Watch: Module 8 – Lemonade Principle (16:30) 

 

Watch: Resilience (19:33)

I hope you enjoyed my Carnivale costume and history lesson on the resiliency and anti-fragility of those fleeing the ruins of the Roman empire. They found refuge in a swamp and built one of the most magnificent cities in the world with the Venetian Empire (“La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia) lasting over 1000 years.

I lived in a building built in 1070 (20 generations before Columbus set sail for the New World) and travelled extensively for a few years while working there. Sounds exotic, but I didn’t tell you about the problems and frustrations with weak infrastructure, erratic train schedules and total absence of mail or fax. Back in 1989 there was no internet, GPS or mobile phones and you had to embrace the uncertainty, getting lost, and spontaneous closure of shops, hotels and museums. But you also learned how to seek and cherish surprise – discovering a magnificent church not shown on the map or being stuck at an amazing restaurant overlooking a bucolic vista. Looking back, I primarily remember all the wonderful surprises that defined my experience and led me to return 20+ years later as a professor of entrepreneurship.

This anti-fragility and surprise-seeking behind ENT Principle #6 – Lemonade Principle is far deeper than merely making the best of a bad situation. Lemons are awesome – you can use them for more than just lemonade. You can make lemon merengue pie, vinaigrette, or lemon martini cocktails. You would be surprised at their usefulness (e.g. you can also use their anti-bacteriological properties as a cleanser).

When you are searching for insights and discoveries, you want to explore the design space and that means finding non-users, extreme users, workarounds, and contradictions. You need the zen concept of ‘Shoshin’ – the curious beginner’s mind. Otherwise you only find what you are expecting. When exploring Italy thirty years ago, it used to be easy to get off the beaten path and be surprised – I was lost most of the time! Nowadays everyone stares at their phone and always knows exactly where they are and what their next destination is – conveniently listed and rated on Trip Advisor along with photos of what to expect when you get there. You can’t be surprised when you try to plan out every aspect of your day.

In the video, I share the example of discovering what people really do with their clothes rather than simply believing what they told us while working on a design challenge in Germany. We had to work hard to catch people as they really acted and not how they told us they acted. Then we had to figure out what all these surprises meant and how we could help them solve their real problems instead of the problems we imagined they had.

Re-Framing Failure, Anti-Fragility and Growth Mindset

Watch and Use Tool #7 – Re-Framing Failure, Anti-Fragility and Growth Mindset

As you grapple with your portfolio of design challenges, you are undoubtedly experiencing some frustrations. Some of your potential interviewees will ignore your emails or Linked In messages. Others may not have much to say or will say contradictory things. You may feel that you are not making as much progress or are not as “smart” as other students. Maybe you’re feeling confused and don’t like “Dancing with Ambiguity”. Maybe you feel like quitting.

I was taught that someone’s IQ was fixed and that we were all born with a given number of brain cells. Some people were just better at things and would be for the rest of their lives no matter how much you worked. It turns out that this is just not accurate. Human brains have plasticity and we can not only grow new brain cells, but we can re-train our brains, change habits and learn new things throughout our entire lives.

Nobody is born smart. We become smart through focus and effort as we learn new things. Someone who is “bad at math’ can become good at math with effort and focus. Nobody is born an Olympic athlete, each and every one of them must work hard to achieve that status. Every professional athlete has their story of overcoming adversity through dedication and hard work.

It is true that some people are born with certain proclivities and seem to learn some things faster and more easily than others. Each of us tends to like and be better at certain things, but we are NOT stuck that way forever. Gender and racial stereotypes have been proven to be false – each of us has the capacity to learn and grow regardless of our genes or hormones.

Human beings are not stuck with their beliefs, values or interests regardless of how early they form or who instilled them into us. Researchers have discovered that people who believe in a fixed mindset act differently from those who have a growth mindset as I describe in detail in the video.

The purpose of Tool #7 is to help you reinforce a growth mindset by re-framing your “failures” as learning opportunities. The growth mindset helps you build positive attitudes like grit, tenacity, perseverance and resilience.

“Everyone wants to have grit, but nobody wants to earn it by being exposed to adversity, pain or failure.” — Steve Gedeon

Tool #7 – Re-Framing Failure Step-by-Step Review

1. Using your Journal, keep track of your disappointments, difficulties, frustrations and failures during the day or week. The goal is not to dwell on these problems, but merely to record them.
2. Categorize these issues into one of three potential buckets: Was it just a simple mistake that you are unlikely to repeat? Was it some kind of regular weakness that you can avoid? Or is this an opportunity for growth – can you exhibit anti-fragile behavior and enhance your grit and resilience? You may consider downloading a worksheet template to use from www.designingyour.life.
3. As you go through and work on improving your growth mindset and practising resiliency, capture any insights and reflections.
4. Document Your Process (e.g. Take Photos of Your Work). Be sure to include a section in your report such as “So What?” or “Insights I Gained” or “What I Learned by Using this Tool”.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)

Assignment #3: Make Progress on Your Career-Related Design Challenges

Let’s continue to make progress on your portfolio of career-related design challenges while incorporating these new principles and tools. Each loop will involve setting a direction with a good DCQ, selecting which principles or tools to use, divergent thinking to evaluate a range of alternatives and a convergent phase to make a final decision and move onto the next step of your design challenge. Some of my tool descriptions also include the use of multiple divergent-convergent iterations.

Assignment #3 is focussed on user-centricity, getting out of the building, enhancing your social capital, conducting life interviews, and using the customer persona tool to help guide your focus and document your quest for the holy grail of specificity. Start by reviewing the feedback you received on your DCQs and Goals in Assignment #2 and iterate to see if you can improve the impulse questions that will launch your Assignment #3. As I describe in ECLD Module 5 – User-Centricity the entrepreneurial tools and methods you use in Assignment #3 will depend on what your design challenge is and who your potential customers are. Your job-related DCQ may follow Stanford dSchool qualitative design thinking methods whereas your side-hustle-related DCQ may follow Lean methods, VPD or 100Steps2Startup methods. Your intrapreneurial-related DCQ may followDisciplined Entrepreneurship methods.

In addition to all these general methods and tools, I suggest that you will also benefit from using the following specific divergent tools and videos that I created to help you with this course and assignment. I cover Brainstorming, Creative Visualization and Mind-Mapping techniques in the first half of Tool #8. Interviewing and Networking Skills are described in Tools 6A and 6B.

Tool #5 – Customer Persona can be used as both a divergent thinking tool to start brainstorming, but is also an excellent tool to use at the end of the convergent thinking phase to document your discoveries and guide your focus in the next Iteration/Loop. I also give you the Odyssey Journey Map in the second half of Tool #8 because students love it and it’s a nice way to capture and see how your different career-related paths fit together to give you everything you want to squeeze into your amazing life.

Tool #8: Mind-Mapping, Brainstorming & the Odyssey Journey

Watch Tool #8 –Mind-Mapping, Brainstorming & the Odyssey Journey (15:11)

You’ve now refined a series of design challenges and are making progress toward them by interviewing people and learning more about what a career in your interest areas might look like. You are looking for more than just a job and are also considering what kinds of side-hustles, startups, changemaking projects and social capital networks will better position you in your career of choice. You’ve been exposed to a variety of design thinking books, methods and tools that you can use during your customer-centric double-diamond.

In addition to these external customers, you are noticing your ‘failures’ and re-framing them as growth opportunities. You’ve been journaling and tracking what you spend your time on, what activities and people bring you happiness, and monitoring your self-talk.

You’ve learned a number of divergent thinking tools to expand your range of choices as well as convergent thinking tools to help you select from these choices and capture insights. You know something about your own problems/jobs/gains/pains as well as your potential customers/employers. You have learned and practised a number of entrepreneurial principles and know that the step-by-step use of Tools are only a rough guide and that search-based design challenges cannot be solved by simply following any step-by-step planning-based causal approach.

As you iterate through your diamonds/loops there are several divergent thinking tools that I can suggest to help stimulate your creativity and provide inspiration for alternatives to explore.

The first one is called a Mind-Map which is especially useful if you are doing this on your own rather than with your design team. This starts with a single word or idea and gives you a structured approach to ideating a larger and richer set of ideas. The example shown here is taken from www.designingyour.life and shows someone who starts with an interest in being outdoors which stimulates a chain of career ideas. The goal is to unleash the creative right-side of your brain using word associations. The words closer to the centre tend to be logical left-brain ideas whereas the words at least 3 levels out (along the outer circumference) tend to be more creative right-brain ideas.

In this person’s case, they ideated from an interest in being outdoors to perhaps wanting a career that involves exotic locations, tropical beaches, pirates, exploring and/or racing. Armed with this divergent set of ideas, they are better prepared to engage in convergent selection methods to help refine their ideas. Often, we just lack imagination and quantity, but can more easily discard and condense among alternatives.

Brainstorming is perhaps the most common divergent thinking method, but this works best with a diverse team (think Radical Collaboration). The goal here is to start with an “impulse” question, design challenge or idea and come up with a large number of divergent ideas with a focus on crazy and extreme ideas which help us get at our right-brain creativity. This normally involves everyone on the team coming up with as many ideas as possible for 20 minutes and writing them onto post-it notes. The team seeks quantity over quality and nobody is allowed to criticize any ideas during this 20-minute creative sprint. Often, using word association, one person’s idea can spark a creative idea in others (this is called “piggy-backing”).

Another method to help spark some creative juices is to use a picture to stimulate ideas. Consider the photograph here (from freepik.com) and write down as many words/ideas that come to mind as you can for 10 minutes. There are 3 categories of words/ideas. The first category of words might include things like blue, fly, plane, propel or hand – these are left-brain ideas that are directly contained within the picture itself. A second category of words/ideas might include things like freedom, travel, adventure or crash – these are also left-brain ideas that directly arise from the picture but are not actually contained in the picture itself. The third category of words/ideas would be something like Elvis Presley which arises from your creative right-brain – Elvis was like a plane that lifted off and flew high before falling and crashing. It takes practice to get your brain limbered up to allow this third category of creative association. Most of us tend to be trapped in our left-brain logical thinking throughout most of the day.

There are several good techniques that you can find online to help you get your creativity flowing. If you are not accustomed to spending time being creative, you should probably devote at least 10 minutes to getting in the right frame of mind (using Mind-Mapping or Brainstorming) before trying the Odyssey Journey tool.

The Odyssey Journey helps you ideate what a potential future career journey might look like. You can expect that there will be a lot of crazy twists and turns. That’s why it’s called an Odyssey which is based on the famous ancient Greek Homeric poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is a story about the Trojan War and the Odyssey gives the story of Odysseus’s 10-year journey home from the Trojan War. He and his crew are continuously blown off course (by one of the gods he accidentally angered) and battle with the Cyclops, witches, sirens, harpies and other fantastic creatures before the hero Odysseus finally returns home to his wife and children after his multi-year Odyssey. It’s an adventure story about a clever and resourceful hero exhibiting grit, tenacity and resilience – just like you!

The goal is to brainstorm 3 radically different versions of what your life might look like over the next few years. The first version is your most likely Plan A journey. The second one is the version of your life you would choose if Plan A was suddenly taken away from you. If Plan A is becoming an accountant, you can imagine that suddenly all accounting is done by AI or perhaps all accounting work is outsourced to lower cost countries (not so improbable it turns out) so you must choose a Plan B divergent alternative. For the third version, Plan C, imagine you suddenly won the lottery and had absolutely no need to work ever again. This is where your creative talents can really roam to dream big and bold. Be the hero of your own life’s story!

Designingyour.life suggests that you pick a 5-year timeline for your Odyssey Journey. That’s not so far into the future that it’s a total fantasy, but it’s far enough away that you can use some creativity in imagining a lot of cool things happening. They have a template on their website that you can use along with a few examples of what other people have come up with.

You should rate each of your Plans A, B and C and then spend some time finding a way to bring the best elements of all three into alignment into your new-and-improved Plan D. For example, if your fabulously wealthy Journey C includes travel, then you should see if you can find a way to bring more travel into your Plan A. If Journey C includes starting a social venture, then perhaps you can squeeze in or explore joining a social venture in your Plan D too.

Regardless of what you put into your Odyssey Journeys, you can use these creative ideas to inform your set of interviewees, the questions you ask them, and the kind of life journey alternatives you might want to consider exploring.

Tool #8 – Odyssey Journey Step-by-Step Review

1. Warm up by doing a couple creativity exercises such as the Mind Map, Brainstorming, or Word Association using photographs as described in the Tool #8 video. Start with an Impulse such as “How Might I… (achieve my career-related design challenge)”. Generate a good assortment of right-brain creative words and ideas that you can draw upon to create your Odyssey Journeys.
2. Create your 5-year Plan A Odyssey Journey potentially using the template found at designingyour.life. [NOTE: Don’t skip the first step! You want to start with a lot of creative ideas, otherwise your Odysseys may be boring, predictable and similar to each other.]
3. Now imagine that you are absolutely prevented from following this plan. You must choose an alternative Plan B that hopefully will also bring you happiness.
4. Create the Journey C of your dreams. One where you have all the money you might need – perhaps by winning the lottery or making a great investment or discovering a long-lost rich old aunt.
5. Finally rate all 3 of these plans, identify any questions you might want to resolve in your design challenge and create a New-And-Improved Odyssey Journey that incorporates the best elements from all 3 plans (Plan D)!
6. Document Your Process (e.g. Take Photos of Your Work). Be sure to include in your report a section for “So What?”, “Insights Gained” or “What I Learned”.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)

Assignment #3 –Step-by-Step Review of Making Progress on Your Career-Related Design Challenges

1. Review your Assignment #2 and any feedback you received on it. Watch the feedback videos posted to D2L to see the feedback given to other student assignments in the class and get a sense of how to improve your current DCQs and Goals. From among your DCQs, select 2 or 3 of your Career-Related ones to focus on in Assignment #3. Your Career-Related challenges should include what you do to earn money (financial capital), social capital and human capital through some combination of job, side-hustle and social activities. Based on ECLD Module 5 – User-Centricity, select the primary entrepreneurial methods and tools you will be using based on which of the four primary customer categories your DCQ is in.
2. It helps to start your divergent discovery phase with Good Questions. Do your current DCQs point you toward actions you can take to resolve the challenge? Do they suggest people to speak with, things to find out, networking events to attend or organizations to join? What are potential activities you can do to get more information that might help? Brainstorm, on your own, different questions that arise from your DCQs and create post-it notes to decide what additional related questions you have, which tools might be appropriate to try, and what you want to learn in order to make progress during this Diamond/Loop/Iteration.
3. Practise Mind-Mapping, Creative Visualization and Brainstorming using Tool #8A. Practise Life Interviewing and Networking using Tools #6A and 6B. I suggest doing at least 1-2 interviews per week and at least 2 networking events per month. Use the Customer Persona in Tool #5 and any other relevant entrepreneurial tools and methods depending on your customer category (e.g. dSchool, VPD, BMC, 100Steps2Startup).
4. Create Post-It Notes to Capture Key Discoveries, Issues, and Things that Stand Out using these tools. Practise using creativity and good visualization techniques in your Post-Its.
5. Sometimes, starting with a few blank canvases can help you create post-it notes in the prior steps as well as guide your convergent pattern seeking efforts in the next steps. Here are a few sample canvas templates you might want to consider.
6. Look for Patterns
   • Cluster, Separate, Label and Add New Post-Its
   • Try a number of different canvas templates and 2 x 2 Matrices.
   • Try using the convergent Odyssey Journal Map in Tool #8B.
7. Capture the Learning and Revise your Design Challenge Question (DCQ) to incorporate anything you learned into your new-and-improved DCQ. Show a Before and After to demonstrate how your DCQ improved over the course of Assignment #3. Will these new DCQs be a good start for the next Loop? Do they suggest good people to interview, networks to join, opportunities to pursue and events to attend during the remainder of the course? Update your Goal-Setting Tool #9 goals and highlight any major updates or differences.
8. Meet with your Design Team using the crazy quilt principle and practise radical candor to review and discuss your progress, brainstorm alternatives, get their feedback and make any changes to address their suggestions. Capture your team members’ feedback in post-it notes with questions, observations, feedback, and suggestions for improvement.
9. Use Tool #11 – Self-Reflection to document which principles, attitudes and/or skills you practised since the last assignment. Don’t just copy the ones you used previously, demonstrate what you practised since the last assignment.
10. Write your Report to Document Your Process (Take Photos of Your Work) and be sure to answer the 5 questions illustrated in the figure (i.e. did you start with good questions, use visualization, find good insights, make progress, practise, and end up at a better place that will help you launch your next Loop/Iteration? Be sure to structure your report with sections such as “So What?” or “Insights I Gained”or “What I Learned”. Write a Report for the course assignment that meets university standards and includes Table of Contents, Introduction, Background, Next Steps and other relevant sections to help us to help you.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)