I'm now contributing an occasional bit about what's cool and interesting over at the The Daily Beast's Buzz Board.
To date I haven't found a good way to include book reviews and the like here at metacool, so the Buzz Board should be a good outlet for that stuff.
"When you're making something of high quality, you have to polish it a certain number of times. This is actually a number of trial and errors. When you think about how much you can polish something in a four-year development period, you're talking about how many times you can do trial and error and then speed becomes the defining factor. When you all share that speed as a team, you can polish a car like never before. It's that simple, really."
– Kazutoshi Mizuno, Chief Vehicle Engineer, Nissan GT-R
I love this insight of Mizuno's, because it speaks to one of the fundamental aspects of design thinking as it relates to the process of innovation: iterate, iterate, iterate. I often relate "business by design" to "business as usual" by using a sporting analogy: business as usual is about efficiency and accuracy, about swimming as fast a race as one can. And there's a time and a place for that. Business by design, in contrast, would be a swim race where you where rewarded based on the number of laps you could get in within a certain amount of time. You want to do lap after lap, because with each stroke through the water, you gain the opportunity to learn something new, to try a different approach. The sum of all those small learnings and insights — together with the occasional big leap — is what ends up being called innovative behavior.
But I like Mizuno's notion of polishing more than I do that of laps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Keep trying for perfection even though you know it will never come in a full sense, but with each try some new learning emerges.
So how quickly can you polish and iterate?
quote source: Gran Turismo TV, "The GT-R Legend Inside Story"
If you have a minute, read this awesome blog post by my friend Bob Sutton
I hope you have a good Thanksgiving.
Sure, you can call me anal-retentive (which I'm not — I think "perfectionist" is a more accurate term, but without the connotation of stasis that comes with it), but I love what I see in the photo above. I took it at a hotel I visited recently.
What do you see?
I see the mark of someone who cared. I see someone who was paying attention. I see a belief in quality and the pursuit of perfection. I see a work culture where people are able to exercise their need to do good work.
All this in eight screwheads aligned on the same plane, plus four switches located correctly within their assigned cutout (if you've ever put one of these panels together, you know how hard this is to do). Quality experiences and offerings are fractal in nature, and rely on the largest and smallest elements to all be in sync. Being a guest at this hotel — from the bed to the room to the food to the views — was a marvelous experience, and looking at this panel none of that news should come as a surprise.
Again, everything matters.
Just the other week I met with the teaching team for the 2009 edition of Creating Infectious Action (CIA) at the Stanford d.school, and we spent a few hours coming up with a new point of view for the class. In previous years we've focused students on building something up, from finding ways to spread the idea of saving money to recruiting more users of Firefox. This year, however, we want to try something different: we're going to have students try to take something down. Really take it down, down to downtown.
The mission of CIA 2009 will be to kill gas. As in the gasoline you put in your car. How can we spread the idea that gas is not the only answer? We'll find out in the Spring of 2009.
Nothing is set in stone, however. We're just prototyping the idea, which means that I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on this theme. Can you imagine projects we can do? Or organizations to work with? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.
This should be a really interesting class, and I'm looking forward to learning a ton from the rest of the teaching team: Perry Klebahn, Joe Mellin, and Bob Sutton.
As I've learned over the past few years of teaching the Creating Infectious Action course at the Stanford d.school, it is possible to consciously design something to be viral. If you have a remarkable offering and a system to spread the word, all you need to be viral is a sticky, memorable message. Easier said than done, but at least there's a list of reliable design guidelines. That's progress.
Last week Tom Perriello won the battle for the congressional seat of the 5th District in Virginia. An underdog in the race, Perriello won the election in no small part because of effective messages, such as this remarkable commercial:
This is nothing if not a memorable, sticky message, artfully designed. It is so because Perriello hews closely to the "SUCCESs" algorhthym laid out by Chip and Dan Heath in their wonderful book Made to Stick. Deconstructing this ad shows us these component parts:
While I don't know if the Perriello campaign used the SUCCESs guidelines in designing this commercial, as a finished piece it is a great benchmark of what a truly sticky message should be.
… what your politics are. In my book, any week where Lewis Hamilton can become World Driving Champion and Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States of America is a very good week.
A very good week for humanity, indeed.
Optimism, perseverence, and courage will take us far.
I participated in The Business Summit at Harvard Business School earlier this month. If you were to plan the most interesting time possible to gather 2,000 business leaders from across the globe, you couldn't have found a better time than October, 2008.
A highlight of the conference was hearing Professor Niall Ferguson lecture on the origins of the current macro economic climate. His lecture was instructive and riveting. You can see the video here.
He also penned a great article for Time magazine earlier this month: The End of Prosperity?
At IDEO (the firm I work at), we recently held a "chain reaction" event across all of our offices: Shanghai, Munich, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Palo Alto. Self-nominated teams in each office crafted their own chain reaction experience, each of which was triggered by another chain reaction experience sitting in another office. It all took place on one Friday morning…
Why? Because… just because. Because it is fun. Because it is there. Because cultures that play on a routine basis are more likely to be innovative routinely. Because the question "how can we be more innovative?" is better couched as "how can we be more comfortable acting in innovative ways?". It's about encouraging a behavior, not a thing. A verb, not a noun.
Since innovative behavior is about both the practitioner and the environment they live in, why not do something that buffs both?
You can see more about this grand world exercise at IDEO Labs
PS: the "trick" in the NYC/SF transition was done using a body double
Here's a great interview with Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman.
He provides a very crisp definition of what design thinking is about. Design thinking is about creating better things, while traditional analytic thinking is about choosing between things. We need both, but surely the world would be in a better place if there was a bit more design thinking in play out there. Which is why we now have places like Rotman and the d.school and the entire design thinking movement.
By the way, if you don't read Rotman magazine, you should. And if you haven't read Martin's book The Opposable Mind, go out an grab a copy today!