Nurture Creativity, Passion And Collaboration To Be Innovative

The Salesforce Trailhead online training modules are inspiring a lot of us to learn new features and exercise what we already know to earn points and badges. And to have fun with Salesforce. There are modules, or trails, specifically for admins or for developers and trails for specific activities like learning about Event Logs. There is even a trail for getting ready for Dreamforce.

These are definitely worthwhile exercises for anyone interested in encouragement to practice new skills. Once you get started, they draw you in with virtual rewards that inspire continuing with a just-one-more goal. And the list of trails is growing at great speed to ensure that just-one-more goal offers something new and different.

I wanted to explore how this popular project came to be so that I can encourage that kind of innovative thinking among my teammates. So I interviewed Lauren Grau, Developer Relations at Salesforce and a member of the Trailhead team, and here's what I learned.

According to Lauren, the Developer Marketing group was looking into ways they might improve on the existing training workbooks. While these were popular for learning Salesforce, they didn't always provide a clear path or define a way to progress beyond introductory steps. It was also difficult for the folks at Salesforce to gauge the usefulness of any particular workbook. Were people getting stuck? Were they making mistakes?

Coincidentally, while that group was looking into improving the workbook training experience and exploring new tools like those from Udacity, one of the developers on the Developer Evangelism team, Josh Birk, was working on a side project called "Medals". Josh intended to demonstrate using the Metadata API to verify changes in an org based on steps in training. As a group, Developer Evangelism is all about coming up with cool uses of the platform to inspire people and Medals was another project intended to inspire developers with the power of the Metadata API.

According to Lauren, this kind of creative exploration is not limited to any single team. Salesforce is willing to help "carve a space" for projects that employees are passionate about and the company is filled with people who are passionate about Salesforce products. Salesforce has even encouraged that sort of creativity with project challenges that eventually get released as Salesforce Labs applications on the AppExchange.

While marketing had started creating learning paths based on roles and flow charts of the "known universe" of the Force.com platform, the demo of Medals was catching fire among all who saw it. In some companies, these two efforts would continue on their independent paths, but at Salesforce, collaboration and alignment across departments is a huge part of the culture. They use Chatter to connect people and ideas and have a "great open door policy" according to Lauren.

This combination of technology and policy helps Salesforce overcome barriers to innovation that other companies find insurmountable. As a result, the people who could bring together the two teams, marketing and evangelism, did so, and brought in the documentation team as well.

The people involved in Trailhead are passionate about solving the problem of helping Salesforce admins and developers with the task of keeping up with the cloud. With Trailhead, Salesforce can provide training that offers real-time feedback and does not require switching back and forth between disparate systems like workbook and computer to execute training steps. The gamification elements ensure that training is fun and addictive while well-thought-out projects and paths make the skills taught even more meaningful.

Luckily for all of us who enjoy the training modules, Lauren tells me "there is still a lot we haven't gotten to do with Trailhead that we've got planned". New learning trails and badges are on their way, expanding beyond the platform to other clouds as well. There will also be trails for end-users. Just imagine pointing users to Trailhead for learning and relearning tasks like running reports and using filters to see just the data they need.

If you have ever wished you could create your own learning trails for Trailhead, you will get your chance as Salesforce expects to harness the power of its incredible community for content creation and review. Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see what ideas develop thanks to Salesforce nurturing creativity, passion and collaboration so that fun and innovative projects like Trailhead thrive.

Living in a Bubble

I have been happy in my bubble, where women are prevalent in technical positions, leadership and as developers.

The bubble started when I was in college, completing a computer science major.  My graduating class had the most women completing the computer science major of any class the university saw from that point on, with 45 of us graduating that one year.  Just a few years later, the same university would see 0 women graduating with a computer science major.  Though numbers soon climbed again, they have yet to reach the same peak.  Similar universities have had similar number fluctuations.

Do you see this as disruptive technology or a necessity?

After graduation, I eventually wound up working in the world of nonprofits.  Look around there and you will see women running the show from the top down.  According to the 2013 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report, there are more women than men who run mid-sized nonprofits.  The number of women in IT and database design and administration, at least in the Bay Area, appears to be high as well, from my personal experience.

In addition, women are hailed as early adopters in a lot of technical arenas. A social media study reported by BlogHer found that "Women have an appetite for the latest gadgets and apps," particularly ones that are useful or fun.

So I've been a bit surprised by all the talk about tech companies lacking diversity and failing to employ women in technical or leadership positions.

There is a view that strong teams contain like-minded people, and that may be true if all you want is a strong team, strong enough to plow forward with weak ideas.  But if you want strong ideas, you need to challenge your solutions by creating teams of diverse thinkers who are comfortable defending their ideas, listening to other points of view and adapting to come up with even better ideas.

Innovation springs from a diversity of thought and experience and leads to ideas that can disrupt industries or invent new ones. Remember, problems inspire creativity, so don't be afraid to expose your teams to a broader picture of the problems they set out to solve.

When elevators had able-bodied, human operators the controls were placed at about elbow-height.  The placement of the controls remained the same even after operators became obsolete.  But with a more diverse viewpoint, someone finally designed an elevator with controls at foot level as well as elbow level.  If you've ever entered an elevator with a cup of coffee in each hand or a large box of equipment, you might see the use of this feature for an even more diverse selection of elevator passengers including anyone who has trouble using their fingers for such tasks as pressing buttons.

We all need to leave our comfortable bubbles to learn new things, broaden our points of view and expand our knowledge so that we can develop stronger solutions with broader appeal.  That just doesn't happen very well without diversity.