"All thought is a feat of association; having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew." – Robert Frost
Every business began as an idea that grew to multiple ideas. The more the founder learns from experiences, the more he/she starts to question whether the reasons for the starting idea and goals are still relevant now. Changes are expected to happen for growing businesses. These types of changes are made because of associations.
Every human has the capacity to improve their memory by association. Likewise, every business can improve their performance by learning from experiences and gain new ideas from associations. The second speaker during the Women 2.0 event is Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, where she mentions that "if you do not get better every year, then you are getting worse". Why? Because if change is the only constant in time, yet your business is static and not changing, you are only getting worse because everything else is moving ahead of you.
She also adds that the best way to get better is to "do one thing every day that scares you". Usually, this means do something different that takes you out from your comfort zone and learn something new. You never know what awesome things you can do if you do not try anything new.
In regards to object oriented programming (OOP), association is "a relationship between classes of objects that allow one object instance to cause another to perform an action on its behalf." It is a general term to explain the relationship between two classes. This is usually done when a function or method is called to control a particular object. This concept also exists for database queries where there are one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships.
For example, while developing the website for Women’s Museum of California, there were numerous ways to consider how to better organize the flow of contents particularly the events that are displayed in the Calendar. The exhibits, categories (Hall of Fame, Wine & Cheese, etc), booking private or public tour of the museum, and general programs all must display in the calendar. Yet each must also be displayed in its own sections without affecting the other parts. At first, it was difficult to understand that exhibits, tours, and programs were all considered events, yet is separate. Meaning they have the same differences?
In order for my mind to process this and how to implement it so that the Women’s Museum of CA staff can easily add the contents without confusion, I have to put myself in their position. It needed to allow them to add that event one time and that gets applied to multiple pages directly. To do this, I had to associate exhibits with events, categories with events, booking tours with events and programs with events. Thus, each type has a many-to-one relationship with events. Best solution is to have a condition when creating a new event and reference that to the other types.
From listening to the Women's Museum of CA staff, I was able to conceptualize these associations and create a website that is simple to use. But that would not be possible if the staff had not told me those associations. I would have thought events are events, nothing more and nothing less.
With this experience, I learned that every business is different because everyone has a different way to organize their activities and thoughts. The clients might know what they want for their business because they have been doing that for many years. But the clients must also know that no one is a mind reader. One person’s daily activities are never the same as someone else’s activities.
Every client must provide information for Goldlilys Media to develop an intuitive user interface and content management system. Why? Doesn’t the client know their business more than the developer does? To get the founders thinking, how would you visualize the associations for your business? Are they simple or complex? If they are simple, do you think you can create new associations to grow your business?
