Believe in the value of failure, and you’ll never stop improving
Valuable takeaways on growth mindset and resiliency when things go wrong or unplanned
This is a dual narrative told from the view of two IBMers — Andreina Dyer and Dante Guintu—about their journeys into livestream production.
Andreina and Dante: This article outlines our experience as producers of a globally broadcasted virtual event: the IBM Spark Design Festival. We share our successes, failures, and how this experience will shape our future behaviors as we take on other opportunities. Hopefully, readers can find takeaways to use in their own journeys.
Getting involved with volunteer opportunities
Andreina: It all started with a Slack message. At the beginning of 2021, a volunteer opportunity came up to be a livestream producer and help broadcast the first annual IBM Spark Design Festival. The request was simple — something like, “Is anyone interested in helping out?” — and straight away, I saw an opportunity to not only learn something new, but to work directly with an audience of users and understand how to deal with pain points and issues live.
From the first meeting, I was hooked. There was so much to learn, so many chances to fail, and so many opportunities to excel.
Dante: I jumped at the chance to be a volunteer producer even with minimal knowledge of live streaming. I was eager to experiment with the Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) application since it’s the platform of choice for many content producers to broadcast their YouTube channels and Twitch streams and that’s something I’ve been interested in for a while.
The best career growth happens when I get out of my comfort zone. I was very uncomfortable but still excited.
Identify growth behavior and opportunities.
Andreina: I think it’s helpful to recognize your own areas of growth to help you choose which opportunities to get involved in. Consider things like, “What growth behaviors and breadth of skills do I want or need to develop?” and “What other benefits can this experience bring?” which might be interesting and ultimately necessary to develop in case things don’t go as well as expected.
Dante: Taking on an opportunity like this can expand your connections and eminence. I knew this experience would expand my internal network, and I was aware of the many outstanding leaders and talented creatives within IBM that I would have the opportunity to collaborate with weekly while working on the festival.
Co-collaborate to expand your skill sets
Andreina: Working with an amazing group of volunteers, we made checklists and went through multiple rehearsals to try and ensure a smooth experience. We enlisted back-up producers and social media helpers to monitor our livestreaming platform in an effort to be prepared in case something went wrong.
Through this process, we learned practice does not make perfect. However, it does reduce your reaction time when you need to pivot which believe it or not, is a much more useful skill than being perfect.
Dante: Even with all this preparation, a livestream setup gets tricky. Linking software tools with hardware becomes essential. A wrong connection could break something downstream. OBS was at the core, but we had to stack several tools together. The deal breaker: a fast internet service with a direct ethernet cable to our home routers — WiFi was not an option due to high bandwidth.
I shared a checklist to track the three sets of livestream channels we’d need to juggle: reminders to turn off unused software and an action script for each session to queue up videos, presentation decks, and other speakers.
Rehearsals were critical to iron out any technical bugs. It helped everyone get comfortable with the technology. Finally, we had to monitor the private Slack channel for any backstage issues or emergencies.
If I think about this experience using the analogy of the gummy bear puzzle (pictured above), each tool (OBS, Loopback, Slack, etc.) and each layer within them (Scenes, Sources, Mixers, etc.) constitutes a piece of that puzzle, and sometimes you need to wiggle that puzzle piece in for it to fit just right and without interfering with the other pieces.
Break down of a hot mess
Dante: My heart dropped when I received messages that my livestream feed was frozen. Hours of thoughtful planning and meticulous procedures hadn’t prepared me for this. The decision was painfully clear — someone else needed to take over.
Thankfully a back-up producer jumped in and restarted the livestream, which was a relief. While I felt dejected, I was eager to succeed during my next assigned session the following day. I tested and prepared even more thoroughly. I wish I could say that everything worked out, but it once again crashed like the first day. I was disappointed and wondered, “Why and how did this happen?”
I dug deep to understand the causes. We conducted meticulous post-mortem of the system connections and actions—no matter how small. With some sleuthing, we discovered the weak links: a recent software update combined with my older laptop meant my machine couldn’t handle the livestream. It was confirmed as another producer had the same issue with an identical device model. We shared these with the stakeholders to prevent failure on future events. In the end, I was relieved that I did my best, and things were unknowingly out of my control.
New challenges make you stronger
Andreina: Having this rare skill set opened up other opportunities for me to be an in-person live-broadcast producer. I helped bring to life the internal fireside chat at IBM with Katrina Alcorn, the General Manager (GM) of Design; Inhi Cho Suh, former GM of Strategic Partnerships at IBM; and Phil Gilbert, the former GM of Design at IBM.
For this live broadcast, there was no backup, no opportunity for a do-over, and zero lifelines like I had with the virtual event for the IBM Spark Design Festival. I learned to adjust camera angles, watch the timing of a presentation, adjust frames, add closed captioning, plus open and close scenes all simultaneously.
I would not have been able to handle all these responsibilities without the virtual experience I got at the IBM Spark Design Festival. The think-ahead mentality that event taught me lent itself to this next opportunity, enabling me to do a better job.
Dante: With two disasters under my belt, I wondered, “Why volunteer again?” However, months later, I leveraged those hard lessons learned to produce two separate broadcasts for IBM’s design community.
Action scripts were created that outlined every step I needed to make at a specific point in time. The knowledge from using OBS helped me transition well into the Streamyard platform. It helped me focus on producing the show rather than struggling with the technology. The previous failures gave me confidence and resilience for success.
Summarizing the experience
Andreina and Dante: Try new things and roll with the punches.
All in all, this experience was so fulfilling. We gained cross-disciplinary skills and met awesome people from around the world. Eventually, this led to peer coaching for both of us, which was an unexpected benefit.
Most importantly, we learned that whether you succeed or fail, the lessons you learn are equally valuable. It’s hard to understand failure while you are going through it, but in the grand scheme of things it is as necessary to fall down as it is to rise high. At the end of the day you get to tell a story about how far you have come.
Andreina Dyer is a design researcher in IBM Systems based in Silicon Valley. Dante Guintu works on DesignOps in IBM Sustainability Software based in Portland, OR. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
