Do you have your own Pocket Mentor?
The answer is within, you just need to ask the right question!
Pocket Mentor
Pocket Mentor is a collection of 54 intelligently designed question cards to help you get unstuck and activate creativity to solve any problem. Pocket mentor uses a strong intuitive approach to problem solving by trusting your own thoughts and feelings. It is a simple and powerful tool for personal, professional and organizational development through self-discovery!
You have a problem : ‘How can I …’ ‘What can I do to …’ or ‘What’s the next step to …’, who do you approach for advice? Which mentor will ask the right questions to open your mind? How can you be aware of possibilities that you haven’t considered?
Here’s an idea: What if you didn’t have to ask anyone but yourself?
How helpful would it be to open a box, have your mentor ask you the most relevant questions, and draw out the solution that perfectly suits your needs?
Developing a positive attitude toward problems will train yourself to respond to problems with enthusiasm, eagerness and a positive attitude and see them as an opportunity to realize yourself and you’ll be amazed at the results you can generate!
Who can use the Pocket Mentor deck?
Pocket mentor is a decision support system for individuals, freelancers, entrepreneurs, coaches, trainers, psychologists, HR professionals, managers, group leaders to facilitate awareness and actions. The deck can be used individually, one-on-one, by small groups, it can be easily adapted to every audience, objective and theme. Use it to gain more agility when facing uncertainty.
"Problem solving" - Mindset of the method
Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi word, which has various meanings depending on the situation. Roughly translated, jugaad is a "hack". Simply put, it's a problem solving mindset to innovate like an Indian, by leveraging constraints, using available ressources and a conviction and optimism that it can be solved! It's a personal culture of experimentation and exploration. Finding the solution to a problem requires sometimes facing reality, sometimes reframing the problem and making small bets to uncover the emerging future!
Grassroots innovation
Develop a personal culture of experimentation
Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, regional, national, or international level. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision making, where everyone is responsible and takes ownership of a problem for a cause they belive in.
Pocket mentor is addressed to these grassroot heroes who are solving their own problems (it concerns everyone of us). (In a corporate context this can be looked at from the notion of Intrapreneurship)
Combinatorial creativity
Secret ingredient of creativity
When constraint by resources, the solution is to find different uses of the available material ressources, features, funtions, knowledge and people (principles of effectuation). The solution then is normaly a combination of past experiences from other domains that help you see around your blind spots and identify resources that you might not have considered! This kind of thinking also requires a system approach to be able to see the problem in a hollistic manner.
An "antifragile" approach
The secret to creativity
According to Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "antifragility" is a property of systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.
While problem solving, the most creative solutions sometimes appear under stressful situations and only when one really feels the pain of the problem that the solution reveals itself. Antifragility is more than resilience, it's the optimistic faith in finding a solution!
The cards
5 families of beautifully designed cards, depicting a symbollic painting with a touch of India and a question designed specifically to take into account various mindsets and principles of chaos theory, cognitive biases and systems engineering to boost creativity and a growth mindset.
System cards
Understand the context
Understand the context of the problem and develop a 360° view of the problem.
Problem cards
Find the underlying problem
Become one with the problem to identify the real underfyling problem
Opportunity
Brainstorm possibilities
Look at ressources and constraints in a different way
Action cards
Take action
Take responsibility, and act
Intuition cards
Give a mental break
Take regular mental breaks to clear your mind's highway for new ideas!
How?
Tough business situations require deep assessment. To reach a solution, finding answers to the “What?” and the “Why?” is critical. Asking the right question will help you find your way through a problem, locate the right customers, avoid future difficulties, and outperform competitors.
Questions act as filters that naturally help you sort and sift through ideas during the discovery process. And your Pocket Mentor helps you formulate smart questions that define the problems well and lead to a clear vision of the issues involved. The cards help to become one with the problem, and detect underlying problems by searching inside yourself, as the answer lies within you!
Buy Here!
Available in French & English ! (Pocket-Mentor has been rebranded to InnovationTarot!)
Author
Minimalist entrepreneur, trainer, lecturer and biohacker !
Abhinav Agarwal
Abhinav Agarwal is an Indian entrepreneur, living in France since 2009. Guest lecturer at HEC business school and trainer to companies and startups wanting to achieve growth through "sustainable innovation". He has 7 years consulting background in Business Intelligence.
A special thanks to the following people involved in helping me with the cards: Romain Joly, Christophe Ralite, Hedy Caplan, Thomas Guyon, Francois de Martino, Laurent Haddad, Virginia SOUKUP
Corporate workshops
Learning Cafés are the format of our corporate workshops. Get in touch with me to plan a workshop in your company!
1/2 day to 1 days workshops
To unleash the entrepreneur in you!
From managers and leaders of teams who want to increase engagement, to project leaders that need their teams to come together to solve problems, to heads of organisations who want to give employees the power to implement creative solutions, this deck can be used to facilitate design thinking workshops, co-dev sessions or agile practice audits.
Some scenarios:
Leveragring collective intelligence to uncover blindspots and highlight strengths
Nurture authentic conversations to build trust and connect in a more meaningful way
Francois Richer
"Pocket Mentor c'est le petit coach de poche qui permet de prendre soi-même du recul, soit d'accompagner très simplement et rapidement une personne ou un groupe."
Jean Christophe F (agile coach)
I use these beautifully designed cards regularly to asses my team coherence and autonomy!
Michael F(CEO)
The Pocket Mentor is my personal oracle for problem solving. Helps me to be objective in my decisions.
Get in touch
Get in touch to get more information about the different programs or if you would like to get involved!
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