Watch: Module 4 – Radical Collaboration (15:53)

The third key entrepreneurial principle, Radical Collaboration, involves co-creating the future and being open to changing directions and leveraging the unique resources of others. Design thinking calls it Radical Collaboration and the theory of effectuation calls it the Crazy Quilt Principle (Crazy Quilt Image Courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.net). In both cases Radical Candor is important for getting the most out of working with others.

Design is a multi-disciplinary collaborative process where other people can help you brainstorm divergent alternatives and make connections. A co-creation mindset helps you learn from others, accept help and embrace diverse perspectives to create win-win relationships. Certain divergent thinking processes like brainstorming rely heavily on using a design team. [If you are by yourself Mind Mapping is often a better tool to use and I cover that in Tool #8.] Working with other people also helps you see new patterns, get unstuck and check your premises during the convergent thinking phases. We often have unconscious biases that others can help us spot.

Being open to surprising new insights and suggestions enables us to increase our range of options and helps us spot new opportunities for personal growth and greater happiness. But asking others to spend the time to help us, ask uncomfortable questions and go out on a limb to suggest ideas, requires that all involved use Radical Candor. This benevolent approach is foundational to working with others. It takes practice to get it right – being a bit too honest with people can easily be perceived as obnoxious aggression. And, of course, when you are the one asking for this help, you must be able and willing to accept their candor. (Image from Kim Scott “Radical Candor”)

Life (or the perfect job, marriage, etc.) is not a jigsaw puzzle to be figured out once and then remain static and perfect forever. This is why planning-based methods around “happily ever after” futures don’t work for so many people. Building a career is more like a crazy quilt co-created with others. Everyone brings their own cloth sections, patterns, colors and resources. Everyone must be open to change of direction and the final quilt must be useful and beneficial to everyone with win-win outcomes.

Assignment #2: Refining Your Career-Related Search Using the Design Thinking Diamond and a Few Tools

Ok, let’s practise using the design thinking diamond and radical collaboration principles with our next Loop or Iteration. We’ll start with 2-3 of your career-related DCQs in Assignment #1 and run through a single Diamond/Loop and practise using a number of different Tools.

We already did your first Loop in Assignment #1 which included a single principle (Entrepreneurial Principle #1: Bird-in-the-Hand) and two tools (ECLD Tool #1 – The Wheel of Life and ECLD Tool #9 – Goal-Setting). Now we’re going to practise using multiple Tools and Principles within a single Loop.

There are hundreds of excellent design thinking, workshop, sprint, and hackathon sets of tools available. Each textbook has their own, but so do many instructors, consultants, organizations, and books (I review the foundational ones in ECLD Module 5 – User Centricity). We also created our own course toolbox in ENT 56AB and 78AB for the four-semester-long experiential capstone stream in the entrepreneurship degree program. There are several dozen tools in this toolbox and these are shared with you on D2L. I’ll introduce you to a few introductory tools here in this workbook and in the ECLD Tool #2, #3, and #4 videos available on YouTube and D2L.

This figure illustrates how your first two assignments, diamonds and tools fit together. Going from left to right, in Assignment #1 we started our first diamond with our given means using ENT Principle #1: Bird-in-the-Hand and Tool #1: Wheel of Life where you created several draft design challenge questions (DCQs).

In Assignment #2, we begin our diamond with 1 or 2 of your Career-Related DCQs and will refine your career related search and get a bit more practice using the diamond-based scientific method with additional principles and tools. You start the Diamond/Loop by looking at your DCQs to see what kind of direction they point you in and start creating 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.

There are many general categories of divergent techniques to choose from and many different sources of specific tools from within those categories. Brainstorming, for example, is a general method for teams or individuals to create a large number of diverse ideas. But there are many specific tools from different organizations that give details such as whether you use post-it notes or digital collaboration, whether the brainstorming session is facilitated, whether there are creativity-enhancing activities, how much time, whether or not there is music, whether participants write their contributions quietly on their own or piggyback on each other’s contributions, rules of participant interactions and many other aspects of how to get the most out of the brainstorming session. Similarly, there are dozens of different ways to do research, observe and interview customers. In this workbook, I suggest you include, as a minimum, Tool #2 and Tool #3 (Please watch the ECLD YouTube videos I created for you) but you are not limited to only these tools and can be guided by your curiosity and proactivity.

Tool #2 is a divergent Observation tool that uses journaling to help you observe yourself, your interests, your habits, your use of time, your reactions and your self-talk. In particular, Tool #2 helps you document which activities you really like (or hate) and want to include (or exclude) in your career-related design specifications and canvases in Assignment #2. Tool #3 is a divergent Research tool that includes using various free on-line websites that offer advice on personality, values and interests that might help you with your career choices.

Once you’ve used a variety of divergent methods and tools to generate ideas, post-it notes, information, data and options you’ll enter the convergent phase where you want to move this information around and play with it using good visualization techniques. You can re-arrange your post-it notes in a number of ways to look for patterns and gain insights. Which of your strengths give you the greatest sustainable competitive advantage? Which of your weaknesses are the greatest threats to your career? Which of your interests or values are most suitable for pursuing in a job, side-hustle or start-up? Is travel more important than salary or autonomy more important than flexibility? Are there certain things that must be included in your career? I like to use a number of different 2 x 2 matrices to help me visualize things, but you may want to try other convergent visualization techniques. Tool #4 gives you a few different commonly used methods for condensing and conveying information to others such as SWOT diagram, T-shaped profile, Customer Profile Canvas and USP.

These tools should help you refine your career-related search parameters and give you a clearer sense of direction, or at least highlight things you still need to discover like where you want to live, whether you prefer working indoors or out, at a big or small company, a fast-paced environment or more stable and long-range planning organization, etc.

Trying to figure all this out on your own, inside your own head, is difficult. Working with a design team using the Crazy Quilt Principle in a spirit of collaboration and candor will help you brainstorm, ask deeper questions, recognize patterns and come up with alternatives. The team can help you determine if your revised DCQs are significantly better than the starting ones and identify whether your documentation of the process makes sense.

Finally, in putting together your Assignment #2 Report, don’t forget to answer the 5 key questions about whether you have used good visualization techniques, found insights, practised building your principles and attitudes, made progress and have crafted good DCQs to start the next Loop/Iteration. Be sure to include Tool #11 – Self-Reflection, which is designed to help reinforce your learning and ensure that you are getting good practice at applying specific entrepreneurial principles, skills and attitudes during your experiential learning.

Tool #2: Observe Yourself by Journaling to Identify Career-Related Activities of Interest

Watch and Start Using Tool #2 – Building Your Dashboard (16:08)

This tool could take a couple weeks, so I urge you to get started on it right away.

Searching requires lots of divergent data. If you’re trying to discover what interests you, then get out there, experience plenty of things, and observe your emotional responses to them. However, it’s hard to keep track of more than 20 things without writing them down either in a journal or post-it notes or a dashboard of some sort.

Buy a journal that you like and enjoy spending time with. I suggest something small enough to carry around easily on the bus and on plane trips (mine are around 7” x 9” x 1”). You can use this journal for a wide range of observations including the things you spend your time on, your self-talk and your emotional reactions to things as well as to document your thoughts around design challenges, goals and insights discovered along the way.

In this particular tool, we are using the journal to observe and track the things that impact your energy, engagement, flow and happiness level over time. You don’t have to be formal with 1-10 ratings if that doesn’t fit your style, but you should track the things that make you happy and train yourself to notice and pay attention to your happiness. Use all the various nuances of emotional states such as joy, thrill, contentment, satisfaction, excitement, pleasure, euphoria, flourishing, well-being and meaning rather than only a single term like ‘happiness’. You can and should also track what makes you unhappy, but don’t let that be the focus of your writing. You want to focus on the positive motivations around values and happiness.

What things, activities, objects and people make you engaged, energized and/or happy? Why do they ‘make you’ that way? Use the ‘5 Whys’ to dig deeper and try to develop insights into what makes you happy. Can you find a way to add more of these things/activities/people to your career and life?

You are looking for things that affect your career-related design challenge. [Everything in this course should be USEFUL to you, or you are not doing it correctly.] If working in a team or talking with other people gives you engagement and happiness, then you know that you want a career that involves teamwork. If, on the other hand, you hate group meetings and get flow and engagement by working alone on a report, then you want a career with greater autonomy. All the data you collect in this tool should be useful toward helping you refine your design challenge and get closer to your goals.

Be sure that you break your activities and time increments down into small enough chunks. For example, let’s say that school work does not bring energy or engagement one day. So What? How does that impact your career-related DCQ? Do you want to avoid a job where you have to read? Or write? Or work with other people? Or do you just hate school so much that you dislike all aspects of everything associated with it but might love doing these things if they were associated with a job? If you break things down into small enough time increments (e.g. 1 hour) you may discover that some aspects of school work (e.g. reading and writing reports) bring you engagement and flow, but other aspects (e.g. working with certain individuals) make you unhappy.

Not everything will impact your career-related design challenge.

Let’s say you love spending time with your dog. So what? Does that affect your career in some way? Do you want a career working with dogs? Or perhaps you want to work in an office environment where people bring their dogs? Or perhaps this has absolutely nothing to do with your career. Similarly, you may love spending time with your mom, but since she cannot join you at work, you may decide that this observation does not affect your career-related design challenge.

You can think of this tool as accomplishing several purposes. First of all, you are training your mindset of curiosity and developing the positive habit of focusing on your happiness. Just thinking about your happiness, and remembering the things that make you happy, makes most people happier. Every evening, list 3 different things that made you happy that day or that you are grateful for.

As I said before, you should also track what things, activities or people make you unhappy. But don’t focus on the unhappiness itself. Focus on what you can do to remove these things or re-frame them in a way that does make you happy. Use the ‘5 Whys’ to get at what’s really causing the unhappiness and see if the root cause is not the actual thing/activity/person, but rather a core belief. Later in this program, we’ll help you try to come up with positive self-talk statements to re-frame these negative beliefs into a positive. For example, instead of saying “avoid being in meetings with A”, you can say “I try to only go to meetings that involve people I trust and respect.” You want your positive value-oriented motivation system to guide you toward a value and help you focus on good things, instead of your negative disvalue motivation system causing you to simply avoid or run away from things, like a snake.

You can also use this journal for other purposes like helping you analyze your inner dialogue, thoughts, ideas, goals, and values. You can use it as a notebook to track things you want to remember later, like To Do lists or important things you want to remember (like where that awesome restaurant in Venice was). A journal is different from a diary. A diary focuses on documenting daily events by date. A journal is more like a laboratory notebook. You’re running experiments, taking data and measuring feedback.

Having a journal will help you track what you spend your time doing. Track the time you spend doing different activities during the day and categorize them by your Wheel of Life. For example, how much of your time is spent doing social media, watching shows, hanging out, doing school-related or family-related activities etc.? Which values are you pursuing during these activities? Do you see any contradictions between what you say your values are and the actual things you spend time on? Do you like the status quo or would you like to change the balance?

When deciding what to document in your journal, it helps to know if you are merely tweaking your life or looking for a major change. You need to figure out what might be important to your design challenges and track those things that matter.

If you care about cash in your business, for example, you need to closely track it with some kind of accounting/finance system. If you care about your retirement savings or ability to buy a home, then you need to track your finances and make career and life decisions based on that information. If you care about your weight, you should monitor your exercise, eating habits, weight and overall health. If you don’t care about your savings (or weight) because the status quo is good, then you don’t need to track those things very closely. In most cases you need to closely track and potentially hire a professional to assist you in these critical components of your security, prosperity and happiness.

If you care about doing work you love, you should track those activities, things or considerations that you want embedded in your career. Most people agree that these would include engagement, energy, flow and happiness. You can, and should, consider adding or changing categories to something more appropriate to your design challenge. Here’s a sample dashboard for you to consider for collecting data. You can also download a free template to use at designingyour.life:

[NOTE: Be sure to break your activities down into relatively small time increments with only a single activity! For example ‘doing schoolwork’ is not very helpful in identifying things you want in your career, whereas ‘reading and understanding complicated things’ or ‘writing reports’ or ‘meeting with group members on zoom’ are all potentially career-related activities that you may want to include or avoid in your life.]

Tool #3: Research Your Personality, Values & Interests

Watch & Use Tool #3 – Research your Personality, Values & Interests (13:47)

This divergent thinking set of research guides helps you develop a broader perspective about yourself and helps you identify information/data to include to your career-related design challenge assignments. There are hundreds of potential tests, assessments, questionnaires, frameworks, inventories, scales and instruments for helping you better understand who you are, what makes you tick and what a good career might entail. Why not benefit from a few?

Your most stable characteristics are called your traits or personality. Your beliefs, values, interests and attitudes are more open to change through conscious practice. Researchers normally try to measure these things by asking you to self-rate your preferences or whether you strongly agree or strongly disagree with various statements in a questionnaire or survey. Most surveys suggest that you fill them out rather quickly to get at your subconscious beliefs and most honest assessment of where you currently are instead of where you think you’d like to be. Each research tools uses different assessment frameworks to give you a different viewpoint on your interests, career matches, personality, values, beliefs, etc.

I suggest that you pick 1 or 2 tests from each of the 3 categories (perhaps 5 tests in total) and see if you learn anything new about yourself and your career direction.

Even if you already have a fairly detailed knowledge of your primary job search direction (e.g. lawyer, family business, real estate agent) you should see if these tools help you refine this search (e.g. what size of company? What kind of working vibe do you want? Where do you want to live?). If not, then perhaps you can apply these tools to your side-hustle or volunteer-related career challenges to help you grow your human and social capital (e.g. finding a social cause you want to get involved in, an advocacy website to start-up, or a professional association to join).

If you are starting with a vague DCQ, you don’t have well-defined career interests, or are struggling with too few or too many interesting directions for your career-related design challenge, then you will probably benefit from trying several additional research tools from the list. I suggest you keep taking tests as long as you are still discovering new things about yourself. Stop when they seem to repeat the results they are giving you. Like everything in life, you get out what you put in. If you need direction, then here is an opportunity to put in the effort to try to find the help you need.

Career Interest Assessments

Ratings and Lists of Career-Aptitude Tests

• https://www.careeraddict.com/the-12-best-career-aptitude-tests
• https://www.thebalancecareers.com/the-strong-interest-inventory-526173 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/self-assessment-tools-choose-a-career-526172
• https://openpsychometrics.org/
• https://www.123test.com/

Career Aptitude Test

https://www.whatcareerisrightforme.com/career-aptitude-test.php

Sokanu Career Explorer

https://www.careerexplorer.com/

O*NET Interest Profiler

https://www.onetcenter.org/IP.html

Interest Inventory

https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk/

Aptitude Test

https://www.aptitude-test.com/

JobBank Career Quiz

Career One Stop Skills

Education Planner

Gallup Report Strengths Insight Guide

Holland Code Career Test

https://www.truity.com/personality-test/206/result/13102046#

Personality Tests

Myers Briggs Personality Type Inventory

https://www.mbtionline.com/TaketheMBTI

DiSC Personality Test

https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/

Personality Belief Questionnaire

www.psychology-for-friendly-people.com

Big Five Personality Test

https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/

Strong Interest Inventory and Holland Code (RIASEC)

https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RIASEC/

16 Personalities Quiz

https://www.16personalities.com/

Enneagram Test

http://www.gimmemore.com

HEXACO Personality Inventory

http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online

Beliefs and Values

VIA Survey

www.authentichappiness.org

Core Beliefs

https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/~/media/CCI/Consumer%20Modules/Back%20from%20The%20Bluez/Back%20from%20the%20Bluez%20-%2008%20-%20Core%20Beliefs.pdf

Core Beliefs

https://mylatherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/corebeliefs.pdf

Core Beliefs

https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/core-beliefs-cbt.htm

Personal Values Assessment

https://www.valuescentre.com/tools-assessments/pva/

Work Values Test

https://www.123test.com/work-values-test/

The (Schwartz) Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ)

https://www.idrlabs.com/human-values/test.php

The Core Values Index

https://ws.taylorprotocols.com/Handlers/ProgressiveReport.ashx?hash=9edc8098f24f4627bb00dfb0a70 b7045&lang=de-DE

The Personal Values Assessment (PVA)

https://survey.valuescentre.com/survey.html?id=5l1OmCPgJO6FGafKLmkogR4E3lIuZOgB0EGag0Ki1C IOvC8MbC5eSA

What are your Values?

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_85.htm

List of over 300 values

https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/11/list-of-values/

Tool #4: Convergent Tools for Condensing & Sharing Insights on Your Design Challenges

Watch and Use Tool #4 – Condense and Capture Insights with Your Design Challenges (17:56)

Watch: “Job to be Done” by Christensen (5:06)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SfUsSyGWJ8

We started Assignment #2 with 2-3 of your Career-Related DCQs and Goals from Assignment #1. You then brainstormed related questions and issues and used a few divergent thinking tools like Tool #2 and Tool #3. After generating lots of divergent data, you started playing with your many post-it notes to look

for patterns and insights using convergent methods like cluster and separate and 2 x 2 matrices. Working with your design team in a spirit of radical collaboration and crazy quilt using ENT Principle #3, you’ve received additional feedback and suggestions.

Here in Tool #4, I offer you six common ways to help you capture your insights and share them with others. Your design team should help you review everything you’ve learned in the first 3 tools as well as give you feedback on the following tools described in the Tool #4 video.

• T-Shaped Profile
• SWOT
• Customer Profile Canvas
• Resume or Curriculum Vitae
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or Objective in Resume
• Capture Your 5 Primary Design Challenges

The T-shaped Profile Tool was created to help you select, form and introduce design team members. It’s a great graphical way to start the conversation among team members and learn about what each person brings to the table. You used it in ENT 56A. It basically captures some of your strengths and interests in a way that also shows off your personality and graphical talents. It shows your character or style and how interesting you might be to have on a team.

In a T-shaped Profile, the horizontal component represents your broad skills that you can contribute to a team. The vertical component shows what deep expertise or interests you have in different domains, markets, and industries. If you have marketing skills (e.g. build or manage a website, social media channel, create promotional materials) that would go on the top/horizontal portion of the T Profile. Working as a marketer is very different from knowing how to work within the marketing industry (e.g. at a marketing agency or advertising agency) which would go on the vertical component of the T Profile.

The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) diagram arises out of the planning-based strategic management literature and is a tool primarily for your own use to try to help you identify your sustainable competitive advantage. The SW portions are based on internal analysis and the OT portions are primarily based on external factors (e.g. PESTEL, Porter’s Five Forces). Ideally, you will develop deep expertise and thus higher earnings in a niche of interest (watch my video on “Finding Your Niche”). It’s a good first step toward creating your USP. The Strengths and Weaknesses should include your Personality results from Tool #3. The Opportunities start from your interest areas (e.g. Career Interest results in Tool #3) but are more specific, externally focused and should be a good step toward refining your design challenges (DCQs). The more specific your opportunities are, the better.

The Customer Profile Canvas was designed to help you capture the needs and wants of customers (ECLD Module #5), but we’re using it here to help you capture your own needs and desires. Each of your major design challenges (e.g. a job, side hustle, social capital, character, balance) will normally require its own CPCanvas. I’m not asking you to create 3 of these, but you may want to use the CP Canvas to help organize your post-it notes around at least one or two of your most important design challenges. Be sure to watch the video on “Job to be Done” (5:06) before using the CP Canvas.

A resume or CV is something everyone needs to have, and I include this in my list here so you get the opportunity to receive feedback on it. It takes time and effort to transform a weak, boring and/or ugly resume into something that really stands out and is entirely free of mistakes. Getting feedback can really help before you need to give it to a prospective partner or employer. As I describe in the video, each resume should be highly customized for the intended audience, so for the purposes of this course you may want to create a longer CV-style version that includes all the material you may end up putting into shorter customized resumes.

The first 4 convergent thinking tools don’t really have a word count limit and so you are free to include whatever you like. The Unique Selling Proposition and Design Challenge tools, however, must be short. It can be quite difficult to edit your longer wording into something that condenses the essential elements into a single sentence or two. Make it memorable and interesting and unique to you. Your USP is promotional and primarily based on your strengths and opportunities. Each USP will probably be specific to each design challenge. Again, I’m not asking you to create 5 USPs but do at least one for your primary design challenge and you can probably repurpose it to include in your resume. You may want to check out my convocation address to the Graduating Class of 2009 on D2L: Watch “Finding your Niche” (Gedeon, 2009) to learn about earning more through building your USP.

 

Finally, capture your learnings and insights into your new-and-improved design challenge question (DCQ). This is the final condensation of everything you’ve learned during this diamond and Tools 1-4. As I discuss in ECLD Module 3, your new-and-improved DCQs at the end of Assignment #2 should be an improvement over your DCQs in Assignment #1 and a good starting point for launching your next Diamond/Loop. Show your starting and end point DCQs to your design team members, discuss how you progressed during Assignment #2 and encourage them to give you honest and authentic feedback using radical candor.

Your first draft design challenges from Assignment #1 may have been very vague. After completing this diamond they should now be longer and more detailed and potentially reference things like your Job to Be Done, Gains, Pains, SWOT or USP. Here are a few examples to consider.

Tool #11: Self-Reflection Based on Conscious Practice

This short tool helps you reinforce and document your ability to practise appling principles, concepts, skills and/or attitudes to new situations in your daily life. Changing mindsets or attitudes takes conscious practice where you turn on your System 2 Executive and consciously select and practise applying a specific principle to a specific application (explained more fully in ECLD Module 9 Pilot-in-the-Plane Principle).

This short, but highly structured, self-reflective method is based on how your mind works to form, store, and retrieve concepts which I’ll cover in class (You can also watch the video “Philosophy for Entrepreneurs: Part 1 – The Crow”).

Each Self-Reflection should be self-contained. It should be short (a page or two max).

The 5 Steps of Self-Reflection

First, you must “Identify” a specific concept, tool, competency, skill, attitude, principle, heuristic, or expert script. Your new file folder needs a file name – it should be short. Ideally a single word or principle name or story title. The more concise you can be, the better. You may need to iterate to get this right, so you can start with a more generalized fuzzy idea to start with, but then you must come back to refine, shorten or change the name during editing. Don’t beat around the bush in this step – you must be concise!

“Describe” how you applied the identified concept in plain language that someone not in the class would understand. This should also be relatively short – especially in your first few tries. If you would like to use enhanced technology features such as photos and videos, your descriptions can become richer and more memorable.

“Analyze” how you applied this concept/principle and how it helped improve the situation. What were you working on when you discovered that you needed to apply the concept? Was there a problem or issue you were trying to solve? How did you “turn on” your System 2? Was there an “aha!” moment?

“Synthesize” how this learning relates to other things you know. Contrast or differentiate this concept from other related concepts. [Note that this step is designed to help you differentiate this concept from other related concepts – for example, how was this being curious but not proactive? If you used multiple concepts at the same time, describe why you needed all of them.] If the concept is part of a larger idea, then synthesize how the concepts relate to each other. Are they at the same hierarchical level or is one included in the other? (For example, you can differentiate chairs from tables but furniture is a higher level concept that includes both tables and chairs). If you’re not sure how to use this step correctly, you should watch “Philosophy for Entrepreneurs: Part 1 – The Crow”.

“Integrate” how you will use this understanding or practise this principle in the future. How will you do things differently now that you know this lesson? How would someone else observe your actions and see for themselves that you have learned this lesson?

Here are a few general ideas to get you started on things you might want to consider using as the basis for some of your Self-Reflections:

What specific principle did you use, where and when?

What specific personal competencies, attitudes or characteristics have you practised or improved?

How has your understanding of some entrepreneurial concept been changed, deepened or transformed during this experience? (e.g. opportunity spotting, alertness, use of a tool or method, internal locus of control, proactivity, self-efficacy, intent, value-creation, resource acquisition)

How will you be a better, more thoughtful or insightful entrepreneur, changemaker or value-creator?

What do you now “get” in a deeper way that you did not previously?

How have you improved at managing tasks, deadlines, people and projects?

How have you changed your interactions with others as a result of this experience?

How has your application of a key entrepreneurial skill (e.g. opportunity spotting, entrepreneurial mindset, negotiation, sales) or principle (e.g. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”, “Don’t believe your own BS”, “Doctor Peter principle”) been developed or transformed during this experience?

For the first few tries, I suggest you use the following format to ensure you are following the correct structure based on Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Identify	Identify a specific concept related to your experiential learning that you practised and now understand better as a result of your reflection on that experience.
Describe	Describe the experience in short, plain language so that someone not in the class would understand it.
Analyze	Now you can fill in some details. What specifically happened? When was that “aha” moment? How do you now understand this concept differently and more deeply than you did previously? What do you see now that you did not before (e.g. complexities, new dimensions)?
Synthesize	How is this concept different from other similar, but different, concepts?
Integrate	How will you now integrate this understanding into your life? What would you do differently with this new level of learning?

Short example of a Self-Reflection

Identify	Ability to accept feedback
Describe	In order to grow, I need to be able to take feedback. Normally my first thought is to disagree with the other person and argue. But sometimes the other person is right and I really do need to change. During several presentations in my communications class, I grew my ability to accept feedback by consciously practising this skill.
Analyze	I gave a presentation in class and several students and professors asked lots of questions. I argued with them and explained that I really had addressed all their questions. I thought they were all so stupid and that they just failed to pay enough attention to my presentation. I thought they were being mean to me and I was angry. I complained to my friend about this and she said that she also thought that my presentation was not as good as I believed and that I really could have done a better job. She also had the same questions as the professors. She used Radical Candor and I did not initially accept her feedback either. This really bothered me and I lost sleep over it. However, after thinking about this I decided to closely watch everyone else’s presentations the next week to see if I fully understood everything. I started to notice that many students gave weak presentations and that I often had critical questions to ask them. That was my ‘aha’ moment when I realized that I could have done a better job and that the professors and students were just trying to help me. The following week, I consciously applied the principle of accepting feedback and found that I was not angry and instead learned from the experience.
Synthesize	Feedback is not the same thing as being critical. Good feedback is different from bad feedback. Sometimes people say things to be mean, but usually they are just trying to understand or help me improve. This is particularly important when my partner gives me feedback. Instead of arguing with her, I should assume that she wants to help me improve. Tough feedback is one of many aspects of Radical Candor. Other aspects could include being authentic and keeping the other person’s best interests in mind.
Integrate	In the future, when someone gives me feedback, I will calm my mind and try to accept the feedback without getting mad. I will assume they are being helpful to me (not mean) and that just maybe there is some improvement that I could make. This is how I will continue to grow and improve as a human being. This will also make me more resilient. I will also try to be more transparent and honest and apply Radical Candor when I give people I care about feedback.

Be sure to watch my video “Philosophy for ENTs Part 1 – The Crow” if you are interested in Self-Reflection, concept formation and how to essentialize, recall and use information and experiences.

Assignment #2 –Step-by-Step Process for Refining Your Career-Related Search

1. Review your Assignment #1 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 5 DCQs, select 2 or 3 of your Career-Related ones to focus on in Assignment #2. 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.
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, 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 start creating 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. Buy a Journal. I suggest that you invest in a nice journal that you can enjoy spending time with and carrying around with you. You’ll be using it for Tool #2, but also for lots of other important ideas, issues, goals, values, and beliefs to help you spot opportunities to improve your happiness. Some people like to use an organizing structure of some sort (e.g. Bullet Journal) so you can find things later. Or remember to leave the first couple pages blank so you have space to create an index later.
4. In your journal, for Tool #2 track the activities, things, and people that affect your Engagement, Flow, Energy and Happiness (minimum 2 weeks) and see which of these you want to include or avoid in your career and your DCQ. Include a section for prior experiences you recall where you found engagement, flow, energy or happiness in addition to your current life. [Especially during COVID-19 you may need to use your memory of events and activities.] Tracking your daily experiences gives you more accurate data, but pandemics don’t last forever so you’ll want to include experiences that are not currently part of your daily routines. Track what you spend your time doing and categorize your major time commitments. You may want to use the Good Time Journal Activity Log https://designingyour.life/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DYL-Good-Time-Journal-Activity-Log-v21.pdf
5. Create Post-It Notes to Capture Key Discoveries, Issues, and Things that Stand Out using Tool #2. Practise using creativity and good visualization techniques in your Post-Its.
6. Try several of the research tools provided in Tool #3: Research Your Personality, Values and Interests. These often provide summary pages or graphics that you can print out to augment your post-it notes (e.g. you can draw arrows on the pages to point to post-it notes or similarities or contradictions you notice between different tools). Try as many Tool #3 tools as you need in order to learn something interesting. Create Post-It Notes to Capture Key Discoveries, Issues, and Things that Stand Out using Tool #3. Practise using creativity and good visualization techniques in your Post-Its.
7. 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.
8. Look for Patterns.
   • Cluster, Separate, Label and Add New Post-Its
   • Try a number of different canvas templates and 2 x 2 Matrices (e.g. Things You Like vs Things You Spend Time On or Things You Spend Time On vs Whether They are Good or Bad for You.)
   • Try using some of the convergent tools in Tool #4.
   • You can also consider using the Energy Engagement Map https://designingyour.life/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DYL-Energy-Engagement-Worksheet-v21.pdf
9.  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 #2. 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 in your next assignment? Update your Goal-Setting Tool #9 goals and highlight any major updates or differences.
10. 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.
11. Use Tool #11 – Self-Reflection to document which principles, attitudes and/or skills you practised during this assignment.
12. 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)