Day 194: Disruption Liftoff!
Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash
In our first day of Entrepreneurship for Lawyers, WVU Law students did exactly nothing they usually do in law school.
Each group of students received two pieces of white board paper, some magic markers, and a tear sheet from a magazine.
First, they had fifteen minutes to draw the picture they saw from the magazine — no other directions given.
Next, they had fifteen minutes for another drawing exercise — this time, the students had to take turns drawing lines in sequence, and the only rule was that the lines could not intersect. (Thanks to Heidi Neck, Candida G. Brush, and Patricia G. Greene for the exercise.)
What’s this Got to Do with Entrepreneurship?
In this class, law students aren’t learning how to represent entrpreneurs; they’re learning how to be entrepreneurs — as they enter a legal profession on the verge of radical change due to AI.
The two exercises produced some pretty dramatically different artwork, and the students described equally different processes for how they got there. Some liked the more structured project, others the more undefined.
What they all grasped, though, is that the two exercises represented two different ways of thinking: process-oriented and method-oriented.
Practicing the Entrepreneurship Method
Entrepreneurship is not management. Research has shown that experienced entrepreneurs usually approach problems in venture creation using a creative, “effectual” approach, not a predictive or causal approach.
Guess which type of thinking law school usually teaches?
For the rest of this course, students will un-learn everything they’ve learned in law school (or at least how and when to shelve it).
Just like we wouldn’t learn to play basketball by reading and talking about it, we won’t read or talk much in this class either.
If you want to learn to play basketball, engage in conscious practice of the methods of basketball. And if you want to learn to be an entrepreneur, engage in conscious practice of the methods of entrepreneurship.