Design

Designing in collaboration is a fascinating place to be. You should try it sometime – you’ll be shocked at how different it is from the usual way of working – and how it makes your risk elements diminish – profoundly.

In the usual way of working, once a core team has developed a plan, you hire a couple of advisors – we’ll bet you call them “subject matter experts” – who do your detailed design for you. Oh, they’ll talk to your users – a bit – but they’re the experts – they know what you need – and that’s what they design for you.

It’s happened a million times – in fact, if it had only happened a million times, we’d consider ourselves lucky. It’s happened countless times. The “advisor” gets to determine the design, and the hundreds, thousands, or tens of millions of people who actually have to LIVE with the idea as implemented are hardly engaged at all.

At CTLabs, we turn that paradigm on its head. We challenge you to invite everybody – yes, EVERYBODY – to the design session. Now, they won’t all come, of course. But 100-500 of your closest friends, as well as everyone who’d like to kill your idea in its tracks…that’s a good start to actually creating a robust design for your idea.

Our Design sessions give you two outcomes that are priceless (although breakfast for 400 can get a bit pricey):

  1. If your core idea survives the day, with however many changes and improvements and recommendations the system believes it needs, then it will be a robust, saleable idea. Venture Capitalists, or an even tougher audience, Treasury Board Secretariat, will want to fund your idea. They’ll likely tell you that in the room though – we invite them. The reason that they will fund it is because your community – the human system you invited into the room – will support it. Broad, MEANINGFUL stakeholder engagement, where they ACTUALLY have a hand in the design, nets a design that has legs, that is supported, and that has a good chance at success.
  2. If we can kill it, we will. It’s not great to have an idea fail in front of an audience, but better 200 than 2 million when it goes live. If the idea just can’t be saved, we will enable you to fail fast. And you will understand, with utter clarity and in great detail, why the idea failed.

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