What I learned from Chris Do at the Birmingham Design Festival (Part 1)
This first article covers my experience with Chris Do’s “Finding Your Superpowers” workshop. Enjoy!
I recently made a one-day trip to the United Kingdom for two workshops with Chris Do at the Birmingham Design Festival. I had a great time, met a lot of awesome people and took away a few tools to find my superpower and price creativity.
Travelling to Birmingham for workshops sounds nerdy 🤓. And I’d admit it — I am a learning nerd, especially when it comes to learning from the best.
Flying from where I live in Leipzig, Germany, I knew I was going to blow out my education fund. In an effort to save some of that money, I decided to drive to Düsseldorf then take a flight to Birmingham from there. That saved me at least 300 Euro for the whole trip. Plus, I could see and experience more while I was on the road.
After that 5.5-hour drive + 1.5-hour flight + 30-min train ride + 45-min walk (Google took me to the wrong place initially), I finally arrived at the Birmingham Design Festival.
It was 9:30 am and the volunteers were still setting up for the event. I settled myself down at a little cafe in the building to post about my arrival on social media.
After finishing my post, I looked up and to my greatest surprise, there sits Chris Do at the table right beside me with his sons Otto and Mattias!
I didn’t even know how to react to it — I spent all this time and effort to come to Birmingham to listen to him, and there he is, sitting right beside me. I had no idea what to say to him, yet I didn’t want to lose the opportunity, so I said, “Hey, Chris! This is super awkward. I was just tweeting about you and now you’re sitting right there”.
I know, it’s not the most charming opening, but we started talking. During the conversation, I told him that I forgot the UK uses another electric plug than Germany, my phone‘s battery is getting low and it may not be able to take me back to the airport later.
“Do you need power? You can use my power bank.” A voice was coming on the other side of the table (his name is Chris Bailey later I found out).
I looked at Chris Do and said,
“Sometimes, people are just amazing”.
He smiles and nodded.
Long story short, I accepted the offer to use the power bank. Apparently, Chris Bailey also came to attend the same two workshops, so we became buddies for the whole event.
The two workshops I attended, “Finding your Superpower” and “Pricing Design Work & Creativity”, were mind-blowing.
Finding your Superpower
Honestly, I didn’t expect to learn a lot of new things from this workshop, I’ve watched almost all of Chris Do’s content on the Futur’s YouTube channel and I attended his Unlocking your Potential workshop in Vienna just a few months ago. But Chris didn’t disappoint me. I was blown away at the end, taking away a few practical tools that could help me to find my superpowers. It turns out the secret is quite simple:
Know yourself; be yourself. The most difficult thing is to know who you are. Once you do, you’ll find your Superpower.
We went through a series of exercises to find that out.
1. What makes (You)Nique
Write down everything that makes you be you. Start thinking about your passions, your physical attributes, history, culture, language, and your weirdness. When you are stuck, think about what others say about you.
2. Opportunity, skill, happiness, archetype, and service
Put down keywords under each category to describe what you identify.
- Opportunity: What opportunities do you see in the world? Here are a few examples I wrote down: AI technology, climate change, minimalist and vegetarian.
- Skill: What skills do you have? This can be a range of soft to hard stills like Photoshop, problem-solving, language, and so on.
- Happiness: What makes you happy? Think of the things that make you smile. It can be as simple as food or travelling.
- Archetype: What titles do you have? What category do you fall under both (good and bad)? The most obvious ones for myself are Designer, Facilitator and Problem Solver.
- Service: How can you serve? How do you help others to achieve their goals? It can be something related to your job but it doesn’t have to be. The most logical ones for me were facilitation, UX design and graphic design. But I also have something you may consider weird on the list: Giving recycle bottles to the homeless.
3. Pick & Mix
Once we have all the keywords down, now it’s time to pick and mix. We choose one word from at least two of the categories. Then we think of an idea of what we can do to incorporate them to create an educational tool/idea/course/e-book/podcast.
For me, I chose the keywords “facilitating” and “travelling” and came up with an idea to “organize facilitation boot camps around the world.”
You repeat the same steps…
- to create a Physical product/object/tool/toy/game, and
- to create a Digital app/website/template/resource.
The idea is that when you can pick & mix all the keywords you have in one idea, you will find the thing that can bring out all your superpower.
4. Refine one idea
Once you come up with three different ideas, you discuss them with the people around you. You listen to each other, give each other feedback and then refine the ideas.
5. Chunking
We did not do this step in the workshop because it requires deeper thoughts and it was not sufficient to do it within a 2-hour workshop. But the idea is that after you refine the ideas, you can choose one idea to build on it.
First, you break it down into 5 milestones to create a roadmap for the goal. Then you want to come up with a more refined plan: define MVP, how to build and how to validate.
6. Facechart
The very last step is called the Facechart. It’s similar to a pie chart but in the shape of your head silhouette. What you want to do is to give a percentage of each characteristic within you. This step is to help you find your voice so you can embrace yourself.
Even though we didn’t finish all the 6 steps during the workshop, Chris showed us a really awesome tool that we can use to find out what our superpowers are and how we can maximize the use of them. He also mentioned that we should do all the exercises again so we can spend more time on each step.
After the workshop, Chris stayed for nearly an hour to spend time with all the participants who wanted to talk or take photos with him. It was fascinating to see how he interact with others. Whenever someone asked him a big question, he always unpacked it first and answer it in smaller chunks.
That’s it for now! Check out part 2 of this article where I share what I learned on pricing creativity. See you then!
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This article is part of the 30-minute #KungFuWriting Challenge that Robert Skrobe has organized. My personal goal is to say to myself “I don’t hate writing anymore.” by the end of June.
If you’d like to take part or to learn more, click on the following link:
