Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Problems’ Category

Environmental stability, aka, Green, is just starting. Most are still in reluctant compliance mode, hoping beyond hope that this newest of corporate initiatives dies on the vine, that it’s just another corporate initiative. Wrong. Very wrong. It’s the way we’re going to grow our business; it’s the way we’re going to make money. It’s time to open our minds, grab Green by the throat, and shake it. Green is here to stay, and Green will demand we change our thinking, will make us see our problems differently, will require we dismantle our intellectual inertia, will require innovation.

Pretend you’re a manufacturer of jeans, the blue ones, the ones that feel so good when you put them on, the ones you’d like to wear to work if you could. (Maybe that’s just me.) Year-on-year your innovation efforts focus on adding pockets then removing them, adding holes then removing them, zippers here then there, dark wash then light, baggy then tight, and yellow stitching than red. What else can a jean innovator do?

Corporate sends the memo: “We’re going Green.” Green jeans. They hire the best sustainability consultants and you, the jean innovator, sit through the sustainability audit results. Their recommendation – reduce carbon footprint: use materials that consume less energy, reduce electricity in your factories, minimize distribution’s fuel costs, and reduce travel miles of your sales folks. Brilliant. Whatever we paid these guys, it was too much. But then they twist your brain. The carbon footprint from the use of your product dwarfs everything else. Your customers generate a massive carbon footprint when they wash and dry your jeans, and you have no control over it. Your jeans are made once and washed and dried countless times. Whoa. Your eyes roll back in your head. What’s a jean innovator to do? First thing – forget about the stupid pockets. Next, figure out how to reduce the carbon footprint generated by your customers. Define the problem and innovate. But what’s the problem?

Why do folks wash their jeans? The obvious answer – they’re dirty. Let’s figure a way to prevent jeans from getting dirty, right? No. The real answer – they stretch, they get baggy and don’t fit right; so we wash them to tighten things up. We wash CLEAN jeans because they get baggy, not because they’re dirty. Let’s fix that.

Believe it or not, there are many likely innovative solutions to make jeans de-baggy themselves, but that’s not the point. The point is we must innovate on jeans that reconfigure, and must not innovate on keeping jeans clean (though we may innovate on that down the road) and must not innovate on pockets, zippers, and stitching.

Green shaped our innovation work. We now have Green jeans that feel good and spring back after wearing and fit great on day two – no washing required. We now have Green jeans that save customers time and money while flattering their backside. But here’s the point – we would have never invented de-baggying jeans without opening our minds to Green as a way to grow our business, to Green as a way to make money. Reluctant compliance won’t get us there. Grab Green by the throat and shake it…before your competitors do.

Improvement is good; we all want it. Whether it’s Continuous Improvement (CI), where goodness, however defined, is improved incrementally and continually, or Discontinuous Improvement (DI), where goodness is improved radically and steeply, we want it. But, it’s not enough to want it.

How do we create the Improvement Mindset, where the desire to make things better is a way of life? The traditional non-answer goes something like this: “Well, you know, a lot of diverse factors have to come together in a holistic way to make it happen.  It takes everyone pulling in the same direction.” Crap. If I had to pick the secret ingredient that truly makes a difference it’s this:

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People with the courage to see things as they are.

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People who can hold up the mirror and see warts as warts and problems as problems – they’re the secret ingredient. No warts, no improvement. No problems, no improvement. And I’m not talking about calling out the benign problems. I’m talking about the deepest, darkest, most fundamental problems, problems some even see as strengths, core competencies, or even as competitive advantage. Problems so fundamental, and so wrong, most don’t see them, or dare see them.

The best-of-the-best can even acknowledge warts they themselves created. Big medicine. It’s easy to see warts or problems in others’ work, but it takes level 5 courage to call out the ugliness you created. Nothing is off limits with these folks, nothing left on the table. Wide open, no-holds-barred, full frontal assault on the biggest, baddest crap your company has to offer. It’s hard to do. Like telling a mother her baby is ugly – it’s one thing to think the baby is ugly, but it’s another thing altogether to open up your mouth and acknowledge it face-to-face, especially if you’re the father. (Disclaimer: To be clear, I do not recommend telling your spouse your new baby is ugly. Needless to say, some things MUST be left unsaid.)

It’s not always easy to be around the courageous souls willing to jeopardize their careers for the sake of improvement. And it takes level 5 courage to manage them. But, if you want your company to contract a terminal case of the Improvement Mindset, it’s a price you must pay.

Click this link for information on Mike’s upcoming workshop on Systematic DFMA Deployment

Though we can’t describe it in words, or tell someone how to do it, we all know innovation is good. Why is it good? Look at the causal chain of actions that create a good economy, and you’ll find innovation is the first link.

When innovation happens, a new product is created that does something that no other product has done before. It provides a new function, it has a new attribute that is pleasing to the eye, it makes a customer more money, or it simply makes a customer happy. It does not matter which itch it scratches, the important part is the customer finds it valuable, and is willing to pay hard currency for it. Innovation does something amazing, it results in a product that creates value; it creates something that’s worth more than the sum of its parts. Starting with things dug from the ground or picked from it – dirt (steel, aluminum, titanium), rocks (minerals/cement/ceramics), and sticks (wood, cotton, wool), and adding new thinking, a product is created, a product that customers pay money for, money that is greater than the cost of the dirt, rocks, sticks, and new thinking. This, my friends, is value creation, and this is what makes national economies grow sustainably. Here’s how it goes.

Customers value the new product highly, so much so that they buy boatloads of them. The company makes money, so much so stock price quadruples. With its newly-stuffed war chest, the company invests with confidence, doing more innovation, selling more products, and making more money. An important magazine writes about the company’s success, which causes more companies to innovate, sell, and invest. Before you know it, the economy is flooded with money, and we’re off to the races in a sustainable way – a way based on creating value. I know this sounds too simplistic.  We’ve listened too long to the economists and their theories – spur demand, markets are efficient, and the world economy thing. This crap is worse than it sounds. Things don’t have to be so complicated. I wish economists weren’t so able to confuse themselves. Innovate, sell, and invest, that’s the ticket for me.

Innovation – straightforward, no, easy, no. Innovation is scary as hell because it’s risky as hell. The risk? A company tries to develop a highly innovative product, nothing comes out the innovation tailpipe, and the company has nothing for its investment. (I can never keep the finance stuff straight. Does zero return on a huge investment increase or decrease stock price?) It’s the tricky risk thing that gets in the way of innovation. If innovation was risk free, we’d all be doing it like voting in Chicago – early and often. But it’s not. Although there is a way to shift the risk/reward ratio in our favor.

After doing innovation wrong, learning, and doing it less wrong, I have found one thing that significantly and universally reduces the risk/reward ratio. What is it?

Know you’re working on the right problem.

Work on the right problem? Are you kidding? This is the magic advice? This is the best you’ve got? Yes.

If you think it’s easy to know you’re working on the right problem, you’ve never truly known you were working on the right problem, because this type of knowing is big medicine. Innovation is all about solving a special type of problem, problems caused by fundamental conflicts and contradictions, things that others don’t know exist, don’t know how to describe, or define, let alone know how to eliminate. I’m talking about conflicts and contradictions in the physics sense – where something must be hot and cold at the same time, something must be big while being small, black while white, hard one instant, and soft the next. Solve one of those babies, and you’ve innovated yourself a blockbuster product.

In order to know you’re working on the right problem (conflict or contradiction), the product is analyzed in the physics sense. What’s happening, why, where, when, how? It’s the rule (not the exception) that no one knows what’s really going on, they only think they do. Since the physics are unknown, a hypothesis of the physics behind the conflict/contradiction must be conjured and tested. The hypothesis must be tests analytically or in the lab. All this is done to define the problem, not solve it. To conjure correctly, a radical and seemingly inefficient activity must be undertaken. Engineers must sit at their desk and think about physics. This type of thinking is difficult enough on its own and almost impossible when project managers are screaming at them to get off their butts and fix the problem. As we know, thinking is not considered progress, only activity is.

After conjuring the hypothesis, it’s tested to prove or disprove. If dis-proven, back to the desk for more thinking. If proven, the conflict/contradiction behind the problem is defined, and you know you’re working on the right problem. You have not solved it, you’ve only convinced yourself you’re working on the right one. Now the problem can be solved.

Believe it or not, solving is the easy part. It’s easy because the physics of the problem are now known and have been verified in the lab. We engineers can solve physics problems once they’re defined because we know the rules. If we don’t know the physics rules off the top of our heads, our friends do. And for those tricky times, we can go to the internet and ask Google.

I know all this sounds strange. That’s okay, it is. But it’s also true. Give your engineers the tools, time and training to identify the problems, conflicts, and contradictions and innovation will follow. Remember the engineering paradox, sometimes slower is faster. And what about those tools for innovation? I’ll save them for another time.

There is a healthy tension between level of improvement, or level of innovation, and time to market. Marketing wants radical improvement, infinitely short project schedules, and no change to the product. Engineers want to sign up for the minimum level of improvement, project schedules sufficiently long to study everything to death, and want to change everything about the new product. It’s healthy because there is balance – both are pulling equally hard in opposite directions and things end up somewhere in the middle. It’s not a stress-free environment, but it’s not too bad. But, sometimes the tension is unhealthy.

There are two flavors of unhealthy tension. First is when engineering has too much pull; they (we) sandbag on product performance and project timelines and change the design willy-nilly simply because they can (and it’s fun). The results are long project timelines, highly innovative designs that don’t work well, a lack of product robustness, and a boatload of new parts and assemblies. (Product complexity.) Second is when Marketing has too much pull; they ask for radical improvement in product functionality with project timelines too short for the level of innovation, and tightly constrain product changes such that solutions are not within the constraints. The results are long project timelines and un-innovative designs that don’t meet product specifications. (The solutions are outside the constraints.) Both sides are at fault in both scenarios. There are no clean hands.

What are the fundamentals behind all this gamesmanship? For engineering it’s technical risk; for marketing it’s schedule risk. Engineering minimizes what it signs up for in order to reduce technical risk and petitions for long project timelines to reduce it. Marketing minimizes product changes (constraints) to reduce schedule risk and petitions for short project timelines to reduce it. (Product development teams work harder with short schedules.) Something’s got to change. Read the rest of this entry »

Improving product robustness is straightforward and difficult. Here’s how to do it.

Identify specific failure modes, prioritize them, and go after the biggest ones first. Failure modes can be identified through multiple sources. Warranty data is sometimes coded by failure mode (more precisely, symptom type), so start there. The number one failure mode in this type of data is typically “no problem found”, so be ready for it. Analysis of the actual products that come back is another good way. Returned product is routed to the appropriate engineer who analyzes it and enters the failure mode into a database. A formal design FMEA generates a list of prioritized failure modes through the risk priority number (RPN), where larger is more important. To do this, engineers are hauled into a room and a facilitator helps them come up with potential failure modes. One caution – the process can generate many failure modes, more than you can fix, so make the top five or ten go away and don’t argue the bottom fifty. It makes no sense to even talk about number eleven if you haven’t fixed the top ten. But the best way I have found to identify failure modes (problems) that are meaningful to the customer is to ask the technical services group for their top five things to fix. They will give you the right answer because they interact daily with customers who have broken product. They won’t expect you to listen to them (you never listened before), so surprise them by fixing one or two on their list. They will be grateful you listened (they’ll likely want to buy you coffee for the rest of your career) and your customers will notice.

Once failure modes are identified, define the physics of failure – why the product breaks. This is tough work and requires focused thought and analysis. If, when you break the product, it “looks like” the ones coming back from the field, you have defined the physics of failure. This is the same thing as replicating the problem in the lab. Once that’s defined, create an automated test rig or experimental setup that breaks the product in a way that captures the physics of failure. I call this test rig a robustness surrogate because it stands in for the actual failure mode seen in the field. The robustness surrogate should break the product as fast as possible while retaining the physics of failure so you can break it and fix it many times before product launch. The robustness surrogate should be designed to break the product within minutes, not hours or days – the faster the better.

To know if product robustness is improved, the baseline (or existing) design is broken on the robustness surrogate. The new design must survive longer on the robustness surrogate than the baseline design. The result is A/B data (baseline design/ new design) that is presented at the design review using a simple bar graph format which I call big-bar-little-bar. Keep improving robustness of the new design even if it outperforms the baseline design by a factor of ten – that’s not good enough for your customers.

Don’t stop improving robustness until you run out of time, and don’t stop if you meet the arbitrary MTBF specification. Customers like improved robustness, and in this case too much of a good thing is wonderful.

Using this method, I reduced warranty cost per unit by 75% over a five year period. It worked.

There are many definitions of product robustness and just as many formally trained specialists willing to argue about them. I get confused by all that complexity, I don’t like to argue, and I am not a specialist, I am a generalist. I like simplicity so I use operational definitions every chance I get. Here’s one for product robustness:

A customer walks up to your product, turns it on, and it works without breaking or getting in its own way.

Bad product robustness is bad for your brand. Very bad. Customers do not like when they pay money for a product and it doesn’t work, especially when they rely on those products to make money for themselves. And they remember the experience in a visceral way.

You can’t fix bad product robustness with great marketing; you can’t fix it with spin selling; you can’t tell customers you fixed it when you didn’t (since they use your product, they know the truth); and you can’t hide it because customers talk (so do competitors). There is no quick fix – it takes tools, time, training, and new thinking to improve product robustness. And when you do manage to fix it, customers won’t believe you until the see it for themselves. They don’t want to get burned again.

No product is infinitely robust, nor should it be. It doesn’t make financial sense. The product would be infinitely expensive and would take an infinite amount time to develop. But how much robustness is enough? An easier, and possibly more important, question to answer is – how much is too little? Or, stated another way, what is the minimum level of product robustness?

The specialists won’t agree with my assertion that there is a minimum threshold for product robustness, but I don’t care. I think there is one. I call this minimum value the brand-damaging threshold. Here’s an operational definition of product robustness that’s below the brand-damaging threshold:

Customers don’t buy your product because they know it breaks or gets in its own way and they go out of their way to tell others about it.

It is difficult to know when customers don’t buy, never mind know why they don’t. But there are some tell-tale signs that product robustness is below the brand-damaging threshold. Here are a few.

The CEO takes enough direct calls about products that don’t work to feel obligated to send you a thoughtfully-crafted, four word email saying something like “Fix that @#&% thing!” Customers have to be really pissed off to call the CEO directly, so the situation is bad. It’s also bad for a reason that’s closer to home – the CEO sent the email to you.

You get a little sick to your stomach when sales increase. You know you should be happy, but you’re not. Deep down you know you’ll see many of those products again because they’ll be sent back by angry customers, in pieces.

The volume of returns is so significant you create a refurbishment department. Or you create a new group to scavenge the reusable stuff off the piles of returned product. Not good signs.

Your product’s lack of robustness is the headline message in your customers’ marketing literature.

Now that the brand-damaging threshold is defined, the next logical topic is how to improve product robustness so it’s above the threshold. But that’s for another post.

It’s time to write, but, again, no topic.  This writing-once-a-week thing is tough.  I drop my son off at the hockey rink and walk back to the parking lot to write in my car (I’m telling you, this is a good place to write). Before I get to my car, my cell phone rings. It’s a teacher friend of mine. He’s the guy at the high school who helps kids work out issues with substance use/abuse and related topics. He’s a real pro – every high school should have a person of his caliber. Without introducing himself, he says, “You want to go for a hike tomorrow?” “I have to work,” I say. “It’s Veteran’s Day,” he says. “Yeah, I know, and I have to work,” I reply. “Oh ya, I forgot about that,” he says with a chuckle.

My mind clicks and I remember a discussion we had the previous week while on a walk.  I ask, “Do you remember talking about that trick to break intellectual inertia?” “Ya, we talked about how I used it to help a kid work himself out of some destructive behavior. Make it worse and do the opposite,” he says. “I love it; it works great,” he says. I now have my topic. We talk for a while and he helps my thinking converge. This one is a joint effort.

Here’s the problem: problems are stressful. We have a physiological reaction to problems; adrenaline rushes through our veins; our blood pressure increases; our heart rate increases; we get flushed. This is real. It’s run or attack, flight or fight. Our mental processing is all about survival. And there is real reason for concern; there are real consequences to not solving a problem – your reputation, your authority, your job. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone laughs at the person who says “We don’t have problems, we have opportunities.”  Why do we say that?  We know that’s crap.  We have problems; problems are real; and it’s okay to call them by name.  In fact, it’s healthy.  Problems are good.  Problems focus our thinking.  There is a serious and important nature to the word problem, and it sets the right tone.  Everyone knows if the situation has risen to the level of a problem it’s important and action must be taken.  People feel good about organizing themselves around a problem – problems help rally the troops.

In a previous post on innovation, I talked about the tight linkage between problems and innovation.  In the pre-innovation state there is a problem; in the post-innovation state there is no problem.  The work in the middle is a good description of the thing we call innovation.  It could also be called problem solving.

Behind every successful product launch is a collection of solved problems.  The engineering team defines the problems, understands the physics, changed the design, and makes problems go away.  Behind every unsuccessful product launch is at least one unsolved problem.  These unsolved problems disrupt product launches – limiting product function, delaying launches, and cancelling others altogether.  All this can be caused by a single unsolved problem. Read the rest of this entry »