I am Lauren, daughter of Barbara, daughter of Eleanor, daughter of Elsie, daughter of Eleanor, daughter of Jane, daughter of Ann.

Years ago, I attended a ceremony to bless a mother-to-be. And the powerful woman who led the ceremony asked us to gather in a circle and introduce ourselves with our matrilineal heritage.

She is of Icelandic descent, and in Iceland, there is a tradition of matronymic naming. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that isn’t common. Most of us carry our father’s names, and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’.

As we went around the circle, I saw a few tears as each of us felt the power of naming our grandmothers and calling them into the circle – this circle of women who were assembled to bear witness to a woman at a threshold. The power of acknowledging the women who had borne us.

Have you ever done this? Give it a try. (It might feel awkward. That’s half my point.)

My grandmothers were both named Eleanor. And they lived very, very different lives. Today I’m going to write about my maternal grandmother.

Eleanor MacLeod, nee Darou, was born in May 1925 to a jeweller in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. She married my grandfather, a farmer of limited means, when she was just nineteen years old; he was eleven years her senior, ruggedly handsome, solid, honest and hardworking. They were deeply in love, so much so that she defied her parents’ wishes and faced down her father’s stormy disapproval to marry the man she’d chosen. Grandpa – Gordon, to her – was her grand romance and he would remain so all her life.

They were playful and flirtatious together. She gave birth to eight children by him (and that’s not counting the pregnancies that ended in miscarriages). She moved away from the comforts of the city, to a tough, farmer’s life with no electricity, indoor plumbing, or nearby neighbours to whom she could turn for socializing. (She’d been very outgoing back home, and craved company.) And she, the only girl in a family of boys who’d all gone to university, chose a life with very limited options for intellectual stimulation. She wrote a social column for the weekly community paper, which catalogued the quotidian lives of its readers: So-and-so’s daughter had given birth to a healthy baby boy in Sudbury, or such-and-such’s son had been up to visit from Toronto.

I remember her quilting, her throaty, earthy laugh, and her temper.

She was prickly, my grandma MacLeod. Not the bosomy, sweet grandmother of picture books. She was quick to kick us all out of the house and into the surrounding fields when she was sick of our childish noise. (“Go on and let the stink blow off!” she’d yell.) She tore around the house like a drill sergeant, hollering commands to her army of children and grandchildren. And she was quick to judge anybody who didn’t see the world the way she did.

She was a terrifying presence at the card table, as well.

To be honest, my grandfather was a far easier person to feel close to. Grandma always seemed harried, and a little crotchety. But she had her moments of greatness.

I loved the way she was with my grandfather. She showed me what lifelong romance looked like. The way her eyes sparkled when they landed on him. The way she’d say, “Oh, Gordon,” when he made her feel special. (I imagine she sounded exactly like that at eighteen and nineteen, sneaking off to go to a dance with him.)

I loved her frank appreciation of sex. (No matter how modest you are, you can’t live on a farm without encountering sex as a basic fact of life on a near-daily basis.) My grandpa gave her a new set of bedroom furniture for their anniversary one year, and he must have been in his seventies, but it was clear by the way their eyes danced over the bed frame that the two of them had plans for it. My mother remembers her mom volunteering to take all the girls in the community to the city to see Blue Suede Shoes, the Elvis movie none of the other mothers approved of because of his wild hips. And one of my favourite memories of grandma is watching her unveil a gag gift she’d made for one of her sons-in-law, a master of lewd and crass humour who also enjoyed cooking: She’d quilted him an apron with a pleat down the middle that hid a lovingly hand-quilted cock and balls. (Yes, really.) I don’t know who laughed harder, the giver or the recipient. But I knew that day that I’d come by my sense of humour honestly.

And while she was conservative and very set in her ways, she had a profound pragmatism that always won the day – so when my mom told her that the reason she and my father were divorcing was that my father was gay, Grandma’s response, after a brief pause, was, “Well, I guess we have to just accept it and move on.” No wallowing in moralism or self-righteousness, there.

She was demanding, and sometimes slightly surreal in her inability to do things that any other farmer’s wife would consider essential. She was a terrible cook, an even worse money manager, and loathed housework. We had an epiphany once and asked her if she’d had servants growing up. “Of course,” she answered lightly. It explained so much that we’d never understood previously. No wonder she didn’t know how to cook or clean – other people had always done it for her. Yet she chose a life where she had no helpers apart from her husband and children. Needless to say, her kids remember her as a bit of a tyrant.

She was also bipolar, and had terrible lows and highs, both horrible in their own ways. She was on meds most of my life, but went off them occasionally and would fight hard against going back on them.

My grandmother MacLeod taught me a lot.

She taught me that love really can conquer all. She sacrificed a lot to be with my grandfather, and I never once heard her frame it that way. She’d chosen the love of her life, and that meant everything to her. The little things – education, career, money, the comforts of home – shrunk in importance.

In her unwavering pragmatism, she taught me that when in doubt, it’s best to begin by putting one foot in front of the other.

She taught me that all of us have a right to pleasure, carnal and otherwise.

She went her own way and didn’t give much of a hoot what other people thought of her.

She also modeled for me some things I didn’t want for myself:

While her love story with my grandfather was very romantic, I thank heaven every day that I never had to make choices like hers. The day I learned that her father forbade her to go to university, even though all of her brothers had gone, I learned a lot about what a difference fifty years can make. I often wonder whether she’d have been happier and easier to love if she’d had more options in life.

She never let us get close to her, emotionally. I wish I’d seen her open and receptive once in a while. Observing her whirlwind of constant activity and frequent criticism of her family was a good reminder to lead with love and listening.

As she aged, she grew more and more lonely, because her friends were dying and she pushed prospective new friends away. While I sympathize deeply with her grief for her lost friends, I know that her latter years were far more isolated than they had to be, because of her refusal to accept newcomers into her circle.

There’s a moment I’ll always remember. I was back on the family farm for a visit; I was in my early twenties, pursuing a music degree, and I remember feeling like my everyday life was so far removed from life on the farm that it felt nearly impossible to bridge the two. I knew my grandmother had no real way to wrap her head around the life I’d chosen, from its deep city-centricity (if that’s a word) to the highbrow culture I’d chosen to immerse myself in. I had found it difficult to connect with my grandparents on this trip, because I didn’t know how to communicate what I did in terms they’d understand, and I knew it must be obvious to them that their world was equally foreign to me. My mother had been the only one of her siblings to move away, and I felt like I had compounded that distance by not only living across the country, but in a different world.

I was getting ready to leave, standing in the driveway in front of the small, one-story farmhouse, after packing my bags into the trunk of the car. I turned back to my grandma and grandpa, and they hugged me goodbye. And Grandma leaned forward and tucked several folded bills into my pocket, wordlessly.

They didn’t have money.

They had twenty grandchildren.

And they were giving me a hundred dollars.

I gave her a look. Come on, Grandma. I can’t take this.

“I don’t get to buy you all the things I buy for the other kids,” she said, with wet eyes. Meaning the kids who’d stayed close to the farm.

I thought about what I’d buy with it. Certainly nothing she’d choose for me. Maybe some CDs or sheet music. Maybe some more black, gloomy clothes. She didn’t mind what I did with it. She wanted me to have something she wouldn’t pick out.

“Thank you.”

It was too much, and it was sweet, and it was as sentimental as my grandma ever got with me. And that’s just fine by me.

This post was inspired by Tara Sophia Mohr’s Grandmother Power blog campaign. I hope you’ll consider participating as well.

I wrote a short, and necessarily incomplete, piece for Quartz on Marissa Mayer’s statement that she’s not a feminist. You can find it here. I struggled to write it, because I knew I was leaving so much context out – and therefore leaving myself open to misinterpretation. So I am expanding on it here, to flesh out some of the things I couldn’t squeeze in.

This post is more personal than the Quartz piece; I hope it helps clarify my perspective.

We Have an Impact-Versus-Intent Problem.

I get why feminists feel betrayed when women they admire disavow feminism (especially when it’s done with a negative flourish that disses feminists, as Mayer did). It feels like a slap in the face to all of our hard work – hard work we are doing for the advancement of all women. So when one of us says, “I’m not part of your cause,” we can hear it as an unwillingness to acknowledge that the work is still underway, and that it’s important.

What bothers me, though, when I hear the chorus of outrage begin again, is that I remember, with painful clarity, a time in my young adulthood when I did not align myself with feminism – and when my feminist friends expressed their outrage and impatience with women like me, it made me feel small, excluded, and like I was not allowed to speak. I felt shamed for my ignorance and shamed for my difference. And I didn’t know how to talk about it without making it worse. So I stayed silent rather than risk deeper rifts.

I don’t believe that was their intent, but that was the impact it had on me.

They raged against ignorance, and I heard, “You’re ignorant.” They raged against misogyny, and I heard, “You hate yourself and other women.” Mostly, I felt their rage and felt afraid.

Multiple Feminisms

These days, I have a very different relationship with that outrage. Righteous anger can be a powerful tool, wielded responsibly and strategically. I have immense respect for intelligent expressions of outrage in the right context.

And I have tons of empathy for the fatigue that sets in when we see the bazillionth person today  fall back on tired stereotypes to diminish feminists. It’s effing hard to resist the urge to roll our eyes or fight back when we feel insulted.

But I really want us to resist the urge. Especially with women like Marissa Mayer, for whom I have great admiration. The last thing I want is for her to hear nothing but feminist outrage in response to her statement. What I want is for her to know there is room for her voice in feminism. That there’s room to be a newbie and ask clumsy questions while you’re figuring out where you fit. That there’s room to build your skills in acknowledging, analyzing, and working to disentangle one’s privilege from one’s accomplishments.

I also want her to know there’s room for thoughtful critique of feminism and feminists. That one need not label oneself a feminist in order to be a constructive voice in the movement for gender equality.

The labels don’t matter much to me, in the end. What matters to me is our willingness to listen, learn, and act with compassion.

A Story

A slight detour, to make a point: My father was a Protestant clergyman. For the first twenty-five years of my life, he led the weekly church services I attended. He is one of the most powerful, thoughtful preachers I’ve ever heard. And while he wrestled with the complexities and challenges of theology and scripture constantly, his faith had a strong core that carried him through many trials and tribulations. I always admired his commitment to God and wished I could feel the same connection he did to the divine. (I left the church in my mid-twenties, when I discerned that my commitment to music was stronger than my commitment to the faith – and I have not returned.)

Dad retired from ministry in the mid-1990s, and didn’t go to church much for quite a while, which I mostly put down to being picky about finding a preacher he enjoyed. (This is a common affliction amongst retired clergy.) And then one day in 2010, we were talking on the phone, and he asked me if I’d heard the news about novelist Anne Rice. No, I hadn’t. “She’s renounced Christianity,” my father told me, and then went on to say that he felt exactly the same way she did – that while he still felt a strong connection to Christ and to the Christian myth (he’s always called it “the Christian myth,” which I find rather inspired), he didn’t think he could stomach the idea of calling himself a Christian anymore, because the word has been corrupted by centuries of abuse and oppression.

I was stunned. The idea of my father – the minister! – not calling himself a Christian anymore was hard to make sense of. But what’s changed? Almost nothing. He still references scripture, and the great theologians, constantly. He still has the same spiritual beliefs. He still thinks deeply about the role of the church and its adherents in the world, and how Jesus’s gospel of social justice can teach us to be more equitable and compassionate.

But the word itself – Christian – is way too loaded for him.

And I get it, because hey, I grew up in a very secular community where every time someone new found out my family was Christian, I had to explain that we weren’t evangelical fundamentalists, we didn’t believe other people were going to hell, and we weren’t out to convert anyone.

And now I feel similarly about feminism. (Not that I think it’s been corrupted by centuries of oppression and abuse, obviously.) Not to the extent that I won’t call myself a feminist – I’m a proud, card-carrying feminist, thankyouverymuch – but I frequently ask myself, “Is it worth using the f-word here?” when I’m talking about gender.

Privilege and Multiplicity

Back to Marissa Mayer. Yes, she’s white, blonde, young, and conventionally beautiful. This gives her exceptional privilege – and it also makes her a target for hostility, backlash, dismissal, and more. (I ran a small business in my 20s, and let me tell you, you jump through a lot of hoops to get respect when you’re young and female in the business world.) She’s also a Stanford grad who was Google’s 20th employee (and their first female engineer). That gives her credentials and privilege, too – and it also makes her a rare breed who worked very hard to get where she is. And of course she has positional power, as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, which again gives her privilege – and makes her a target for critique on the basis of  her class status, her capitalism, and her conventional definition of power.

My question is this: Does feminism not have room for her voice? I am strongly in favour of a pluralistic feminism that includes and celebrates the full range of women’s, men’s, and transgender persons’ experiences. I want to learn from everyone’s experiences of gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, colonialism, and other axes of identity. My life is richer when I make room for difference, with compassion and curiosity.

And I really, really want to learn from Marissa Mayer, who has lived an extraordinary life thus far and isn’t even halfway through her career yet.

The Invitation

The turning point in my relationship with feminism was when I was invited in with joy and love. When friends gave me books to read, and asked what I thought with genuine curiosity. When I saw women I could identify with – which for me meant smart, funny femmes with big smiles and ready laughs – talking about reconciling their love of high heels and makeup with their politics. When I discovered the world of intersectionality and couldn’t resist its intellectual depth and breadth. When my friend Liz held my hand through the purchase of my first set of cloth pads and compared notes with me as I unlearned years of shame and discomfort with my body.

These welcoming experiences laid the foundation for deeper, more complex interactions where my worldview was challenged in big ways. Trust must be built first, before we can have constructive conversations about privilege and power. We must let go of embarrassment, shame, and not-belonging before we can engage with courage and respect.

I fear that we have forgotten this fundamental truth of human relationship, in our quest to make ourselves heard. First, we must demonstrate that we can – and will – listen too.

I know there’s a diversity of perspectives on this, and I have great respect for the views I’ve seen expressed elsewhere, even while I disagree with some of them. As always, I welcome your comments.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have been feeling hopeful about my country lately. I haven’t felt that way in a while. While my American friends often joke about moving up here when the climate gets reactionary (like, say, after both of the elections George W. Bush won, or after another regressive “marriage protection” bill is passed), the fact is that Canada’s current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is far more conservative than President Obama in many regards. And many of the things I love about my country – like its vast wildernesses, its generally-pretty-good track record on things like providing a safety net for people who hit hard times – have been suffering badly at the hands of short-sighted legislators.

For anyone with a sense of interconnectedness with other people and the world around us, it is a tough time to read the news.

And yet, something amazing is happening.

The First Peoples of Canada – indigenous Canadians – have started a movement that we need, badly. I feel this in my bones: We need the conversations it has been prompting. We need the celebration of holistic approaches to solving huge, multi-faceted problems. We need the excuse to stand in awe of the visionary leadership of First Nations women and men – and youth. Perhaps especially the youth.

Just watch this 11 year-old girl, Ta’Kaiya Blaney, speak more articulately than I think I’ve ever seen a young woman her age speak – and then sing with a power that will blow you away. (“I wasn’t raised to be an activist; I wasn’t hardwired to be an environmentalist. I was just taught to have empathy and be respectful of our mother.”)

She is asking us to consider carefully the inheritance we are leaving her. Will we listen?

Read this piece on Chief Theresa Spence and nonviolence, with its repeated entreaties to “all my relations,” and just try to maintain a belief that there is such thing as an “other,” that we are not all both implicated in colonialism and empowered to dismantle it. (Note that I said “implicated in,” not “guilty of”; guilt is not required, nor is it helpful. We may not have created the system we live in, but we are responsible for fixing it to the best of our abilities.)

All my relations, I don’t know what will happen if we are confronted with our national origin story because most of my fellow citizens haven’t been taught to understand their history of institutionalized violence. Many of them may instead be hateful and act hatefully, for knowledge truly is power and if their elementary and secondary school education were anything like mine, then with respect to Indigenous peoples in Canada they have been systematically denied it. Many thus understand Indigenous Canadians as two-dimensional people: historical and angry.

I had the privilege of participating in a conversation recently that convened indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians (sidebar: the language around this is really awkward and fraught – no one seems able to agree on what the most inclusive and respectful labels might be, so please forgive any toe-treading) to talk about Idle No More and learn from one another. The conversation was courageous, curious, and vulnerable. One white woman admitted that she doesn’t have any significant relationships with First Nations people, and therefore finds it hard to connect with their cultures and concerns. A First Nations man told us how he didn’t learn about residential schools until he left home, because the culture of silence among the survivors in his community was so strong. The experience reminded me that we are all learning to piece together our histories and make sense of our present – and while it feels enormously vulnerable to admit gaps in our knowledge and understanding, admissions of ignorance, made humbly, are generally greeted with good humour, compassion, and a willingness to share and teach.

Yes, it is humbling to admit that we lack knowledge and awareness. And it is a profound gift to experience the generosity that comes when we seek to remedy the situation.

An invitation has been extended to all of us, to learn about the histories that have been systematically erased from our textbooks, omitted from polite dinner table conversation, ignored by those of us who take pride in our country’s reputation as a peacekeeper without noticing that we got a failing grade from Amnesty International last year because “by every measure, […] indigenous peoples across Canada continue to face a grave human rights crisis.”

We are witnessing the birth of something fragile – something that has the potential to grow big, beautiful, and strong, to spark the kind of profound shift in awareness that comes along once in a very long while. And we are being called to do our part to ensure that it survives and matures.

If we do, we might be able to right some very old injustices, and to avoid inflicting new ones.

Let’s do our very best. Even the eagles are watching.

Moved and humbled by prayer circle & ceremony today at CBC Vancouver. Graced by 2 eagles circling overhead. #IdleNoMore @chieftheresa

— Su-Feh Lee (@sufeh) December 30, 2012

An eagle just flew over the #IdleNoMore protest at YVR City Hall. Speaker from Squamish Nation: “Our ancestors are here with us today.”

— laurenbacon (@laurenbacon) January 11, 2013

#IdleNoMore #halifax an eagle flew over the rally in solidarity. twitter.com/extrasalt/stat…

— Shani HG (@extrasalt) January 11, 2013

Here is the moment from last night’s Bruce Springsteen concert that I want to remember.

He worked the crowd like an old-fashioned revival preacher, at times using the language of church – “Can you feel the spirit? Give me a ‘Yeah!’” – and in other ways more obliquely, walking into the crowd for the laying-on of hands. I grew up in church, and I find this stuff both familiar and discomforting, achingly beautiful (how I long to feel close to the sublime, to lose myself in the gospel-choir backup singers’ ecstasy) and dancing on the edge of frightening mob mentality (twenty thousand pairs of hands raised in the air at the bidding of a single charismatic figure).

The first hour or so was all fire and brimstone, big anthems excoriating the perpetrators of social injustice, intermingled with big, crowd-pleasing singalong numbers. Then he changed the pace, introducing “My City of Ruins,” saying that he had written it in honour of Asbury Park, New Jersey, a town that had experienced a 25-year period where it had been sapped of its life force, a shell of its former self. He said the band had performed it for a wide range of occasions, but tonight… tonight it was simply a song “from our ghosts to your ghosts.”

When we’re kids, he said, we’re scared of ghosts. But as we get older, and we start losing the people we love, we begin to collect our ghosts, to hold them close to us, walk around with them wherever we go. And we’re comforted by their presence.

“Are we missing anybody tonight?” he called.

Cries erupted around the arena. We all had ghosts we wanted to remember.

“Are we missing anybody here tonight?”

I couldn’t shout, couldn’t clap, couldn’t even move. I was falling apart, dissolving in tears as the preacher led us in a prayer for our dead. The only kind of prayer I can bear these days, since I stopped feeling at home in church. Grieving my lost friend, crying at a rock concert, awash in sadness while those around me hooted and swayed to the music.

“I said, are we missing anybody tonight?”

I knew – we all knew – the band was missing members. Clarence Clemons, The Big Man, died last year, and Danny Federici a couple of years prior. Bruce was missing people tonight. And all of us were missing someone tonight. I wasn’t alone – I was in a sea of people who were walking with their ghosts. That familiar-discomforting feeling deepened.

And then, Bruce leaned into the mike and crooned:

I’m in a sad mood tonight… I’m in a sad mood…
I’m in a sad mood tonight… I’m in a sad mood…

And that was the moment. The moment where you feel: He just did that for me, and me alone. How did he know? Two lines of a Sam Cooke song. No one else seemed to notice. Sam Cooke, one of my favourite singers of all time – and another wounded, flawed preacher-performer, who left the church and gospel music to sing worldly soul. Sam Cooke, who never sounded more real or more raw than when he cut loose with “Nearer My God to Thee,” loading it up with every ounce of longing for the sublime anyone ever felt.

I’m not going to say I was healed. I didn’t experience a miracle. But I might have felt something like communion: A sense of not being alone, of sharing a bittersweet cup with an assembly of people who were taking a moment to remember the missing and the dead.

And for that I am thankful.

Today, my grandfather Gordon MacLeod would have been 99 years old. Last year, I was hoping against all odds that my son would be born on his due date, November 23, as a kind of birthday gift for Grandpa. That didn’t happen, but I hear that gritty old, tobacco-and-weatherstained voice in my mind every day when I look at my son: “Yup, he’s a terror,” he’d say with a chuckle as one or more toddlers (and there was rarely just one) tore around the old farmhouse. He could usually be found holding an infant on his knee as he rocked in front of the wood stove – when he was indoors, that is, which wasn’t often.

I wish he were here to sing cowboy songs to my son, to wrap those powerful, worn hands around his belly, and tell him stories of logging with teams of huge black Percheron horses, of carving out a living from unforgiving Canadian Shield farmland, of doing kitchen table surgery on the neighbours’ kids when they had minor accidents, of falling in love with my grandmother and building a marriage that survived 8 kids, 20 grandkids, lots of ups and downs, and more than 50 years. To teach him how to collect eggs from the chickens in the haymow, repair an engine, survive winters that frequently brought six feet of snow. To show me how to carry a child with grace, bring him along and include him in the daily work of life, let him know he belongs and is valued, show love and respect in my actions. To teach his great-grandson responsibility and loyalty and perhaps even the manly arts of wearing flannel shirts with clean white undershirts beneath them, muddy old workboots, and Old Spice.

He was the eldest son of Margaret MacLeod, the local midwife, and she delivered just about everyone who lived in their tiny community in northern Ontario. My parents, vacationing in Florida one year, struck up a conversation with a restaurant manager there and discovered he had been born into my great-grandmother’s sure hands. (Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, they walked into his.) I never knew my great-grandmother MacLeod, but I suspect he took after her. He, too, brought a lot of kids into the world, and adored babies.

Each of his twenty grandchildren felt we had a special connection with him. I know I still do.

When he died, I had the great honour of being one of his pallbearers. My grandmother, ever pragmatic, decided that the six eldest grandchildren ought to carry his body out of the church, and it just so happened that we were three men and three women. I told her how much it meant to me to do it – and how cool I thought it was that she was defying gender conventions. She replied, “Well, being a girl never got you out of doing hard work on the farm.”

He was a large man: about six feet tall and two hundred pounds or so. His casket was made of mahogany. What I’m saying is: It was heavy. When we lifted his casket and felt the weight on our shoulders, it felt appropriate. Burying the patriarch of one’s family should take real effort. It should require a slow pace, a solemn tread. You should feel it in your bones.

We sure felt him there, on our shoulders. A fitting reversal of roles for us, the grandchildren he had dandled on his knee – appropriate for us to carry him, for a turn, at the last.

I remember how he’d always be the first one up, out in the barnyard doing chores before sunrise. He’d light the wood stove before he went out – and when he came back in, he’d put on a pot of coffee and often, a pan of bacon & eggs, and the rest of us would wake up to the most heavenly smell in the world: coffee, bacon, and the wood fire in the stove. And Grandpa, waiting in the kitchen, tall and broad and tanned from decades of outdoor work, gently powerful, fiercely protective of the clan he’d built.

We remember you, Grandpa, with great love. Happy birthday.

(Too busy to read this whole post? The TL;DR version is that I’m hosting a Vancouver livestream of the Lean Startup Conference on Monday, December 3. You should join me!)

“If one more person tells me to read The Lean Startup, I’m gonna flip out,” complained one of my favourite tech startup founders recently.  Indeed, if you work in tech and you haven’t heard of  that particular bestseller, chances are you’ve been living under a rock with earmuffs on. Just about every startup founder I know bandies “MVP” around with as much frequency as other popular acronyms like ROI, iOS, and HTML.

Meanwhile, outside the tech sector, there’s a whole world of entrepreneurs who are just beginning to get that ole Minimum Viable Product religion, thanks to inspired preachers like Tara Gentile and Adam King over at Kickstart Labs. (By the by: Their 5-day Prototype Challenge is an excellent hands-on introduction to the concept, should you be in the market for such a thing – and will nudge you from concept to execution with impressive speed.)

I’ve noticed that whenever I talk about Lean Startup principles to people outside tech, they immediately grasp the concept and run with it – it’s one of those small-but-mighty paradigm-shifting concepts that has the power to radically revamp the way you do business, for the better. It’s quite simply one of the must-read books of the new economy.

Anyway, if you’re wondering why I’m waxing poetic about a book that came out over a year ago, it’s because the Lean Startup Conference is coming up in just a couple of weeks – and the conference organizers are providing streaming video of the December 3 event to official simulcast partners around the world… including yours truly.

That means that I’ll be hosting up to 40 people at the Mozilla office in downtown Vancouver for a Lean Startup Conference livestream event. (There are two other downtown Vancouver venues as well, because my co-hosts and I are expecting a crowd and we thought it would be nicer to meet in several smaller spaces rather than a big, impersonal lecture hall.)

Yay!

This is gonna be so much fun. So here’s the deal.

Who should come?

• Entrepreneurs of all stripes – startup founders, leaders of established companies, government intrapreneurs, social entrepreneurs, and nonprofit innovators
• Product designers
• Developers
• And anyone interested in learning to make data-informed business decisions.

You’ll find value in this whether you’re new to Lean Startup methods or have been putting the practices to use in your organization.

Give me three reasons I should make time for this.

1. Instead of traveling to San Francisco and paying $900 for a conference ticket, you can stay home, save on airfare and carbon emissions, and pay $5 to watch the same amazing content.
2. You’ll meet a bunch of Lean Startup aficionados in a beautiful, comfortable, welcoming environment – and you’ll be guaranteed lots to talk about with them thanks to the fantastic speaker lineup.
3. Even if you can only come for part of the day, or have to bring a laptop and get a bit of work done, this will be a fantastic environment to soak up some fresh ideas, boost your creative energy, and meet smart people.

Who’s speaking?

The (remarkably diverse, hooray!) speaker lineup can be found here. More than 30 entrepreneurs will speak about their first-hand experiences, with keynotes including:

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
• Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur, author, lecturer at Stanford
• Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer at GE
• Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

What should I expect?

As with any conference, the stuff happening onstage – or in this case, onscreen – is only half the story. The real value of coming to the livestream event will be the conversations you have with the other people in the room, and the connections you’ll make.

Plus, it’ll be low-key and relaxed; you’re welcome to bring your laptop and get some work done while you’re there.

Why are there 3 venues?

Because we wanted to keep costs down, and the very generous people who offered us the spaces are providing them for free. (We’re bootstrapping, dig?) And because we thought it’d be nicer to hang out in a couple of smaller rooms where we can see each other’s faces than sit in a cavernous lecture hall where we’re likely to experience first-year-of-university flashbacks.

They’re all within a few blocks of each other, anyway, so we’re hoping to organize a post-event meetup nearby where we can gather for beers.

Which venue should I choose?

Well, I’m totally biased, ’cause I want you to come to mine! I’ll be at Mozilla’s gorgeously refurbished office in the Flack Block, which is not only one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver, but is a stone’s throw from at least three of the best lunch spots in the city (La Taqueria, Nuba, Meat & Bread) and some truly excellent coffee (JJ Bean, Revolver).

But hey, the other two venues are awesome, too. Work@Play has a beautiful office a little deeper into Gastown/Railtown, and The Network Hub is right at Richards & Hastings, about a block or two from every conceivable type of public transportation you might want to use.

If the venues are free, why does it cost $5?

Because anyone who’s organized a free event knows that it becomes nigh-impossible to predict attendance with any accuracy unless you charge people something. And so that we can keep everyone fueled with coffee and snacks during the event.

Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?

Because I think the Lean Startup is awesome, and I think I’ll meet some awesome people by hosting. Also because I happen to know a couple of people at Mozilla and they said they could offer their amazing space. Besides, I just like hosting events; it’s fun.

Where do I sign up?

Riiiiight here. Can’t wait to see you.

I mentioned in my post on user matrices that I’d be blogging more about personas, and how you can use them to get inside your customer’s* mind.

Personas are an underused tool that almost anyone can benefit from using. They’re an amazing framework for helping us get outside our own heads and unpacking our assumptions and biases – and when you’re creating something that you want other people to benefit from, it helps a lot to spend some time seeing it from their perspective. How they see the benefits and value of your product or service, for example, may be very different from how you see them.

I’ve seen this a lot with software and web apps. To use a simple example, an engineer might agonize over architecture and APIs, while most customers focus first on speed and interface design. Of course, the two are intertwined, but when it comes to prioritizing what goes into your MVP, odds are your API can wait for the next release.

But while the tech industry spends a lot of time thinking about end users (or at least, a lot of time talking about them), I’m a big believer that anyone who makes or sells anything – even ideas – should be working with personas. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve seen them used in real estate, and I used them when I wrote a book – there’s no reason your restaurant, clothing line, or online marketing course shouldn’t have some personas as well.

Let me add this: A lot of people in marketing use personas. Personas are great tools for marketers, but they’re even better tools for product designers. If you’re not thinking hard about your end users during the product design stage, you are doing it wrong.

Most of us, if we’re remotely empathetic people, do this intuitively: We come up with a business idea, we immediately imagine who would benefit from it, and we hold a little focus group inside our heads.

Personas help you flesh out that process & do it more systematically. They’ll help you identify opportunities you hadn’t noticed before, potential pitfalls to avoid, and points of resistance you’ll need to overcome.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty recipe.

1. Come up with two or three broad customer segments.

Take your customer base and divvy it up into a small number of groups – no more than 4 to start with. You should be able to describe them in 5 words or fewer, e.g. “Techies,” “DIY-ers,” “Contemporary Design Aficionados,” “Wall Street A-Type,” etc. It’s OK if they sound like stereotypes for now; you’ll add more detail and dimension shortly.

If you come up with more than four, cross off the group(s) you know are secondary. You can always come back to them later.

Questions to ask yourself: What kinds of people will this appeal to? Who are the people most likely to appreciate the value of my offering, and be willing to commit to it (by making a purchase, joining your cause, etc.)?

2. Pick your biggest segment and give him/her a name.

The name is important, because as soon as you choose a name, your persona comes alive.

It’s also utterly unimportant, so don’t sweat it too much. What matters isn’t which name you choose, but the sheer act of naming. When in doubt, go to LinkedIn and pick a random combination of first & last names from the people you know. Michelle… Wong: Good enough! Don’t sweat this step too much. Just make sure each persona has a name that’s different from the others.

3. Jot down the things you already know for sure about her.

If you know this customer segment is comprised of 30-40 year old women, make her 35 and female. Likely to live in a major city in the US? Pick one and make that her residence. Level of education, hobbies, type of home… whatever the common threads that unite your customers are, fill ‘em in.

Don’t get too carried away yet. There’s more to come, but for now we just want the absolute bare-bones details – the things you already know for sure.

4. Flesh out the persona using an Empathy Map.

With a giant hat-tip to XPLANE, the brilliant pioneers in visual thinking… and a note that it can be helpful to draw this out on paper or a whiteboard, to call forth your right-brain skills. (You can also learn how to build one in Google Drive via this post, or use this template.)

An empathy map answers these questions:

• What does she SAY & DO? (attitude in public, appearance, behaviour towards others)
• What does she THINK & FEEL? (core values, major preoccupations, worries & aspirations)
• What does she HEAR? (what friends say, what influencers say)
• What does she SEE? (environment, friends, what the market offers)
• What is the PAIN she wants to avoid? (fears, frustrations, obstacles)
• What is the GAIN she hopes to achieve? (wants/needs, measures of success)

5. Repeat steps 2-4 for your remaining segments.

I like to do them in order of priority, i.e. biggest & highest-priority segment first, smallest & lowest-priority last.

Bonus Rounds: If you want to dive deeper

I usually stop here. But there are other layers you can add to your personas. For one, there’s the user matrices I mentioned previously.

There’s also an old-ish, but still very relevant, article over at Boxes & Arrows by George Olsen that goes into serious depth about his persona design process, and that contains a link to his personal toolkit (an 18-page PDF) for the process. Personally, I find his methodology intimidatingly thorough, and can’t quite imagine filling in every category in the toolkit – but I don’t think that’s his intention. Rather, it’s an amazing resource for checking that you haven’t overlooked a significant detail in your personas that could be a factor in their decision to work with you.

If there’s enough interest in this topic, I’ll write more about it (and in particular, how the Empathy Map works) – so if you have questions or feedback, I’d love to hear them.

* If “customer” doesn’t work for you, you can substitute user, member, stakeholder, reader, etc. etc. – I’ll stick with customer for simplicity’s sake. But personas are definitely valuable in contexts beyond consumer-oriented, transactional ones. Nonprofits can use them to think about members, volunteers, and other stakeholders; artists and designers can work with them to think about audiences; healthcare practitioners to think about patients; and so on and so forth.

Have you ever seen an interview with an artist – a writer, say – where they’re asked about the meaning of their work, and they say something like, “It is whatever you say it is?”

It can come off as elusive, flippant, or falsely innocent. But those artists have discerned an important truth about their vocation: Art cannot exist without an audience.

I don’t mean artists can’t survive financially without an audience. I mean the art itself needs a viewer, listener, or reader to take it in, digest it, and make meaning of it, in order to serve its purpose for existence. (Don’t take my word for it: Lots of hoity-toity academics have written about this.)

The same is true for technology products: Tech has no meaning beyond what its users make of it.

We’ve seen this again and again. I don’t think anyone foresaw how Twitter would end up being used. (I know I certainly didn’t.) Never mind the masses of applications that started out as one thing and evolved into something else once the user community got its hands on them. (Ahem, Flickr.)

Technologists: Your users are the audience for your art. Whatever it is you think they’re going to make of it, you’re probably mistaken. And it doesn’t matter, really. What matters is the relationship between you; the conversation you’re initiating; the fact of you sharing your gift with the world and inviting people to play with it.

In technology, as in art, we are co-creating meaning. The author can’t function without the reader.

Can you loosen your hold on your creation enough to invite your audience in?

Dale: What’s in a name? Maker feels more open than hacker. #OHS

— MAKE (@make) September 27, 2012

Yes, language matters. Especially when we’re inviting community. What feels more welcoming to you: A hackerspace or a Maker Faire?

The hackerspace I know best is actually very diverse, incredibly welcoming, and an amazing place to learn new skills and share knowledge among friendly peers. But I might never have gone there if I hadn’t been invited by a friend, who explained what it was. So I find myself wondering: Who stays away because it’s called a hackerspace?

I’m not just talking about negative associations with the word hacker (although I do love how badass it sounds). I mean this: Who doesn’t consider themselves techie enough, l33t enough, outlaw enough to belong?

On a similar note, David Eaves asks in a recent post how the Quantified Self movement includes and excludes women – and in particular, how a longstanding data-tracking tradition among women (menstrual cycle and fertility tracking) relates to the larger Quantified Self trend. He suggests, “A rich and important history is not (sufficiently) reflected in the conversation and so important lessons and practices are potentially missed.” So how do we convene more inclusive conversations? I find myself asking: If it’s true that women are underrepresented in the QS community, is it because they aren’t drawn to QS practices (which feels hard to believe given the popularity of fertility charting and baby scheduling apps alone, just to touch on one area of primary interest to women) – or is it that the label “quantified self” doesn’t appeal to them?

To be clear, I’m not arguing that everything we do go through extensive focus-group testing and suck the life out of every naming process. Quantified Self, for example, feels entirely gender-neutral to me – and I consider myself a bit of a QS geek.

On the other hand, I don’t consider myself a hacker, despite 15 years in the tech industry – because to me, hacker means something specific. It means “hard-core coder.” And I don’t consider myself one of those. When I speak to serious coders, I’m quick to explain that my coding skills are limited to front-end web development – and that I’m more of a strategist, designer, information architect, and so on.

“Hacker” doesn’t include me. “Maker,” on the other hand, does.

This isn’t exclusively a gender thing – there are lots of men who I bet would relate more to “maker” than “hacker,” too. But when we post an invitation to makers, we include people who create handmade goods of all kinds; designers of digital and tangible artifacts; and just about anyone who considers themselves creative. That’s a much, much bigger pool.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s room for exclusive, tight-knit communities in the world. But let’s choose our language intentionally and carefully. When you’re designing for community, make sure to reach out to the people you want to include, and make sure they see themselves reflected in the name you’ve chosen.

Put another way: If you want women in your hackerspace, consider putting out a call for makers, and see who shows up.

I have been reading and re-reading this passage from Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. Such richness.

Communal processes [can be]… supportive but not invasive. They help us probe questions and possibilities but forbid us from rendering judgment, allowing us to serve as midwives to a birth of consciousness that can only come from within.

The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox – the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other’s aloneness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul, at avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.