Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

If you think asking for help is a sign of weakness, you won’t get the help you deserve.

If the people around you think asking for help is a sign of weakness, find new people.

As a leader, asking others for help makes it easier for others to ask for help.

When someone asks you for help, help them.

If you’re down in the dumps, help someone.

Helping others is like helping yourself twice.

Helping is caring in action.

If you help someone because you want something in return, people recognize that for what it is.

Done right, helping makes both parties stand two inches taller.

Sometimes the right help gives people the time and space to work things out for themselves.

Sometimes the right help asks people to do work outside their comfort zone.

Sometimes the right help is a difficult conversation.

Sometimes the right help is a smile, a phone call, or a text.

And sometimes the right help isn’t recognized as help until six months after the fact.

Here’s a rule to live by – When in doubt, offer help.

“Helping Daddy” by audi_insperation is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

If you know the right answer, you’re working on an old problem or you’re misapplying your experience.

If you are 100% sure how things will turn out, let someone else do it.

If there’s no uncertainty, there can be no learning.

If there’s no learning, your upstart competitors are gaining on you.

If you don’t know what to do, you’ve started the learning cycle.

If you add energy to your business model and it delivers less output, it’s time for a new business model.

If you wait until you’re sure you need a new business model, you waited too long.

Successful business models outlast their usefulness because they’ve been so profitable.

When there’s a project with a 95% chance to increase sales by 3%, there’s no place for a project with a 50% chance to increase sales by 100%.

When progress has slowed, maybe the informal networks have decided slower is faster.

If there’s something in the way, but you cannot figure out what it is, it might be you.

“A bouquet of wilting adapters” by rexhammock is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

One of the best problems to solve for your customers is the problem they don’t know they have.  If you can pull it off, you will create an entirely new value proposition for them and enable them to do things they cannot do today. But the problem is they can’t ask you to solve it because they don’t know they have it.

To identify problems customs can’t see, you’ve got to watch them go about their business.  You’ve got to watch all aspects of their work and understand what they do and why they do it that way.  And it’s their why that helps you find the transparent problems.  When they tell you their why, they tell you the things they think cannot change and the things they consider fundamental constraints.  Their whys tell you what they think is unchangeable.  And from their perspective, they’re right.  These things are unchangeable because they don’t know what’s possible with new technologies.

Once you know their unchangeable constraints, choose one to work on and turn it into a tight problem statement.  Then use your best tools and methods to solve it.  Once solved, you’ve got to make a functional prototype and show them in person.  Without going back to them with a demonstration of a functional prototype, they won’t believe you.  Remember, you did something they didn’t think was possible and changed the unchangeable.

When demonstrating the prototype to the customer, just show it in action.  Don’t describe it, just show them and let them ask questions.  Listen to their questions so you can see the prototype through their eyes.  And to avoid leading the witness, limit yourself to questions that help you understand why they see the prototype as they do.  The way they see the prototype will be different than your expectations, and that difference is called learning.  And if you find yourself disagreeing with them, you’re doing it wrong.

This first prototype won’t hit the mark exactly, but it will impress the customer and it will build trust with them.  And because they watched the prototype in action, they will be able to tell you how to improve it.  Or better yet, with their newfound understanding of what’s possible, they might be able to see a more meaningful transparent problem that, once solved, could revolutionize their industry.

Customers know their work and you know what’s possible.  And prototypes are a great way to create the future together.

“Transparent” by Rene Mensen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Put together things that contradict yet make a wonderfully mismatched pair.

Say things that contradict common misunderstandings.

See the dark and dirty underside of things.

Be more patient with people.

Stomp on success.

Dissent.

Tell the truth even when it’s bad for your career.

See what wasn’t but should have been.

Violate first principles.

Protect people.

Trust.

See things as they aren’t.

See what’s missing.

See yourself.

See.

“man in park (triangulation)” by Josh (broma) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

If there’s one superpower to develop, it’s to learn how to assess a project and get a good feel for when it will launch.

When you want to know how long a project will take, ask this simple question: ‘What must the project team learn before the project can launch?”  By starting with this single question, you will start the discussion that will lead you to an understanding of what hasn’t been done before and where the uncertainty is hiding.  And if there’s one thing that can accelerate a project, it’s defining where the uncertainty is hiding. And knowing this doubly powerful, like a pure two-for-one, because if you know where uncertainty is, by definition, you know where it isn’t. Where the uncertainty isn’t, you can do what you did last time, and because you’ve done it before, you know how long it will take.  No new tools, no new methods, no new analyses, no new machines, no new skillsets, no new anything. And for the remaining elements of the project, well, that’s where the uncertainty is hiding and that’s where you will focus on the learning needed to secure the launch.

But it can be difficult to understand the specific learning that must be done for a project to launch.  One trick I like to use is the Same-But-Different method. It goes like this.  Identify a project that launched (Project A) that’s most similar to the one that will launch next (Project B) and perform a subtraction of sorts.  Declare that Project B (the one you want to launch) is the same as Project A (the one you already launched) but different in specific ways and then define those differences as clearly and tightly as possible.  And where it’s different, that’s where the learning energy must be concentrated.

Same-But-Different sounds simplistic and trivial, but it isn’t.  More than anything, it’s powerful.  For the elements that are the same, you do what you did last time, which is freeing.  And for the small subset if things that are different, you dig in!

Same-But-Different drives deep clarity and extreme focus, which result in blistering progress and blinding effectiveness.

And for some reason unknown to me, asking a team to define the novel elements of a project is at least fifty times more difficult than asking them how Project B is different than Project A.  So, it feels good to the team when they can use Same-But-Different to quickly easily define what’s different and then point directly to the uncertainty.  And once the team knows where the uncertainty is hiding, it’s no longer hiding.

And if there’s one thing a project team likes, it’s knowing where the uncertainty is hiding.

“The same, but different by the Paris Photographic Co. (c.1880)” by pellethepoet is marked with CC BY 2.0.

Clean-sheet designs are fun, right up until they don’t launch.

When you feel the urge to do a clean-sheet design, go home early.

When you don’t know how to make it better, make it worse and do the opposite.

Without trying, there is no way to know if it will work.

Trying sometimes feels like dying.

But without trying, nothing changes.

Agreement is important, but only after the critical decision has been made.

When there’s 100% agreement, you waited too long to make the decision.

When it’s unclear who the customer is, ask “Whose problem will be solved?”

When the value proposition is unclear, ask ‘What problem will be solved?”

When your technology becomes mature, no one wants to believe it.

When everyone believes the technology is mature, you should have started working on the new technology four years ago.

If your projects are slow, blame your decision-making processes.

Two of the most important decisions: which projects to start and which to stop.

All the action happens at the interfaces, but that’s also where two spans of control come together and chafe.

If you want to understand your silos and why they don’t play nicely together, look at the organizational chart.

When a company starts up, the product sets the organizational structure.

Then, once a company is mature, the organizational structure constrains the product.

At the early stages of a project, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

And once the project is complete, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

“Toys Never Forget” by Alyssa L. Miller is marked with CC BY 2.0.

When you have no slack time, you can’t start new projects.

When you have no slack time, you can’t run toward the projects that need your help.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to think.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to learn.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for concern for others.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for your best judgment.

When there is no slack time, what used to be personal becomes transactional.

When there is no slack time, any hiccup creates project slip.

When you have no slack time, the critical path will find you.

When no one has slack time, one project’s slip ripples delay into all the others.

When you have no slack time, excitement withers.

When you have no slack time, imagination dies.

When you have no slack time, engagement suffers.

When you have no slack time, burnout will find you.

When you have no slack time, work sucks.

When you have no slack time, people leave.

I have one question for you.  How much slack time do you have?

“Hurry up Leonie, we are late…” by The Preiser Project is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When you design something, you create a solution to a collection of problems.  But it goes far beyond creating the solution.  You also must create objective evidence that demonstrates that the solution does, in fact, solve the problems.  And the reason to generate this evidence is to help the organization believe that the solution solves the problem, which is an additional requirement that comes with designing something.  Without this belief, the organization won’t go out to the customer base and convince them that the solution will solve their problems.  If the sales team doesn’t believe, the customers won’t believe.

In school, we are taught to create the solution, and that’s it.  Here are the drawings, here are the materials to make it, here is the process documentation to build it, and my work here is done. But that’s not enough.

Before designing the solution, you’ve got to design the tests that create objective evidence that the solution actually works, that it provides the right goodness and it solves the right problems.  This is an easy thing to say, but for a number of reasons, it’s difficult to do.  To start, before you can design the right tests, you’ve got to decide on the right problems and the right goodness.  And if there’s disagreement and the wrong tests are defined, the design community will work in the wrong areas to generate the wrong value.  Yes, there will be objective evidence, and, yes, the evidence will create a belief within the organization that problems are solved and goodness is achieved.  But when the sales team takes it to the customer, the value proposition won’t resonate and it won’t sell.

Some questions to ask about testing. When you create improvements to an existing product, what is the family of tests you use to characterize the incremental goodness?  And a tougher question: When you develop a new offering that provides new lines of goodness and solves new problems, how do you define the right tests? And a tougher question: When there’s disagreement about which tests are the most important, how do you converge on the right tests?

Image credit — rjacklin1975

Next year will be different, but we don’t know how it will be different. All we know is that it will be different.

Some things will be the same and some will be different.  The trouble is that we won’t know which is which until we do.  We can speculate on how it will be different, but the Universe doesn’t care about our speculation.  Sure, it can be helpful to think about how things may go, but as long as we hold on to the may-ness of our speculations.  And we don’t know when we’ll know. We’ll know when we know, but no sooner. Even when the Operating Plan declares the hardest of hard dates, the Universe sets the learning schedule on its own terms, and it doesn’t care about our arbitrary timelines.

What to do?

Step 1. Try three new things. Choose things that are interesting and try them.  Try to try them in parallel as they may interact and inform each other. Before you start, define what success looks like and what you’ll do if they’re successful and if they’re not.  Defining the follow-on actions will help you keep the scope small.  For things that work out, you’ll struggle to allocate resources for the next stages, so start small.  And if things don’t work out, you’ll want to say that the projects consumed little resources and learned a lot.  Keep things small.  And if that doesn’t work, keep them smaller.

Step 2. Rinse and repeat.

I wish you a happy and safe New Year.  And thanks for reading.

Mike

“three” by Travelways.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When times are stressful, it’s more difficult to be effective and skillful in our interactions with others.  Here are some thoughts that could help.

Decide how you want to respond, and then respond accordingly.

Before you respond, take a breath. Your response will be better.

If you find yourself responding before giving yourself permission, stop your response and come clean.

Better responses from you make for even better responses from others.

If you interrupt someone in the middle of their sentence so you can make your point, you made a different point.

If you find yourself preparing your response while listening to someone, that’s not listening.

If you recognize you’re not listening, now there are at least two people who know the truth.

When there are no words coming from your mouth, that doesn’t constitute listening.

The strongest deterrent to listening is talking.

If you disagree with one element of a person’s position, you can, at the same time, agree with other elements of their position.  That’s how agreement works.

If you start with agreement, even the smallest bit, disagreement softens.

Before you can disagree, it’s important to listen and understand. And it’s the same with agreement.

It’s easy to agree if that’s what you want to accomplish.  And it’s the same for disagreement.

If you want to move toward agreement, start with understanding.

If you want to demonstrate understanding, start with listening.

If you want to demonstrate good listening, start with kindness.

Here are three mantras I find helpful:

Talk less to listen more.

Before you respond, take a breath.

Kindness before agreement.

“Rock-em” by REL Waldman is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

By definition, the approach that made you successful will become less successful over time and, eventually, will run out of gas.  This fundamental is not about you or your approach, rather it’s about the nature of competition and evolution.  There’s an energy that causes everything to change, grow and improve and your success attracts that energy.  The environment changes, the people change, the law changes and companies come into existence that solve problems in better and more efficient ways.  Left unchanged, every successful business endeavor (even yours) has a half-life.

If you want to extend the life of your business endeavor, you’ve got to be novel.

By definition, if you want to grow, you’ve got to raise your game. You’ve got to do something different.  You can’t change everything, because that’s inefficient and takes too long.  So, you’ve got to figure out what you can reuse and what you’ve got to reinvent.

If you want to grow, you’ve got to be novel.

Being novel is necessary, but expensive.  And risky. And scary.  And that’s why you want to add just a pinch of novelty and reuse the rest.  And that’s why you want to try new things in the smallest way possible.  And that’s why you want to try things in a time-limited way. And that’s why you want to define what success looks like before you test your novelty.

Some questions and answers about being novel:

Is it easy to be novel? No.  It’s scary as hell and takes great emotional strength.

Can anyone be novel? Yes. But you need a good reason or you’ll do what you did last time.

How can I tell if I’m being novel? If you’re not scared, you’re not being novel.  If you know how it will turn out, you’re not being novel.  If everyone agrees with you, you’re not being novel.

How do I know if I’m being novel in the right way? You cannot. Because it’s novel, it hasn’t been done before, and because it hasn’t been done before there’s no way to predict how it will go.

So, you’re saying I can’t predict the outcome of being novel?  Yes.

If I can’t predict the outcome of being novel, why should I even try it? Because if you don’t, your business will go away.

Okay.  That last one got my attention.  So, how do I go about being novel? It depends.

That’s not a satisfying answer. Can you do better than that? Well, we could meet and talk for an hour.  We’d start with understanding your situation as it is, how this current situation came to be, and talk through the constraints you see.  Then, we’d talk about why you think things must change.  I’d then go away for a couple of days and think about things.  We’d then get back together and I’d share my perspective on how I see your situation.  Because I’m not a subject matter expert in your field, I would not give you answers, but, rather, I’d share my perspective that you could use to inform your choice on how to be novel.

“Giraffe trying to catch a twig with her tongue” by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0