Bizdesign on George Supreeth

The Tools I use for Research

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:25:02 +0530

The other day, I wrote about the tools that I use to help me design Business Design workshops. I thought I should also write about the tools I use for on-ground research, considering I’m currently working on a fairly complicated project that requires me to visit small towns and villages in my home state of Karnataka to conduct field research. While I cannot disclose details about the project itself, I can certainly write about the tools I use.

The Tools I use to build Business-Design workshops

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:25:02 +0530

Making Sense of Information

I work in the field of Business-Design, a discipline which sits at the nexus of the fields of Business and Design. It involves approaching business problem-solving using design based methods.

This means that I facilitate workshops with diverse and cross-functional groups of people who represent various business functions of the organisations that I work with. To facilitate these sessions, I custom design each workshop, prior to which, I have to digest a fair bit of information on how these various business groups operate and try and understand the problems that they grapple with.

Soak before the Squeeze

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 12:25:02 +0530

Having been involved with building a new edtech category over the past year, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges in new category creation. In the Trellis Sessions that I used to admin last year, I floated the idea of Scope VS Scale or knowing when to explore vs exploit – AKA, soaking vs squeezing.

A lot of that thinking was driven by my observations of smaller startups. Now that I’ve been working sufficiently long in a larger setup, I can see how some of that thinking applies here as well. I’m dumping my thoughts as bulletpoints. Maybe I can write it up later.

Notes on Fixing Work Culture

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 12:25:02 +0530

Imagine for a moment that Earth was visited by beings from a distant galaxy, one that had it’s own laws of physics. This group of intergalactic tourists may very well view Earth and it’s inhabitants as one homogeneous culture. In the beginning, at least.

In time, as more alien visitors arrived, one could imagine that these earthropologists begin to realize what they assumed was a homogeneous culture, is in fact composed of many thousands of smaller sub-cultures, which in turn breakdown to even smaller units until what was left were a few atomic blocks like behavior and environment – elements that are in constant flux.

Don’t alert the immune system

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:25:01 +0530

When you’re working as a part of a team embedded in a larger system, you have to be careful about the birthing process of the design solution. People love exploration but the business system hates it.

This is because the larger, more mature organisations are too efficient for their own good. When a functioning system has permanently tipped into exploit mode, exploration becomes a threat to the system.

A mature system is one that has had plenty of time to optimize its activities to the point that it has achieved some sort of operating equilibrium. To a system such as this, the uncertain pay-offs of exploration are anathema.