Pocket Mentor
Do you have your own Pocket Mentor?
The answer is within, you just need to ask the right question!
"Jugaad thinking" - 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.
- The kit also includes a handbook of practical explanations.
- Process Maps to guide through the path of exploration.
- Access to online community, guidance, ideas and training on how to use the mentoring game in professional settings.
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!
Author
Frugal entrepreneur, innovation consultant, and lecturer.
Abhinav Agarwal
Jugaad master
Abhinav Agarwal is an Indian entrepreneur, living in France since 2009. Guest lecturer at HEC business school and consultant to companies and startups wanting to achieve growth through "frugal 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:
- Kick-start a project that’s slowly going stale
- Defuse volatile situations
- Assess risks, options, and reframe them using a non-linear approach
- Create an environment of openness and trust when brainstorming, auditing a project and in team meetings to get cooperation
- Increase proactivity and engagement in your teams
- Want to lift the cloud of the conscious brain by accessing the creativity of your subconscious to solve problems
Leveragring collective intelligence to uncover blindspots and highlight strengths
Nurture authentic conversations to build trust and connect in a more meaningful way
A trainer community
Become Jugaad-Lab Trainer in frugal innovation, our partner that uses the mindset behind the method of Pocket Mentors to master our innovative tools and method
and expand your business!
1 day workshops
Arm yourself to change
- The Trainer Program is an engaging and inspiring workshop. It offers the opportunity to experience the power of our tools while gaining a wealth of theoretical and practical knowledge.
- As a Trainer you can effectively use your "frugal innovation" mindset for individual and collective work to develop a mindful and conscious business.
- Get visibility through our communication channels
- Run local chapters in your own city as Stewards!
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