Tim’s presentations are focused on how he had to develop innovative new fencing moves to help his team win its first Olympic medal for Team USA in his event since 1948 and how that process translates into developing winning moves in business and leadership. Tim’s business and entrepreneurial experience includes launching the largest introductory fencing non-profit in the USA, Fencing In The Schools, working with IDEO to develop new and innovative fencing technology and launching several businesses to grow and expand the sport of fencing across the USA.
Team Builders with Fencing: Tim conducts exciting fencing team building experiences where a team of up to 30 employees can learn the sport of fencing from the convenience of any large conference room.
Tim’s experience includes speaking, hosting and giving leadership presentations at TedX Orange Coast, the Social Innovation Summit, White House and United Nations and at GE, Google, Bank of America, AIG, Hugo Boss amongst many others.
Developing Winning Fencing And Leadership Moves
In my Tedx Talk, Embracing Your Awkward Moves, I shared how I went from a Division III athlete to an Olympic Silver medalist in fencing by developing unconventional moves.
At the time, I didn't realize I was engaging in the same process that designers at IDEOand other world-renowned technology think-tanks used to create ground-breaking products like the first Apple Mouse and Crest's no-squeeze toothpaste tube. That process, I've come to understand, is called design thinking, and it's not just for design. I used it then to achieve athletic success and I'm still using it now as an entrepreneur, working to make the sport of fencing accessible to children in low-income communities with my foundation Fencing in the Schools.
The cornerstone of design thinking is Human Centered Design. It involves getting feedback and making revisions from real world situations. Part of discovering my unconventional moves involved me giving up on trying to design moves that I thought should work, or what other people told me should work and focusing instead on designing moves that the system was actually telling me were working.
Here are a few key ideas to help you use design thinking to develop your own winning moves in any industry:
Step 1: Start with a Clear Goal
My goal as a fencer was to make the Olympics and then to win a medal. Because I had a clear goal, it gave me a clear understanding of the results my moves had to achieve. In order to make the Olympics, I had to design moves that could defeat Olympians (with intimidating names like Pozdniakov...).
If a move I was using didn't work consistently on Olympians, then it wasn't a move that would help me achieve my goal and it had to go. Whether designing your business or your game as an athlete you won't succeed unless you have a clear goal,
Step 2: Prototype Your Moves
Prototyping is the time to be creative and try new ideas and solutions. Throughout the 10 plus years I've taken lessons with my coach Yury Gelman, we have tried thousands of different moves and combinations of moves that have ranged from the standard to the incredibly wonky.
It takes time to discover what works best for you. You can't be afraid to experiment, even if some of your ideas seem far-fetched, and you can't be afraid to try things that might "fail." The nature of designing a breakthrough product or move is that you will have many "failures" until you find the thing that works.
Step 3: Hack Your Moves
Having prototyped a new move, I would then go and practice the move with my teammates to see how well it worked. Often it didn't! Sometimes only a piece of a move worked and I would carry the successful bits forward to competition while discarding the "products" that the "market" was telling me wouldn't work.
STEP 4: Test Your Minimally Viable Products
The minimally viable product is a "quick and dirty" testable version of what your final move might look like. It won't have all the smoothed out edges, but it will be strong enough from testing in lessons and practice that you can take it into the "market" for a test-run.
As an athlete, my market is competition. Once I found a promising move, I'd first try it at local competition and see how it would fair against a variety of opponents. If the move still showed promise, I'd take the next step of bringing it to a national competition, and if the move still showed promise, I'd bring it to a world competition. 99 percent of my experiments never made it past a local competition.
Step 5: Observe, Get Feedback and Refine
Each time I brought out a new move I would pay attention to how it was working and against whom. This is where the human centered design approach matters. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if something works in practice. If it doesn't work in the "real world" then it isn't a final solution or product, and back to the drawing board it goes for further tweaking and testing.
The only way to determine if something meets the bar you've set is by testing it in the real world. Yes, sometimes you will look silly when you are testing out a new move in your market, but don't let that deter you. The moves that I ultimately developed to succeed at the Olympics came through years of work and years of "looking silly." If you have a clear goal and a healthy dose of design thinking, eventually you will hit on your winning moves.