Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting time into reading about patterns that aid in moving new ideas into organizations, i.e. what to do first, what to do next, how to keep the wheels on the idea.  One of the first patterns talks about weaving your new idea into your own work, then sharing it with others for validation and/or buy-in.  There’s more to it than this, but here’s where I’ll start my story.

I’d taken a very different approach to building in a feature for an application at my shop.  The business had a lot of input on how they need to perform tasks, I captured what I thought was everything in one, one hour meeting last month.  I used my (borrowed from a conference last year) idea for how to compose the information they had shared and today I shared their information in a new format they probably have never seen.  Four levels of employees all reading from the same pages, and everyone got that I populated those few pages with pictures, ideas, and information that told the story of how one part of the business works.

We went from the dry stuff to something a bit more interactive and fun – I let the end users show me how the feature’s workflow would be most beneficial for their day-to-day operation.  They seemed to get excited to have some authorship on the idea, and all with a low-tech prototype that allowed from quick changes on the fly as the conversation progressed.  We finished with only go over 15 minutes beyond our allotted time.

A good day, today, a win.