Year 1… Ideas with Beers

Our Friday afternoon office in all its glory. We all absolutely love our city Bristol (UK) and hope to share some of its colourful delights with you in all our future blogs.

We want to thank Bristol Beer Factory for (unofficially) hosting us!

We drank many a beer in this here watering hole and we can safely say it was our favourite workspace to date! It is amazing how ideas flow when you are with friends, being creative and with a jar or two inside your belly. However, there is definitely a happy medium for ultimate creativity to take place. Perhaps there is a mathematical formula somewhere on the internet and if you find it please email us, we would love to take a look. So, we generally found that during our first drink our enthusiasm and planning skills leapt out, but into our second there was always a loll (possibly food related). Between two and three was our prime time for having fun, being creative and just enjoying the process. However, anymore than that was game over, good night, do not pass go, do not collect £200! So upon reflection, the margins for success were very slim, but needed to be explored nonetheless! We called it ‘Development’.

So, being well hydrated and picking up from our last blog where we had combined our talents and interests, we then moved on to use spray diagrams as a technique to map out what our three identified common interests meant to us. The three standouts were the Environment (who doesn’t adore Sir David Attenborough and all that he has done for this world), Health and Wellbeing (we’ve each struggled at different stages in our lives and it was Nick’s time during this period) and Technology - we design submarines, go figure. Now using this tool allowed us to spot general themes, which could then be later explored. So the colourful marker pens were released again and we went to town; mind mapping any thoughts or words that came into our heads. This process sparked some extremely strange, twisted and quite frankly absurd conversations. No rock was left unturned. From tree planting drones (they exist) to new ranges of mechanical data capturing sex toys (they exist), let’s just say we each got to know each other a little better.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that we are three grown men, enjoying colourful sharpie pens too much, in a brewpub where many other locals are using ipads and laptops. We probably looked a bit weird to the wandering eye, but upon reflection, these sessions were full of excitement, optimism, cake and beer. Every man’s dream.

Back to the process…. The purpose of using Spray Diagrams is to try and establish links or trends between our ideas; ultimately allowing us to explore identified areas in more detail. The take away from this exercise was to map areas of interest into an ‘Ikigai’ model. Now, wise young Jon made us aware of this model; where the word ‘Ikigai’ denotes ‘a reason for being’. You can use this concept to identify social, non-social and anti-social perspectives in your life to find a balance and a purpose. As per Wikipedia - To find your ‘Ikigai’ (a Japanese concept) means to have found a direction or purpose in life with a feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that follows when people pursue their passions. We’re glad to have followed Jon’s wisdom and were open-minded enough as a group to give this a go. It certainly made us pause again, reflecting on our initial thoughts which were money driven! As we all know, we obviously need more money to buy more things we don’t need right?

Sorry for the stock image. Matt is looking for the original, he thinks he made it into a paper aeroplane.

Again, filled with optimism and a confident belief system behind us, we each began to wonder if we should be documenting our journey. We asked ourselves, would people really want to know what tools or processes can be used in the early stages when problem solving or at the ideas capture phase? These are common tools we use within our industry, but applying them in others may be of interest to people. To be honest, we weren’t sure, but during this session there was a lot of thought processing going on; hands on chins, looking at the ceiling, pondering for the sake of pondering etc. It was like we drifted ten years into the future and looked back at our non-existing successful ideas, written in colourful ink on beer-stained paper. Nevertheless, this session did spawn an idea that we should write a book detailing the successful completion of our chosen idea, whatever that was to be.

Thought #2 – Write a future book detailing our process and share our journey.

Stay safe everyone.
The3engineers