Stating your intent

This week I did an exercise to clarify what the intent of my thesis will be. This is important because based on the exercise that I did last week regarding my audience and stakeholder interviews, I realized that I need to speak with more experts. As I begin to seek out experts in the field I need to be really clear about what I want to achieve so they can best help me.

 The “intent exercise” consists of posting adjectives related to my thesis on a wall and grouping them in a positive and a negative pile.

Some key words that I pulled out include:

• Thought provoking
• Actionable
• Desirable
• Proven
• Believable
• Game changing
• Guiding
• Collaborative
• Self sustaining
• Replicable

Then I made connections between word associations to form a scale of intent. For example thought provoking and actionable.  There is a bit of tension between these two words, so on a value scale I must decide which is more important. This is good because it causes me to think about which is more important as I purse my topic. 

In doing this exercise I realized that what I value is in challenging brands to be different. There are lots of methodologies to create new things but I believe that if you can change how people perceive a product or a service you have a chance to stand a apart.