Bits+Blocks|Bye
Well, I guess not really goodbye.
I used to make it a habit of writing a sappy goodbye note on Facebook every time I closed out a significant experience in my life, thanking everyone who was a part of it and getting super dewy eyed and nostalgic, but probably did it with more intent for social media likes than for true reflection. This is legitimately for the latter, and to write everything down for posterity sake, to revisit whenever I need a mindboost.
Thinking back over the past nine weeks, I realize that the journey actually started way before that, at the Make-a-thon event held by IDEO Futures at Harvard innovation Lab. It was a call to create a peer to peer sharing network, and served as a 48 hour long interview for a summer internship. Personally, I was in the throes of midterm season, staying up until 3am every morning working through the tedium of practice tests and almost didn’t go to the Make-a-thon but made a split second decision.
Few people have the fortitude to be enveloped by magic, and this was gold. The sophomore slump was very real, leaving me saturated with apathy towards anything but just getting through the year and churning out psets and grades. This make-a-thon was like an adrenaline shot that charged me up for the weekend and just kept going. Why? Because there was raw, unbundled creative energy in that room, the kind you find ferociously in the minds of 5 year old imagineers, who are still raring to go change the world, believing that nothing can stand in their way.
It was an explosion of post-its and design thinking, but more importantly, creating things that didn’t exist in the world, that that feeling of making something new was an entirely new sort of drug, a high that lasted for weeks after, an idea that your mind fixed onto and evolved. At one point, I had asked one of the guides:
Wait, you do this every single day…for work? As a job? You get paid for this sort of thing?
Hooked. And so damn excited when I found out that I was going to do this all summer long. But the point of this isn’t to point out what a huge IDEO fan girl I’ve been since childhood and how awesome the company is, but to remember some lessons learned about the venture design process while still fresh. (You know that thing consultants do at every job where before they leave they download all the company resources before their digital access is revoked? This is the mental version of that.) And so without further ado:
Don’t get ready, get started.
My mother personally would be offended by this one, as a lover of prep work and a firm believer that organization can solve most of your problems and I agree and wish I had her personality traits, but this concept of getting started and doing a deep dive…terrifying, and as most terrifying things are, also thrilling. This is the proactive part of the design process, to just get your hands on it, to do something, and get right down to the bare bones. This is the ultimate mantra, to just get going, right now. Of course, there are some inherent problems just doing something without previous legwork, and you sometimes fail, hard, but when dealing with ventures, I think that it’s okay. Which brings us to the next point.
Fail early and often.
I feel like I was paid to fail for six weeks this summer, and then maybe kind of failed less hard for a final product. In talking to some IDEOers at the Boston studio, they said that they had been paid for fail everyday for something like five years, so I guess it’s okay. This is a complete paradigm shift for someone who has been in formalized education for the last 18 years of her life. Why? Because in life we are trained to succeed, and in school we are taught that success is very narrowly defined as the concept of getting the “right” answer, the one that is already written in the teacher’s edition of the textbook. The question there shouldn’t really be why the only right answer is the one in the textbook, but rather that if a solution exists already, why is the question one still worth asking?
And so I suppose this ties back to the idea that you should just go ahead and just do it. In failure, you learn so much than if something works on the first try. And in venture design, there’s no binary measure for success. There are always iterations, there are always things to improve upon, and failure cannot be looked at as inadequacy, but rather as a safety feature letting you know that this is not the path you’re looking for.
Have the creative confidence to design new worlds.
- Creative Confidence, by David and Tom Kelley is an amazing read, just do it.
- It does not make you a crazy person to say that you are designing new worlds.
Number one is not a paid advertisement or plug, the hour or so you spend reading it should change your life and the way you view the world. Number two pushes you to barrel down pre-existing notions and really believe that an idea can change the course of things today. Think back to Facebook, think back to Uber. In the early stages, they were nothing more than ideas, but they changed the fundamental ways we do things and interact with the world and each other today. It worked though, because someone had the vision and the gonads to just say “this is going to work, let’s do it.” It didn’t matter that this summer I was working with people much more endowed with degrees and accomplishments, aged with experience and credentials. In the field of creativity, it could perhaps be argued that there needs to be a sweet spot between having enough context from what you’ve seen, but to not have seen too much so as to be jaded from it. Because we are trying to make something that did not exist prior to today, experience is less valuable than creative confidence.
Design loves urgency.
(Quoted from Reid Williams) and design loves constraint. Every single college student can tell you that the structure of writing a 10 paged paper means you’re probably going to write the last 8 pages in the last 2 hours before it’s due. We made so much stuff this summer, and we timeboxed the shit out of everything, and it was really only in the end and in those time crunched periods of time that we found pure focus.
KYC.
Not the banking law, although incredibly relevant for this summer. KYC as an acronym for
- Know your customer.
- Know your community.
- Know your constraints.
This is about having the whole context for what you’re designing for, and stepping in and out of those restraints and seeing what solution works. People are making “human-centered design” a really buzzwordy phrase, but to be fairly honest, why would you ever have non-human-centered design? We make ventures to be either vitamins or painkillers in the world, to address problems directly, to allieviate pain points that exist, or to create new needs stemming from an inadequate solution. Context is everything here and empathy is so incredibly important.
Work with your friends.
Our workplace culture was kind of like kindergarten…if kindergartners were all super into venture design. But seriously, there were a lot of snacks, we were drawing on walls all the time, sometimes there was crying, occasionally we napped, and we were super creative. 5 year old me would have been proud.
But seriously, these people became such good friends because we depended on each other to succeed, because nobody else quite understood the craziness that went on from the day to day, and because quite frankly, these 25 people kicked ass and did cool things with their life.
Most workplaces don’t encourage time spent on .gif wars, on talking about kale (apparently IDEO is a place that loves kale), on getting lunch with people from Craigslist, on watching movies, but these were all kind of prototypes, research in their own ways, and it worked. Because we were working with friends and having so much fun it really wasn’t work. It was an incredible experience that didn’t really stop whenever we left the office, it wasn’t a traditional 9 to 5 because for 24 hours a day, everyday, anything that was remotely related to what we were doing got excitedly Slacked to our team.
We were working with friends. We could’ve just called it hanging out.
Choose to be inspired.
Honestly, you can have inspiration boosts (Dan, how could you NOT have called them blockchainspiration or bitcoinspiration? Missed opportunity.) and be exposed to stimulating things, but unless you actively choose to be amazed and inspired, it probably won’t get your creative juices flowing. The decision to be five years old about everything and channel your energy into converting something in the real world into presently intangible potential is hard work and requires a lot of mental processes that are hard to find on a Monday morning before you’ve had coffee. But if you set it as your default mode, there is wonder in everything, even a simple commute to work. You start seeing the world as a playground of potential, every poster you walk by something worth snapping a pic of, in case the color palette is something you want to use in the future, a 4 am bleary eyed airport security experience something you can drastically fix, making you an eternal optimist in the sense that if anything is worth complaining about, it is worth changing.
This could probably go on forever but for now, it covers a lot of immediate thoughts. Another post will follow on the actual meat of the Bits+Blocks experience, with more stories, people, and more tangible things. This was just a very large and overarching overview of context.
It was an incredible summer of just being immersed in excitement and invention, of being exposed to huge, world changing ideas, of meeting impressive and hugely influential people (and trying to suppress the fangirling so as not to creep them out) and just being plugged into this ecosystem of adventuring out into unexplored space.
Thank you, IDEO Futures, for the summer of my life, and I hope this isn’t like a high school graduation where you promise to keep in touch and never see each other again. I will aggressively be following up. #bitsblocks
