“So you’re saying … our understanding of our business is all wrong. We have no idea what we are doing, and we should change our entire operations.”

“Well… if you find this opportunity interesting, you’ll have to take some risks.”

- the Q&A during our Design Management Finals

I was exhausted at this point, and my throat was parched. It was probably around 7:45pm and I had been in that same classroom since nine in the morning. Sarah, Prachi, Guri and I had been preparing for this pitch the whole day, putting the final touches on the presentation. In the previous twenty minutes I had given the strategy and concept portion of our pitch as Cirrus Design, and now we are fielding incisive questions from Karen McGrane and her colleagues from our mock client, WellLife.

I simply couldn’t tell whether we were doing well or not.

And, in a sense, I didn’t mind. From the beginning of the project, our team committed to a strategic and behavioral design focused pitch. We took the time to fill out the ideas and following through with research and concepts. (It helped that a few of us had been reading behavioral change literature for a while.) We pitched a comprehensive (and perhaps radical) re-imagination of WellLife’s business, oriented around behavioral change and habit building. We truly believed that our recommendations were sound, and the least we could do in the presentation was to stick with it.

So we did. It was incredibly hard to find the right combination of firmness and tact to answer the tough questions Karen and co. were lobbing at us. I don’t even know where the audacity of my response came from.

Getting tough questions during the Q&A does not necessarily mean the client doesn’t like you. In fact, it often means they really DO like you and want to see how you handle yourselves under fire. … You handled yourselves gracefully, which was good to see.

- Karen’s feedback

In hindsight, that was a moment to take pride in. A big chunk of getting design out in the world is defending what you believe in, and we as a team did that. Thinking back, that’s one of the things Karen taught all semester long. In the moment though, I didn’t know whether we were exuding confidence, or digging our proposal’s grave. We had no choice though, we simply had to blaze through it. I suppose that’s what taking risks is about.