Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘The Future’ Category

Last year is gone, and going forward things will be different.  Last year’s you is gone, and going forward you will be different.  That’s the thing – everything changes. Regardless if last year was enjoyable or terrible, no matter. This year will be different.  You can try to hold on to it, but all you’ll get is rope burns. Or, you can take comfort in the impermanence.

Your company is different; your competitors are different; your customers are different.  In fact, everything is different.  And what you did last year won’t get the same response today.  Yet we hold on.  It’s difficult to see things as they are when there’s so much comfort in seeing things as they were.  Even if things weren’t so good last year, there’s comfort in seeing things as they were.

Toughest of all is to see yourself as you are. (I’m not talking about the body stuff – older, grayer, more wrinkles – that’s easy to see.  I’m talking about the inside stuff.) On the inside, you are not what you were last year.  You don’t have to know how you are different; just take comfort that you are different. Take comfort that right here, right now, as you sit, you are different, and so is everything else.

It’s difficult to plan out how things will go this year; and it’s impossible to predict how you’ll grow. Things will change; you will change; and putting yourself in that frame of mind can be helpful.

At the New Year, take time to celebrate the upcoming impermanence that will surely find you.

Photo from free HDR Photos – www.freestock.ca

We strive to get everyone on the same page, to align the crew in a shared direction. The thinking goes – If we’re all pulling in the same direction, we’ll get there faster and more efficiently. Yes, the destination will come sooner, but what if it’s not there when we get there?

There’s implicit permanence to our go-forward travel plans. We look out three years and plan our destination as if today’s rules and fundamentals will still apply. We think – That imaginary tropical vacation spot will be beautiful in three years because it looks beautiful through the kalidascope of today’s success. But as the recent natural disasters have taught us, whole islands can be destroyed in an instant. But still, the impermenance of today’s tried-and-true business models is lost on us, and we see the unknowable future as statically as the unchangeable map of the continents.

Thing is, all around us there are weak indications the fundamental tradewinds have started to shift – weak signals of impermenance that may invalidate today’s course heading. But weak signals are difficult to hear – the white noise of yesterday’s success drowns out the forward-looking weak signals.  And more problematic, once heard, weak signals are easily dismissed because their song threatens the successful status quo.

You feel weak signals in your chest. It could be a weak signal when your experience tells you things should go one way and they actually go another. Martin Zwilling (Forbes) has some great examples. (Thanks to Deb Mills-Scofield [@dscofield] for retweeting the article.)

100% alignment reduces adaptability because it deadens us to weak signals, and that’s a problem in these times of great impermanence. To counter the negative elements of alignment, there must be a balancing injection of healthy misalignment.  This is an important and thankless task falls on the shoulders of a special breed – the radical fringe.  They’re the folks smart enough to knit disjointed whispers into coherent ideas that could unravel everything and brave enough to test them.

Disruptive movements and revolutions build momentum quietly and slowly.  But if you can recognize them early, there’s a chance you can get into position to ride their tsunami instead of being ambushed and scuttled by it.  But you’ve got to listen closely because these young movements are stealthy and all they leave in their wake are weak signals.

It’s difficult to do something for the first time. Whether it’s a new approach, a new technology, or a new campaign, the mass of the past pulls our behavior back toward itself.  And sadly, whether the past has been successful or not, its mass, and therefore it’s pull, are about the same.  The past keeps us along the track of sameness.

Trains have tracks to enable them to move efficiently (cost per mile), and when you want to go where the train is heading, it’s all good. But when the tracks are going to the wrong destination, all that efficiency comes at the expense of effectiveness.  Like we’re on rails, company history keeps us on track, even if it’s time for a new direction.

The best trains run on a ritualistic schedule.  People queue up at same time every morning to meet their same predictable behemoth, and take comfort in slinking into their regular seats and turning off their brains.  And this is the train’s trick. It uses its regularity to lull riders into a hazy state of non-thinking – get on, sit down, and I’ll get your there – to blind passengers from seeing its highly limited timetable and its extreme inflexibility.  The train doesn’t want us to recognize that it’s not really about where the train wants to go.

Trains are powerful in their own right, but their real muscle comes from the immense sunk cost of their infrastructure. Previous generations invested billions in train stations, repair facilities, tight integration with bus lines, and the tracks, and it takes extreme strength of character to propose a new direction that doesn’t make use of the old, tired infrastructure that’s already paid for. Any new direction that requires a whole new infrastructure is a tough sell, and that’s why the best new directions transcend infrastructure altogether.  But for those new directions that require new infrastructure, the only way to go is a modular approach that takes the right size bites.

Our worn tracks were laid in a bygone era, and the important destinations of yesteryear are no longer relevant. It’s no longer viable to go where the train wants; we must go where we want.

The natural mindset of innovation is more-centric. More throughput; more performance; more features and functions; more services; more sales regions and markets; more applications; more of what worked last time. With innovation, we naturally gravitate toward more.

There are two flavors of more, one better than the other. The better brother is more that does something for the first time. For example, the addition of the first airbags to automobiles – clearly an addition (previous vehicles had none) and clearly a meaningful innovation. More people survived car crashes because of the new airbags. This something-from-nothing more is magic, innovative, and scarce.

Most more work is of a lesser class – the more-of-what-is class. Where the first airbags were amazing, moving from eight airbags to nine – not so much. When the first safety razors replaced straight razors, they virtually eliminated fatal and almost fatal injuries, which was a big deal; but when the third and fourth blades were added, it was more trivial than magical. It was more for more’s sake; it was more because we didn’t know what else to do.

While more is more natural, less is more powerful. The Innovator’s Dilemma clearly called out the power of less. When the long-in-the-tooth S-curve flattens, Christensen says to look down, to look down and create technologies that do less. Actually, he tells us someone will give ground on the very thing that built the venerable S-curve to make possible a done-for-the-first-time innovation.  He goes on to say you might as well be the one to dismantle your S-curve before a somebody else beats you to it. Yes, a wonderful way to realize the juciest innovation is with a less-centric mindset.

The LED revolution was made possible with less-centric thinking. As the incandescent S-curve hit puberty, wattage climbed and more powerful lights became cost effective; and as it matured, output per unit cost increased. More on more.  And looking down from the graying S-curve was the lowly LED, whose output was far, far less.

But what the LED gave up in output it gained in less power draw and smaller size.  As it turned out, there was a need for light where there had been none – in highly mobile applications where less size and weight were prized. And in these new applications, there was just a wisp of available power, and incandesent’s power draw was too much.  If only there was a technology with less power draw.

But at the start, volumes for LEDs were far less than incandesent’s; profit margin was less; and most importantly, their output was far less than any self-respecting lightbulb.  From on high, LEDs weren’t real lights; they were toys that would never amount to anything.

You can break intellectual inertia around more, and good things will happen. New design space is created from thin air once you are forced from the familiar. But it takes force. Creative use of constraints can help.

Get a small team together and creatively construct constraints that outlaw the goodness that makes your product great. The incandescent group’s constraint could be: create a light source that must make far less light. The automotive group’s constraint: create a vehicle that must have less range – battery powered cars.  The smartphone group: create a smartphone with the fewest functions – wrist phone without Blutooth to something in your pocket , longer battery life, phone in the ear, phone in your eyeglasses.

Less is unnatural, and less is scary. The fear is your customers will get less and they won’t like it. But don’t be afraid because you’re going to sell to altogether different customers in altogether markets and applications. And fear not, because to those new customers you’ll sell more, not less. You’ll sell them something that’s the first of its kind, something that does more of what hasn’t been done before. It may do only a little bit of that something, but that’s far more than not being able to do it all.

Don’t tell anyone, but the next level of more will come from less.

We’ve been conditioned to ask for direction; to ask for a plan; and ask for permission. But those ways no longer apply. Today that old behavior puts you at the front of the peloton in the great race to the bottom.

The old ways are gone.

Today’s new ways: propose a direction (better yet, test one out on a small scale); create and present a radical plan of your own (or better, on the smallest of scales test the novel aspects and present your learning); and demonstrate you deserve permission by initiating activity on something that will obsolete the very thing responsible for your success.

People that wait for someone to give them direction are now a commodity, and with commodities it always ends in the death spiral of low cost providers putting each other out of business.  As businesses are waist deep in proposals to double-down on what hasn’t worked and are choking on their flattened S-curves, there’s a huge opportunity for people that have the courage to try new things on their own. Today, if you initiate you’ll differentiate.

[This is where you say to yourself – I’ve already got too much on my plate, and I don’t have the time or budget to do more (and unsanctioned) work. And this is where I tell you your old job is already gone, and you might as well try something innovative. It’s time to grab the defibrillator and jolt your company out of its flatline. ]

It’s time to respect your gut and run a low cost, micro-experiment to test your laughable idea. (And because you’ll keep the cost low, no one will know when it doesn’t go as you thought. [They never do.]) It’s time for an underground meeting with your trusted band of dissidents to plan and run your pico-experiment that could turn your industry upside down. It’s time to channel your inner kindergartener and micro-test the impossible.

It’s time to choose yourself.

You’re busier than ever, and almost every day you’re asked to do more. And usually it’s more with less – must improve efficiency so you can do more of what you already do.  We want you to take this on, but don’t drop anything.

Improving your efficiency is good, and it’s healthy to challenge yourself to do more, but there’s a whole other side to things – a non-efficiency-based approach, where instead of asking how can you do more things, it’s about how you can do things that matter more.

And from this non-efficiency-based framework, the question “What aren’t you doing?” opens a worm hole to a new universe, and in this universe meaning matters.  In this universe “What aren’t you doing?” is really “What aren’t you doing that is truly meaningful to you?”

[But before I’m accused of piling on the work, even if it’s meaningful work, I’ll give you an idea to free up time do more things that matter. First, change your email settings to off-line mode so no new messages pop on your screen and interrupt you. In the morning manually send and receive your email and answer email for 30 minutes; do the same in the afternoon. This will force you to triage your email and force you to limit your time. This will probably free up at least an hour a day.]

Now we’ll step through a process to figure out the most important thing you’re not doing.

Here is a link to a template to help you with the process —  Template – What Aren’t You Doing.

The first step is to acknowledge there are important things you’re not doing and make a list. They can be anything – a crazy project, a deeper relationship, personal development, an adventure, or something else.

To make the list, ask these questions:

I always wanted to ____________.

I always wished I could __________.

Write down your answers.  Now run the acid test to make sure these things are actually meaningful. Ask yourself:

When I think of doing this thing, do I feel uncomfortable or or a little scared?

If they don’t make you a little uncomfortable, they’re not meaningful.  Go back to the top and start over.  For the ones that make you uncomfortable, choose the most important, enter it in the template, and move to the next step.

In the second step you acknowledge there’s something in the way. Ask yourself:

I can’t do my most meaningful thing because _______________.

Usually it’s about time, money, lack of company support, goes against the norm, or it’s too crazy. On the template write down your top two or three answers.

In the third step you transform from an external focus to an internal one, and acknowledge what’s in the way is you. (For the next questions you must temporarily suspend reality and your very real day-to-day constraints and responsibilities.) Ask yourself:

If I started my most meaningful thing tomorrow I would feel uncomfortable that ____________.

Write down a couple answers, then ask:

The reason I would feel uncomfortable about my most  meaningful thing is because I __________. (Must be something about you.) 

Write down one or two. Some example reasons: you think your past experiences predict the future; you’re afraid to succeed; you don’t like what people will think about you; or the meaningful stuff contradicts your sense of self.

Spend an hour a week on this exercise until you understand the reasons you’re not doing your most meaningful thing. Then, spend an hour a week figuring out how to overcome your reasons for not doing. Then, spend an hour a week, or more, doing your most meaningful thing.

Today is a celebration – four years of Shipulski On Design!

To celebrate, I’m introducing my new book — Product Process People – Designing for Change.

And as a gift, I’m offering for free (pdf format) to my subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, click  below to download the pdf.  If you’re not a subscriber and you want the book, simply subscribe to my blog (see the box on the right) and download the pdf. (It’s the honor system.)

[wpdm_file id=3] Download it, read it, and share it with all your friends. (They don’t have to subscribe because you do.)

I hope the book helps you have a meaningful discussion about the future.

And for me, to help spread the message, if you download it please share it.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to a great year 5.

Mike

With websites, e-books, old fashioned books, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs, there’s a seemingly limitless flood of information on every facet of business. There are heaps on innovation, new product development, lean, sales and marketing, manufacturing, and strategy; and within each there are elements and sub elements that fan out with multiple approaches.

With today’s search engines and bots to automatically scan the horizon, it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for especially as you go narrow and deep. If you want to find best practices for reducing time-to-market for products designed in the US and manufactured in China, ask Google and she’ll tell you instantly. If you’re looking to improve marketing of healthcare products for the 20 to 40 year old demographic of the developing world, just ask Siri.

It’s now easy to separate the good stuff from the chaff and focus narrowly on your agenda. It’s like you have the capability dig into a box of a thousand puzzle pieces and pull out the very one you’re looking for. Finding the right puzzle piece is no longer the problem, the problem now is figuring out how they all fit together.

What holds the pieces together? What’s the common thread that winds through innovation, sales, marketing, and manufacturing? What is the backplane behind all this business stuff?

The backplane, and first fundamental, is product.

Every group has their unique work, and it’s all important – and product cuts across all of it. You innovate on product; sell product; manufacture product; service product. The shared context is the product. And I think there’s opportunity to use the shared context, this product lens, to open up design space of all our disciplines. For example how can the product change to make possible new and better marketing? How can the product change to radically simplify manufacturing? How can the product change so sales can tell the story they always wanted to tell? What innovation work must be done to create the product we all want?

In-discipline improvements have been good, but it’s time to take a step back and figure out how to create disruptive in-discipline innovations; to eliminate big discontinuities that cut across disciplines; and to establish multidisciplinary linkages and alignment to power the next evolution of our businesses. New design space is needed, and the product backplane can help.

Use the product lens to look along the backplane and see how changes in the product can bridge discontinuities across sales, marketing, and engineering. Use the common context of product to link revolutionary factory simplification to changes in the product. Use new sensors in the product to enable a new business model based on predictive maintenance. Let your imagination guide you.

It’s time to see the product for more than what it does and what it looks like. It’s time to see it as Superman’s kryptonite that constrains and limits all we do that can become Popeye’s spinach that can strengthen us to overpower all obstacles.

If you’re sitting in the present, you’re sitting in a good place – you’re more mindful of what’s going on, more aware of your thinking, and more thoughtful of your actions.  But there’s one thing sitting in the present can’t provide, and that’s perspective.  To create perspective, to understand the hows and whys of your journey to the present, requires reflection on the past. But to self reflect without distorting the image requires separation from your present.

Here’s an idea to create separation – an exercise in mental time travel where your past becomes your present and your present becomes your future.  It goes like this: Set your mental way-back machine for five years ago, turn the crank and jump back to a five-years-ago present. From your seat in your new present (your past), erase your future (your present) to open it up to unlimited possibilities.  Now, imagine a future (one of the infinite possible futures) that is identical to the one that actually happened. (But remember, you don’t know it happened, so it’s only a potential future state.) Okay.  You’re now ready to mint your own perspective.

From your seat in your new present (your past), ask yourself three questions.

If your imagined future (your actual present state) came to be:

1. How would you feel about your relationships with your friends, your community, and your family?
2. How would you feel about your health?
3. How would you feel about the alignment between your actions, values, and passions?

With your answers in hand (and I suggest you actually write them down), use your way-back machine to jump forward to the present present. Sitting in the present (the real one), read your answers (written five years ago) to the three questions above.

How do you feel about your answers?  What do you like about your answers? What makes you uncomfortable? What surprised you? Write down your answers because that’s the unfiltered perspective you were looking for.

Now the valuable part – two final questions (write down the actual answers):

Taking guidance from your newly self-minted perspective:

1. Going forward, while sitting in the present, what will you do more of?
2. Going forward, while sitting in the present, what will you do less of?

If you are sufficiently intrigued (or confused) to try the exercise and find value in it, please pay it forward and share it with others.

And don’t forget to repeat the process every year.

When things don’t go as planned, you have a choice – look outside or look inside. Looking outside is about control and looking inside is about lack of control.

When you look outside, what you’re saying is the universe didn’t behave per the plan, and you’re going to teach it a lesson. You’re going to tighten the screws until it does what you want; you’re going to add personal energy (probably all your energy) to lock things down; you’re going to control what must be controlled so the universe follows your plan.

The look outside approach can work, for a while. You can put your fingers and toes in all the holes; you can make sure everyone does their job; and you can be the master scheduler for the universe, but only for a while because the universe has limitless energy and you don’t. And while your control-the-world strategy looks like it’s working, it’s not – not even in the short term. The universe is playing you – it’s sucking your energy while you tread water. The universe isn’t stupid – it knows you can’t last.  But at its core, the universe likes to teach; and when you fight it head-to-head, it wants to teach you about opportunity cost. While you spend all your energy wresting it to a draw, it prevents you from moving forward. It wants you to learn you have finite energy and to be thoughtful about how you spend it.

When you look inside, what you’re saying is the universe didn’t behave per the plan, and didn’t think it would. You’re going to learn from the universe and work with it; you’re going to surf the wave of the universe’s energy and carve a cross product with its momentum; you’re going to adjust your plan because you have a lack of control over the universe and most other things.

The look inside approach is effective in the long term because it works with the natural trade winds of the universe. Sailing downwind takes far less energy than tacking into the teeth of the cosmic winds, and it’s faster. This is the lesson the universe wants you to learn. But it’s not that easy.  The universe constantly tests you.  It changes wind direction without our consent and watches. Will you look outside or inside? Will you tack into the wind or change course and throw a huge bow wave as you go?

The toughest part isn’t the wind; it’s the other sailors. They’ve been trained over the years to tack quickly and tack often, to sail directly toward the destination regardless of the wind, even if they must grab the oars and break their backs into the wind. For those sailors, a course change is a sign of weakness – real sailors battle the wind; real sailors stay the course even if the great circle route is faster.

Thing is, plans never happen as planned, and yours is no different. Yes, control things that can be controlled, but remember – the uncontrollable can’t be controlled just because you want them to be. The universe has been around a long time and knows the ropes. It knows you don’t have control over it; it knows you only have control over how you respond to it.

When you work hand-in-hand with the universe, it rewards you, though it does so obliquely. So if your winds suddenly change and you have to sail away from your grand destination, don’t despair – that’s the universe rewarding good behavior. Double the watch and scan the horizon for the uncharted island with far more treasure than you thought possible. The universe calls that karma.

Image courtesy of YachtPals.com

There’s a natural desire to create comfort because, well, it’s comfortable. The parents of comfort are sameness and familiarity. To be comfortable we naturally seek out familiarity, and since we’re most familiar with what we did last time, we naturally want to repeat the past. Because we’re familiar with it and because the familiarity makes us comfortable, there’s natural gravitational pull toward the past. Same goes for sameness – it’s comfortable so we seek it out. That’s why there’s so much momentum around what we did last time – familiarity and sameness create comfort and comfort feels comfortable.

And there’s a second level of intellectual inertia created by our desire for comfort. Yes, the parents are the same – sameness and familiarity – but this level of comfort is about comfort with what we have. Whatever success we’ve had, we want to hold onto it so we can feel comfortable. It’s the success we know, it’s what we’re familiar with, and we want sameness around success.

Level one is about comfort around our behavior and level two is about comfort around outcomes of our behavior. We do what we did last time because we know how to do it and we extrapolate – because we did it well last time we’ll do it well this time. We do what we did last time because it worked and we extrapolate – because it worked last time it will work well again. And when the past is repeated, we’ll be comfortable.

This is a fine way to go if things are static – when the rules of the past are the same in the future. But the wheels fall off when things are dynamic – extrapolation doesn’t work when the rules change,and surely we live in dynamic times. If there’s one thing we should be uncomfortable with it’s seeking comfort in familiarity and sameness.

Just as comfort fosters sameness, discomfort drives disruption.

No doubt the future’s rules will be different, and discomfort will be the forcing function. Discomfort with the status quo will propel upstarts to innovate and break rules. For them familiarity and sameness are uncomfortable, and since they too are human, they will seek out comfort. But they will find it in unfamiliarity and difference. They will be comfortable when they disrupt the game, dethrone the leaders, and coronate themselves.

Whether you’re the leader or the start-up, increase your level of discomfort. The leader can create pockets of discomfort (financed by comfort-based success) to break the rules on their own terms and obsolete their best stuff on their own timeline. And the already uncomfortable start-up can add more to harden itself for the tough times ahead.

Maximizing comfort does not maximize business success. There is little learning without discomfort and there is no adaptation without it. If you’re feeling comfortable, that’s the telltale sign you shouldn’t.