Toolkit—Tools to Shift Hope and Activate Potential Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This Chapter provides practical tools and examples that youth entrepreneurs can apply to boost their entrepreneurial heartset, mindset, and handset and help bring their entrepreneurial dreams to life. It shares the entrepreneurial dream and outlines entrepreneurship as a career.

1 Introduction

This chapter provides practical tools and examples that youth entrepreneurs can apply to boost their entrepreneurial heartset, mindset, and handset and help bring their entrepreneurial dreams to life. It shares the entrepreneurial dream and outlines entrepreneurship as a career.

2 Our dream

Do we have a dream that sees us as the masters of our destiny? Will we be the generation that transforms the African economy? Are we dreaming a dream that allows us to take control of our finances and supply goods and services to our community and others on our continent? When we have such thoughts, we share the entrepreneurial dream.

The entrepreneurial dream is simply the desire and ability to change the world around us into a place where individuals and communities grow and prosper.

To bring our dream into action: we shift our hope and activate our potential through entrepreneurship (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Entrepreneurial dream

The entrepreneurial dream is a journey that encourages its participants to (a) find their purpose, life-calling, or passion; (b) analyse their attitudes to work and life in general; (c) analyse their skills; and (d) translate their ideas into action.¹

While many entrepreneurs begin their dreams with a strong desire to make it come true, we need to use our abilities to get the business idea off the ground. Hence the action-based nature of our theme: SHAPE—Shifting Hope, Activating Potential Entrepreneurship.

Otto Scharmer, whose ideas have been an important inspiration for this book, argues that our capacity to pay attention ‘co-shapes’ the world.² What stops us from giving our full attention to situations we encounter (including business situations) is that we are not fully aware of the ‘interior places’ within ourselves that our attention and actions spring from. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our ‘blind spot’. He sheds light on this blind spot in business leadership and suggests processes, principles, and practices that will help change-makers to eliminate the blind spot. His ideas help to identify some of the deep personal factors that we can draw on for the guidance, energies, and inspiration that will help propel us along the path of entrepreneurship. This book brings together some of these ideas and presents what we call the ‘SHAPE entrepreneurial discovery’.

All the essential processes that an entrepreneur goes through involve collaboration: A collaboration with other people, but also, more deeply, collaboration with one’s own deeper self. So, we get (as shown in Fig. 4.2) co-initiating, co-sensing, co-inspiring, co-creating, and co-evolving.³ This builds on the Theory U approach discussed earlier in the book (Chapter 3).

Fig. 4.2

(Source Van der Westhuizen and Steenberg, 2022)

The SHAPE major entrepreneurial discovery processes (a Theory U approach)

3 Co-initiating: Uncovering our Intent

Entrepreneurial attitude starts with that profound wish that we all must make a success of our lives. This ‘heartset’ leads to ‘mindset’ (really putting our mind to the issues, figuring out all the issues) and then acting on what we know and doing the actual work needed, which we will call the entrepreneurial ‘handset’. These three stages form the basic SHAPE Entrepreneurial Ability Model (Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3

(Source Van der Westhuizen, 2022)

Basic SHAPE entrepreneurial ability model

These stages relate to processes through which we can shift our entrepreneurial hope and activate our entrepreneurial abilities; they usually involve more than just the entrepreneur working alone. Most successful entrepreneurs draw important support from groups of people that they have built around them. They also need to have potential customers, and they also need a conducive working environment, called a business ‘ecosystem’, which includes suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, government agencies, and so on. All of these will be involved in the delivery of the entrepreneur’s product or service (Fig. 4.4).

Fig. 4.4

Life, purpose, and passion

4 Finding a Life Purpose and Passion

Entrepreneurship is both a journey and a destination: As soon as we think we have arrived, we discover a new beginning that brings new opportunities every day.

However, it is not easy to decide what our life purpose is when we do not understand all the options and consequences of our choices. It seems that to be successful today, we need to have an idea that is different from what is happening around us. It also seems that there is always a ‘Bigger Picture’—a better hustle and another choice that changes the possibilities. Many would-be entrepreneurs never take the necessary action because there always seems to be a better idea than the one they are working with now. The Bigger Picture describes the way that human beings—individually and collectively—fit into a world that includes family, friends, community, city, region, a country, and surrounding countries.⁴

While for us as entrepreneurs, there is a Bigger Picture; our potential customers have had the same needs for a long time. What are the things that people spend money on? There is a business producing those things, and the possibility is always open for us to start supplying those services to the potential customers around us.

When our business connects with the needs of people in the big world, and we draw on the support of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, we start ‘co-creating’ towards a common goal that contributes to the achievement of the objectives of sustainable socio-economic development. The aim of socio-economic development is to harmonise the three pillars of sustainable development: economic development, protection of the environment, and social upliftment. It does this by promoting a prosperous, innovative, knowledge-rich, competitive, and eco-efficient economy that provides high standards of living and high-quality employment opportunities.

The individual inner journey of an entrepreneur involves deep self-reflection on their life purpose and passion. The entrepreneur’s reflective journey often follows the five stages of the SHAPE diagram shown in Fig. 4.2: Co-initiating, co-sensing, co-inspiring, co-creating, and co-evolving. Sharing a business idea with others, and discovering that idea within our own ecosystem, is more achievable when we, as entrepreneurs, have self-direction. These five processes guide us to better apply self-leadership and empower ourselves first from within before seeking to co-develop within our ecosystem.

After our self-reflection, we might find that we are well on the journey already and that our next stage is much closer to where we need to be.

As we begin to understand the social and economic problems surrounding us—the Bigger Picture—we can begin to apply our skills and knowledge gained through teaching, learning, and first-hand experiences to start generating solutions to real-world problems. When we solve problems for people, this is the first practical step to creating a product. Understanding the Bigger Picture points us in the direction of the skills and knowledge that we need to solve real-world problems and towards the opportunities out there for us to become entrepreneurial.⁵

With more exposure and experience, we can develop better solutions.⁶ We can enhance our exposure and experience in many ways: By travelling to other towns or cities, other provinces or countries; participating in student exchange programmes; reading up on ways that other people do things; visiting companies (they often arrange tours for students or the public); visiting the local municipality’s business support unit, visiting the local chamber of commerce; and speaking to role models, for example, our parents or successful family members, and to existing business owners.

People often start out with a specific interest and, as they grow in knowledge and experience, they may change direction a few times through exposure to new opportunities and through meeting new people.⁷ Many successful entrepreneurs changed their industry or focus area completely while undergoing ‘growing pains’ as individuals and businesspeople.

To find our life’s calling, we need to reflect on four areas: the things we love, the things we are good at, what the world needs, and what we can get paid to do.⁸ This reflection informs our passion, vision, mission, and vocation.

5 Competencies and Abilities for Entrepreneurs

The SHAPE Model for Entrepreneurial Competencies captures the abilities needed by an entrepreneur.

Anyone can develop these competencies over time by owning a business. A story is told that an entrepreneur was shown a model, like the competency model shown in Fig. 4.5, and was asked if it was correct. She confirmed that each of these things is necessary to run a business and that she did, in fact, have these competencies. The researcher then asked her how she got these skills, and she answered, ‘through osmosis’—the physical process by which something is acquired by absorption, independent of action. The researcher asked her which skills she had when she started her business. She answered that she needed to make money to stay alive (this was her attitude). The rest she learnt over time by being in business. The moral of this story is that we will learn about all aspects of running a business while we are running the business, and we do not have to get stuck on knowing everything about business before we start. The skills that we do not have, we can get from others through cooperation or employment; or by listening to others talk about them, or by reading.

Fig. 4.5

(Source Steenberg and van der Westhuizen, 2022)

The SHAPE model for entrepreneurial competencies

The most important skills are having an entrepreneurial spirit and developing an entrepreneurial attitude. We then move from the heartset to the mindset and the handset of the SHAPE journey.

6 Introspection: Thinking About Hopes and Dreams

Introspection means self-examination, analysing yourself, looking at your personality and actions, and considering your motivations. An example of introspection is when you meditate to try to understand your feelings. An aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset is determination and self-leadership to sustain the initial business dream.

Our first question then is: Why do we want to start a business? This question can be very important to determine the type of business we should start.

If we only want to make some extra money, maybe we should start something ‘on the side’, along with what we are already doing. Or, perhaps we are looking for more freedom, not having a ‘boss looking over our shoulder’ all the time. If this is the case, it may be time to leave our eight-to-five job to start something new, or we could possibly do better by asking for a raise or getting a better job (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6

Entrepreneurial hopes and dreams

If we want to do something in the community, maybe joining or starting an NGO (non-governmental organisation) or NPO (non-profit organisation) could be a solution.

Once we have our reason for starting a business, we ought to consider what skills we possess to start and run that business.

Table 4.1 shows some topics that we might reflect on before starting out.

Table 4.1 Topics for reflection before starting out

We need to be brutally honest with ourselves when thinking about these issues because the decision to start our own business will have an enormous impact on our lives. We need to know that we are doing what we really want to do.

6.1 The SHAPE process of discovering our business idea

Figure 4.7 shows how the SHAPE Start-up.

Fig. 4.7

The SHAPE start-up ‘Entrevolution’ process (Source Steenberg & van der Westhuizen, 2022)

Process can be applied in discovering our business idea.

The SHAPE Start-up ‘Entrevolution’ Process outlines the typical process of moving from being a person with no EI to creating a business that’s moving out of the start-up phase.

As with most careers, no one is ‘born’ as an entrepreneur and simply starts running a business. We become aware of the potential to be an entrepreneur through many different influences. It may come from discovering our passion, listening to the stories of successful people, or questioning why something is happening in our life.

When looking at people’s follow-through on their business intentions, it was found that only 50% of people who have an intention to start a business will do something about it.⁹ In Fig. 4.8, the outer circles show what factors influence their big decision.

Fig. 4.8

(Source Steenberg & van der Westhuizen, 2022)

SHAPE intention influence factors

To move from intending to start a business to doing it; four major factors come into the picture:

• 1. We need to want to start a business (‘own attitude’). The biggest supporter or criticiser or motivator or deal-closer or inspiration or smack-down when one is an entrepreneur is oneself. Our attitudes, beliefs, and self-motivation will be the driver of action on business passions and will bring ideas to life.

• 2. The five people closest to us will be required to support our idea (‘attitude of those around us’).

• 3. We must decide whether we believe it will be difficult to do (‘planned behaviour construct’).

• 4. We need to follow a structured process to start our business.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes.¹⁰ They come from different backgrounds and age groups, and they all have their own different experiences and skillsets. The SHAPE Self-Assessment Tool on Entrepreneurial Attitudes, as set out in Table 4.2, is a useful tool for helping to ‘SHAPE’ ourselves and doing self-reflection to improve our self-leadership abilities.

Table 4.2 SHAPE Self-assessment tool on entrepreneurial attitudes

The table lists some of the most important entrepreneurial qualities. We do not all have all of these qualities, or we may not have had the opportunity to show some of these qualities. But most of them are important for someone who hopes to start a business. In the last column, rate yourself from 0 (Not me at all!) to 10 (Totally me!).

Did you score between 70 and 100? If this is you, then you have only a few areas to work on. Did you score less than 70? You may want to reflect on the areas you marked less than five and think about how you can surround yourself with people to support you in bringing these aspects into your business.

7 Supporting our Entrepreneurial Dream—The Five People Around Us

Research has suggested that the five people closest to us strongly influence our chance of entrepreneurial success. The people who give us advice and whom we surround ourselves with inspire us with ideas. They move us to action by holding us accountable, organising us into structured action, helping with the work that needs to be done, and promoting our message (Fig 4.9).

Fig. 4.9

(Source Steenberg & van der Westhuizen, 2022)

Five people around you

If we want to change our lives, we need to change whom we take advice from and look carefully at our role in our own scheme. Are we being our own best promoters? Do we do the required work while also organising everything? Who do we look towards for ideas and to push us into action? As entrepreneurs, we need to be ready to play these roles for ourselves.

8 Entrepreneurship is a Career

When someone starts a business, they are deciding to develop a career path for themselves.

Just imagine for a moment that we decide to attend our class’s twentieth reunion. What will we tell our friends from high school who have not seen us for twenty years? Will we tell them about a life of adventure in which we tried various things, succeeded, and failed, until one day we figured it all out and made millions? Or are we going to tell them a story of not having failed because we never really tried anything new?

Everyone is good at something, and we can use that knowledge and skill within ourselves to help others. Not everybody is an entrepreneur, of course, but if we are, it may be our greatest asset. So, be all we can be and change the world around us. Let us ‘Shift Hope and Activate Potential Entrepreneurship’!

We may ask: What does the life of an entrepreneur offer us that our day job does not?

This is perhaps an answer to that question:

• It increases our skillset much faster (entrepreneurs can escape the corporate challenges that slow down personal and skills progression).

• It offers personal development (a good platform for our self-development and can also be for the world at large).

• We see our vigorous work changing the lives of others (our offering gets to change the lives of the people who consume it).

• There is the possibility of unlimited income (as entrepreneurs, our income is related to our efforts and the success of our business, meaning the harder we work, the higher our income will be).

9 Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the requirements shaped by an attitude and desire to succeed in the world of work that points to an entrepreneurial mindset. This is a process of ‘uncovering intent and listening to what life asks us to do’. Entrepreneurs are not born; they are made, moulded by an environment they have, in part, created for themselves. The chapter helps us think about whether we are journeying down the right path to entrepreneurship, and it then gives us tools to help us decide on the capabilities and attitudes that we need to develop if we are going to be successful as entrepreneurs.

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