Mark Dowds

How to appear intelligent in a meeting

Over the years I have learned from many consultants that you don't actually need to know anything to help someone. In fact the one's that pretend to know the most (experts) end up being annoying and their opinions grating. Great facilitators have the knack of letting the person/people in question wrestle with the problem and solve it themselves. I am not suggesting that there is no co-creation in solving a problem with someone but rather that it is much better to ask questions and nudge things along instead of directing.

Joel Spolsky has a decent in this month's Inc. Magazine called 'How hard could it be?' that resurfaces the Five Whys problem solving technique developed by Toyota after World War II to improve its manufacturing process.

The basics of this process is to ask "Why?" five times to get to the root of any failure/issue in order to solve the core problem instead of the symptoms. For instance, imagine the problem you are facing is that you have a dissatisfied client. Why? because the job is only 3/4 complete in their mind. Why? because their expectations were different that what I understood. Why? because I assumed I understood what they meant? Why? because I didn't want to spend too long going through requirements. Why? because I wanted to get working and save time.

You get the idea. Try using this in meetings and you may get slapped by the odd person for seeming belligerent however for others you will be impressively brilliant as long as you pace with the people you are working with.

I think we will eventually learn that this process was actually derived from children and not Toyota.

Brainpark

I have a request...I am working on a new start-up called Brainpark and would greatly value the input of the wider community on what we are doing. We are hosting two "happy hour" evenings at the playground in order to learn from others on their approaches to sharing, organizing, and collaborating around ideas and information online.

Tuesday November 13th from 5-7pm focus on "ideas"
Thursday November 15th from 5-7pm focus on "information"

The links above have a sign up via eventbrite for 12 people at each session. If for some reason we overbook and you have an issue registering please contact me directly and let me know you would like to attend.

There are no specific qualifications necessary other than you have an opinion to bring. See you there

Social Innovation

Two of my good friends (and Indoor Playground tenants) got a decent write up this week in the Star about what they are doing to change the world. Dev and Zahra are young and full of energy. I wonder how they have been able to accomplish so much in the years when most of us were trying to discover who we were...well done folks

Conversations on Entrepreneurship

Tonight at 8pm (Thurs May 3rd) there is a bunch of us gathering at Indoor Playground for conversations on entrepreneurship. This will be an open space evening where many conversations and topics generated from the group will start some ongoing dialogue on those things that surface as most important and most passionate.

If you would like to attend the criteria is simple. You are an young enterpreneur by self definition. That means if you are interested you can show up...

If you show up the main banner of conversations will be "Entrepreneurship in Canada". From this overarching theme I will be asking each person to write down problems, issues, passionate ideas and the like that they are interested in having a conversation about with a few people. Then there will be timeslots around the room where folks post their topics and people sign up. Then after that it sort of takes its own life and we take it wherever it goes.

The address is 364 Richmond St W suite 503

It is an informal BYOB event

Quality Analysis

Today at Creationstep we launched QA Room, our new company focused on software testing. This is something we have been looking forward to launching for a while so it is a pleasant relief to have the site ready. We always enjoy getting the clients first and website later...The team is fantastic with extensive experience in this field. It is exciting to see some brilliant minds like this come together to share in some new possibilities

Silver Lining

The past 7 days has been eventful when it comes to Indoor Playground. As many of you have been tracking with, we got covered in Business Week, ABC Global News, and One Degree here in Toronto. In addition I had an interview with the National Post yesterday which I believe will be in print on Monday. It has been a wild journey trying to experiment and discover our way since we opened just over a month ago. It cost quite a lot in the renovations even though we bootstrapped as much as possible to keep the prices affordable to the community.

We have been hoping for a few people to partner with us and share this risk. Today that hope became a reality as Carissa Reiniger from Silver lining signed up as our first strategic partner who will share the cost and risk of making this venture successful. I met Carissa several months ago and have been inspired by her vision and commitment to making the new entrepreneur and small business successful. I have to admit that she has about twice as much energy as I do and seems to channel it in the right direction.

She has one of the best lead generating business development solutions for the small business that I have seen and is proving it to be working with their rapid expansion throughout N.America. We believe our partnership with SilverLining will prove beneficial as it will not only bring in new energy, insight, and expertise, but will take us beyond having a predominantly male influence and membership. Silver Lining is not exclusively woman led (kudos to joshua and the lads) but will definitely help balance out the hormones and bring an important influence within what we do. All said and done it feels great to have someone who is willing to stand beside us that will take a financial risk to benefit the entrepreneurial
community within Toronto.

We are still scheming and instigating with a few other key players who have some clever ideas about how we can give more to the community here in Toronto. I have to admit to having a lot of fun with this today...

Five Questions

Thanks to Ken Schafer and Arieh Singer over at One Degree the Indoor Playground has got some more exposure. I quite liked their format of five questions and I got a little candid with my answers as I got comfortable. This time around I listed a few of the folks who really helped get the word out there and some of the folks who are helping us shape what this whole thing is behind the scenes...

ABC World News Gives Indoor Playground a Mention

ABC News just gave indoor playground a mention. This comes on the back of some buzz the coworking movement has been getting this week and follows the mention in Business Week. This comes on the one month anniversary of our opening.

Here is the clip

Here is the complete webcast

Indoor Playground | Centre for Innovation

Today was a proud moment when Indoor Playground got mentioned in Business Week. It has been several months of hard work getting it off the ground but it seems to be working. We have about 15 people signed up as member now through the blog community. It is almost the end of month one and things are looking good. We have a long way to go but it appears like we are on the right track

Workouts for the Body and the Mind

I have just received the latest Springwise newsletter and have been surprised yet again how they discover some of the more bazaar yet interesting innovations happening in N.America.

The aspect that caught my attention was the concept of a stationary bike connected to an a form of learning content that guides you through an educational experience while getting fit.

I am certainly up to my ears in learning content and have often seen that as a convenient excuse to avoid my passive fitness regime. I had not considered bringing the two together before. Mind you, this may still remain in the "interesting" aspect of my mind and doubt that I will quickly change my current habits.