As a rule, I don’t write much of anything here about my job at IDEO, but in this case, I have to make an exception.

Here’s what life looks like in place that likes to build stuff, do stuff, and generally kick ass.  We have a yearly Halloween party where various IDEO’ers put together costumes, scarf some pizza, and generally have a good time.  This year, however, the ante got upped, and things were, well… thrilling.

In what kind of organizational culture do people dedicate multiple lunch hours to practice dance moves?  This one.  Creative genius at work.  And look at the all the obvious love and support they get from assembled coworkers.  Cool.

failure sucks, but instructs

For my MBA friends (apologies to Dr. Porter)

I’m mildly addicted to cable TV.  I simply can’t get enough of two shows on Discovery Channel: Dirty Jobs and Build it Bigger.  Both of these shows revolve around a witty, game, and willing host who puts himself in to the middle of projects where things are being built, renovated, restored, maintained, or torn down.  These aren’t shows about stuff, they’re shows about the reality of making stuff and keeping stuff viable.  I call them "build" shows because they deal with atoms, not just ideas, and atoms tend to have a mind of their own… building things is a tough past time.  Talking about doing things is one thing; doing them is quite another.

I’m a big believer in knowing how to build things before you begin to decide what to build.  In other words, at an individual, team, group, and organizational level, deeply understand execution before you engage in strategy.  If innovation is about using ideas to make a change in the world, then the ability to execute is vital, and the ability to know what can be executed is even more important.  Building informs one’s ability to know what will work the next time you go to the strategy board.

Building is not only important as a way to shape one’s ability to formulate strategy.  Especially important is the notion that building is strategy, or that building as you go is a key way to coax an emergent strategy in to being.  The other day I was shooting the breeze with a colleague who made the observation that the way we (him, me, and design thinkers in general) formulate strategy is by making our hands bleed.  We in other words, we take our notions of strategy and build them, whether they be of bricks or bytes, and we let the results kick the crap our of precious notions of what should have worked.  Sometimes building a prototype will literally cut your fingers  — or, heaven forbid, take them off — but even a HTML protoype can deal a nasty sting to one’s ego.  But that’s the way to go. Know by doing, do because you know.

Perhaps strategy should make your hands bleed.

I just spent part of an hour looking for Steve Fossett via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  Fossett has been missing since he took off in a Citabria on September 3.

It was very easy.  I searched about 7 square kilometers of Nevada in just 40 minutes.  Here are the directions given by Amazon:

Instructions

You will be shown a single satellite
image. The task is to flag any satellite images which contain foreign
objects that may resemble Steve’s airplane or parts of a plane. Steve’s
plane will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or
nearly white, about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan.

Notes

If in doubt, be conservative and
mark the image. For complete coverage, we’ve set up this HIT such that
multiple people will cover the same area several times over. Please do
your best, but do not worry that missing one little detail will be
tragic. It will get caught.

Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who
will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Steve
Fossett.

Friends and family of Steve Fossett would like to thank you for helping them with this cause.

You basically just scan, and click "yes" or "no".  Here’s what the interface looks like:

Per the open source dictum that many brains make deep bugs shallow, I hope that in this case many turks make a lost plane findable.  This a striking yet tragic example of the power the web has to facilitate networked collaborations of broad scale and scope.  You can help here.

Here’s a Director’s Commentary by proxy.  Former Formula 1 mechanic turned author and commentator Steve Matchett walks us around some of the aerodynamic details on the Ferrari F2007 Formula 1 car. 

Warning!  There’s a lot of gearheadedness here.  It’s a quick watch though, and even if you’re not in to the extreme technological thinking that goes in to a modern F1 car, it is worth thinking about this:  what might happen if all the human ingenuity currently being poured in to carving out the tiniest margins of relative performance were instead focused upon creating paradigm shifts in the way we move across the planet?  That would be mind-boggling, I suspect.

Unfortunately, motorsports has become largely a game of incremental innovation.  It needs to be a place where revolutionary innovation is not just encouraged, but essential.

Well, a guy can dream.  Until then, tomorrow’s Grand Prix is at Monza, my favorite circuit on the calendar.  It’s the hallowed ground were the greatest racers like Nuvolari, Fangio, and Moss all plied their craft.  I might even get up at 4am to watch it live. 

Go Massa!  Forza Ferrari!