(@mmilan)

Lindsay found this great @steveblank article this morning which really described the undercurrent that we during a product design workshop we recently hosted for one of our startup clients.

In our team debrief after the workshop we discussed the fact that we’d had an extremely clear, focused and successful outcome.  One of the team members commented about the fact that we didn’t stick that closely to the schedule of workshop activities we’d originally set out.  My comment was that the activities were secondary to the outcome - all we cared about was driving to the outcome, regardless of how closely we stuck to process.  This pretty much goes against everything we were taught in agency-land, school or even previous startups we’ve worked at.

Knowing activities and process is invaluable, but sticking to them blindly is a good way to increase the chance you have a poor outcome, or even no outcome at all.

One of the best parts about working at Normative is that we don’t have a five step, seven step, or other sexy-sounding mnemonic process.  We learn about the problem we need to solve as best we can, we think about it critically and then drive to get the desired outcome in any way we can.  I guess we’re in the business of getting stuff done - I can live with that!

elledog:

I really feel like we practiced ACTION versus MOTION this weekend in our work sessions. Like Steve Blank says, we didn’t focus on process, but focused on the end-point and worked through activities to get there. Very inspiring!