end where the next supercycle is going to be not about building digital products, but by building intelligent products, products that can start using AI to make recommendations and start doing things more autonomously, which you cannot do unless you have good, solid foundational data set to start training your models on. And so the very first thing we talk about when we’re talking about this idea of building intelligent products is the foundational layer of can you get your data in order first? Interestingly, this foundational thing, it’s not generally a toolset problem. It’s a mindset problem.
And a lot of organizations, there are strong cultural silos where it’s like, this is my data, this is my application. I don’t want to open that up or expose that to other places in the organization. and you need top-down leadership to say that the value is actually having transparent access to all of this information and having systems that integrate into a shared data repository, not thinking about applications and work processes as siloed, individual things. That is as much of a mental political challenge as it is, I think a technology one. But when you get that, when you have a shared kind of foundational data set to start thinking about, in this case, replacing a whiteboard with an actual structure, like, where are the cars in my yard building, what we call a digital twin of that yard?
Digital twins are a way to take an existing physical plant operation or like work order and make that something you have data to build around. So now we have a digital twin of the yard. Now we can start getting up to that next level. And so here we can start getting into like the information layer. So how can I start providing unique notifications and alerts that allow a human to take action.
So like hey inventory is low. If you were to shop this car for repairs, we would not be able to take order on it because we do not have the right materials in house. Then, beyond those kinds of things, now we have data coming from multiple different sources, all being normalized and made actionable in the first layer. Now we start providing information. The next is knowledge and the knowledge layer.
You start getting to a place of not just what happened, but why it happened. This is helpful to say, like inventory is low because we are missing a certain level of parts. I’m going to order those parts in. I’m able to start triggering an action. It’s not just knowing about what’s going on, but why it’s happening that I can take more of an actionable step towards doing something.
And then the last is where we get to wisdom, where we start saying, I now have more insight than I used to. I can start taking not only like some autonomous actions happening automatically start replenishing my supplies and inventory when they’re low. Don’t wait for a notification to go off, but also wisdom thinking about maybe where do I want to shop these cars? Maybe I need to rotate my entire yard around, or where I’m deploying the fleet to not even go to certain places because I know the inventory is going to be low there. It’s being able to have wisdom about changing the way you operate based on the intelligence that you’ve gathered.
And so as you get further and further in the pyramid, you can have, frankly, larger and larger operational savings, but you don’t have to build something that’s totally autonomous. That’s really complex. You can start getting benefit right at the foundational layer of just capturing data around things you don’t already have. And I think that’s where we’re seeing it’s very exciting to talk about the promise of AI and the benefit it can have. But, you know, the unsexy truth is you really can’t do any of that until you actually get your data house in order first and understand how that is the really the foundation of these things.
And this is the shift our industry needs to make. I think going from we are a computer science industry into being like, well, actually we’re more of a data science industry as well and have to understand that the data that we create is maybe more valuable than the system that creates them. It’s moving from the concept of a digital software, digital technology, or digital transformation into these intelligent products, which I think differentiate from data products are different from software, digital products that you have to think about the data that you’re creating, the access to data that you can use to start training a model as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:35
I know your company, Mark, has solved a lot of interesting problems, and I’d love to hear a weird use case, maybe one you didn’t expect because I know you’ve helped, you know, with the retail, digital health, biopharma nonprofit education, what’s been a weird use case and why you think about that for a second. I could totally get what you’re saying with the kind of the intelligence thing, because we had an issue with our HVAC, right? Like just our heating cooling thing. And, you know, they came out and they realized, okay, it’s, you know, they didn’t have the part, right? But they didn’t tell us that for like two weeks.
They had to order it. It’s like, well, you kind of knew what the issue, you know. So if that talked to it, it probably would have known okay. we’re low on this part. That’s probably a common part.
And we should ordered it and had it. So I experienced that from a consumer perspective. And it was painful from that perspective. But what’s been a weird use case that of a problem that you that you solved.
Mark Rickmeier: 25:42
There are two I think one is weird and one is maybe the most inspirational thing I think I’ve ever seen a client do on the weird one, which I really enjoyed. Our neighbor down the block is Tyson Foods, and they contacted us and said, we want to operate in think more like a software company with the agility that goes with that. Can you help us to institute design thinking and help us to think it’s a mindset before it gets to be a toolset or a skill set? And we said, yeah, great. You know, we don’t make food though, right?
Like and they’re like, yeah. So rather than prototyping digital products and mobile apps, we were prototyping with a chef in their kitchen, but helping them to understand the needs of their users and how they could come up with new concepts and ideas, how they could rapidly prototype on those. And our testing was with a Michelin-star chef in a kitchen making materials. And then the prototype we were doing was still with end users. It was maybe the most delicious and fascinating work we did.
It was great. And so it was really fun to warn them because they wanted to work more like a software company in terms of how they approached problems, not because they were writing software. And it was a really, I thought, creative and bold thing that they hired a software company to help them make food differently. It was fascinating.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:49
How did they even come to that thinking? Did they mention that?
Mark Rickmeier: 26:53
Yeah. Did they have an advisor?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:54
That said you need to go into design? You know, hire a firm for design thinking.
Mark Rickmeier: 26:59
Or they had hired a guy who named Rizal, who’s a wonderful friend of ours. Now that we’ve gotten to know him, work with him several times, but he was brought in as kind of head of innovation, and he was seeing these projects that would spend months and months and months, and it was all, you know, innovation, theater, a bunch of slide decks. Nothing ever happened. You know, it was all looks really polished, but it’s just a deck with nothing ever got executed. Nothing was really changing.
And he’s like, we need to be able to move nimbly and quickly. We don’t want to spend months coming up with decks. We want to actually do something and see if it works. And so he said, we need to start working more like how software companies operated. And I thought it was really interesting to actually come and say, can you work with a big food company and help them think about how they operate?
Again, first it’s mindset and then it’s some skill sets we taught them and then the tool set. The tool sets were not our typical tools. We weren’t iterating and developing applications, but it was working with chefs in the same concept of let’s create a concept that you can put in the hands of users. But the first thing we did was do an ethnographic research walking, doing shopping trips with people, going to their kitchens and seeing what they use, what they didn’t use, how they think about buying food, how they think about the foods they want to invest in for their families. It was a lot of the same techniques, but it was the.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:10
Same.
Mark Rickmeier: 28:10
Framework to work rapidly. Yeah, exactly. Same framework. So that was maybe the most weird use case was prototyping with chefs in the kitchen and it was great. I think the most innovative one we saw was as we talked about the value of data.
As I said, that is becoming more important than the systems that create them. And when you have the ability to have that transparent data across a large, in this case, across the entire organization, the impact that can have. And so one of our clients was telling the story in a conference where they have a very large knowledge graph that they built around a whole bunch of medicine data and clinical trial information. And they have this really robust data set. Some of it is private.
Some of it’s actually research that’s been open to the public for decades. But the interesting thing about Knowledge Graph is you can find relationships between data much differently than in a normal data structure. And so in this case, there was a soccer coach in a small town who had a child, a teenager, on their team that was diagnosed with an incredibly rare disease, one that’s not commercially viable, which is a disgusting term, but basically it means it’s only 1 in 500,000,000 people who have this. No one’s going to invest in clinical trials. No one’s going to study because it’s such a rare concept.
And so he called this person who worked in a company and said, you work in pharma, do you have anything? I don’t know what to tell this poor family. Do you have anything I can go on? This is a Hail Mary pass. And that person said, well, I know my company has been building this large data set.
Let me see if there’s a way I can use the knowledge graph we’ve created to know more about what options might be available. And was able to look up this disease and look up which part of the human genome was affected by that disease. Surfing the knowledge graph. Seeing what other already in market available drugs are known to impact that part of the human genome, and actually found a series of connections by no human can do this connecting research and published over decades, and string it all together and saying there actually are some commercially approved in market drugs that have secondary treatment, like they have like alternative treatments, other ways they can affect the human body. That actually might be an actual treatment for this incredibly rare disease.
And so they had a quick kind of ethics review. And they said, we can’t tell the physician what to do, but we can say, read this article and then this article, then this article, like this is the things we think would be interesting research for you to do. That doctor’s eyes went wide. Called his own ethical review board and said, I think we can treat this patient. I think there’s a thing that’s out there that’s already FDA approved that might be able to affect this poor kid who’s been nicknamed Hope.
And so being able to structure and getting access to information in a way that allows to connect the dots across data, you can start finding patterns. And that’s why I talk about intelligent products. You can start finding patterns. No human would have been able to tie all those things together over decades and decades of research, but this was able to do something and find an actual possible treatment for a kid who had nothing to go on. And I think that’s where we start seeing the value of intelligent products more than just having digital products.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:10
So mark on like a granular level. Does that — what does that look like for your company? Do you go and have to connect all of these sources so that it can be easily searched? Or how does —
Mark Rickmeier: 31:23
In some cases.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:23
I mean, like in this case, they had a large data science team and they were working with a great like a very large knowledge graph to build that. We were building the application on top of that knowledge graph that would allow people to find those patterns. And so a part of what we’re thinking about is how do you structure and organize the data. And then the other part is how do you get users to engage with that data. In this case, it’s one of the largest data sets in the world.
I think one of the top ten knowledge graphs. It’s massive. So being able to create an application that allows you to be able to navigate that. And increasingly that total that pattern is totally going to change. This is where Agentic AI is now starting to change how the industry operates.
And I think we are expecting a very large shift in how users engage applications. I think we got it wrong as an industry. If you remember, remember Minority Report when that came out, you know, Tom cruise, like, you know, as an expert user, seamlessly navigating between all these different applications and just like flicking with his hands and getting all right down to the answer, like a mad scientist just working through, like literally, it looked like seamless, like 20 different apps, just instantly just going to what he wanted. That’s not how the world’s going to work. I think that’s for a while.
We thought that’s what the digital future looks like. The future and the future actually is going to look a lot more like her. If you saw the movie with Joaquin Phoenix and he falls in love with his phone, with the Scarlett Johansson voice as the —
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:48
I haven’t seen that yet, but I will have to check it out.
Mark Rickmeier: 32:51
So there’s a scene where he’s like, I’m really stressed out at work, and Scarlett Johansson is the phone said, you know what? I’m going to go through your whole inbox. I’m going to archive all the stuff. Doesn’t matter. I’ll just bring you back the ten top most important things.
He’s like, thank you. He’s not seamlessly navigating all the apps. He’s talking to an agent and the agent’s like, let me just do all that work for you. So I think what’s going to be interesting is that in the future, humans are not going to use the interfaces we’re designing. Primarily.
They’ll say, hey, agent, I have a kid on my soccer team who’s really struggling right now. We got anything for that. And I’ll be like, great, let me go do the research and come back to you with answers. You will have an agent as the primary interface for how it’s very possible. That’s where our industry is going to be going.
I think if I had to bet you’re going to see more of a tendency to go towards her than you are to go towards Minority Report, which is interesting, because that’s where I think the idea of intelligent products really rises, and putting the power in the hands of the user by interacting with an agent that can do actions on behalf of that user. We’re not really there yet, but that’s where the industry is going, I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:51
Are there any favorite resources you have? It could be books or, you know, sites from this design thinking that people should check out, or maybe just around the just this thought of design thinking or some of your favorite resources.
Mark Rickmeier: 34:08
One of the things I thought Google did really well. This was back in 2017-18. They published a book called Sprint, which wasn’t anything really novel except that they packaged it up really well and they showcased. If you want to do this kind of work, it doesn’t take months and it doesn’t take a special research PhD. Here’s a way you can do something in five days that shows you from an actual idea to validated, tested prototype by the end of that week, and you get real value in a single week.
It is a heads-down, very busy week, but you are able to work through the entire process design. Those are called design sprints. Design sprints really pave the way for people to start thinking along the lines of how do I get value faster? And I think from design sprints, it’s popularity in 2017, 18 and 19. You start seeing this broader movement and adoption of design thinking more generally and the double diamond method.
And so for people who have been doing design and design thinking for a while, this is nothing new. They’ve been doing this for a long time. I think what we started seeing towards that era in software was that that pattern, that way of solving problems, was getting adopted more by software companies. And then even applying it to large companies like Tyson Foods, they would just operate differently. And so Sprint is a good book to get a primer on.
How do I do this rapidly, and how do I kind of deploy a process that teams can follow in five days? But I think the Double Diamond, there’s some great books that talk about that. Gives a more generic like here’s how you should affect your mindset. It’s less of a playbook and more of like how you should be thinking and operating your teams.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:42
Yeah, no, I love that the two books, when you’re talking that like just cry Out to me is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half The Time and then The Goal. Because I feel like what you guys do is you eliminate bottlenecks for these companies, or is these one of the things that you do? And so those two stick out to me when you’re talking for sure.
Mark Rickmeier: 36:04
I think good, good ways to think about both half of the equation. You don’t want to just build the right thing and have no ability to build the thing right. No one wants to end up with a PowerPoint deck the end of the day, and that’s it. But you also don’t want to only have to come in and they can build the thing, right? But no right way of building the right thing to begin with, because then you could build a whole thing that no one wants.
And that’s very expensive. You really have to figure out a way to do both.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:26
I want to talk Mark about, I know one of the things that’s really important to you and the company is culture and some of the things that you do to maintain culture because you’ve done some things. I’m not going to say unorthodox, but just like, you know, I mean, we’re talking today, right? Just bringing everyone together can be a pain and you do it. So some of the things that you do that maybe are a pain, but you do it anyways because of the culture. I know you’ve done things with the chef before and sending food to people, so talk about some of the things that you do from just to maintain culture.
Mark Rickmeier: 37:02
Culture, especially for a consulting company where we don’t have a platform that we sell, right? We don’t have a digital product. Our platform really is our people. So we have to really think about what is the employee experience of TXI. A big thing for us is learning culture and really maintaining a culture of learning.
That is a very valuable thing in terms of growing people’s careers and helping them to kind of pick up new skills. It allows our clients to benefit from the adoption of those new skills and new capabilities. So this week, we’re doing something called a co-working week, where we fly everyone in together and we get a chance to sit down side by side. After Covid, we went all remote and we take the money we used to spend on rent. Now do these kinds of co-working weeks, and one day of that co-working week is just being able to work side by side and do a what we call like a no-working day k-n-o-w, no working.
We’re actually doing like an internal conference to be able to share ideas back and forth. And that internal conference allows us to be able to highlight new ways of working, learn from each other. Like that kind of internal conferences is a great way of doing that. And so we try to get all those different people together to talk about how they’re operating and how they’re collaborating. There are a lot of benefits we have that encourage learning and development.
There’s lots of conferences we can send people to. There’s even when people are on the beach, beach projects will spin up, help people to learn new skills, training we bring in and, you know, expert companies we get to pair with. No company does everything great. So you always find a way to pair up with new other companies that you can partner with and learn from. So there’s a lot of, I think a lot of the benefits, a lot of the culture of TXI is anchored around how do we help people learn and grow new skills?
And as we think about this, one of our. Values here is own. It is not just being able to own your own growth and own your own path. But we talked about ultimately what is the extension of that value is how do you own a piece of the business and that you have a stake in what we’re all building together? Because if you really have an ownership stake in the business It means something more to you than just an employment, just a job.
And so a couple of years ago, after we were thinking about this for a long time, we ended up selling the business to the employees to become a fully owned ESOP. And now everyone who’s an employee has an ownership stake in the business and has a financial upside as the business as well. So when they’re growing and they’re learning their own skills, not only are they becoming more employable in the market and bringing new skills to their clients, but they’re also being able to increase their own value in the market and the value of TXI, which they now have a piece of. So that’s a really big value. You can see a picture there of us all doing a kind of learning together.
This is where we get the benefit of having that collective ownership is because we’re all incentivized to try to help each other grow and help the company grow as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:45
Talk about the ESOP portion, Mark, and maybe some of the things you wish you would have known when you went through the process, because it seems like it’s a complicated process.
Mark Rickmeier: 39:57
It is. It’s funny. It’s the only thing I think Republicans and Democrats agree on. Republicans want to see ESOPs succeed because they want people to have more individual reliance without relying on the government when it comes time to retire. And Democrats like it because they want to expand ownership opportunities beyond maybe the very wealthy or the typical C-suite. And so being employee-owned is something where as an ESOP, you no longer pay taxes, but instead you invest back into the employee experiences of your people, and then they have a stake in the financial future of that business where it’s not a governance structure.
It’s not like they have like voting rights on the board, but they own a piece of the business. And so when they retire or they quit or they’re fired or they leave for whatever reason, they get bought out of their ownership stake. And so for people who are here for a year, doesn’t have that big of an impact. But if you’re here for five years or for ten years, that really adds up. And you start thinking about, you know, having an ownership stake in the business, you start seeing ESOPs become far more resilient businesses because they can reinvest back into the people and to grow their people.
Most people see the real value of their tenure in the organization. And so that ESOP allows generally people to be more resilient as organizations get more agency and more autonomy from their staff. And people start thinking about the long-term trajectory of their careers a bit more.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:17
I mean, Mark, I can see a lot of upsides with it. I’m sure you explored all angles. I’m curious, what did you see as some of the downsides? And obviously those weren’t big enough to overshadow the upside.
Mark Rickmeier: 41:31
I think so there’s something very, you know, like a Pavlov’s dog reaction about the way we used to have ownership before was you would literally write a check, you’d buy into the company, and then you would get every quarter. We would distribute dividends. You’d actually get cash in hand that quarter. ESOPs don’t work that way. ESOPs are you building up net worth in a business that’s as its enterprise value grows, it kind of grows with it.
And then when you leave, you get bought out. But there’s not that Pavlovian like, oh, I got a check in the mail every quarter, kind of a thing. You don’t get that instant reward. So we have other incentive programs we’ve created to do things like annual profit distribution with the company.
It’s goals, like other things that are more short-term incentives. But I think there was something that’s a downside, right? Like people that are used to getting a check in the mail every quarter. Now, don’t they have paper money? That’s something that pays off when they retire.
I think the benefit, though, is that when we asked who wanted to buy in, like half the company raised their hand and wrote pretty sizable checks to buy into the company. But the half that did came from, generally speaking, institutional wealth, family wealth, or some place of privilege that they could write a check for $50,000 and buy into the company. Not everyone can do that. And so if you really want to have an equitable company, you really want to diversify that ownership opportunity to everybody. You can’t just give to the folks who have access to that money because they probably can’t.
Not everyone can do that, especially if they’re new parents or they’re the first person in their family that went to college and they don’t have the background and the money they can borrow from family to do that. So this is an opportunity for everyone to have that upside. And I think that is a far bigger benefit. And so I think getting people to think about the long term value creation and like having a more equitable approach to ownership greatly outweighed that dopamine boost of getting a quarterly distribution.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:10
What type of advisors do you need? Did you find were important to work through this process?
Mark Rickmeier: 43:16
We had an advisor who just does this. They help companies think through what ESOP means, what it’s all about. When we created our board, we wanted someone on the board who had been involved in running ESOPs before primarily could also do employee education, because I think people have all and still do have all kinds of questions around, how does this work and what does our enterprise value and how does it change? And so every year we’ve committed to bringing in that board member to do an education around what this means. In the first year it was so funny.
Everyone’s like, oh, I’m an owner now, am I a millionaire? And we’re like, you’re hundred-aire. That’s what you are.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:50
Because it’s just the first year.
Mark Rickmeier: 43:51
You’ve just acquired a lot, lot of expenses in the business. But now over time, like, you know, by the third year, maybe the ownership structure is enough to buy a used car for their kid. And by the fifth year, it’s going to be enough to maybe put their kid through college and by their 10th year now has a meaningful impact on their ability to retire. So it does really add up over time. And part of that education is helping people think about as the enterprise value grows and the debt services pay down, what does that look like for them? So a fair amount of employee education has to go with it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:24
Mark, I have two topic questions. I know we have a minute, so I don’t — I want to make sure that we have enough time so I can keep it to one. Unless you have a few more minutes I don’t I don’t want to keep you.
Mark Rickmeier: 44:36
Okay. No worries. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:38
No worries. The last question then I’ll keep at this is just parenting. And how have you used some of these business concepts from a parenting perspective?
Mark Rickmeier: 44:53
So I have two girls who I’m regularly trying to encourage and give challenges to, based on some of the things I’ve learned. And it’s funny, I find some of the same facilitation techniques that I use at work in our ideation workshops, or Sticky notes on the wall. Totally work with kids. In fact, might work better with kids. And so thinking about how I can send you maybe an article we can share after, but how to use the same techniques around ideation with in a workshop in a professional setting, I might do with a top tier chef at Tyson Foods, and then come home and brainstorm some what ifs with my kids, also using sticky notes.
And when we did it well, we made a whole board full of challenges for my kids. And it was so great that it was. One was you have to build something in Lego taller than you, and one was you got to read a book to a grandparent. You got to go outside and find five different species of trees with four different colored leaves, like just things that would not normal challenges they would do. And my dad would come visit and they’d grab him by the shirt and be.
Mark Rickmeier: 45:53
Like, I’ve got to read a book to a grandparent, get over here.
Mark Rickmeier: 45:55
Like just having this wall of challenges and these sticky notes that could move around Kanban style like we do in agile from in-progress to done. It was really fun to see them rise to the challenge and taking some of the motivational things we do with teams to mark progress and to show a backlog we could do with kids. And like they, they really loved it and it was great. So yeah, I’ll send you an article about creative use of sticky notes for childhood education.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:18
I love it. Mark, thank you. I want to be the first one to thank you everyone. Check out txidigital.com to learn more. And we’ll see everyone next time.
Mark, thanks so much.
Mark Rickmeier: 46:29
Thank you.
