Building a manga comic language: Michael McKerlie at TEDxUbud

Summary

In his engaging TEDx talk, Michael McKerlie explores the concept of performance as a conversation, both internal and external, and shares his unique approach to fostering engagement and creativity within his team. McKerlie highlights how he transformed traditional business processes by employing innovative and playful methods, such as creating comic-based communication tools and gamifying career progression. Through these creative strategies, his team developed their own language and methods for enhancing performance, ultimately leading to better results and a more dynamic work environment.

Highlights

• McKerlie redefines performance as a conversation that goes beyond results 💬.
• He introduces an imaginary mentor, a samurai, helping him guide his internal dialogue 🥋.
• Incorporating comics in the workplace enhanced communication and engagement 🎨.
• Gamifying career progression motivated employees and streamlined skill development 🎮.

Key Takeaways

• Performance is more about the journey than the outcome; it's a lively conversation 🎤.
• Embrace creativity to drive performance; McKerlie uses comics and gamification to transform work dynamics 🎨.
• Understanding and developing internal conversations can significantly alter performance outcomes 🧠.

Overview

Michael McKerlie's TEDx talk is an invigorating exploration of performance, differing from the typical metrics and results-focused perspective. He presents performance as a multifaceted conversation, both within an individual's internal dialogue and the collaborative discussions held within a team. By focusing on performance as a journey, rather than just an endpoint, McKerlie offers a refreshing take on achieving success.

One of the stand-out strategies McKerlie discusses is the inventive use of comics to convey complex business processes and policies. This creative approach enabled his team to better understand and engage with their roles and responsibilities. By transforming mundane information into captivating comic forms, McKerlie fostered a more dynamic and engaging work environment, enhancing communication and cooperation amongst his team members.

Further pushing the boundaries, McKerlie gamified career progression. By transforming an employee's growth path into a gaming experience, he motivated his team to better understand their skills and areas for improvement. This gamified system not only provided clear career trajectories but also encouraged personal development and performance enhancement in a fun and interactive way, leading to a more motivated and effective workforce.

Building a manga comic language: Michael McKerlie at TEDxUbud Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I'm here to talk about performance and it's always a bit tricky when the person before you got a standing evation W 100,000 bucks for their speech like actually brought me down to earth a little bit made a bit easier to be fair I'm like well I'm not going to be as good as that but I'll do my thing and that will be good but I am interested in performance and I'm interested in how we get people or groups of people to do great performance
• 00:30 - 01:00 and I think there's this real orientation in the world as we look at the results and if I want to separate the two concepts which I prefer to do I I look at it this way if you can recall back to when you're a child and you're learning to ride a bike maybe you're four years old and on this day your mother or your father turns you says today sunny or little daughter Isabella you are going to ride a bike and we're taking those training wheels off so naturally you are scared but you go and do that thing you get onto that bike and you feel the steading hand of your parent that's small your back and the another hand on The Handlebar and they
• 01:00 - 01:30 give you that gentle nudge and that exact moment is the moment you cease to ride a bike and not riding a bike is the result and not riding a bike is the result that you get for an awfully long time but the performance was an entirely different set of things and what happens if we look at the results we make a certain set of decisions about what we have to do but if we look at the performance and we live in the performance in the act of doing things we do a different set of things so in the world of sport if you did uh if if we looked at those results of the three
• 01:30 - 02:00 or four year-old not riding a bike you would have been axed from the team in business you would have got fired Apple will go bust and stock prices will plummet and will freak out in government you would have been axed gone and in school you would have got a grade F but if we actually looked at the performance and the excitement of that child the nerves that their heartbeat would have been gone 10,000 mil we would treat things very differently and I actually believe what performance is is a conversation my idea is that performance is absolutely and only a conversation
• 02:00 - 02:30 and what Leanne just showed you was the power of a conversation what that lady has done is mindblowing and it started with a lady who couldn't walk properly sitting down and talking to people and that's it so for me and understanding my own performance I realized I needed a coach and I needed to go through a period where I'm like Mike you just have to be a different dude like the dude you are is not going to be the dude that's going to do the things that you want to do if you could follow what I just said but that's what I had to do right
• 02:30 - 03:00 so I started out looking for a coach and a mentor and uh know I've I've worked with people all around the world and then I realized I had the perfect guy so I actually invented that dude up on the screen a samurai perfectly logical for a managing director of a digital agency to invent an imaginary friend and I put my imaginary friend over there and he was fitter faster stronger leaner more handsome smarter Wittier Kinder softer and unfortunately somehow taller than me and that guy was my guide and that
• 03:00 - 03:30 allowed me to manage the conversation I was having with myself cuz that's the first part the first dialogue that's going on is the internal dialogue about who you are and how you're going and so in this conversation with my mentor the samurai we invented a philosophy and this philosophy is something I took to my team and I'd start to speak to these guys every day I was worried about how people were regarding time in relation to what they were doing I was worried about how well we were communicating and our effectiveness as communicators I was
• 03:30 - 04:00 worried about our ability to understand the plan and more shockingly just to follow the plan the number of times people would agree a plan shake hands walk out the door and then do something completely different shocked me we're not going to achieve performance if we don't stick to the plan and then the last one was quality and I have this really important belief there's no such thing as the best in the world don't even try and Chase it there is only the quality that is relevant to where you are right now quality is context based
• 04:00 - 04:30 and those two that concept of quality was really important to me CU I I would say of my team like if you want to understand something understand what's the quality required for the performance you're about to give in our case might be delivering a big website and then are you able to achieve that quality and it was okay to not be able to achieve that quality you had to know whether or not you could and you could raise your hand and that gave us some topics for our conversation on performance so in our business we would talk about these four things in relation to what we would were doing and how they would impact us and
• 04:30 - 05:00 allow us to be better so like all businesses we was a nervous and excited start and with that excitement we carried ourselves forward and then we started to grow and we grew very quickly and we suddenly went from like a handful of people to 20 or 30 people and you have to go through the process of inventing systems and systems are horrendously boring and unfortunately massively critical so I have up here like 80 pages of Gump on how you build great big
• 05:00 - 05:30 websites and you do them in a really Kick-Ass way and I had to think about this second law of performance was about communication like there is no way I can get my team to read that not a chance and unfortunately it's right it's what I need them to learn so I sat down and like the Samurai and I would stroll around our office and we started go well who are we speaking to and my office now is an average age of 26 years old and English is not their first language to despite the fact that
• 05:30 - 06:00 they speak it well and lo and behold they like to read Japanese Comics which is good cuz I got a samurai already on my back so I can go with the Japanese comic thing pretty easily and so we get the manga going and so what we did here in 50 words or less is to describe how you build a million-dollar website 50 words or less they it's not actually detailed enough but it's a good start and we had to start somewhere so the second thing we did was just look at sales and how are we going to make my team understand the the sales process so
• 06:00 - 06:30 again we went through this process of turning into art and bringing to a little bit of life and so my medium for communicating my medium for managing that conversation was improved and I was getting engagement in the conversation so we then started to look at other interesting things and we took on the puzzle of uh sickle and so I said uh let's imagine here we got this dude uhoh crunch time giant dinosaur stepped on the the poor fellow po crunch guy is clearly going to
• 06:30 - 07:00 have to take sick leave then after sick leave the guy's going to be rushed to hospital then he's going to whip out his company insurance card that's how he takes care of that and then over here he's got four days of sick leave left that's a lot more interesting way to tell a story of sick leave than in four pages of policy and procedure on sick leave so we started to get engagement now things were kick and butt in my office and we would gone really well we'd actually um got invited to do a piece of work for a major International
• 07:00 - 07:30 sporting event and we were uh scared and we also got big and then we had 50 people and when you get to 50 people you have certain realizations and I had this uh einsteinian Revelation about my own ability and like that fourth law that quality it's like I can't do this it's actually really hard to manage 50 people by yourself really hard doesn't matter how well they are performing at some point it gets way out of control now at that same time and we started to rethink our management structure again this is not Uber
• 07:30 - 08:00 exciting to most people but we've approached it the comic way but I had this genius moment and it wasn't me that was a genius I just happen to sit there and listen and get it a designer by the name of Andrew whose art you've been looking at so far Andrew came to me and said Mike what if what if we took the comic and instead of making it the you know the literal translation of the policy what if what if we told the story of an Intergalactic freedom fighting force that flew to other planets and rescued cities and built Bridges and
• 08:00 - 08:30 fought off alien races that were taking over and all that sort of stuff what if we did that now that's an insane idea right but he had me and I already had a Samurai and I was like I was in a pretty weird place myself so I'm like dude Intergalactic Freedom Fighters not a problem bring it on so that's what we did but in our management structure we took it further we said well let's do away with the old titles I became an admiral it was not a career objective of mine to become an admiral and Admirals are good but this one's got a stogy a cigar and adms were cigars are way
• 08:30 - 09:00 cooler so I was very happy then we had captains and lieutenants and these roles we'd meet in the war room and that's where we meet we've got this whole language there's a whole way we talk with each other we talk about time and we talk about how well we communicating we talk about captains and Admirals in the War Room we've invented our language we own our conversation about how we perform so I'm I'm well into seeing people perform right and I really wanted
• 09:00 - 09:30 to see like exciting Futures created for my team so uh when people started to arrive I would have this moment where I would like uh welcome dude give you some knuckle I'd slap him on the shoulder and say go to your computer do amazing things and then over time I noticed how I would speak about it changed and grew and I'll still do give me some knuckle brother come here I'm like what's your name and he'd like suto and I'm like that's a tricky name for me suto what's your nickname and he'd say it's bowwow okay all right little bowwow little bowow you're on the team you're
• 09:30 - 10:00 in Squad X you're in Rico's rough neck is the team that you go into and then I would say this right little bowow in this company you will achieve performance like you've never achieved before in your life you will do things that will Amaze you my furry little friend and you will walk out of here and you'll be chuffed to bits at what you do and what you've achieved and you will delight and Amaze yourself and you will delight and amaze me I'll give him a kiss on the cheek a cuddle slap him on the bum and send him on his way great right except the poor guy
• 10:00 - 10:30 hasn't got a whole lot to work on except he's got an insane boss that talks in a funny way so what we did is we started to create a model for capability a model for how people can understand the individual skills if you like that they need to affect and so that model looked like this now again what we've did we've taken 60 pages of information and we put it into a chart and then we realized another thing and this is what we're doing right now is that Comics are good
• 10:30 - 11:00 Intergalactic freedom fighting forces are good Comics invented by Samurai that are actually games that you play that impact your career and give you career progression are awesome and so what we're doing now is starting a new conversation we're gaming up we're allowing people to understand and what this does here is got 25 numbers that gives you like an a score about how well you are at say communicating or how well you are might be at designing or programming or negotiating
• 11:00 - 11:30 and what what this does is if we go through we see here we got another story this guy this Super Trooper has just completed a mission as a result of completing the mission his boss has said you have earned 10 more points in the era of discipline this moment here where it looks like he's bursting into flame is your typical manga power up moment and then at the result he's gone from level five to level six the level five to level six is a massive change for that guy level five to level six tells tells me the manager that he has proven
• 11:30 - 12:00 to be able to handle more complicated scenarios by making it a game he got engaged in the game called Career progression now I could do the normal policies procedures and development and all that sort of stuff but by making it a game he got engaged and out of that game you can see here this one's gone from level two to level six he knows or she knows what they have to do what they have to change to be better and as a result they get a new title they might be a lieutenant or a
• 12:00 - 12:30 captain now they might get a pay rise but we did something we created a language we put it into Comic format we created we're creating a game so they got a way to engage and so what's this all about it comes back to this one central idea that at the end of the day we have a conversation we have it with ourselves there's a conversation we have with those people directly and there's the conversations those people have with other people and for us we in vented Comics as a great way to communicate it
• 12:30 - 13:00 all we've inventing games to get participation and we've invented words that we use that keeps us in that conversation see right now in your teams in your companies or wherever you are there is a conversation it's alive and it's working already and that conversation delivers the performance that you are producing you may or may not be owning it but the more you own that conversation the more you respect and manage and develop that conversation
• 13:00 - 13:30 the more powerful results you will achieve thank you