July 1, 2019

This morning started with a class session at the hotel which included my first group presentation about the fifth chapter of Ten Faces. This chapter describes the persona of the collaborator, an individual who brings people together to get things done, and basically acts as the glue in a group to prevent from total chaos or the project falling apart. I think our presentation went pretty well—a few things didn’t quite go as planned, but overall I think that it was good. One thing that I wish we had done differently was the first activity, the thought experiment among the larger group. I think that either giving this activity more time, or allowing more people to contribute their own thoughts about how the activity went would have helped add more substance to this activity, but I liked the other activity a lot, which asked small groups to discuss how a good collaborator would handle a variety of different difficult situations. As groups shared out about their discussions, and how they decided they could handle the situations, I was really excited to hear that groups grasped the persona accurately, and seemed very engaged with the activity.

Also during our class time, we discussed chapter six of Ten Faces, the director. I really liked this discussion, because although I don't feel that I necessarily identify with this persona inherently, I feel that in many of the roles that I take on at school I act in a directorial fashion, so learning about what an effective director does, and reflecting on the best (and worst) directors in my life really helped give me a good idea for what to strive for in my own life. In our discussion of the Bason readings, we focused primarily on the spectrum of innovation, which describes innovations as ranging from incremental to radical, and also on the four types of innovation (process, product, positional, and paradigm). The readings combined with our discussion really helped me start to frame the ideas that I am forming about innovation as we make site visits, and also caused me to consider some facets of innovation that I hadn't been considering. For example, when I thought about the Feeling Van Gogh initiative that we learned about when we visited the museum, I originally perceived that program to itself be the innovation. During our discussion, however, we talked about process innovation (how to make things more efficient for people within the organization), which interested me because none of our site visits really clearly addressed process innovation. Through discussion it became clear that in order to arrive at one large innovation, like Feeling Van Gogh, it requires many smaller innovations, like potential process innovations within the organization to help the program run more smoothly, paradigm innovations in terms of how people perceive what a museum experience should be, and product innovation in terms of the product that the museum is offering to patrons. I think this shift in thinking will be useful moving forward, as we continue to take site visits where we are confronted with a final product, and it is up to us to investigate how that product came to be.

After class, Kleitia, Talia, and I went to get manicures and then shopped around a little in the same downtown area. We then returned to the hotel where we gathered a larger group and headed out to a jazz bar for an adventure! It was really fun, and the live music was great! Definitely a good day overall.