Ask your customers to bring examples of artifacts created or modified by your product or service. Ask them to tell you why these artifacts are important and when and how they’re used. For example, if your product is a software system to manage invoices, ask them to show you the invoices, reports, or spreadsheets that they’ve created through using your product. If you make running shoes, ask your customers to bring you several pairs of worn shoes and tell you about all their runs.

Pay careful attention to anything that surprises you. What did you expect customers to create or modify that they have ignored? What things can you do with your product or service that aren’t used? What was used in unexpected ways? What do these tell you?

Countless studies have demonstrated something that great managers have known for a long time—most people want to do a good job. It doesn’t really matter if the person is a barber, a construction worker, an accountant, or a software developer. All want to demonstrate their special skills. Show and Tell works by giving your customers a chance to dip into a deeply felt human emotion to show you when and how they are using your product to do their best. By telling you how they are doing the best they can, they will also be telling you how you can help them do it better.

Show and Tell requires a lot of work from your customers to prepare for the game. Do everything you can to make this easy for them. Give them detailed instructions on what to bring and plenty of time to prepare the materials. Ask them in advance if you can keep whatever they bring so they aren’t surprised during the game. One way to do this is to offer a new product in exchange for the old product.

There are times when customers will want to bring examples that are private or that contain sensitive information. In this case, offer a private audience with just you and your customer to review these private objects. You won’t gain the benefit of other customers’ comments and reactions, but you will gain a more complete and thorough understanding of how your customers use your products and services.

When playing this game with multiple customers, be certain to find a way to identify which customer provided which artifact. If you’re having trouble with this, ask your customers to sign or personalize what they bring after they’ve finished presenting.

You need to create and bring a full set of materials created by your product because your customers will usually bring only the subset of materials that they actually use. For example, suppose your product is a software program that generates 40 standard reports. Chances are good that some reports will be perceived as more useful than others, and your customer will typically bring only the subset of reports that they normally use. By bringing a standard set of all of your reports, you’ll also gain the advantage of asking them to comment about what they don’t use.

Although this game is best played with a small group of customers who can ask questions and elaborate further on what is being presented (and therefore help you learn moreabout how your product is used), it is a great game to run during a single customer visit.

Products that don’t produce much in the way of directly tangible results are not good candidates for this game. Business-oriented software systems that produce various reports, charts, and graphs are a good choice for this game. Software that doesn’t produce much in tangible results, such as games or the embedded software that controls your microwave oven or antilock brakes, are not. Many items in the physical works are also not good choices for this game. Chairs are used for sitting, cups for drinking, and tape for holding things to walls. If you want to learn more about how customers use these products, consider Me and My Shadow or The Apprentice.

Take photos of all artifacts before, during, and after the game so that you can track any changes made to the artifacts during the game.

It is much more powerful to convince a skeptical product team that changes are needed when your customer presents their ideas in their own words. To make this easier, encourage your customers to bring extra copies of artifacts created by your system so that you, and they, can edit, annotate, or mark up these artifacts as they wish (use markers, scissors, glue, tape, paper, transparencies, and so on). If the artifacts are expensive to produce, such as when your system helps make teddy bears, sneakers, or portable MP3 players, offer to reimburse your client for artifacts you take with you or ask them to bring mock-ups or even photos.

Organize your results into the following categories and analyze them as follows:

• Artifacts created or modified in normal/ expected ways. Compare these with your future development plans to ensure that you are continuing to support the normal use of your product. As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

• Artifacts created or modified in surprising ways. These are your greatest areas of opportunity to learn from your customers how your product can be extended to meet their needs or tap new markets.

• Artifacts not created or used. These represent areas in which your total offering can be improved or simplified. For example, it could be that your product is just fine but your education and/or reference manuals are lousy. Alternatively, it could mean that your product is over engineered and that features can be removed.

Sample copy of “standard” things created by your product or service

Like most Innovation Games, Show and Tell is a game that you can play with a single customer. For example, suppose that you’re a vendor of high-end machining equipment and you’re visiting your customer to upgrade their control software. During the trip, it is very natural to play Show and Tell and learn more about how they use your products and services. Learning more about your customers is always a good thing and should be encouraged.

However, a key tenet of the design of the games is that anything you can do with a single customer is likely to be more interesting with multiple customers present. Play Show and Tell with a customer and you’ll learn how one customer uses your product. Play Show and Tell with other customers present and you’ll not only learn how they use your product, you’ll learn how other customers react to the presentation. You’ll be able to observe rich conversations where customers question, challenge, extend, and modify product usage, often sharing best practices, heuristics, and “never do this” advice. Perhaps more importantly, your customers will do the questioning, which can itself be a source of rich insight. What questions do they ask? Why did they ask these questions?

Ultimately, it is not a question of the right or wrong way to engage your customer. Instead, it is about the degree to which you can gain powerful insights into customer needs, and you should feel comfortable using any number of customers that you can to realize this goal.

Playing Show and Tell can be more fun, and produce even more interesting results, when you leverage other Innovation Games to create a more compelling experience. For example,

• Leverage Product Box and bring markers, pens, and other things that your customers can use to mark up existing artifacts, telling you about what they’ve done and selling you on their new creations.

• Leverage Start Your Day and ask customers to show and tell you about how they use your product during different times of the day, week, month, or year.

• Leverage Remember the Future to help your customer envision how the current artifacts could be made more useful.

As you become comfortable with all of the games, you’ll find that you can leverage the concepts behind one game with other games.