Bags #26-50 have arrived!
Earlier this week I had a chance for a 3-min milestone. A new shipment of bags arrived! Our maker is finishing them off 25 at a time. It’s truly a magical moment that I get to celebrate when these kinds of things arrive at my house. Artifacts, symbols, and signals of progress. I am extremely excited!!!
More bags are arriving, the altMBA has wrapped up, the Badass Backpacks team has our 2016 planning session behind us — I feel that I owe you a ton of updates.
2016 BFD (Backpacks For Dinner)
I wrote quite a bit last year about our Tuesday night approach. I also gave a lot of hints that our pace in 2016 would be evolving. While we are changing up our team approach, I just can’t seem to let go of Tuesday nights on my calendar. So going forward, Tuesdays will still be a big part of my weekly work on Badass Backpacks. I’ll keep the Tuesday night momentum going. 🙂 But it will likely look a little bit different. We’ll also leverage some ad-hoc BFD sessions this year to create more connections and expand our Tribe: sharing more with you, and learning more from you as we go. BFD is a conversation based process. It’s a willingness to stick with conversations that do not die.
2016 Website: What’s up with our website?
“What’s up with your website Adam?” This is the most common question that I am getting from our followers — if you’re reading this, then I’m talking about you.
My altMBA followers witnessed me thrashing a bit with some website woes during my time in the altMBA. Rusty, Eric, and I had put in a lot of important work to edge-craft the website in 2015, but no amount of time spent worrying about it seems to have been enough to force the issue on getting our website published and ready to go. So this is the top priority goal that I’ve shifted my focus to right now. I’ve got an aggressive new goal to get our basic website launched by March 21. This will be a phased approach. And the initial website isn’t going to have everything that we’ve been dreaming to include. This is how these things go. But the great news here is that we are finally making REAL headway. I had a meeting with Rusty tonight, and we are now on a path to get this baby-steps, pre-nascent, beta, first draft version of the site ready for action. Here’s a quick peek at where our homepage development is now.
Badass Backpacks’ Planning Session 2016
On Feb 15, I had a chance to meet with Rusty and Eric. We kept the conversation burning late into the night and we leaned on some altMBA thinking as we considered new goals, and new angles on the stories we are telling ourselves: and how those stories are helping us (or not helping us) move forward. While the below is by no means comprehensive — I wanted to at least share a few quick insights that stick out in my notes from our Feb 15 planning session. Thank you Rusty and Eric! 2016 is well underway — and so is Badass Backpacks:
- We laughed through some new motions to establish our identity:
- I never knew it: but I want to be a modern Impresario. I am joyfully embracing this new idea by declaring loud and clear, “I am an impresario” ← There, I said it.
- Badass Backpacks has always been an experimental project. And the experimental nature hasn’t gone away. Specifically, we are still looking for important ways to embrace that part of our chosen identity. Special hat tip here to Rusty: he never fails to remind us when this valuable part of our identity is getting lost in the noise of trying to be something we are not.
- We are global citizens. Badass Backpacks embraces a long standing and important part of our identity: We are conscious of the role we play in our international community. To that end, going international will be important. Stay tuned for some fun news on the international front. It’s happening. Oh yes… it’s happening. 🙂 Marina. Matthew. I’m talking about you.
- Goal setting for Badass Backpacks was a part of our conversation — and it was moving along very very slowly until this one particular moment: setting goals is important (yes, team acknowledgement) BUT goal setting is so important that we can’t run the risk of getting locked into goals that were embraced yesterday if they are no longer the goals we need to guide our actions today (a lot changes from yesterday to today) … so what’s a small collaborative art project team to do? We will adapt.
- I am off and running on getting our team goals drafted as a starting point. They’re open to our team. And these goals drive our key activities and our key tasks. (I’m using Zig Ziglar’s 7-part goals structure as a framework for detailing Badass Backpacks’ goals.)
- We will constantly evaluate these goals. HOW: in our team slack board, I have created a channel that is called our “HUG” (Heads up Goals). I have also created a separate channel called our “HUT” (Heads up Tasks). My intention is to visit the goals on a regular basis. Head over to that channel to grab a quick “HUG”, and remind myself what our chosen purpose is, what our chosen direction is, and what we’re here to work towards getting done.
- And we will adapt our goals constantly as is needed. (This has the potential to sound very boring — but think about this approach for just a short moment: have you ever found that you set a big goal for yourself at some moment, and then 6 months later, so much has changed that you aren’t even sure if you want to work towards that goal anymore? I’ve experienced this frequently, and so this new change in my approach to goals — the change to constantly see, to constantly evaluate, and to constantly adapt our goals — this is something that I hope will be a game changer for how I use goals in my work.)
- Our initial goals include specifics around developing new bags and new bag designs, working with new artists, launching our website & next-up plans for evolving our website in phases, and continuing the work to establish our desired identity for this project — like I said: all of this is subject to change. 🙂
- More, more, more… What does “more” look like for Badass Backpacks? We have more to think about. We have more work to do, and of course, I have more to share. All in due time. Final point here: Badass Backpacks has historically been a side project for me. One of the most potent realizations that I have had amidst all of this recent change: I have a new goal of figuring out how I can make this project a full time endeavor for myself. I don’t yet know how. But I believe it will be possible.
“If I could paint a picture of all I could never hold in my hands
I’d name it possible and jump from this earth.”
— Lacey Roop, excerpt from The Spinning World