Why my idea needed to die!
As I go over Inoneweekend I continue to examine what I have learned and what I believe there is for me to learn from this event. If you have read “about this blog”, then you know that this blog is for some special people I know. So today I examine MY understanding of why my idea that I put forward for the Inoneweekend event had to die. First, what was the purpose of Inoneweekend? From the Inoneweekend site: “One hundred people gather to create a start-up venture from scratch in one weekend”. The final result that had to be achieved was a start-up venture. This was to be accomplished using the collective experiences, knowledge, and talents of 100 people who were willing to pay money and give up their valuable time to make this happen.
To make such a venture work you have to get 100 people, who are likely to be type “A” personalities, working together effectively. To state it more simply, you have to have them all pulling together in the desired direction. There are many ways to accomplish this and the method as I see it that was used was to create a concept that encompassed the shared experiences of the people who attended. According to the Heritage Dictionary one can define a concept as: A general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences. This “general idea” is key to remember, for it does not depend on a specific idea. As I observed Friday night it depended on recognizing a pattern emerging from a collection of specific ideas. This pattern provided the basis for the concept that would later evolve into Lifespoke.
So why did my idea have to die? The heritage Dictionary defines an Idea as: Something, such as a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity. My idea existed in my mind based on my knowledge and experience. When we broke into small groups I had to get something that existed in my mind alone into the minds of six other people. These other people did not have my knowledge and experiences. I had only words and body language with which to make my idea exist in their minds. If I could not get my idea to exist in their minds then how could this small group create a shared understanding? The ideas that did emerge were ones that members of my group could make exist in their minds based on common knowledge and experiences. Of the ten groups working on ideas, around 60 ideas survived the groups to be put before the total body assembled. We could only use one concept this weekend. We all had to be pulling in the same direction when we left Friday night. So, we were each given three votes and the process of selecting the top three ideas was started. However, we were really not selecting the top three ideas. For what happened was that as the ideas were examined during the voting it was discovered that several ideas shared common elements. These were put together as the voting progressed. Two of these groupings consisted of many ideas. The two largest groupings became the foundations for two concepts. The final concept was based on the winning grouping of ideas. The concept became a general idea consisting of several of the key components of the individual ideas.
Why was this important? The small groups selected ideas that enough of the people in that group could get their minds around to support. The voting process and merging of similar ideas created a concept that the majority of people could get their minds around. This made getting everyone to support the final concept easier. It also allowed harnessing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and experience of the people assembled to take the concept and grow it throughout the weekend into a start-up company. Was my idea bad? It was like my grandma growing a peanut plant in Alaska. It required great effort and care to grow a single peanut plant in Homer, Alaska. The environment is not the kind where a peanut plant can flourish. It had to be grown indoors, receive special lighting, and heat. However, Grandma grew some of the best rhubarb I have ever seen. This was because all the conditions in Homer, Alaska were right for rhubarb to flourish. It was the rhubarb crop that made money each summer. The poor little peanut plant only every produce a couple of peanuts. Are peanuts a bad crop? In the right conditions peanuts are a very important crop. What happened Friday was like selecting the seeds that will grow in the environment you have to work with. My idea could not flourish in the environment available. So that is why my idea had to die.
