The beauty of prototyping is that it occurs very early in the thinking/designing/planning process. VERY EARLY! This are the wonderful moments in a project when things are open to discussion and when no major ego investments or offices politics are in play. Prototypes are very low risk, low cost, and high creative, which makes them so valuable in pushing for a solution.

However, this early thinking can be highly disruptive because it allows ALL thoughts to be expressed by ALL players – all in a rush! It encourages a massive dumping of perception, factual information, feeling, past experience good and bad, and many other very human expressions and thinking activities. Sometimes a person requires several attempts, with feedback from others, before the person fully understands what he/she is trying to say. There is a lot of “chaotic” and “miscellaneous” sorts of information being expressed and shared and collaborated.

In these moments of “messiness,” one of the most valuable traits all participants can bring to the activity is a very high tolerance for ambiguity, for contradiction, for “abrasive” challenges and highly creative deviations. In these times, everyone must be able to wait, to be patient, to keep adding to the “fire” of the creative and expansive thinking going on among the group players.

Everyone has to have the faith in the human mind that somewhere along the way the threads will begin to form into patterns and mosaics of meaning and that a defensible and correct answer or solution will form. The human mind likes convergence, seeks the moment when team members begin to say, “I’ve got it!” or “Ah ah, I see” or “Now it’s beginning to make sense.” If the team “fights” its way through chaos and ambiguity as it prototypes again and again, the team can know for a surety that, in time, a solution will form and become clear.