Module 10: Discovery in the Field

Welcome to Week 10. Last week you built a discovery agent for each of your segments and got organized for real fieldwork; this week you go out and do it, running the first full round of discovery with real people. The idea to carry all week is short and it changes everything: you will be changed by what you hear. If you go into the field only to confirm what you already believe, you have not done discovery; you have run a survey of your own opinion. Honest fieldwork rearranges your assumptions, and this week is built to let that happen. Class time this week is office hours and group check-ins, so the room is a place to troubleshoot what is actually going wrong in your interviews while the round is still live.

Here is the Seminar's central question from this week's angle: do we find, unearth, or create value? Aimed at fieldwork, it sharpens into this: the value of your idea does not live in your head where you can reason it out; it lives in other people's experience, which you can only reach by listening. So the question becomes practical. When a real person tells you something that does not fit your picture, do you defend the picture or change it? A week of listening is worth more than a semester of guessing, and this is the week you find out whether you can actually listen.

By Sunday you will have two things. First, a first-round discovery synthesis: your raw interview notes turned into honest patterns and findings, written so a stranger could see what you actually learned rather than what you hoped to learn. Second, a pivot-or-persevere note: an evidence-based call on whether to keep going as-is or change direction, argued from what the field told you and not from how the week felt. Both are built from real conversations you run this week.

If you are joining this week, you have lost texture, not prerequisite knowledge. You need your problem, a short list of people you can talk to, and ideally your CDO and segment agents from Modules 7 and 9; if those agents are not built, you can still run interviews this week and stand the agents up alongside the fieldwork, because this module uses the agents rather than requiring them to be perfect first. The "Ask Wren" panel can orient you to where things live and how the week works, and Wren facilitates nothing you have to pass here. Wren Calloway is your course concierge. Nobody is graded on whether their assumptions survived; you are graded on whether you listened honestly and said so.