Prototyping through Conversations

I'm in Week 7 of a Working Out Loud Circle (my first) and while I had some difficulty connecting this week's exercises to my goal and I've almost lost track of what my goal was in the first place, there are always interesting insights that come out of the conversation with my circle buddy. 

I have found the additional resources provided in each of the weekly guide to be a great source of useful insights even when I'm not sure the rest of the activities did anything for me. 

Here's an example:  This week was about thinking about a long term vision of oneself. I did a lot of work on that a year ago when I was transitioning from full-time work to consulting.  My vision is still the same and I'm on track. In a sense, this entire year has been an experiment, prototyping a range of different activities.

One of the additional resources for week 7 is a blog post by John Stepper titled "The simplest and easiest form of prototyping is a conversation."  I experienced this earlier this week when, after a significant number of individual interviews to collect data on on-the-job learning for a client, I was finally starting to see where this work was going, I did a hand-written sketch of the framework that was emerging, and during the last two interviews of the week, I went with my "prototype" framework to test some of the ideas that were emerging.  These conversations were some of the most satisfying I have had so far.  Listening, asking questions and absorbing information in interview is great, but I find the conversations where I start to validate my own emerging understanding to be the most satisfying.