A few gems from an insightful talk:
...I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul.
... one of the big sayings in social work is lean into the discomfort of the work. And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's.
....
So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is --neurobiologically that's how we're wired -- it's why we're here. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing -- an opportunity for growth? (Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right. Well apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection. Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection. The things I can tell you about it: it's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability,this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.
....
What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were whole-hearted. These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled these interviews, pulled the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just like writing and in my researcher mode. And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.
The other thing that they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.
Brene Brown, "The power of vulnerability,"TEDxHouston, Jun 2010, www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html via Sarah.
Andres Glusman and Karina van Schaardenburg designed Meetup's set-up to be simple and cheap: no dedicated room, no two-way mirrors, just a webcam and a volunteer. This goal is to look for obvious improvements continuously, rather than running outsourced, large-N testing every eighteen months. As important, these tests turn into live task lists, not archived reports. As Glusman describes the goal, it's "Have people who build stuff watch others use the stuff they build."
Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, talks about Tesla -- "time elapsed since labs attended" -- a measure of how long it's been since a company's decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1.
...Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn't learning from their users doesn't want to learn from their users.
Clay Shirky, "Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing," boingboing.net, 13 Dec 2008, www.boingboing.net/2008/12/13/meetups-dead-simple.html via Northtemple
Lasseter was learning: If he reached out to the technologists, the technologists would reach back.
....
As the work progressed, one of the team members...voiced concern about lasseter's color choices. Lasseter wanted purple leaves on the trees. Leves aren't purple, the staffer objected. Indeed, the group had been studying magazine photos of trees for reference and they seemed to back up this observation.
Rather than simply asserting his artistic authority, Lasseter took the group to a San Francisco museum exhibit of paintings by the illustrator Maxfield Parrish, noted for his rich use of light in natural scenes. After a while, the dissenter volunteered that Lasseter was right: Leaves could be purple. It all depende on the light. Lasseter had showed the group that there was more to realism than was dreamt of in their technical papers.
David A. Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, Vintage Books, 2009, p. 56.
Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction.
"The Invention of Money," This American Life, Episode 423, aired 7 Jan 2011, www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/the-invention-of-money.
After hundreds of explorations, we found the answer in simplicity...
Now to the actual result: This is a fantastic, confident evolution. If you look at the image of the coffee cups above you realize how clunky the old logo was and just how extraneous its many elements were. It went from four circles/rings to one. It went from two colors to one. It went from three stars to one. Perfect simplification without losing the essence of the brand. That new cup design alone elevates the identity to an actual lifestyle brand more than a retail brand. It has a newfound sophistication that would have been impossible to achieve before.
Armin, "All right Mr. Schultz, I’m Ready for my Close-up," Brand New, underconsideration.com, 6 Jan 2011, www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/all_right_mr_schultz_im_ready_for_my_close-up.php via Rich Goade.
Let's not get confused at the difference between a goal and a dream. A goal is something measurable, trackable, and is built on analytics. Goals have realistic timelines, are measured by weighing the data, the risks, and the current assets. They are essential to success, but they follow dreams. A dream is bigger--it has no boundaries, rules, or past history. It's focused on transforming business as we know it, and approaching from a direction never pursued--or at least never attained. In dreams, we seek the outstanding change--not just within the products we create but in the results those products inspire....
The iPod team is exemplary of all of the traits of breakthrough teams that we've discussed; the skills of each personally competent team member fit together perfectly. They were all steeped with experience. It was technical savvy meeting creative brilliance. It was a combination of past successes meets past failures. It was a group of men who recognized their individual strengths, but had also gained a thorough understanding that they could not achieve the dream unless they realized the strengths of one another.
....They needed to create something small enough to fit into the tiny casing, but powerful enough to maintain a charge that would oversatisfy users....
Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, "How a Team at Apple Made the iPod Dream a Reality," Fast Company, 4 Oct 2010, www.fastcompany.com/article/how-a-team-at-apple-made-the-ipod-dream-a-reality via Rich Goade
“It still comes down to a ridiculous amount of work,” said Mr. Powers. “But it’s really nice when the new computer software is so streamlined. It’s nice to work with it instead of fighting it.”
Peter Wayner, "Animation in Starts and Stops, Simplified," New York Times, 20 Oct 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/technology/personaltech/21basics.html.