The key to success: share your ideas early and often.
Activate the feedback loop as early as you can — Photo by ThisIsEngineering
Minimum Verbal Prototype
One of the simplest prototypes you can create is to describe your idea to someone else.
What if we
Why don’t we
Imagine that we
Your Minimum Verbal Prototype or MVP is a more rounded description of your idea — not just one of many ideas on a list. Your verbal outline creates the first impression and helps someone understand your initial intent.
The MVP is the kick to begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.
The Word prototype is from Greek prōtotypon “a first or primitive form,” from prōtos “first” + typos ‘impression, mould, pattern.”
Prototyping is not the goal. Feedback is.
A different way to approach prototyping is:
To engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can.
Feedback is the main reason we share drafts. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t.
And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas.
When you share a First Verbal Prototype, you activate a feedback loop to develop your creative ideas.
Remember, the only thing worse than a bad idea is to isolate an idea from feedback for too long.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.
This is a snippet of my Dialogic Learning Weekly. ⚡A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.
When we are not ready to hear feedback, it does not matter how good the feedback is. This tension is a simple truth that often goes unnoticed during the process. That is why many of my tactics and strategies to improve feedback focus on how well we can receive it. It does not matter how good the feedback is.
During the process of creating something, we invest in different ways. Let’s say for this article; the creative process is a student working on writing a narrative piece that has a simple planning, drafting and editing process. But it could be anything: from a conference presentation you are making, a script you have been pitching, a product you are building or a jewellery piece you are designing.
Please extend these ideas into your context and consider how it is more important what you do with your feedback.
Once the task of crafting her story is shared, our student’s ideas will begin to bubble. For feedback to be useful, it should happen as early as possible. Depending on the learning design a student will invest in her writing in the following ways.
Factors Affecting the Response to Feedback
Cognitive effort
Is the work effortful? The challenge of planning and drafting a piece of narrative is quite broad. Our student invests cognitive energy in the problem. The levels of cognitive effort are likely to be very different for everyone. Some of us find it easy to develop slides for a presentation, whereas others have to invest more cognitive effort.
Perhaps what is more important here is the level of accumulated cognitive effort. In other words, how much thinking we have done. When feedback occurs at: “I have spent ages thinking about this.” it is received in a fundamentally different way to: “I have only just started thinking about this”.
Emotional Investment
When something is more meaningful to us, we want to commit. We cannot learn anything unless we care about it. Passionate commitment to a piece of writing is not always a part of the experience but given time; a writer will invest emotion into their work. When there is a high level of emotional investment, it is harder to hear critique.
Creativity
The ideas for the narrative piece need investment to get off the ground; creativity is the engine room. But over-investment in a poor plan is a harsh environment for feedback. There are lots of potential barriers to effectively hearing feedback here. For example, the first idea is considered the best approach or clutching too tightly to an idea even when it is a poor one.
Resources
Over time more and more resourcing is brought to a project. Tasks that have unlimited resources from the very beginning often lead to overcommitment. Should we be using every pencil in the set?
Accumulated Time
My reference here is the quantity of time that our student spends on her work. This amount accumulates as the work progresses and as the project continues. We are often far less inclined to action feedback when we have committed hours and hours to a version.
Here is another set of ideas that change throughout a creative task such as writing.
Fidelity
Although messy in reality, the path of a creative task is towards higher and higher fidelity. Let’s define fidelity as to how close the outcome is to the original concept. As time and effort accumulate, we would like to think that we are approaching a higher fidelity. At which point do we stop hearing feedback?
Opportunities to fail
Stakes get higher as opportunities to fail reduce. This is closely related to the amount of time that has passed and how long a student has been working on a piece of writing. Commitment to a “final” product or draft is crossed, and any significant changes or large scale feedback is difficult to action.
It is worth noting here that this could be a perception and have no grounding in reality. A student may incorrectly perceive they cannot start again or change their work at a late stage. It might not be ideal, but it may only be a perceived constraint. The second order effect is the stakes get higher.
Opportunities for formative evaluation
As stakes get higher, opportunities to fail reduce (perceived at least) and opportunities of formative assessment reduce. The word “formative” has a time stamp on it. Developmental evaluation should be happening as the writing begins to grow. Think of a more frequent reference to our “formative years’: that time in our life when we were learning life lessons.
At the very centre of this is the disposition of the feedback receiver. Typically the mindset is somewhere on the Convergent – Divergent scale. As we decide on ideas and as our commitment or effort increase so our disposition shifts to Convergence. We rally around a core idea and push on. Our thinking becomes narrow as opposed to the expansive open thinking we should have done to get started.
Remember, this is a critical shift and one that allows us to execute creative work and not just deliver a hot mess of ideas. When it comes to the conditions for effectively receiving feedback, we might assume we need to be in a divergent state. But that is not always the case – the feedback needs to match the disposition state.
If I am refining a single idea and the intricate detail within it, I do not need other more significant ideas that might replace it. We have to be aware of the mindset of the receiver of feedback and carefully adapt what is shared.
The exception to this is always having an open disposition to feedback regardless of when it occurs. In my experience, what is coupled with this is a well-established feedback filter. After all, just because it is shared and we have received it, does not mean we need to do anything with it. We can still be open to late feedback when we are narrowly executing an idea.
Late and Early stage feedback
Let’s map these variables and how their levels of investment increase or reduce over the course of a project.
Variables Affecting Early and Late Stage Feedback
Formative evaluation needs to happen early on in a project arc. This allows the receiver of feedback to be most ready to hear it. Our student’s mindset is more open or divergent, and they are more likely to action new ideas.
Late stage feedback can still be invaluable, but we have to raise a red flag and be aware that receiving the feedback may be more challenging, requiring a much higher level of skill.
Practical Strategies
Here are five strategies that emphasise early feedback and ways to mitigate some of the challenges we have explored in this article.
Design the feedback process – take your time to consider the frequency and type of feedback that is going to be shared. Intentionally design feedback opportunities.
Design “low investment” creative tasks – increase the constraint on creative tasks at the beginning. Work on whiteboards or post-it notes rather than impressive graphic organiser, work with thick marker pens rather than every pencil in the set. Develop ideas on the back of a napkin, literally and metaphorically.
Create opportunities for early feedback – a tonic to many of these challenges is to design as many options for initial input as possible. Early in the process, we are more likely to have an open mind to critique.
Explore a range of ideas – work to develop a wide range of designs. We tend to have a bias towards our first idea. With little constraint, we might overcommit. Practice the thoughtful exploration of various concepts. Crazy 8s is always a good starting point.
Match the feedback type to the point in the process – a critical insight I want you to take away is that feedback is received in very different ways. Attempt to match the feedback to the person receiving it and their journey. (Learn more about this in my article about 30% and 90% feedback.)
Despite the best intentions of the feedback provider, their high skill levels and even high quality – unless the receiver is ready to receive, it does not matter. Mitigate this by using some of these practical strategies and considering how we might increase the capacity, readiness and disposition of receiving feedback.
Prototyping is all about the process of generating multiple versions of a solution so you can continually improve it.
Prototyping is one of the later stages of the design process and is normally folowed by a period of testing. You can make a prototype without testing it. This stage normally follows on from a time when you and your team have generated and filtered a range of ideas.
It would also be true to say that the sooner you are prototyping and testing the better as this often instigates new thinking quite quickly.
A different way of thinking about this stage is that prototyping is to engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can. Feedback is the main reason anyone creates rough versions of anything. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t. And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.
You have to remember that the only thing that is worse than a bad idea is one that has been isolated from feedback for too long.
Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them to grow and get stronger, starved of it and your ideas will get weaker.
When you create a rough prototype, first draft or early sketch you are using iteration to develop your creative ideas.
Often the first prototype you can create is the moment you describe your idea to someone else.
What if we…
Imagine that you…
Your FVP (first verbal prototype) is the kick to then begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.
I developed this little decision tree to help you and your students think through some ideas for prototyping.
A Visual Prototype will be one that focuses on the look (and feel) of the product, but it will not function. You will likely focus on:
Sketches and illustrations
Storyboarding a short video
Digital / paper wireframes
Creating the packaging for your product
Making an advert for your service
Photo sequence for a new service
On-the-shelf mockup (placing your new packaging alongside competitors in a real store)
A Functional Prototype will be one that focuses on showing how something will work, even in a rudimentary way. The visual quality will be ignored.
3D printing
Paper prototype and mockup
App mockup
PPT or Google Slides for a website mockup
Bodystorming a service (using roleplay to act it out)
Cardboard life scale mockup
You might also explore the following reflection promtpts to help you make the most of the prototyping process.
Which type of prototype is most feasible / useful in the time you have?
Why is your choice appropriate for the solution you are exploring?
What resources and support will you need to build your prototype?
Who are you testing your prototype on?
What specific aspects of your idea do you want feedback on?
How will you record feedback and ideas?
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I discovered the little app POP by Marvel which is a fantastic way to quickly prototype ideas for apps. I drew around my phone and then did some sketches. Took some photos and added some links and hotspots and then you have a little functioning app.
Sketches
Hotspots
App screens
Took me 5 minutes (including downloading the app) a great example of a functioning prototype. I need to work on the visuals!
I thought I would share in a little more detail about some of the different things we can do to positively impact on these topics.
Creativity Can Be Blocked
One of the most interesting areas to read about is the disposition it takes to be able to be creative.
In this context, I refer to creativity as the generation of novel ideas that add value. Much of the time we face a range of blocks that get in the way of this endeavour.
These can often be our own approach and self-censoring, even self-sabotaging. Or the environment around us sometimes has a negative impact through exuberant judgement or too much pace.
During the session, we will have a look at the different types of blocks and explore the ideal conditions for ideas to thrive.
Speak up!
Dialogue is no different and it can be a delicate experience, swayed and influenced by dominant voices or even culled by assumptions and an underlying threat.
Of course, we can control much of these issues through deliberate protocols and practices. Long term it is about establishing a core set of habits that work for you.
Dialogue is different to a discussion, the former being much more akin to building and developing ideas together in a highly supportive environment. Certain conditions will encourage this and some will detract from it.
Feedback, up, down, forward
Getting feedback right has been a focus for thousands of teachers the world over for many years now. And yet we still seem to spend too much time exploring how to give feedback.
Ultimately we might all be expert feedback givers, but unless the recipient is an expert receiver of feedback, and it is done in a supportive and encouraging space – little may change.
In the workshop, we will explore practical tools and activities for providing and receiving feedback effectively.
We will pay close attention to how we might design the ideal conditions for feedback conversations to take place and what we might do to ensure it is heard and acted upon in the most positive way.
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Imagine each of these – Creativity, Dialogue and Feedback as three little seedlings, each ready to burst forth – we just need to carefully surround them with the ideal conditions to thrive and grow.
Join me on the 13th April in Melbourne for my keynote and workshop at TeachTechPlay.
Her eyes widened and her mouth fell agape. I suspect the ticking clock suddenly stood still and the taste buds, that had become her all-powerful ally, dried up as fast as an unwatched pan of pasta. Her idea had been derailed.
Wherever I look I see processes of critique and feedback. It is unquestionably an integral process for learners. However, it is also a process that binds and carries the progress of many other professions and creative endeavours, as well as almost everything else in between.
That is why when watching the TV show Masterchef, the amateur cooking competition, the impact of feedback was all too present and obvious.
Masterchef style feedback refers to providing feedback at a point when it is creatively inappropriate as well as emotionally challenging to hear.
Now if you have never seen Masterchef let me share the scenario. The contestant I describe had begun a challenge in which they were in a small group of other contestants but cooking independently. They were given a time limit, like 30 minutes, to cook a particular style of dish or create something unique.
I recognise that the pace of the creative process (generating original ideas for a dish) on show here is very high along with the intensity of the environment, time, expectation and competition. This can be a block to creativity.
In this intensity, the contestants are immediately generating ideas as they hear the challenge ahead of them, even before the basket wielding supermarket sweep for ingredients begins. They are all drawing upon a history of cooking, a long line of experience using the ingredients they have and a range of ideas and principles of cooking that have been tried and tested before.
The action usually commences with everyone rushing off to a pantry filled with a plethora of fresh ingredients and cupboard essentials. The ideas for their dish begin to swirl as they are confronted by the swathe of stock laden shelves in the pantry. There are those that pluck what they need, the decision made and those that are still developing something, waiting for inspiration to strike, lost momentarily in the various types of vinegar on offer.
With baskets crammed the cooks rush to their workbenches and stovetops to begin cooking. Stakes are high (fill in your own pun) as they compete with each other, the clock, their own nerves and the judgement of professional chefs and food critics. Suffice it to say that emotionally the environment is highly charged for those involved.
And then comes the first moment of feedback.
Who knows really how much time has passed due to the editing process for television. However typically a trio of judges saunters across to a contestant to try and learn what dish is being made and observe the progress towards that goal. Comments both positive and negative are typically shared with the contestant at this point. This is a moment when really contestants are implementing their idea for the dish, they have committed to it and are pushing on. Feedback which is anything but affirmation is derailing.
So every now and then you see idea derailment in the eyes of the contestant. The widened eyes of an inner struggle to assimilate the expert advice with their emotional and technical commitment to an idea. “How can I possibly change my dish now?!” The contestant has invested in their idea and fast-tracked to implementing it. They are no longer making major decisions about what to do but are now amongst the intricacies of making it happen. Their mindset is no longer in a divergent state but is now one of convergence towards a more and more fixed goal.
It is this style of feedback which I think we have to seek to avoid. After all the cooking on Masterchef, however much a show for TV is still a microcosm of a creative process. This is similar in so many ways to when we ask the learners in our classes to create something, think high stakes, time, judgement.
To avoid Masterchef feedback or idea derailment we simply have to provide more feedback earlier on in the creative process.
In the case of Masterchef the time in the pantry, as the contestants jostle for ideas, inspiration and ingredients, would have been a good time to speak with people to offer ideas and feedback. Sometimes on a show, you see those stranded in the pantry getting a pep talk from a judge as they share and develop ideas together. That early feedback and dialogue are much more developmental and appropriate than derailing ideas already on their way.
In the classroom, we might build in earlier check-ins with learners as they begin the process of generating ideas for their writing, painting, modelling etc. The longer you leave that early check in the more committed to their ideas students will become and there is a higher chance of idea derailment if you offer critique. Plan for feedback to occur early and frequently to catch our young thinkers whilst their mindset is still divergent and open to ideas.
