Great idea or big mess?

What’s the impact when a great idea isn’t thought all the way through? For me, the impact recently has about 2.5 hours of extra work…but it was totally worth it!

At the Society of Women Engineers conference, I experimented with the idea of printing the back of my session feedback forms with the pattern of a paper airplane (like the ones on the cover of Reimagine Your Work which was the focus of the session). My goal was to drive participation and get more information than I typically get with a QR code to a google form on one of my slides. I also thought it would look cool to have everyone throw their feedback at the end of the session. On these merits alone, I consider it a success!

What I had not thought through was how I was going to handle all of those paper airplanes at the end of my session. The airplanes were small, and put together in a hurry, so most of them did not go very far which meant that in a room filled with over 200 people, there were crashed airplanes everywhere! (And they each had to be picked up.) Not only that, unlike flat paper, paper airplanes do not stack very well and therefore didn’t fit back in the folder they had come out of before the session started. (So they ended up just shoved in my laptop bag.) And last but not least, prior to having to enter the data manually (the only risk I had actually considered prior to the event) each and every airplane had to be unfolded and flattened!

Would I do it again? Absolutely!

Would I do anything differently? Absolutely! I will bring a grocery bag with me to collect the airplanes at the end (and ask the attendees to help with the cleanup)

Do you have any great ideas that you didn’t think all the way through???