I’ve been thinking about the last week, the MACE 4 days full-immersion and the Lean Start Up experience with Dan Lockton last weekend. As I often do when something get stuck in my mind, I couldn’t stop myself to talk about it with basically anyone who liked to listen.
I also spoke with my mom, she’s a nurse. She was impressed by this approach: adapt the environment to meet needs. Your first thought could be that, since she is working in an hospital, taking care of someone would probably be something she sees everyday set as first priority but it’s not. She meets everyday people in need (patients) and on the other side people who don’t pay much attention to these needs (many doctors). Bureaucracy and medical procedures replaced the human dimension and empathy ends up to be a luxury.
Then the miracle happened. She told me that observing patients she noticed that, sitting on a wheelchair, they felt uneasy about having someone they couldn’t see driving them somewhere (not very funny places mostly) as baggages. It makes difficult to communicate and they keep turning round. So she just googled the problem to find the solution: a wheelchair with rear-view mirror. Simple.
I know that Google is not the final answer, but what surprised me is that giving people a different prospective can actually encourage them to be innovators and framing problems.
With the Lean Start Up workshop and the “blind/disability” exercise we did earlier happened something quite similar. We have been asked to look for a question before to answer, to observe and to be emphatic and communicative doing research and as a group.
This is the video blog of our experience:
We confronted ourselves with someone else’s attitude and point of view, it was not about us. Testing the KFF (Kingston Friend Finder) we found out that we needed to adapt our idea to each new need we discovered in the next interview. It can be a never-ending process, we can make mistakes and admit that it is not working and start all over again, but even this is a vital part of the thinking process.
There is not just one way to address a problem but seeing it and keep going deeper is the first step. As this was our first week.
thoughtfromthemace 