Somewhere right now, someone is holding up a solved math problem, a 3D-printed baby Yoda, or a plate of perfectly cooked gnocchi and saying, “Look!”

That’s the magic moment: progress. Humans are wired to make things better. We tinker, we refine, we toil—and sometimes we even smile through the struggle—because we’re chasing that spark of wonder.

Yesterday I wore my Bob Ross shirt. It says “No mistakes, just happy accidents.” While not a mentality I’d advocate for the implementation phase of a project, it captures a philosophy I like for the early stages of design, because it makes space for innovation to take root.

Design patterns have limits. When you need to go to the moon, even the greatest paper airplane will not do.

We have a fake ID and we’re 18! There was a mix-up at the Secretary of State’s office, and it shows our business creation filing as April of 2006 but I am sure it was 2007. So, as we see it, we get to pass for 18 as long as the bouncer doesn’t ask us any tricky questions about our height or birthday (wink).

That’s pretty cool, because at 18, a young person in this country gets to do some exciting things: namely, vote. When I turned 18 (for real), it was also the legal age to use tobacco, so I bought a cigar, attempted to smoke it and promptly vomited in a trash can. Voting would have been more dignified, but there wasn’t an election handy and I wasn’t a patient girl.

Of course, what makes voting dignified is knowing what you stand for. That’s one reason we don’t get to do it until we come of age - we need time to understand the world and what matters to us.

Here are 5 things ET would vote for if it could:

There’s a finely tuned tension between the drive to get things done (of which entrepreneurs often have an amplified dose) and the patience required to not make an absolute mess of things.

Last week, I wrote about unsolvable problems almost always being due to missing information.

In practice, this also stems from a general intolerance of that period of uneasy toiling when we’ve identified that there is a problem to be solved, but haven’t yet solved it.

I’ve been chewing on the same infuriating question since before the holidays. I knew I needed to solve it, and yet it resisted all attempts, and I churned.

I tried to think this question out. It would not be thunk into submission.

I tried to diagram it. It sneered in the face of my circles and arrows.

Thus affronted, I pulled out the big guns: I threw math at it.

We live hundreds of corporate lifetimes through our clients, and of course those are piled on top of the undercurrent of our own cycles.

Because of the velocity with which we as advisors experience these ups and downs, we get to see it with a little perspective. We know that although we do this every day, for our clients, it’s a rarer event, so we have the luxury of a little longer view on these things – namely, that sometimes it all feels big and heavy and people don’t always talk about that enough amid all of the highlight reels.

A lot of what I write is strategy on how to have a bigger impact, keep your investment working for you longer, and generally do tech experiences better.

Today’s not going to be about that, because I’m getting to the age where I want it all to mean something.

If I’m going to spend a good share of my waking hours investing gobs and gobs of energy into something, I need to feel that it has a purpose in itself. And I’ve concluded that it does, but not in the way that my 25 year-old self expected.

This is the story of how a small software team (us) crafted a ticketing system for a savvy client that drives faster agent response times than Zendesk and kept that advantage for 10 years with minimal updates.

When I was a kid, I fell in love with a PC game called Heaven and Earth. The graphics were gorgeous. It was peaceful (a nice alternative to Wolfenstein 3D which was too scary for me) but had enough tension and variety to keep me engaged. A couple of years back, swept away by nostalgia, I went on a mission to find and play this game again. In the thirty years since, I have never found a game that made me feel the same way.

In the early 1990s, Windows released a surprise standout program. Users flocked to it, spending more time on it than the much-vaunted Word or Excel. This program was developed by a bored intern named Wes Cherry on a lark and included by Windows ostensibly only to train users on how to operate this newfangled thing called a mouse. This program yielded no visible benefits to the user; it did not produce spreadsheets or documents. It did not allow the user to read email or the news. But it had one thing that trumped all of these shortcomings in attracting and keeping users: an absolutely killer cascading card animation at the end.

It is surprising how often motivation is forgotten in the drive for change. We assume that merely by supplying the means, people will bend their behavior to our designs. “If you build it, they will act.” But they generally will not, unless supplied with motivation that bests their existing motivation, and therein lies the rub.

In this article we explore how we use feedback to drive behavior, and provide some general guidelines anyone can use to be more successful at motivating change.

Technology transformation projects by rule involve change. Our ability to manage change has an outsized influence on our ability to be effective at these projects. When conceiving projects, we tend to fix our eyes on a point on the horizon, months after the moment of launch, when everything is running smoothly. But to over-focus on that point of fruition is to doom our chances of ever getting there.

These are our guiding principles when managing change.

The hard truth is that most failures are avoidable, meaning success in established markets can be nearly guaranteed given the right investment, but it requires a cohesive, well-designed plan with the future state at its center. In short, we have to start paying attention to the fact that the transformation we’re trying to drive often hinges on our ability to mold human behavior. And that means admitting that we as an industry routinely fail at both change management and understanding what motivates our audience’s choices.

Nora Crosthwaite is a problem solver. Initially she pursued a career in software development, as a programmer, administrator, and project manager for over fifteen years. Then, she decided to put her problem solving skills to work in a more personal way: as a realtor, helping people find and sell homes. Her motivation: being able to see and feel a real impact on real families in her community. We were thrilled to help her create her software, Stagerie.