‘July’ Fools Day – It’s Not Really Almost Over

I’m still in disbelief every time I look at the calendar. I feel like we should be nearing the end of the first week, not the third. The CSC has been a great experience so far, and it’s certainly something I will always fondly remember.

As a reminder, I’ve been working with Han Te, a small eLearning startup based in the development zone of Qingdao. In the past three weeks, Maria, Matthias, and I have entrenched ourselves in their company and really become part of the team. It’s been really interesting to see how they operate and how integrated we’ve become to their working process. That being said, we’ve been not only training them on how to improve their business, but we’ve truly become trusted advisors, helping them set the future direction of their company.

For example, the last two days we’ve been participating and driving the product plans for the next major phase of their premiere solution, SOKE. SOKE is a SaaS-based offering that provides an eLearning platform for enterprises, smaller businesses, and even individual consumers that just want to learn.

Throughout the entire three weeks, we’ve focused on giving them the tools to be successful themselves, not just telling them what to do. We choose this approach so that the process would be sustainable. The last two days in particular, we were working through how to evaluate and prioritize the ever growing list of ideas that they would like to implement. The most rewarding part is hearing the CEO of our client tell us at the end of a planning meeting how helpful we have been, and how she has a much better idea of how to do similar things in the future.

It wouldn’t be a day in China if we didn’t have a few adventures. For example, while we were at lunch, we noticed that the place we’ve had lunch four times now has the lowest food safety grade rating. Apparently all the restaurants we’ve been to have the same, so there’s not much to be worried about.

We also had a bit of a water incident in the office. Somehow while loading the jug in the water cooler, it spontaneously developed a crack and started leaking all over the place. In the afternoon, I was on the Kanban board for presenting Storyboarding, Playbacks, and Prototyping which all went very well. I was thrilled with how well the prototyping in went. The four examples each had something unique to use as a lesson for why we prototype. There were examples for button placement, identifying that a control was missing, and two prototypes that were attacking the same goal that looked completely different.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, there are three other sub teams working with three other clients. One of those clients, Angel Emergency Assistance Center, was kind enough to offer their emergency training services to all of us last night. Matthias wasn’t feeling up to it, so he decided to go back to the hotel, but everyone else from the group including all the PAs took part.

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The emergency training was broken down into four major areas: smoke escape training, using a fire extinguisher, CPR, and rope tying. For the smoke escape, we learned that by folding a piece of cotton clothing or a towel so that there are 8 layers and wetting it will reduce the amount of smoke you inhale by 60%. The other key, of course, was to stay as low to the floor as possible.

For the fire extinguisher exercise, we learned the proper way to use one. However, it wasn’t just an informational session, but we each actually got to use a real fire extinguisher to put out a real fire coming from what looked like a medium size propane grill. The fire extinguisher we were using was actually patented by the Angel team. It was primarily water based to avoid polluting everything during the training.

After that, we went to the CPR training. There were about a dozen mannequins that some of us — aka Rafael — grew quite fond of quite quickly. Here’s a nice photo of their soft embrace. (Sorry Rafael)!

For the CPR training itself, we practiced both compressions and breathing. We were also given small cotton patches for the breathing to prevent infectious diseases when giving CPR. They were teaching the 30:2 compression to breath ratio at 120 compressions per minute.

For the last exercise, we learned about using a rope to escape a fire. We learned three different knots that could help in an emergency. The first was used to tie two lengths of rope together with effectively two slip knots. The second could be used to secure the rope to something stable within the structure. The last (and perhaps most interesting because I don’t think I would have thought to do it) was to include loops in the rope about every two feet to use as a makeshift ladder.

All in all, it was a great experience, a lot of fun, and I definitely learned a few things along the way. Thanks Angel team!

@TalkToErik