Lab Learning: Day 8

I haven't anything to post for day 7 as I wasn't there :-P I took to start the day with reflection, but I found myself drifting towards debriefing and got collared for it. I realize that it's important to maintain focus and keep the group focused on thinking about what they learnt and not on what they found out. Because of the heavy syndication, when we met in the morning, everyone was like waiting to offload their syndications,as a result I lost control and the group drifted. It's important to stick to learning and separate from the debrief; The faciliator, more that anything has to keep that in focus. I learnt also today that we don't rely very much on data. We acknowledge that data is important, but we work more on perceptions and feelings than the data itself. We found instance where data is being collected,confidence level on the data is very low,the data itself is very narrow and non representative. From the data we knew how many instances a particular event happened, but we couldn't tell if this event was the most significant amongst other events. And pilots were launched on items which was not reflected by the data. Adding to this was that we didn't see steps being taken to improve the data quality. Thus, if we really depended on data, we should take efforts to improve the quality first. This also means that given that there are 500 registered vendors, speaking to 5 isn't enough. We would need to speak to a large enough group that can provide a representative view of the community I learnt (was reminded?)today how the first page of the Lab charter is organized: That the fundamental question is a summary of the case for action, the hypotheses were things that needed to be tested while the assumptions were the givens. Also today I learnt that there are a lot more to be learnt; we are kept thirsty by feeding us lessons a little at a time. As we scramble around trying to figure out what's going on, the answers are there, kept away till the moment arrives. I'm a little less uncomfortable now that I know that this is a concept lab, where our group is expected to deliver the model as a concept and not delve into the design details and implementation concerns. And by model we mean we need to come up with a representation of a working system and we need to identify the sub systems that make the part whole. In day 9 we will start defining the model. The plan is to define requirements based on the fundamental questions, list out systems required in the model to deliver the fundamental question requirements.We're gonna divide and conquer, so I think from now onwards the pace is gonna shift one notch up. And the profiles will come in handy to help us break the groups. "The answer is in the Question". We have all the answers. When do we need consultants? When we have a blindspot, need best practice, need subject matter experts or are short handed.