Old Ways Won't Open New Doors

Fresh Approaches to Fresh Situations

Human-centered

Human-centered mindset goes beyond thinking of people as customers to recognizing and respecting them as nuanced and capable individuals.

The process requires empathy—the capability of understanding another person’s experiences and emotions. You need to consider your customers’ perspectives and ask questions to determine what products they’re currently using, why and how they’re using them, and the challenges they’re trying to solve.

  • pinpoint customers’ pain points
  • provide a solution to a real life problem or hole in the market
  • learn about a specific subset of people or a target audience

Expectation Management

Clear expectations can lead to greatness at work. But too often, expectations are unclear or unmet and result in disappointment. Misaligned expectations can lead to frustration, decreased productivity, and strained relationships.
 
Mastering the art of managing expectations is essential to fostering clear communication, ensuring accountability, and driving results.
  • it’s no longer enough to meet customer’s expectations, you have to move into the arena of exceeding expectations
  • create expectation and buzz no more than what you can deliver on
  • anger always comes from frustrated expectations
Expectation Management

The Power of Stories

People remember how stories make them feel, and are more inspired to take action than if they just heard facts and figures.
Stories are one of the most powerful tools you can use to engage and connect with your audience.
  • raise curiosity, create suspense
  • be believable, be relevant
  • introduce a conflict (a moral issue or solving a problem)

The Magic of Words

Like waving a magic wand, words have the power to shape our reality. They can inspire, motivate, comfort, and heal. They can build connections and relationships as well as destroy them.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, and supporting our words with congruent actions is important. That being said, words have a power of their own that sometimes goes unrecognized.

  • change your words, change your world
  • only if you underestimate words themselves, the strength of them strung together
  • reading the spirits and signs of our times

Workflow Documentation

Workflow documentation helps you improve your processes, streamline your workflow, and align your team.
 
It helps you to keep track of what you’ve done, and helps others understand what you’ve done. When done correctly, this documentation can be handed off to another individual at your organization, and they can complete the task completely independently.
  • define the process scope and boundaries
  • save time on FAQs and sifting through old documents
  • get everyone on the same page about your team’s standardized workflows

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology studies mental processes, including how people perceive, think, remember, learn, solve problems, and make decisions.
 
Learning about how people think and process information helps people understand the human brain and make better choices.
  • attention: how we selectively focus on certain aspects of our environment
  • schemas: Cognitive psychologists assume that people’s prior knowledge, beliefs, and experiences shape their mental processes
  • problem-solving and decision-making: how we reason, make judgments, and solve problems

Systems Thinking

The social and environmental problems resulting from our economic system can often feel independent from one another.

At Metabolic, we take an integrated view of these issues – from climate change and biodiversity loss to human health and economic stagnation – acknowledging that many of these challenges are inextricably linked, and stem from a few key root causes.

  • shift thinking from linear to circular
  • You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it
  • embrace complexity, idenfity points of intervention

Models-Based Analysis

Organizations are awash in data — from geocoded transactional data to real-time website traffic to semantic quantifications of corporate annual reports. All these data and data sources only add value if put to use. And that typically means that the data is incorporated into a model.

But creating an “ensemble” of models isn’t just about picking the ones that perform best on their own. You want to combine models that complement one another.

  • Procuring education on consulted assurance in do.
  • Northward by described up household therefore attention.
  • Excellence decisively nay man yet impression for contrasted remarkably.

Data Visualization

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data.
By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data.
Data visualization translates complex data sets into visual formats that are easier for the human brain to understand.
  • data visualization simplifies the complex data
  • visualization highlights patterns, trends, and correlations in data that might be missed in raw data form
  • visual representations of data make it easier to share findings with others especially those who may not have a technical background

Transdisciplinary Learning

Today’s big challenges need a ‘transdisciplinary’ approach: a team effort involving many different scientists and partners from society.

But because these problems are so diverse—covering different topics, domains, and stakeholders—projects often struggle to find effective methods for organizing their work. The cluster wants to develop such methods, using the perspective of design.

A major purpose of transdisciplinary learning is to understand the world around us, and that learning should be contextualized in and applied to real-life, far beyond the traditional notion of “school”.

  • transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries
  • different forms of research coexist and can support one another
  • there is often more than just one way to solve a problem

Iterate Faster

Iteration speed is crucial to startup success. Companies tend to add processes and get slower as they grow. You must actively combat this tendency.

Iterating faster beats iterating with higher quality. Why? Speed means more iterations, and you learn with each iteration. Therefore, as iteration speed increases, learning rate increases.

Fast iteration applies to both the planning phase and the delivery phase.
  • ideate, create, iterate
  • integrate hardware- and software development closely to create and iterate over the full product rather than over the single components
  • agility means embracing how people work, which is to say we need to fail faster in order to learn and ultimately succeed

Reality-Perception Gap

One of the primary reasons startups fail is a lack of market need. Or, in more straightforward terms: The founders built a product or service no one wants.
Creating a successful business requires identifying an underserved need, validating your idea, and crafting an effective value proposition.
 
The discrepancies between reality and perception impede the optimization and scalability of business strategy.
 
Rather than develop products based on assumptions, you conduct user research and assess customer needs to determine what prospective buyers want.
  • the further away you are from feedback, the more disconnected you become from reality
  • establish boundaries to properly manage the expectations of others
  • balance meetings throughout the week to allow time each day to stay on top of what really matters

Focusing on Untapped Potential

The business world is experiencing a paradox. On one hand, companies are crying out for skilled talent to fill crucial roles and drive innovation. On the other, they’re surrounded by employees whose full range of skills and potential remain largely untapped.

This disconnect is at the heart of many challenges organizations face today. The skills gap, a chasm between the skills employers need and those available in the workforce, continues to widen.

  • identifying untapped talent
  • awareness opens the door for transition
  • Visualizing Untapped Potential

Love of Knowledge

Love of learning means a passion for learning, a desire to learn just for learning’s sake. While attempting to obtain a love for knowledge and willpower to think, one must not overlook reality or disregard past experiences. One must relate to the “sense of reality” under the watch of reason and control of conscience, and consider it on a par with one’s ability to taste, smell, and touch.
 

You need to have knowledge and act wisely in the light of this knowledge.

It goes beyond simple knowledge recall and aimless memorizing. It’s about developing fresh perspectives on the world and gaining the knowledge and abilities needed to realize your goals, which will make you the finest possible version of yourself.
  • love is never a cliché
  • the unity of knowledge and action
  • the quest for knowledge is addictive