Borrowed Systems • Lateral thinking field trip in Indiranagar

When was the last time you looked at a chai stall and thought about your sprint planning? Or when you saw a kitchen prep for a busy service and thought about how your team handles pressure?

Borrowed Systems is a hands-on workshop that teaches you to observe laterally, to find connections between things that aren't apparent at first sight, and more importantly, to know what to do with them. In small groups, you'll spend time on the streets of Indiranagar finding systems that would quietly break if the people running them stopped. Then you'll come back to Paper Crane Lab and translate what you found into something concrete for your team.

This is an outdoor and indoor workshop, split equally between observation (outdoors) and translation (indoors).

3:30 PM- Welcome and framing at Paper Crane Lab. Then we send you out in pairs or teams of three.

4:00 PM- Fieldwork in Indiranagar. In teams, you have 90 minutes on the streets. Your job: find 3 to 5 systems that would quietly break if the people running them stopped. Document what you see. We will help you with ways to observe and document.

5:30 PM- Back at Paper Crane Lab. Your group debriefs what you found. Then comes the harder question: What problems from your jobs kept surfacing while you were out there? We spend the second half translating observations into something specific enough to act on. We work individually, in small groups.

6:15 PM- Personal output. You leave with one borrowed idea, applied to one real problem, with a plan.

6:30 PM- Chai and conversation. We close for the day

Who is it for?

For PMs, founders, team leads, and ICs who suspect that the best answers to their team’s problems lie outside their industry, and are curious enough to go looking ;)

What you'll leave with:

Skill: How to observe the world around you and find what’s worth borrowing.
Output: A translated observation, applied to a specific problem in their own team.

This workshop is hosted and facilitated by Heartwork, a product team consultancy run by Aarti Bhatnagar and Hari Mohanraj. Heartwork brings research, design, and engineering expertise to help good product teams be great.

Look us up!
www.heartwork.in • Aarti Bhatnagar • Hari Mohanraj

This event is part of Basecamp, a community-powered tech week in Bengaluru bringing founders, builders, and operators together. Basecamp is free for the community and powered by the community.