Skip to main content

forget feedback, just leave me alone

One of the biggest chalenges of this thesis is doing it alone. After learning the richness of working in teams, with an amazing group of highly driven, but also, very different folks, this project is like being sentanced to solitarty confinement. Had it not been covid, i dont know if i could have spent this much time at home, ass firmly seated at my desk. But as of late, another part of me just wants to be left alone. I see a bunch of posts all over our class slack chanel, and i just look away. Considering that the major premise of my solution relates to feedback, why am i not requesting any? A bit stems from embarasement. Im really not seeing my way through the fog, if this thesis actually comes together, i will be amazed. Ive got some chapterts written, but in terms of a red thread, theres none. Early on, when I went up in front of a startup group and shared the topic of my research, I knew better what my research was about, somehow, mpnts later, im finding it difficult to articulate what Im trying to do. If theres one thing I shouldnt do is hide from my classmates, so im going to make a pledge to share where im at with whoever is willing to listen. But just to see if i can wing it, here goes. My project is titled trial and failure. It sees failure from a positive perspective, as the requisite trigger for learning. How trial and error works is that we seek to corrcect our mistakes to avod the unfortunate outcomes they produced. Essentially, learning by doing is the learning strategy we use to develop, take learning to walk for example. Many unsucessful attempts lead to incremental improvements, that over time, allow us to explore the world on two feet instead of four. We apply this to the business world, and ask how might destigmatize failure in order to facilitate learning from errors. Oy, hardly an elevator pitch. this needs to worked on. But lets keep going. Failure is unpopular. Nobody weanst to be one, or be on the losing team, just ask Donald Trump. The thing is, there are a million errors gong on within business environments daily, but because its awkward to speak up and draw attention to a problem, neither are these problems fixed, nor is anything learned about what caused them, pretty much ensuring that they will continue. Get to the point. I decided to look at startups, to learn if these companies practice the fastfailing that they preach. Is this simply a slogan on a t-shirt spotted at a tech convention, or do new businesses accept and even embrace failure, allowing them to A. get it out the way early when its possible to fix, 2. learn from successive failures in order to improve their offering. still too long I spoke with a dozn or so startups, noty a large enough sampling perhaps for statistical accuracy, but through my interviews, I got a sense that small organizations really are more comfortable with risk, and are therefor more accustomed to failure. so then the question was, what methods can a moe established company implement that will encourage a culture of taking more chances, in order to learn from controlled experiments. The design solution I am proposing is fail positive workshop that will invvite participants to engae with their teammates, in order to gain trust, and start sharing. My hope is that these hands on excercies can work for an established company that is neither new nor particularly daring, and within an society where people are trained not to make waves. I am going to share my workshop with ikea, get feedback on what went well, and what can be improved. Ill revise my presentation taking the users needs into account, and present it once more. my god, is this wordy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

running a startup

brian sent me a text mesage saying i could interview him on his way to work. in a nour. sure, right, whatever. the only guy i know that runs a startup, this was pretty exciting. oh shit, no questions written, so i put some down quicjk so i wouldnt be fumbling when we spoke. good thing, his walk to work is just 15 min, and while he let me go over by around 8 min, by the end, i could tell he was in the office and had to attend to far more important stuff. so this is what i got. this is his first vc backed startup, the business he grew and sold in austin was bootstrapped. hes doing a kind of bio engineering biz to grow meat from cells. theyre on the 3rd round of funding, and i think i recall that it was some millions of dollars. so thats pre-seed and seed and then whatever comes after. they have just moved from dontown SF to berlkley, as they needed a bigger space. the team has grown to 16, and hes very confident speaking about all the stages of development like hes a pro. i just kind of ...

iterative

the first team that i was on at hyper island came up with the name looop, to signify the iterative process of design thinking. unfortunately, we were inexperienced, lacked leadership, and were frustrated by differences of opinion on just about everything. as susan wheelan would say, we were stuck in stage 2 of team development. so now im workingalone, and while there are fewer disagreements, the lack of alternate perspective is frustrating. what i am beginning to see is that the learning is more painful, but faster in a group environment, that when you are a one man band. i recall seeing the guy on the street corner of brtatislava, with contraptions allowing him to play at least a hald dozen instraments. while he can keep all the coins thrown into the hat set before him, he never gets the benefit of flow while playing with other musicians. anyway, a i approach the stage where i propose an experience design solution, i must now need to return to the books to get theory on trust, and f...

forgetfulness

how do i say this, but i forgot that i had started a blog. my intention had been to write daily, now its been several days without an entry. i sippose theres no reason to post on a day when theres little that has changed. today i got edits back from my coach. i had given these to her 11 days ago, so im definitely concerned, because my deadline is looming. her feedback is useful, but with her health condition, she has not been present, and im not sure that this serves my purpose, i wonder if this turns out to be another dead end?