Seeding by storytelling

I thought I'd share a realization that popped in my head today, which has been seeding in my head for a while through #theforge #badass leadership program and my crew #fortitudo, in particular @Phil Nesmith and @Jackie Niro.

I used to think, wow those people that can deliver a seed through storytelling are special people, I would love to be able to do that!

My realization, I can, and you can too!

It is as simple as "observing with an awareness of things you do every day".

An example

I had to fix a door that had the door handle hacked out because it had seized and wouldn't open. You can imagine the mess of the door. The panel around the door handle smashed away. No structure to put in the door handle.

There are at least two seeds from this story.

Seed 1 seeding Experimentation as an action from a retrospective.

The problem is noise is causing issues when I'm on a video call.

Hypothesis

We believe if we fix the door so it can be closed

It will reduce the noise

We will know we are successful when the noise is reduced and we feel the noise issue is 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, (where 1 was as bad as it was previously and 5 is there is no noise.)

Seed 2 seeding MLP (Minimum Lovable Product),

When I looked at this door, the first thought was to buy a new one. But as hardware places were not available during lockdown. It was waiting or fix the door. But it would take weeks to fix the door back to a close standard of its previous state.

We decided the MLP was a door that closed to reduce noise. We didn't know if we would succeed or not. So we decided to break down the tasks to fix it and do a bit each day .

Day 1 - Glue piece of wood back in to act as the door frame and clamp in place to dry

Day 2 - Glue broken panel parts back to the construction and clamp in place to dry

Day 3 - Drill the wood and expand drill hole, for the door mechanism

Day 4 - Fill the gaps where the wood is missing with a filling product

Day 5 - Smooth the filler fit door handle

- Fit door and test opens and closes

The end result was the door was very ugly, but it opened and closed- MLP - DONE

My wife is insisting there must be a next iteration to beautify it !