Review I: Preparing for the Presentation & Digesting the Constructive Criticism

It looks like there is more burning in store for Team Bedouin. Our Review I wasn't a complete disaster, but after presenting for more than twice our allotted time, bombarding our audience with too many words and too much data, and losing sight of our unifying model, we have a lot of work to do before Review II.

The weeks prior to the review, we had a litany of VCs. Our first misstep was the format of these meetings; we were presenting to each other, but team members outside of the presenter's discipline were often not fully understanding the presentations. We would try to pack as many presentations into each VC as we could, which resulted in not much time to allow for questions. Due to these time constraints, confused team members would choose to not ask questions, because they didn't want to sit through a three hour VC.

At first, it was proposed that our team use Prezi to create a more interactive, stimulating presentation for the review. Gretchen prepared a template and inserted her subgroup's information, and asked the other subgroups to follow suit. Unfortunately, many team members had never used Prezi before, and so, a week after the VC in which Prezi was discussed, no one had added their information. So, the decision was made to just use Powerpoint and convert it to a PDF. 

The formatting of our presentation was attractive, but our slides were too packed. Some coaches remarked that we had too much data, not enough sketches, and most were dissuaded by the sheer number of words on each slide.

We also lost sight of our great work from the physical kick-off. We kept referencing our four visionary words (dynamic, reciprocity, layers, and trust), but became too focused on the necessary deliverables for the review, and neglected to make connections to our metaphors and our physical model. This left our audience overwhelmed with data and lost without ties to our vision. One coach imparted some good wisdom: "FILTER your data. Find what is the most important."

View our full Review I document here.

Following the review, we began a thread on the Facebook group to digest the comments from the coaches, voice our feelings of frustration and encouragement, and figure out what to do next. 

A screenshot of some of the discussion

Going forward, we felt that we needed to:
1) Bring back our narrative.
2) Meet virtually more often, and in smaller groups. 
3) Make sure each team member understands the concepts when others are presenting their ideas/findings/analyses.
4) Include our coaches on more of our meetings.
5) Find a balance between technical topics and conceptual ideas.

For the next review, we plan to:
1) Run through the presentation multiple times to ensure that time constraints are followed.
2) Start with our vision/model/program/concept, as these were given much less time during Review I.
3) Filter our data and only include the most pertinent/suitable/relevant analyses.
4) Develop a deeper vision and concept for the site.

View our plan for the upcoming weeks here.