Your business plan is incomplete, of course, because you've listed outcomes instead of actions, and (funnily) outcomes don't simply exist but emerge. They're suggested, not designed; you design interactions. The outcome is the goal, the guidepost, of the interaction-design process. It's the metric - the closer you are to an interesting, dynamic (generative) outcome, the closer you are to the 'right' interaction. But interactions are your working material. You don't 'play a melody' as such, you play notes; you do create a melody eventually in the performative moment, one emerges, but you build with melodic components. What's coming out of your horn is notes and silence. Maybe you're thinking about these components quickly or 'intuitively' (i.e. really fast), but at some point you have to address the components themselves: playing scales, learning alternate fingerings, strengthening your embouchre, controlling your breath, learning to hear intervals, etc. That's craft; that's the difference between fan and creator, executive and engineer. That's why you need 'game designers' working on your games: the skill applies to the task. It's why your 'business plan' isn't about your objectives, your dream of your Self, but rather about What You Will Do. Everything else is fiction.
Yes, you need to be able to provide forecasts - empty promises are the very nature of advertising. But if you wish not only for funding but for use, for success, then your predictions and aspirations must be grounded in concrete actions. David Mamet insists that the proper scale of consideration and work for the actor is not the play but the scene: choose a strong, clear action, say your lines clearly, and let the text do its work. The meaning of the play will emerge from your actions; it inheres in the actions themselves, in communicative exchange rather than the critic's static parsing - not in objects or states but in transition. Similarly, the meaning of a business is the service it provides. Its employees will act to offer that service, and its customers will react appropriately (by handing over lots of money, one hopes). If '...and a miracle happens' appears in your plan then you're probably fucked, and probably deserve it.
That website you're designing? It's a tool and is as good as its use. If you approach website design as a religious practice - 'throw it up and pray' - then you will fail. You wouldn't design a hammer not having seen a nail; you wouldn't build a website without studying the use of websites. If you wish to encourage competition, you are designing a game, and must think in those terms: a game is a machine for regulating player action and desire. Drama is a machine for regulating audience attention and desire. The object of one's attention in a drama must be interesting; put another way, audiences will be interested in interesting things. One's in-game actions must prompt meaningful, appropriately-pitched feedback; if the feedback is prompt and rich and actionable, and indicates that mastery is attainable, then the player will act further.
Of course by 'business plan' I mean 'curriculum,' by 'investor' and 'player' I mean student, and by 'website' I mean 'classroom lesson.'
Mamet's lesson for actors is an injunction to students and those who would seek to teach them. The proper level of actor attention is the scene; to master a scene is to learn your lines and perform strong clear actions: it is to perform craftwork (e.g. in this case 'depiction'). The pleasure and purpose of learning is the invitation to demonstrate mastery of a craft. As for students so for teachers: the joy of teaching lies in expanding the student's knowledge of a craft and allowing her entrance into the sister- and brotherhood of craftsmen according to her level of mastery. Any other action by a teacher abuses the trust between teacher and student; it is masturbation.
Multiple-choice tests are abusive: they serve the teacher and not the student, but worse, the teacher isn't expected to react to them with pedagogy, only with shame. The exam marks the end of instruction on a specific subject rather than a measure-taking midpoint; it alienates and shames us because it doesn't ask us to demonstrate mastery, only to refer to the idea of it secondhand. 'When was the Louisiana Purchase? Choose one of the following...' makes a handful of category errors all at once, the most important of which is mistaking the accumulation of trivia for achieving mastery of a body of knowledge. We acquire facts as a side-effect of other processes of self-directed inquiry. This is obvious to children, tutors, and anyone fortunate enough to act in a mentor/apprentice capacity; it's obvious to gamers as well, readers of fiction, mountain climbers, painters, jazz musicians, etc. Yet it is a foreign notion in educational institutions. The standardized or multiple-choice test is a waste of time and effort because it is a moment for neither teaching nor meaningfully taking stock: the original sin of testing culture is the idea that relative mastery should be measured numerically, never mind the stupidity of the notion that it can be so measured with any kind of precision.
So.
Your 'curriculum' is at the moment a set of facts to be acquainted with, a series of topics to discuss, arbitrarily linked and ordered according to fictional standards. It is a fantasy - an aspiration in the form of a checklist. The putative object of the 'curriculum' is the student but its practical object is the administrator, whose feeling of powerlessness is lifted by producing such a list, as if filling in a multiplication table made one a mathematician. A proper curriculum is a set of concrete actions designed to increase the student's scope of inquiry; it is a script for structuring performance, and progresses according to a logic of action rather than aspiration. You know you've reached the fifth act of a play when everything that's happening needs to happen; and so would it be with a competently-written curriculum, with any self-directed student inquiry. Meaningful action is prompted and guided by the actor's (student's) felt necessity. Schoolwork is by this standard largely meaningless to the student. That's how we like it, of course; schoolwork isn't for students. The moronic logic of standardized testing makes clear that schoolwork is for school administrators to fill their days. 'Learning' - enhancing and demonstrating mastery - happens in schools by accident, i.e. by personal, extra-institutional or anti-institutional teacher effort.
The structure of American public education is in large part unnatural and arbitrary and (as any student can tell you) its default mode is to endanger students' wellbeing and happiness in the interest of conformity and quiescence; only extraordinary teacher effort can overcome its structural shortcomings; like any dangerous activity it must be stopped. We must find a better way. I remain confident despite the evidence; this psychosis is called 'optimism.' I wish it upon you, among other things.
