How do we learn what to do to make a living?
We spend a good portion of our early lives learning slowly by climbing a hierarchical ladder of teachers until we reach a specific trade. From parental tutelage to broad elementary school studies to possibly slightly more focused college and even more focused graduate studies, someone is there to tell us what to learn, even if we don’t always comply. We answer to a set person until we reach someone willing to pay us and teach us at the same time. This final apprenticeship often follows the same learn, test, reward progression as most of the schooling before it. Because there is no apparent change from school-learning to on-the-job-learning (at least at first), many that make it all the way through to a job never perceive the subtle change. That fundamental difference between being and doing.
Sure, your boss will tell you what to do. And the larger the corporate entity, the more predetermined your work will be. It’s natural, and indeed expected, that you make your immediate superior happy in your work. But at some point, you must put an ear to the ground yourself. You must know what your boss knows, what makes your particular product or service valuable. How is that different from the way we have all been taught to learn you ask?
That difference is who you are expected to listen to. No longer is your goal to listen to a single person who will provide you with instructions on what to know and do to reach a success mark. You must learn how to learn without guidance, without a set teacher. Everyone becomes a source of learning: your boss, your coworkers, your subordinates, the supporting staff and consultants, your customers, your potential customers, prior customers that you lost, your competitors’ customers… you get where I’m going with this. Your only chance at true autonomy is to listen. Listen daily and keep notes. Listen in the hope that you may hear, compile, and understand what it is that people will pay you to do.
That is the message behind the “there are no answers inside your building” mentality of today’s most well known entrepreneurs. Though you may have fallen into the habit of answering to a set person who has been assigned to you, recognize that this does not hold true in the real world and is a dangerous practice to keep. It is unsafe to place trust in the knowledge of a small group of people in a conference room to figure out what problems need solving, how to solve the problems of the many, and how to extract value for you and your company. The more sources of thoughtful feedback you can get and utilize, the better your chances for success.
The internet gives us access. It bypasses the limitations of those six degrees of Bacon we scrape through to get email introductions. It renders obsolete the arms-length approach of distributing postcard surveys at a mall with the sole feedback motivator being a sweepstakes for a free vacation to the Florida keys. ideapho.re is our vision of a place you can go to learn from each other. A community built specifically for customer development. It allows companies to compile a useful database of raw feedback from people they can directly compensate for thoughtful, well-articulated ideas. It makes learning from one another accessible on tap.
ideapho.re is crowdsourced innovation. What are you learning?
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