Since the late 2000s boom in Silicon Valley, self-help style mantras for start-ups have truly proliferated and seeped into business and popular culture. I am thinking about this scene in HBO’s Silicon Valley where it is proclaimed, satirically, that “Failure = Success.” And the “Move fast and break things” posters hanging up at the Facebook headquarters.

But if you can get past the catchy slogans, “Getting Real” does seem to offer us budding creators some important advice. I have worked for most of my career in educational organizations where long meetings and consensus building are part of the culture. We are probably less efficient than we could be, but when the goal is to build knowledge and supportive communities with diverse groups of people and constituencies — that approach makes sense. If the goal is to make a product, however, I see the wisdom in following some of the mantras about scaling back, staying lean, reducing the number of meetings, launching on time no matter what, and prioritizing.

At the same time, I wonder if any of the values implied by the advice in the Getting Real text contribute to the dismal statistics on diversity in the tech industry. In a recent episode of the Reply All podcast, the reporters interviewed Leslie Miley, who was the only Black engineer at Twitter for a number of years, as a platform for discussing the differences between how diverse and non-diverse teams operate in workplace settings. They talk about how many start-ups have low diversity stats because company heads make assumptions similar to those in the text about how communication should be free-flowing and teams should be lean — which leads them to hire people who share similar backgrounds and cultures to themselves. Research discussed in the podcast suggested that even if diverse teams take longer to build trust, they are consistently better at solving problems because they come at challenges from many different angles. I only read the assigned pages, but up to there, diverse thinking was not a consideration in the Getting Real text.

Of course, as we all know from the campus protests this year, and statistics and accounts from students and professors of color in higher education, academia struggles with inclusion and diversity as well — so its values don’t always correspond either… but I still wonder…

Provocation 1: As you begin brainstorming your project ideas, how do you reconcile the different / incompatible seeming cultures/values of education/humanities fields and the start-up world? What can/should educators and academics learn from start-up culture and vice versa?

Also —

The juxtaposition of the “Getting Real” text with the readings about specific projects and tools seemed very appropriate. On the one hand, “Getting Real” urges us to keep our ideas focused, and to deliver something limited in scope and simple, but powerful and functional. In browsing through all of the project examples (especially the 1989 feature and the Green Book mapping project), however, my mind started racing from idea to idea, and I felt a case of “scope creep” coming on.

Provocation 2: How, practically, can we keep our visions simple, especially in this exploratory stage? I feel like there’s something useful about a “sky’s the limit brainstorm” which then gets paired down. At this point in the game, if I think too small, I think I limit myself. As my writing teachers have said, it’s easier to cut than to add more stuff… How do we balance both kinds of thinking  — feasible and idealistic?