TKS Session 14: Challenge 1 + Velocity Session 5
The TKS Challenge started! We got our groups and our challenge statement and it’s all so exciting! I’ll get into it all later in this post.
My intention for this session was to take notes and learn as much as I could about the challenge, the company we were working with, and what our goals should be.
For velocity, we discussed the PotW, Tom Bilyue, who was one of the founders of the Quest protein bar company. He now has his own company, Impact Theory, whose goal is to spread knowledge to everyone through podcasts and videos. Listening to his podcasts and his interviews gave me a few things to take away and think about as I go through my life.
One thing that stood out was how he talked about having the right mindset, being aware of your self-identity, and what beliefs it makes you have. Your self-identity is shaped by the conditions and surroundings you grow up with. Those can include things like your neighbourhood, living situation, people, the things you would see and hear around you, etc. Based on how your self-identity was shaped growing up and the beliefs that were given to you, it can also impact the type of mindset you have. This is important because our self-identity and our mindset determine how much potential we think we have. People most of the time don’t do great things because they don’t feel any motivation to or their mindset doesn’t allow them to think that they are capable of doing more than they think. So, what I’m taking away is to not limit myself to average standards. I won’t allow myself to think I can’t do something, especially if I haven’t tried. I will try and take that risk and see what happens.
In one interview Tom did, they were both talking about emotion vs progress in your daily life. It was then said that, no matter how valid your emotions are, you must choose to have progress in order to make a difference. It was mainly stated that you can’t have both emotion and progress and that you can only choose one. I somewhat agree with this. Emotions, both “positive” and “negative” ones, are important because they can help you realize how much you value something or how important something is to you. Your emotions can actually drive you to make progress. But, sometimes, when we let our feelings guide us, we might get overwhelmed and may not make the best decisions, which can stunt our progress. So, I think that you can choose to have both emotion and progress working alongside each other in different aspects of your life and influencing each other, but not both at the exact same time when the work actually needs to get done.
In the actual session, we first discussed the MotW, figure-it-out. This mindset was introduced to us now because, with the challenge starting, we are going to have to do a lot of problem-solving and innovation, and things can go wrong. When those problems do come up, we can’t just stop and give up. We need to actually act upon it and start to think about how we can fix this. And, if we want to be as innovative as possible, asking others for help every single time something goes wrong doesn’t allow us to learn anything from a problem, be creative, or prepare us for when bigger and bigger problems may come up. Plus, we aren’t practicing any independence by constantly asking others for help with every little thing. The figure-it-out mindset requires you to try on your own to problem-solve when an obstacle comes up, but if you are still stuck after a good effort put in, then ask for help. This is important because people may not give you answers right away, and you need to be confident that you are smart enough to do it yourself.
Now, the challenge! For those who don’t know what that is, the challenge is where TKS partners with a big company, and they present to us with a problem they are facing. We then get two weeks to come up with a solution to the problem, create a 5-minute video presentation, and a stand-alone deck detailing our solution. If our project is selected, it gets to be presented to a team of executives in the company for review. We got right into it and found out the company we would be working with is: IKEA!
IKEA is a billion-dollar furniture company that has revolutionized the way we shop. It’s one of the only companies doing big innovations and changing the retail landscape. The company’s challenge statement, which we will be working with throughout this challenge, is:
What should IKEA do to provide the best possible shopping experience for you, your families, and your peers?
It’s very ambiguous because there are so many different routes you can take with this. It is also an extra-challenging problem because IKEA is known for how successful they are at creating the best shopping experience for its customers. But, there are always things to improve on, we just need to search for them.
I’ll be working on this challenge alongside Sophia Dhami and Arissai Filleul, and I’m really excited to be a part of this team!
In the session, we looked at some of the innovations IKEA is known for such as the flat-pack packaging, its famous store layout with the showrooms and guided “maze”, its two restaurants located in the store, its Swedish culture as part of its branding, the self-serve furniture warehouse, etc.
After looking at some background information, we then talked about the process of the challenge and how we can be successful in it. We first looked at the Design Thinking Framework, which looks like this:
Empathise: Find what people struggle with or need
Define: Turn that into a problem statement or your mission
Ideate: Start thinking up solutions
Prototype: Figure out how this will work, and build something to demonstrate
Test: See if it works and if it helps solve your problem
We also looked at how to structure stand-alone decks. Those kinds of decks are text-heavy and don’t require a presenter. Here is how we could go about structuring them (you can use more than 1 slide for each part if necessary):
Intro/team slide
Executive summary
Conversation data (empathize phase) and the things you learned
Defining (define phase) niche problem, why it is the problem, who does it target, and how it relates to conversation data
Introduce the prototype (ideate/prototype phase), walk through the solution, and why will it make things better
Data to back up why it’s a good idea (test phase)
Financials, what will this cost, the financial impact, opportunity costs
Feasibility of the idea, timeline of implementation, how to implement
Tie it back to the overall company mission and goals
bring it back to the why, do customers want this, why is it a need/must have
Remember to keep it clean and professional.
Then we all talked about the good/bad qualities of teams and what the foundation for a successful team is. We were shown the 3 “pillars” of a successful team:
Culture: What comes from the people and what is expected of them
Structure: How everything is organized (ex. meetings)
Game Plan: How we are going to get through the challenge, creating different milestones or phases. The phases we were recommended to follow were:
Phase: Gather Data
Phase: Identify Ideas
Phase: Ideas Validation
Phase: Build The Recommendation
Phase: Finalize The Deck
In order to create a game plan, your team needs to be collaborative, break down the problems, have a clear timeline, continue to give feedback to each other, create milestones and goals that can be achieved, and not jump to conclusions but instead look at the data.
Lastly, before we finished this session, we looked at common mistakes teams can make, especially when doing the TKS challenge:
People jump to ideas
The recommendation is too surface-level
People procrastinate
The team isn’t aligned
Loss of motivation
I was really happy about the information I got out of this session. I feel more prepared on what to focus on in the challenge and how to make sure that our team can be successful!
