The Prototyping Mindset: Think, Act, Reflect, Repeat

What is a prototyping mindset and why should you build one?

Photo by Paweł Bukowski on Unsplash

I talk and write a lot about what I call the prototyping mindset. It’s a way of approaching problems that has been very helpful to me in the past few years. But what exactly is a prototyping mindset?

Today I want to explore the prototyping mindset through three main movements:

1. Why is a prototyping mindset useful? What problems does it help solve?

2. What is a prototyping mindset and why does it work?

3. How can you start developing a prototyping mindset today?

1. A prototyping mindset helps you to get moving

The power of the prototyping mindset is encapsulated for me in a simple statement of fact: the first attempt to solve a problem is rarely the best. This applies across a wide range of problems and fields from engineering, science, writing, and athletics. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that there is often a disconnect between how we think something works and how it actually works.

In the age of YouTube, we can learn how to do almost anything from basic car maintenance, home improvement projects, playing an instrument, and science. But there is a big difference between watching someone do something and actually being able to do it.

This same challenge exists in the classroom. Watching a teacher work a problem on the board is very different than trying to do it yourself. When you actually sit down to try it out, then all the steps that seemed so obvious just a few hours ago in class somehow seem like the result of inaccessible intuition. This is why the practice of active learning is so powerful. Active learning instructional methods engage students in the learning process beyond a passive role where they listen and take notes. Instead of just watching, they’re doing.

This problem is at the heart of learning, whether in the classroom or outside of it. The prototyping mindset lays out a set of dispositions or ways of being that help to tackle this.

2. The prototyping mindset provides a structure for an iterative practice of action and reflection

The first part of a prototyping mindset is to just start moving. Learning only happens when you actually try something.

Of course, it’s easy to say “just go try things,” but a prototyping mindset goes beyond this. The prototyping mindset is about embracing action within a framework of thoughtful and iterative experimentation. The point isn’t just to try to do the best you can on a single attempt, but to build a practice.

Embody the question and then reflect on the results

To understand more about what makes a prototyping mindset an effective iterative process, we first need to understand what a prototype itself is. After all, iteration itself isn’t enough. As the adage goes, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The key is to make small changes between iterations.

I like the definition that

Scott Witthoft

gives in his book This is a Prototype. He defines a prototype as an “embodied question.” As I’ve written before, the two components of this definition encourage us to:

1. Keep an open-minded and curious perspective about the problem we are exploring.

2. Focus on concrete actions as opposed to abstract ideas.

While a low-resolution model of a new device, a pre-release version of a new gadget, and a rough draft of an essay are all examples of prototypes, this definition also encompasses conversations and experiences provided that they are framed with curiosity.

This emphasis on action is one part of the prototyping mindset but the step of reflection is equally important. After testing a prototype, you need to reflect on the results of the iteration. Then, in this reflection process, you decide what adjustments you want to make for the next prototype in order to get closer to your goal.

My prototyping journey

I don’t just preach about the power of prototyping, I try my best to practice it too. This year I’ve been exploring a few different prototypes that I want to report back on.

Two of my favorites? Daily journaling and curious conversations.

Prototype #1: Daily Journaling

I wrote at the beginning of this year about a new journaling practice that I was planning to explore this year. I was inspired to try this out when I sat down at the beginning of the year to review what I accomplished last year and realized that there were whole periods of the year where I couldn’t remember much about what I had been working on or how I had been growing.

So, inspired by Sahil Bloom’s 1-1-1 method I came up with three prompts to explore every night:

1. Accomplishment - what did I do?

2. Anxiety - what am I worried about?

3. Appreciation - what am I thankful for?

At this point, about halfway through the year, I’ve found this to be a beneficial and valuable practice for me. It helps me at the end of the day to quickly think about what I did that day. I’m sure that this will be helpful at the beginning of next year when I can quickly look back through my year and remember some of the highlights that I was thinking about in the moment.

The anxiety prompt is also helpful. It is freeing to put down something you’re worrying about on paper and get it out of your head. I am also looking forward to seeing how this practice will help me to see things in perspective as I look back on them. I suspect that many of the things that I worry about in the moment will turn out to be insignificant when viewed from a few months in the future.

Finally, the appreciation prompt is normally the last thing that I write every day and is a great way to finish out the day. Ending the day by finding a bright spot, especially on the heels of acknowledging anxiety, helps me to see all the ways that I am blessed and cared for by my family and community.

Prototype #2: Curious Conversations

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned from the design thinking work that I’ve done over the past few years is the power of conversations. We often think of networking as a sort of slimy activity where people are just looking to make connections in order to leverage them for their own benefit.

Of course, this does exist, but the Stanford Life Design studio taught me to think about networking more like asking for directions. When you’re lost and ask someone for directions you don’t feel like you’re taking advantage of someone. And when you’re asked for directions, it feels good to be able to help someone else out.

So, to tap into the power of conversation I’ve been trying to intentionally reach out to someone interesting to chat with them about their story and hear more about them. In a world where remote work and Zoom meetings have been so normalized, it’s an easy ask for a 30-minute Zoom call or phone call. It’s true that these aren’t always successful, but I’ve made many great connections and learned so much just by having conversations with folks and double-clicking on something about them that I find interesting and that piques my curiosity. So far I’m averaging around one conversation a week and have found these conversations to be some of the favorite parts of my week.

3. Begin building your prototyping mindset with an experience or conversation

If you’re curious about how to embody the prototyping mindset in your life, I want to help. The first step is to lean into your curiosity. What skill or hobby do you want to try out, learn, or improve? This could be anything from learning how to garden to baking bread or making pizza (always a good choice!).

After you decide what you want to explore, the next step is to design your prototype. Remember, a prototype is an embodied question! What you come up with for your prototype should be something you physically do or create. While reading about it online or watching a YouTube video about it might help you to get started, these activities don’t count as prototypes. Don’t just watch a video about making bread, go into the kitchen and try it out. Don’t just read about how to grow vegetables, visit your local nursery and pick out a tomato plant to plant in your backyard.

Once you decide what you want to do, think about what you hope to learn from the experience. What question does your prototype embody? What do you want to learn from the experience?

Once you’ve got these two things in place, just do it. Don’t get trapped in a cycle of overanalyzing your plans or worrying about failure. Once you have an idea for a small experiment to run and a question you hope to explore, you’ve got all the pieces you need. Go run your experiment and then sit down afterward to decide what information it gave you to help answer your question. Then, collect what you’ve learned and use that information to build your prototype. Before you know it, one step will turn into two and you’ll be walking toward a new skill, experience, or habit.

A note of thanks to those who have helped me to build my own prototyping mindset

I want to end by acknowledging some of the sources that have impacted my thinking about the prototyping mindset. The prototyping mindset is a topic we frequently talk about in the Engineering department at Harvey Mudd. These conversations at Mudd were formed in large part as a result of a workshop that I and a few of my HMC Engineering colleagues attended a few years ago from the Stanford Life Design Lab and the book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans Designing Your Life. And of course, many of the concepts of the prototyping mindset resonate with the ideas and practices from the fields of design thinking, human-centered design, and structures like the engineering design process.

However, what resonates with me about the language of a prototyping mindset is the way that the combination of action and failure is put front and center. The combination of these two pieces are often the biggest barrier preventing you from learning something new.

Resources to explore more

Here are a few resources to further explore the prototyping mindset.

• Stanford Life Design Lab. The workshop I attended several years ago was one of my first introductions to design thinking. I’m grateful for all that I’ve learned from these amazing folks!

• Big Little Breakthroughs by Josh Linkner. Josh really gets the prototyping mindset. In this book, he shares many inspiring stories and practical examples to help you build your own practice of experimentation.

• Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book really emphasizes the power of small habits compounded over time. There are so many small tips that can help you to build habits that stick.

• This article on failure by

  Anne-Laure Le Cunff
  that I read last week. It’s really excellent.

• This talk I gave a few months ago about “The Power of the Prototyping Mindset.”

Did anything I write resonate with you? Please leave a comment so that we can continue the conversation!

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The Book Nook

This week I made some more progress on the book I shared last week, Big Little Breakthroughs by Josh Linkner. I couldn’t help but share this one again this week since it is so resonant with the prototyping mindset. Although Josh doesn’t use that phrase, the way he talks about developing a practice of experimentation is another way of saying the same thing.

Quotables

A few specific quotes that have been resonating with me:

On getting the bad ideas out so the good ones can flow. See also this recent post from

David Epstein

.

We tend to think that getting started is all about generating the absolute perfect plan, but it’s really more about getting every possible idea out of your head so you can later sort the good from the bad. Chuck Jones, the famous Warner Bros. animator whose creations include Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry, said it best, “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them, and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”

Initial ideas aren’t that important. The real magic is in the evolution of the idea.

[W]hile initial ideas can be directionally important, they are not the panacea that most people think. The majority of value, in fact, is created as the idea evolves. One idea leads to another idea that morphs into something altogether different. Conceptual ideas only come to life through hundreds of Big Little Breakthroughs, which can only be discovered once you’re in hot pursuit.

We can’t see which ideas are best from the outset. We need to experiment to discover them.

“Creative persons, even the so-called geniuses, cannot ever foresee which of their intellectual or aesthetic creations will win acclaim,” Michael explains. Accordingly, he coined the “10,000-experiment rule,” which states that creative success is directly correlated to the number of experiments conducted.

Innovation means failure. But that’s ok. Failure means that you are pushing boundaries.

According to Stefan Thomke, Harvard professor and author of Experimentation Works, companies that have a failure rate of less than 20 percent are not taking enough creative risks to keep up with increasingly competitive market pressures.

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The Professor Is In

This summer I’ve been prototyping bi-weekly 1-on-1 meetings with each of my summer research students. So far the early returns are very positive.

Here are a few guiding principles that I’ve been using that I learned from Michael Bungay Stanier’s book The Coaching Habit:

• The structure of the meetings is set by my students. My first question to kickstart is something along the lines of “what’s on your mind?”

• I try to listen a lot more than I talk (not always successful at this…). Some questions that help me are: “what else?” and “tell me more about that.”

• I end every meeting with the question “what are you taking away?” This is a great way to help them summarize their learnings, but also for me to see what resonated most with them. Sometimes it’s what I thought it would be, but other times I come away surprised.

A thoughtful perspective on how we should be thinking about AI for this fall

This article from

Emily Pitts Donahoe

is a great read. In it, she shares a list of questions that is worth all of us educators considering for our courses this fall as we consider the impact of generative AI:

• How are we inviting students to demonstrate their knowledge, and is writing the only (or the best) way to do that? 

• What are our assignment goals? And (how) might generative AI help or hinder students in reaching those goals? 

• If we’re asking students to do something that AI can do with equal facility, is it still worth asking students to do? And if so, why? 

• If we think students will use AI to circumvent learning, why would they want to do that? How can we create conditions that motivate students to learn for themselves? 

• What structural conditions would need to change in order for AI to empower, rather than threaten, teachers and learners? How can we create those conditions? 

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Leisure Line

My new proofing bins have taken my pizza game to the next level. Just one more step toward slinging pies at my local farmer’s market :)

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Still Life

This weekend we went to Zuma Beach for our first beach trip of the summer. We had a great time and even had the chance to try out our new kite from Costco.