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TITLE: Keep Pointing To The Possible

TOPIC: You can’t have leadership without connection. This week we discuss how to align people to shared goals, big or small, we talk about historical examples of explorers who were mapping new territory and leading the way to a new future. We talk about the golden age of technological capability (right now) and the difference between designing an object and designing a process. On todays journey we touch on the value and price of trust, the power of uniting people behind your ideas and how to truly lead in the connection economy.

SPONSOR:
This weeks show is brought to you by The Experience Workshop. The Experience workshop builds outstanding experiences that your customers love, talk about more often and buy more often. Come to www.ExperienceWorkshop.com.au and take your products and services to the next level.

SHOW NOTES:
The Industrial Revolution
WordPress
Carbon Arts ElectriCity Sparks public forum
A Kick in the Seat of the Pants: Using Your Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior to Be More Creative
Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story
Henry the Navigator
Division of labour
processing
Divergent Minds Episode #6: You’re not designing for yourself
Active listening.
Connection economy
BJ Fogg and the Fogg Behaviour Model
Divergent Minds Episode #7: Domesticate Failure
Social Proof
A room with a viewpoint

The post #8 Keep Pointing to the Possible appeared first on Jason McDermott.

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TOPIC: Even coke isn’t for everyone. This week we tackle a listener-chosen topic, the fear of failure. What creates a culture of fear, how to diagnose fear of failure in your own life habits and how to overcome it. We talk about how to create a structure around your goals and stop setting yourself up to fail. By embracing failure we can create clear boundaries, define what ‘good enough’ means and break through the barriers to your success.

SPONSOR:This weeks show is brought to you by The Experience Workshop. The Experience workshop builds outstanding experiences that your customers love, talk about more often and buy more often. Come to www.ExperienceWorkshop.com.au and take your products and services to the next level.

4 Steps to overcome a fear of failure
1. Define really clear goals to work towards,
2. Break those goals into tiny, achievable steps,
3. Capture failure as you go, so you can see what you’ve learnt along the way, and
4. Celebrate the success you’ve seen so far.

If you follow those four steps in your projects, you’re guaranteed to build momentum and break through the barriers that were holding you back. Good luck!

SHOW NOTES:
seth godin
Thomas Edison
theory
Scientific Theory
Sir Isaac Newton
Albert Einstein
Quantum Theory
Post-industrial Society
Gutenberg press
Instagram
Vine
Youtube
How podcasting got its name

The post #7 Domesticate Failure appeared first on Jason McDermott.

The hard part is in figuring out which aspects of your business aren’t worth your focus and attention, right now. Technology startups that prescribe to the lean startup methodology might tell you that they’re focussed solely on cpa, cost per acquisition (CPA) or the customer lifetime value (CLV), and the rest of the data can take a hike. This is a bold move and utterly critical for small businesses getting started and is not limited to businesses that describe their front of house with terms like ‘bounce rate’ and ‘click-throughs’. It can be applied to almost every form of small business, the smaller the better, and it can be the difference between hours of wasted time and success.

It’s called picking the metric that matters.

As a small business owner, you no doubt have a strategy in mind for growth. That strategy might be completely inarticulate (“let’s just keep doing what we’re doing, but better!”) or it might be more finely detailed (“we’ll pursue growth by adding to our line of products and opening a new branch in a new neighbourhood”), but it’s there. No matter if you’re looking to make more money, be more influential in your sphere, win more contracts or simply keep your creditors at bay, you’re looking to create new value. So why would you want to think about just one metric? Isn’t that crazy? Won’t you lose sight of the bigger picture?

The answer is both yes and no, but the more important question is how are you going to decide where to focus your efforts. Looking at one metric is a simple exercise in focus, a way of triaging the less important numbers. Focussing on too many interrelated metrics will leave you in confusion about what really happened and you still have to make a call on which is the most important. Instead of continuously changing your view, depending on how the data is playing out, just pick one and stick with it. Pick one that will genuinely change the way you do business, if it goes up or down. Pick one that might keep you awake at night. Pick the riskiest part of your small empire and focus on that alone. It could be how much it costs to win new business. It could be how high your overheads are. It could be the small revenue you earn per customer. Each business will have a different significant metric and different ways to measure it.

Your job is to identify it, observe it and to dream up experiments to test its limits.

Think of it like mould in a petri dish. How could you imagine that mould growing exponentially? What would it take to make that happen? What kind of environment would allow it to flourish, just like you’re imagining? How could you change your business to grow your metric like the mould in that petri dish? How might you change your approach?

Do everything you can to help it grow. Talk to your customers. Buy new ad space. Write more blog posts. Change the logo on that banner ad. Mention how you’re in the process of designing that cool new widget. Share your ideas, and watch how that metric changes. If something you try breaks the business, that’s ok. Remember you’re trying to break the small business in order to create that ‘petri dish’ rate of growth.

It takes guts to embrace this, but you won’t regret it. Find the metric that matters. Poke it and prod it. Find the best conditions for it to flourish, then get out of the way.

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The bad news is that any decision you make from this point is almost always going to end up being wrong. Why? Because the idea is still inside your head, being warped by your hopes and fears into something thats too scary for all the wrong (and right) reasons. Because you haven’t made the important steps to get meaningful feedback from your potential new customers. You haven’t even put pen to paper and figured out the true costs of implementing your great new idea. Because you haven’t spoken to anybody yet (least of all your collgeagues, for fear of negative feedback), to see how it feels when the rubber hits the road.

You’re still daydreaming and that’s not step 1 on the path to success.

The good news? The good news is that there has never been a better time to get feedback faster, to learn from others about how good ideas fail, to get in contact with the people who matter (your customers). The internet has opened the doors on a global marketplace of people who could buy from you (good), help you find other customers (very good) or help you uncover new ideas to bring to market (amazing!). The modern communication era (Seth Godin would call it the connection economy) is constantly creating new opportunities for observant entrepreneurs, all you need do is look. The best part is that the cost of launching and failing is so low that you can put together a business concept, be interfacing with customers and developing real products within days. To put it another way – there’s never been a better time to fail fast.

The truth is that you’re never going to have the perfect model for the future of your business idea, not even in the 10th year of operation. You’ll always need to be testing, learning, watching, looking for opportunities to improve or innovate. Otherwise you’ll stagnate, treading water, finding ways to scale rather than rocking the boat in the search for newer, better ideas.

The post Have you decided yet? appeared first on Jason McDermott.

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TOPIC: When to know you need feedback. Trying to solve a new problem? Looking to improve your business but don’t know how? How do you know what you ought to be doing? What information do you need in order to make your decisions better? Feedback is critical to increase your ability to make the right decision, to avoid wasting time, attention and effort and to maximise your efforts in bringing your ideas to life. This week we tackle feedback, when to give it, when to look for it and how you can use feedback productively.

SPONSOR:
This weeks show is brought to you by The Experience Workshop. The Experience workshop builds outstanding experiences that your customers love, talk about more often and buy more often. Come to www.ExperienceWorkshop.com.au and take your products and services to the next level.

3 Tips to improve your Feedback

1. It’s important to be asking the right questions. If you’re asking the wrong questions you can lost sight of the goal, get wrong or distracting feedback and waste more time. Think carefully about the information you actually need to make better decisions.

2. It’s important to distance yourself emotionally from feedback you get. Even negative feedback or criticism can provide useful information, providing you’re asking the right questions. If you can distance your emotions from the feedback, it can become a positive productive force and help you make your product, service or idea better.

3. It’s important to remember empathy when looking for feedback. You should always be looking for opportunities to learn and sometimes the best way is to humbly ask the stupid or obvious questions. Try to understand your audience, user or customer. The better your empathy skills are, the better you will be at understanding their needs or hopes – and therefore much more able to create the products or services they desire.

SHOW NOTES:
Lean Analytics
Steve Blank – Get out of the building
The Lean Startup movement
Eric Ries

The post #6 You’re Not Designing for Yourself appeared first on Jason McDermott.

TOPIC: The way designers draw. Drawing is a fundamental part of any design communication, a way of showing connections between ideas and taking someone else on a journey via colour, shape and form. This week Frank and Jason delve into the fuzzy world of sketching ideas to solve problems, communicate emotions or seal the deal at the company picnic. We discuss the way that drawings can be a form of super rapid prototyping, helping people collaborate and understand fuzzy ideas through paper, squiggly lines and more.

SPONSOR: This weeks show is brought to you by The Experience Workshop. The Experience workshop builds outstanding experiences that your customers love, talk about more often and buy more often. Come to www.ExperienceWorkshop.com.au and take your products and services to the next level.

SHOW NOTES:
Dan Roam, Sketching
Dan Shiffman Nature of Code vimeo channel
Nature of Code
Nature of Code Kickstarter
Procreate App
Procreate Forums
Nikkos Procreate Tutorials
Bert Bongers, Modalities
Social Firefly (on CAN)
Frost* Design
Processing

The post #5 Exploring with a Drawing appeared first on Jason McDermott.

Hey there! Frank and I are very pleased with the response to our first episodes of Divergent Minds, it’s very rewarding to create interesting podcasts, knowing that real people will listen to them. Hopefully they’ll also be useful or enjoyable at the same time! I’d like to put out a call for feedback from all of you who’ve listened to one or more of the shows so far (and if you haven’t, there’s literally no better time to give it a try!), to see if there are any ideas, topics or concepts that you’d like Frank and I to dig into. Maybe we could dig a little bit deeper in one aspect, or perhaps we could hit some other topics that you have in mind.

How are we doing so far? Are we too long, too short, too hot, too cold?
We’re always open to feedback, it’ll help us improve what we do and make the show so much better. How could we improve? We’d love to know.

There are a few ways you can get in touch with us: You could drop a comment in the box below, you could tweet at myself or Frank or you can email me directly.
Can’t wait!

The post We’d love to hear your thoughts on our new podcast: Divergent Minds appeared first on Jason McDermott.

Topic: You want immediate feedback. This week Frank and Jason discuss the concept of a ‘beat’, the value of asking the right question (at the right time), building reciprocal relationships with new clients, thinking and acting strategically and making use of good motivation!

Show Notes:
Asymco, Fine Young Cannibals
Just pick up the phone!

The post #4 Getting paid in ‘Lip service’ appeared first on Jason McDermott.

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TOPIC: A kamikaze approach to the market. This week Frank and Jason discuss scoping new projects, Franks efforts to help create a new artwork for the 2013 Vivid Sydney festival, the reasons why we’re doing this podcast and what it’s like to have a hidden inertia pushing you to leave a trail of concepts in your wake.

Show Notes:
Radiolab, Speed
Arthur C Clarkes Three Laws
Morphic Mirror Testing on Vimeo
2013 Vivid Sydney festival

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The post #3 Productive dissonance appeared first on Jason McDermott.

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TOPIC: Constant Pitch. This week Frank and Jason talk about time management, get sucked down a productivity software rabbit-hole and discuss a new public artwork we’re creating for the 2013 Vivid Sydney art festival. Along the way we discuss our design process, concept development and tools used to shift from idea to reality. Questions posed: What’s your artistic vision? Can you achieve what you would like to achieve? How do you mask out the things that aren’t important?

Show Notes:
David Allen, Getting Things Done
GitHub, social hosting
Evernote
Zapier
Omnifocus
Pinboard
IFTTT
Instapaper
Modern Times, 1936
Morphic Mirror
Screaming Rapture
Makerbot
Shapeways
USB Wireless Receivers
Kinect
Faceshift
Steven Pinker, Language as a window into Human Nature

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