An Embarrassing Case Study (Storytelling)
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.
I wrote last year about the importance of creating embarrassing work: of having the courage to launch something creative or entrepreneurial that’s still rough around the edges, rather than waiting until it feels perfect and polished to make it real. As a coach, I’m particularly fascinated by our internal experience of this. Yes, the practical know-how matters: the experiments to run, best practices to follow, key things to measure, all of that. But we humans are complex creatures. Head knowledge isn’t enough. We also need the willingness to step into the discomfort of uncertainty and exposure … and for many of us, this doesn’t come easily.
I was glad to find that ThePowerMBA includes a lesson on this inner stuff.
The instructor, Borja Adanero Guinea, walks us through what we can expect to feel when we are at the early stage of testing an idea. In a word: fear. Fear of failure, fear of others’ judgment, fear of finding out that we’re wrong, fear of actually interacting with prospective customers.
I loved that ThePowerMBA named this reality and made space to normalise it. Honestly, though, I was left hungry for more. I could literally spend months exploring entrepreneurs’ experiences of self-doubt, discomfort and anxiety, looking for patterns and developing programmes to address them!
I know that’s not the mandate of the programme, however, and that most students aren’t coming at it from my perspective. In the meantime, it’s just whetted my appetite for the upcoming Leadership module, where I’m really looking forward to seeing what we cover.
Now, I’ve already shared my own experience of launching something embarrassing. And so for this post, I wanted to get a feel for how others have found it. What was it like for them to launch their ideas? How did they go about testing whether they were viable? And how did they navigate the discomfort that came up for them in the process?
I decided to interview three social entrepreneurs I’ve previously worked with at Good Ideas, Scotland’s incubator for social innovators:
Dr. Kath MacDonald, Founder of ListenUp Storytelling.
ListenUp Storytelling supports professionals who care for others to care for themselves.
Interview below.
Steven McCluskey, Founder of Bikes for Refugees (Scotland).
Bikes for Refugees (Scotland) refurbishes and gifts used bicycles to New Scots (recently arrived refugees).
Interview here.
Sandra Codd, Founder of Chakana.
Chakana provides collaborative support to businesses run by Aymara women in Northern Chile.
Interview here.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur but don’t know how to start — this post is for you.
In their interviews with me, Kath, Steven, and Sandra talk very openly about:
What prompted them to see if they could make their ideas a reality
The experiments they ran to test their ideas, and what they learned from them
How it felt to take that risk, and how they navigated their uncertainty and vulnerability
The advice they’d give to would-be social entrepreneurs.
I’m sure that you’ll find their insights really helpful.
To make our conversation more readable, I’ve split up their answers into three blog posts: one for each person. You can read Kath’s answers below, Steven’s answers here, and Sandra’s answers here. All their contact details are at the bottom of their blog posts.
Conversation with Dr. Kath MacDonald, founder of ListenUp Storyteling
1) Please tell us a bit about you and your social enterprise.
I’m Dr. Kath MacDonald, Managing Director of ListenUp Storytelling. I spent many years as a senior lecturer in nursing, and I became keenly aware of the rates of stress, burnout and compassion fatigue among caring professionals. I founded ListenUp Storytelling as a response to this.
We’re a social enterprise that supports caring professionals to care for themselves. We do this through creative storytelling workshops; facilitating time out for reflection on practice, and to support wellbeing and development. We’re currently working on a storytelling project related to people’s experiences with Covid-19.
2) Lots of us have ideas for ages and never act on them. What pushed you to see if you could actually make yours a reality?
At the university where I work, I saw a flyer for an event run by Good Ideas, the social innovation incubator where I met you, Megan. It invited people who had a good idea to come along and share it, and I thought ‘why not?’
I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I ended up attending the full incubator. The support and knowledge I gained through the programme encouraged me to take it from a passing thought to a real-life business.
3) Can you tell us about one hypothesis you wanted to test in the early stages of exploring your idea? What experiment did you run, and what did you learn from that?
One of my early hypotheses was around student nurses and the reasons they left the profession -- or at least their nursing programme. I wanted to find out what their main sources of stress were.
My hypothesis was that dealing with death and dying was number one. To test this, I took a subset of a year group, and asked them what things they found most stressful and whether these things would make them leave. There were some findings that I hadn’t considered, so I repeated this with a different year group, incorporating new questions. My findings were inconclusive. There were some similarities between the two groups, but also some divergence.
I also learned that my question design was flawed: some people got the Likert ranking scale numbers mixed up, so thought 1 was 10 or vice versa. I was able to correct this on the second test, and then follow up my test with a focus group which was much more useful. The outcomes of these multiple rounds of interviews ended up showing me that my target customers are not, as originally planned, student nurses; but registered (working) nurses.
4) What did you personally find most scary or challenging about running this experiment?
As a researcher I wasn’t scared about approaching people; I’m used to that. But when it came to the results, I did feel vulnerable, especially if my findings didn’t match up to my hypothesis. I was also embarrassed that my design was flawed. I thought I should know better!
5) What helped you work through this fear (or act despite feeling scared)?
Working with my peers and facilitators in the Good Ideas incubator really helped. You feel you’re not alone, and the interactive exercises, and ongoing reflection, gives you action plans to take forward and try again. Failure is not a bad thing; it’s a great way to learn.
[Note from Megan: if you’re not currently able to get involved in a formal incubator, the message to take from Kath here is to not try and do it alone! There are lots of online support options, whether that’s group support, informal accountability groups, or 1:1 coaching.]
6) What advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to test their idea, but feels intimidated by the prospect?
Just do it! Use any help you can get from people in the know. Sometimes it’s good to pitch to people who have no idea. It helps you see what assumptions you’ve made and can help clarify basic questions that you may have taken for granted. Gathering evidence to support your idea, and prototyping that over and over again, is really important. And always make space after to reflect on what went well and what learning you can take from your experiment.