MBA1325 Q&A Wednesday: HELP! I have a huge project with no framework or instructions. Where do I start?

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because your business deserves the best. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. Today's question is from Fatima and Fatima asks help. I have a huge project to take on with no framework or instructions. Where do I start? Fatima has just started in a new job and her boss has asked her to implement the maker Movement philosophy to their workplace. For those who are not familiar, the maker movement is a philosophy where you build, you create and you learn by doing and making. This is something that has been tried and true for thousands of years. Literally our ancestors have been building and making things and that's how they learn how to do them. So Fatima has got to implement this philosophy in her new workplace. How does she do it? Her boss just told her to run with it. That's what we're going to be covering. It's a very specific question, but it has to do with the idea of how do you get started with a Very simple idea that's not clear. You don't have an implementation plan. You don't have a framework, you don't have instructions. This is a metaphor for starting a business. And we're going to boil it down to its simplest form and get really focused to not only help Fatima in her situation, but for anybody who's listening and they're starting out something brand new. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Fatima needs some help. She needs to implement this maker movement philosophy in her workplace. She's got nothing to go by. She just got to make it happen. So my first piece of advice is to take a step back and ask yourself the question or even ask your boss this question. What's your desired outcome? What are you trying to accomplish by asking me to do this? By asking me to implement this maker movement? What do you want to see change in the organization and you want to take notes. Either you're asking yourself this question or you're asking the person who assigned you this task. This is going to help you get started and really clarify the purpose of this task. Because you might be making some assumptions right now. You might be thinking, oh, this is what they need, this is what they want, this is what they mean. Now you don't have to take too much time to get these answers. You're looking for 10 minutes here and you might get answers like, I want my team to be able to learn faster by doing. I want them to not be afraid to fail. I want to be able to train them to iterate. I want them to understand that this is a place where we get our hands dirty and we try things out. Once you understand what you actually want to get out of this project, what the desired outcome is, you're well on your way to get started. I know it sounds a little bit foggy right now, but you know what the end goal is now we can work backwards. And your job is to get a quick win for your team. So you're not going to get the long term goal accomplished in an instant, but you can get a small win. For example, let's say you want to implement this maker movement for your team and you want them to learn by doing and not to be afraid of experimenting. So one of the best ways just to start with a micro project, a small thing that can take 30 minutes for the teammates to do. So it could be something like an egg drop. An egg drop is basically you give two teams a set of supplies like cardboard and some straws, some rubber Bands and a half dozen eggs. And you ask them to create something where they can drop the egg from chest height and the egg doesn't break. Basically, they're engineering a way for the egg to land safely and it gets them to work together, be creative and not be afraid to break a few eggs in the process of trying to get one egg to land safely. Now, you might be saying, this is just a small exercise. This is not the whole philosophy, this is not the whole framework. Yes, but it's a start. It's a way for you to get buy in from the rest of the team. There's no point of creating a framework or having a whole regimen and a schedule for everybody to do if they don't understand the purpose. You want them to taste the purpose and see what's going on, why we're doing this, and get one of the desired outcomes, even if just for a short period of time. So they can be like, wow, okay, we failed a bit. We learned in the process. We got out of our heads and actually got doing and we saw the point of the maker movement. So once you have one project under your belt, one little task, this is where the fun begins and this is where you're going to make this about the team. Yes, you are in charge of kind of crafting this and putting it all together, but you can't do this alone. You could do this with your team. You're going to ask your team what they learned from that exercise, the egg drop, and then you're going to bring it back to the workplace. Hey, how can we do the same with our daily jobs, with our tasks, with the responsibilities? For example, right now we're working on X project. How can we learn by doing? How can we fail fast? And how can we implement the maker movement? Put the question onto the team, get ideas from them. Let it be a brain dump. There's no wrong ideas. Just take notes because this is how you're going to start formulating ways to incorporate this theory that we just saw in a microcosm, in real life, in the workplace, in their jobs. And you need ownership, you need them to be a part of the way they do this. The idea's got to come from the team, not from you. What you really want to do or what you want to really hand them is just a set of guidelines or vision statements or let's say, values of this theory. So, and this is easy, this is something that they're going to say when they give you feedback after the first project. This is what I Learned. This is what I got out of it. And you're just gonna make maybe, you know, five or six value statements. Hey, this is what the maker movement's all about. This is what we're doing in our company. This is what it means to us. It means not being afraid to fail. It means learning by doing. It means X, Y, Z. You get the point. Once they understand that these are kind of the rules you're gonna live by, you as a group can start forming actual projects where you actually implement this in real life in the workplace. Now, if you run a business, you could do this in your business. You can start doing this. And in fact, the egg drop, we did this in our this past June in Bali and it was great. And it was just a metaphor of all the ways we all like to solve problems. And it was a good way for us to learn about each other and learn about our learning styles and our communication style and then we can implement the same philosophy in our tasks in our projects at the company. This is how you actually put philosophy into action. You take a small example of this philosophy in action with a small exercise, takes 30 minutes so you can get buy in from the actual team. And then let's see how we can apply the same principles with tasks. Now you may not be able to do that with every task in your company. Some things are going to be a little bit more administrative and a little bit more straightforward. But even if you have it implemented in some tasks, that philosophy will live on in your business.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Fatima looking to implement the maker movement philosophy in her company. This is how you get started with a micro project, get buy in and then have a discussion with your team about what that means, what they got out of it, and how they want to implement the same thing in their tasks, in their projects that they're working on in the company. You can't do this alone. You got to do it as a collective team. But you just lead the conversation. That's your responsibility to lead the movement, not to be the movement. Well, that wraps up today's Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar@100mba.net I hope you you're not just keeping your questions in your head. Ask them. We'd love to answer them right here on the show to not only help you, but help others that have the same questions in their head. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Introducing something new to the team is something you want to do gently. You kind of want to do it with a little bit of finesse. People generally do not like change, so if you can introduce something in a fun way in an activity, in a low time commitment way, like a 30 minute task, it's so much easier to get people to be sold on it because it's not such a big deal and they can see the value of it before you just impose it on them. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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