Module 7: “Now then… Did it work?”
7.1 Themes & learning outcomes
Themes
Failure and success: Learning from iteration & experimentation
Opportunities and pitfalls in intercultural encounters
Intended learning outcomes
After finishing this module you will be able to:
Discuss the value of iterative and experimental approaches as well as diversity of thought when evaluating entrepreneurial opportunities
Extend your ability to assess new situations and concepts, such as the importance of (im)politeness, face-saving, and face-losing acts in intercultural encounters
Deal with possible stumbling blocks in intercultural encounters
Reflect on the nature of the entrepreneurial process and related decision-making processes in relation to collaboration, teamwork and self-confidence
Reflect on the overall process of working in a virtual environment
Time required: 2-3 hours
7.2 Introduction
Taking a look back
Let’s zoom in on the primary components of this course: entrepreneurship and intercultural competence.
What do you think are the top reasons that entrepreneurial ventures fail? There is a number of reasons why early-stage ventures fail, however, by far the most frequent one is that we build something that nobody wants to buy. Alternatively, we develop a solution to a problem that few people have, or the solution provided is superseded by a better option. All of these scenarios could be avoided by identifying the problem to be solved and the need to be addressed.
Read more on the top 10 reasons for start-up failure.
Can you come up with some more examples?
"Not the right team" refers as much to the mix of skills among a start-up team as it does to the culture in your team: how people interact and treat each other. This is where deep understanding, appreciation, and alignment of differences, viewpoints, and work styles is crucial. This is also where intercultural competences can be built. It is hard enough putting yourself into the shoes of someone who is from the same cultural background, but it becomes even more challenging when you work with people from different countries - as you might have experienced throughout this course.
Now is the perfect time to reflect on the issues raised during the virtual experience related to intercultural issues and working in a team across different countries. Pay particular attention to the following points:
Giving feedback in an intercultural context
Differences in verbal communication
Differences in nonverbal communication (and identifying the cases where it applies in a virtual context)
Understanding the other people's points of view/different perspectives
Think about it: What did you experience during your virtual journey? Take some notes.
After that, you can use your newly acquired perspective in areas that haven’t been covered in this course. For example, think about the notion of politeness in different countries. What is considered polite and impolite, appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, varies greatly according to cultural context and situation. In this video you can find examples to contextualise different interpretations of politeness - something to reflect on as well:
After watching the video check your understanding: Try to match the words with the correct sentence:
7.3 Warm-up
There is a lot of talk about failure when it comes to entrepreneurship, and one of the most common themes to emerge is the fact that different cultures deal with failure differently. Another is that we should celebrate failure and learn from it. What most of the discussions are based on is a conception of "success" and "failure" in absolute terms: either total success or total failure. However, there are other ways to think about succeeding and failing, as shown and shared in this graph:
Success and failure are defined here more as a conceptual framework of trial and error.
Can you relate to this graph by thinking of a trial and error scenario from your own personal experience? Write down your thoughts.
Produce a 1-2 min video describing a situation in which you managed to turn failure into success by not giving up and by learning from your less fortunate experience. Use the ‘What?– So what? – Now what?’ framework below when thinking about this scenario.
Finally, share your video with your team members and comment on theirs.
‘What?– So what? – Now what?’ framework
What? - Facts or description:
What happened? Focus on key events/highs/lows/incidents (big or small)
Who else was involved?
What emotions or feelings were triggered? What precipitated those?
How did you act? What impact did that have?
So what? - Making sense and interpretation:
Insights, deeper understanding, "aha" moments, lessons learned. What you have realised?
These can be about anything – or may relate to the key themes of the course, such as teamwork, learning to learn, communication skills, building community & networks, self-care & resilience, and so on.
Now what? - Outcome and future application:
What would you do the same/differently next time?
What have you learned?
How can it be applied in the future?
7.4 Advice & “know-how”
Hopefully, the NICE programme has been an enriching journey for you. Finally, here's a small summary and some hints for the parts of entrepreneurship and intercultural competence.
Entrepreneurship
Part of the entrepreneurial myth is constructing a clear and logical narrative of which key decisions were taken at certain points in time that ultimately led to success. We often hear stories that consist of a clear vision, dogged pursuit, and eureka moments. What we don't see are the U-turns, the dead ends, and moments of crisis in which things could have gone wrong. And there are many of those!
We tend to sabotage ourselves when thinking about failure and success in absolute terms: “if I fail to achieve that goal, I will be a failure”. However, in Module 1 we learned that people with an entrepreneurial mindset do not think about goal-setting in this way. Instead, they work with the resources and information they have at a given point in time, and experiment with assembling and aligning these according to a variety of possible outcomes rather than just one ideal outcome. The key is to be agile and responsive in this process, and to evaluate constantly when new pieces of information or new resources are acquired.
So, to sum up:
In an entrepreneurial context, failure is not defined as the absence of success but as an opportunity to learn.
Failure is an in-built part of the entrepreneurial process and it cannot be avoided.
The iterative model of product development consists of building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) → trialling the MVP with customers and users → defining and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPI) → learning from the experience (was it a success or not?) and accepting that failure can be controlled in scope but not avoided. The lesson is to run small and cheap experiments to learn how customers and users respond to your proposition.
Do not let your ego get in the way! Iteration (repetition with small changes) and pivoting (major changes) to your value proposition will be part of the journey.
Always think about your team as an asset: different talents, strengths, and viewpoints are important in refining your problem-solution fit. Build on the ideas of others.
Learning from failure - If I fail, I must not start again from scratch.
Experimenting - Distribute your product first to a few selected users.
Responsiveness - Find what caused negative feedback and fix it.
Valuing users’ needs - If the users like it, don't fix it.
Too much self-confidence - The product is my idea, so I know better than the users.
In a nutshell, think of venture creation as a journey through dense fog: you can only see as far as your car's headlights go, but you can travel 1000 kilometres that way.
Think about it: What are your key take-aways regarding entrepreneurship after taking this course? Write down your thoughts.
Intercultural Competence
Dealing with others is always a matter of intercultural communication. Reflect on the six common stumbling blocks of intercultural communication that you should have learned about and might also have experienced yourself during the NICE course:
Assumptions of similarities: Many people assume that there are enough similarities among people to make communication easy. This approach overlooks cultural complexities and reduces the discomfort of dealing with difference and uncertainty. The assumption of similarity does not often extend to the expectation of a common verbal language, but it does interfere with caution in decoding nonverbal symbols, signals, and gestures.
Language differences: Language is often seen as one of the greatest differences among cultures, not only because of the need for translation, but also for commonly used slang or idioms. A bigger issue still is the tenacity with which someone will cling to just one meaning of a word or phrase in the new language, regardless of connotations or context. In some cultures, it is polite to refuse the first or second offer of refreshment, but in other cultures people who refuse will not be made a third offer.
Nonverbal misinterpretations: The meaning of gestures varies between cultures. A gesture from one culture may be offensive to another person from another culture.
Preconceptions and stereotypes: Possibly some of the hardest obstacles to overcome are stereotypes and prejudices creating a representation of what every person from one culture is like. Stereotypes can positively or negatively affect the way people look at someone due to the way a person from one culture may be programmed to think about another culture. Because stereotypes can be partially true at times, images of certain cultures are formed through popular culture.
Tendency to evaluate: We have a tendency to evaluate actions from other groups or cultures and judge them quickly, instead of taking time to understand why an action occurred.
High anxiety: People can be anxious in situations that they do not understand. Thus, in cross-cultural communication people often do not understand each other's cultures or make assumptions based on culturally-coded interpretations which can result in miscommunication.
So what? Most importantly, we must be aware of who we are (when communicating) and what is going on around us. Here are some helpful hints:
Think of communication as a successful exchange of meaning. Be mindful of verbal and nonverbal clues, and the different elements that influence communication, such as scenario, participants, and instruments used to deliver your message. Communicating involves much more than using words.
Think about the context, time, and situation in which the communication takes place. And remember to listen actively!
Be aware that when we communicate we may have different identities depending on the context, and that there might be different expectations of politeness in different cultures.
In a virtual environment, many things are different. Most important, feedback is limited when compared to a face-to-face discussion. You must hang on, though, to what stays the same; for example, politeness must always be preserved.
Even if nonverbal communication is reduced in virtual communication, it is still present. Pay attention to any change in the reactions of your partners: longer times before the answers come; less details than before in their interventions; and so on.
Think about it: What are your key take-aways regarding intercultural communication after taking this course? Write down your thoughts.
7.5 Resources
Belyh, A. (2015). "How the Build-Measure-Learn Cycle Really Works." Link.
Dorf, B. and and S. Blank (2012). The Start-up Owner’s Manual.
Maurya, A. (2012). Running Lean - Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. Lean Series.
TED videos on the topic of Failure. Webpage.
The Failure Institute. Website.
Wissman, B. (2017). "10 Strategies for Entrepreneurs Dealing with Failure." Link.
Barna L. (1994). "Stumbling blocks in intercultural communication." L. Samovar and R.E. Porter, Intercultural Communication: a Reader, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing (337-346). PDF.
Van Oostendorp, M. "Politeness." Miracles of Human Language: an Introduction to Linguistics. Lecture.
7.6 Challenge
You are now at the end of this course and should have come up with a solution already to your Global Challenge, and be ready to test it against customer/user and market needs. Before this next step, however, it is important to ensure that everybody is on the same page in terms of defining the problem and the solution. So as a last check for you and for your team, visualise the problem-solution fit related to your challenge. Using visualisation techniques instead of words can be a great way to highlight and solve ambiguities or lack of clarity. A picture is worth more than a thousand words... isn't it?
Step 1: Individual visualisation
First, visualise the problem-solution fit related to your challenge individually by drawing it; no need for artistic talent, a simple graph on how you understand individually the problem and the solution are enough.
Share your visualisation with your teammates.
Step 2: Team discussion and video
Now set up a team meeting and compare your different visualisations. Discuss the differences in presentation with your team.
What are the aspects that need to be clarified? Any surprises or disagreements?
As a result of the discussion, create a video (about 3 minutes) in which you describe your problem and your solution. The video should state the common view that you have just agreed upon. Don't forget to include your business model canvas and your team! Also, try to make the video interesting and appealing - think of it as your chance to convince others of your idea.
7.7 Team assignment
For your last team assignment, meet up and reflect on your journey.
Step 1: Preparatory work
Start with reflecting on the process of developing your idea. What was the most difficult part?
Add reflection on the collaboration that took place when you evaluated as a group the solution to your Global Challenge.
On both points, outline the highlights and areas for improvement: what would you do differently in the future?
Apply the "What? – So what? – Now what?" framework to your thoughts.
Think about how to work, operate, and give feedback to each other in an intercultural context.
Consult the team contract you drew up in Module 2 and collect good practice examples related to the different cultures in the group.
Take notes on your reflections on the items above. They will be of use to you in the next step, where you will be asked to organise this information and give it a shape.
Step 2: Output
Create a collaborative written document (e.g., Google Docs) which contains your concluding reflections. Break the set of conclusions into several directions and decide together what the descriptions should be about. Then, assign to each team member a certain topic that they must describe in the document like you discussed.
7.8 Reflection
You are now at the end of the road, so look back at the path you have walked and how it has changed you. Take your time and examine yourself thoroughly.
Reflection on these questions should be done individually.
What did and what did not work? What would you do differently in the future?
What did you learn about entrepreneurship? Have you acquired new skills/mindsets?
What did you learn about turning an idea into a venture?
What did you learn about other cultures?
What did you learn about collaborating in a virtual environment? How is it different from "classic" collaboration offline?
What did you learn about collaborating in an intercultural context?
Corollary: What did you learn about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses?
Write down your notes/comments on these questions.