Shipulski On Design

Search Results

Everyone wants to do more innovation.  But how? To figure out what’s going on with their innovation programs, companies spend a lot of time to put projects into buckets but this generates nothing but arguments about whether projects are disruptive, radical innovation, discontinuous, or not.  Such a waste of energy and such a source of […]

When doing new things there is no predictability. There’s speculation, extrapolation and frustration, but no prediction. And the labels don’t matter.  Whether it’s called creativity, innovation, discontinuous improvement or disruption there’s no prediction. The trick in the domain complexity is to make progress without prediction. The first step is to try to define the learning […]

When you’re laying in your camping tent dead tired and wanting for sleep the last thing you want is a rouge mosquito that dive-bombs you continuously throughout the night. With each sortie, it pushes on your expectations of how things should be. This little creature, so small and so powerless, becomes powerful enough to ruin […]

Like it or not, everything changes. The rock solid brand will erode and the venerable business model will wither and die. Though you will add immense energy to hold on to what you built, natural forces of competitive evolution will come up with something makes your best work extinct. We see it in our everyday […]

Today marks seven years of weekly blog posts.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far: When you can write about anything, what you choose tells everyone what you’re about. Sometimes you’ve got to start writing to figure out what you have to say. Some people think semicolons are okay; others don’t like to show off. When […]

When money is tight, it’s still important to do new work, but it’s doubly important not to waste it. There are a number of models to increase the probability of success of new work.  One well known approach is the VC model where multiple projects are run in parallel.  The trick is to start projects with […]

Urgency is important, but it’s not everything. It creates focus, but washes out the radical fringe. It’s easy to measure, but easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to work on. In the heat of the moment urgency is king. Frantic project managers take shortcuts to meet a deadline defined fourteen months ago; […]

Doing new work isn’t difficult, thinking about is difficult.  Stop thinking and start starting; there’s no other way. If you’re a scientist, everything has a half-life.  If you’re Buddhist, everything is impermanent.  If you’re a CEO, your business model is out of gas.  It’s scary to admit everything goes away, but it’s far scarier to […]

When the work is new, it all comes down to learning.  And with learning it all comes down to three questions: What do you want to learn? What actions will take to learn what you want to learn? How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn? There are many definitions of […]

Today’s work is complicated with electronic and mechanical subsystems wrapped in cocoons of software; coordination of matrixed teams; shared resources serving multiple projects; providing world class services in seventeen languages on four continents. And the complexity isn’t limited to high level elements.  There is a living layer of complexity growing on all branches of the […]

How a company allocates its resources defines its strategy.  But it’s tricky business to allocate resources in a way that makes the most of the existing products, services and business models yet accomplishes what’s needed to create the future. To strike the right balance, and before any decisions on specific projects, allocate the desired spending […]