Author: unbox

Hello 911? It’s an emergency.
I am being tested!

As the bell rings, the teacher starts distributing the question papers. There is pin drop silence in the room. And any hint of a conversation is immediately quashed. As time ticks away, slowly, but surely, some students try cheating. Silently asking their friends or neighbors for help. Small chits filled with answers are skillfully passed hidden from the prying eyes of the invigilator. 

This is a standard exam room that, I’m sure, many of you recall from your past. A room full of students trying desperately to write answers to questions that they’ll eventually forget. 

Now, let me ask you this: Do you remember what was given in the question paper? Do you remember the answers? No, right?  

Honestly, if you are anything like me, you probably forgot most of the information before the day was over, which is understandable.  

On an average, people give at least a hundred paper-pen exams in their lifetime. But, at the same time, they are quite boring. Tedious even. And most of them, only test your ability to memorize answers and spew them onto the answer sheet.  

These paper pen exams and assessments are an exercise of retaining and recollecting information. That’s it. So, in today’s day and age, with all this knowledge and technology at our fingertips, this becomes redundant.  

At Unbox, we understand this.  

So, when a global financial services firm hired us to train their incident management team, we knew that we needed to shake things up a bit by bringing in an innovative methodology to assess and test their current capabilities.  

The team’s key struggle was managing multiple crisis situations effectively by making the necessary decisions to solve them.  

But… What exactly prevented them?  

We didn’t know. 

So, that’s what we set out to do. 

We needed to create a pre-assessment, or we can call it a “pre-test” that would help us identify specific challenges that this team faced while managing a crisis. However, in this situation, a paper-pen test would be ineffective. It could only tell us what they knew, theoretically. But what they knew practically would remain a mystery.  

Instead, we wanted to create something that simulated the urgency and chaos of a crisis. We wanted to see what happened when a crisis hit.  

So, that is exactly what we did.  

We created an assessment where participants had to emulate 911 first responders. As 911 dispatchers, we could see them apply all the soft skills necessary to manage a crisis. Yet, it was different enough from their profession so that they do not come overly prepared with standardized answers for it. Instead, they had to be quick on their feet while interacting with a person in distress who required their immediate assistance.  

Within a span of 8 minutes, they were expected to obtain relevant information and deploy emergency services. Their responses told us everything we needed to know about their individual strengths and areas of improvement.  

This simulation was no doubt difficult and time intensive. In our office, it was all-hands-on-deck. Multiple people from our office were simultaneously running these simulations, pretending to be that person in distress, for 3 days straight!  

Needless to say, we heard about A LOT of accidents during that time. But… we hit the target on its head. 

In the end, with all this information, we were able to evaluate each learner’s needs individually which then translated into specific learning goals for every team member going forward.  

We formulated a 12-month-long journey along with comprehensive coaching sessions that showed exponential growth among the learners based on the collected information.  

At Unbox, this is what we strive to achieve. We want each one of our learners to experience personal growth. And we’ll do whatever it takes to achieve it. 

The Unbox approach: Prioritizing YOU to curate effective solutions

We are not the experts, you are !

Every organization is different. That is why, at Unbox, we believe that no one knows your organization, and its challenges, better than you. Therefore, in our consulting engagements, we do not believe in giving ready-made solutions to our partners. Instead, we aim to understand and bring out their organizational challenges to the forefront, and then provide support with solving them.

The first step towards solving any challenge is understanding its true nature.

You need to treat the root cause, and not its symptoms.

However, this process is not as straightforward as it seems. Many of our partners take steps to understand their organizational and learning development challenges, but still, they find it challenging to find effective solutions.

A few years ago, we were approached by an omnichannel furniture and décor retailer who were looking to personalize and improve their customer experience. When we interviewed the leadership, we were told that their field design consultant team is in need of communication skills training. This was a good starting point and a hypothesis for us to work with. 

To understand the challenges faced by the field design team, first, we reached out to its members , and individually spoke to them about their experience. We used these interviews as an opportunity to validate or invalidate the leadership’s assessment of the challenge. 

We conducted ethnographic interviews which is one of our most useful tools. It helps us in having open-ended conversations with the teams to gain insights and understand their challenges. 

During these interviews, we learnt that most of the team was able to communicate quite fluently with their clients.  However, they also agreed with the leadership’s assessment–they were unable to build a good rapport with their clients. 

So… What was the problem?

Then, we started looking for the “unsaid needs” of our customers (in this case, the field design consultants). So, we decided to observe their day-to-day activities and interactions with the customers in real time. To achieve this, a few team members from our Experience Design team shadowed the field design consultants on their customer visits as “interns”. We also immersed ourselves in the customer’s experience by anonymously hiring our partner organization’s services for a home décor consultation. 

This was a game changer for us! 

While work-shadowing, we realized that some field agents were underprepared for the meeting. One even showed up to the customer’s house with a completely discharged i-Pad, and asked them to provide him with a charger. Others were unable to find the location on time, and often showed up late to the customer meetings. 

This challenge now started to make more sense to us, and we communicated it to the leadership. Based on our insights, we suggested a communications training program that was split into 3 sections – before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. This captured the thought that perfecting the conversation with the customer is not enough. Instead, what you do before and after the conversation is equally important. 

By the end of this 9-month long engagement, the leaders began to see real growth and change within the organization. Even the business impact was evident and return on investment on this program was over 20x. 

At Unbox, you, our end-user, are at the center of what we do. The problems, and to an extent the solutions, are all you. After all, no one else knows what’s best for your organization. Our goal is to deepen your understanding of the problem and design learning programs that can solve them.