Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Agile everywhere

    I’m finding examples of agile work practices in more and more places, and see them as perfectly aligned with the application of design practice in innovation services. Here’s a running list…

    I think people in the product design and user-centered design disciplines work in agile ways as well, but haven’t yet found a common frame that other disciplines readily understand.

  • Dancing elephants: Lockheed

    I love seeing big companies move in agile ways (because it’s so unusual), even if it only arises from panic of losing their old revenue streams. Here’s an example from Lockheed, whose old culture (despite their Skunk Works-style innovation) included bitter internal fights over whether to pursue unmanned aircraft…

    …It also designed and delivered the seven-pound Desert Hawk within 127 days of receiving an Air Force request. The total cost for the first six drones and laptop-computer control system was less than $400,000, Mr. Cappuccio says. To date, Lockheed says it has supplied 126 Desert Hawks, which are used for surveillance to protect U.S. bases in Iraq.

    When you also produce the most expensive fighter jet in the world, that’s certainly overcoming your innovator’s dilemma.

    Incidentally, here’s an article about another group at Lockheed using agile practices.

  • On pre-sliced, preserved apple slices…

    Twelve Easy Pieces…

    Not since the canneries of the early 20th century have food processors sought merely to preserve perishables. Processing foods now means redesigning them, making them easier to eat for a population that is steadily less willing to go to any trouble at all. Given the childhood obesity epidemic and the longstanding economic troubles of America’s apple growers, boosting the apple’s performance so that it could, as an industry observer explained, “stand up to ordinary use,” was a doubly urgent project. By making a healthful, fresh fruit that looks and acts more like a bag of chips, a handful of companies like Crunch Pak may have finally figured out a way to compete with the hassle-free junk foods that blazed into this era of hyperconvenience. Some marketers say that the reformation of our venerable apple — and the sense that this improvement was necessary — suggest that we may soon buy most of our produce this way. Presliced plums, celery, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, mangoes and star fruits are all in production.

  • Thinking numerically

    I’m taking a class in financial models to round out my skill set. The instructor said something interesting last night, taking care to put us in the right frame of mind for this work. He said, “Teach yourself to see the world in numbers. Try to think numerically.” In that comment I hear that quantitative work is not merely work, it’s a worldview, a mindset. Hearing this, to me, it validates talking about design as a way of thinking, and by investigating different areas I see how they differ but also how they can fit together. As I go through the class I want to see how thoroughly I can mesh the two.

    Incidentally, to help one think numerically he recommended the book What The Numbers Say.

  • Positive solutions that are neither left nor right

    In this Bruce Mau talk on Global Creativity, he mostly discusses the Massive Change exhibit. But at the end he drops this, without making it clear how it’s tied in… (my paraphrasing)

    Why are we seeing things on the political right and left that are both interesting? They should be at odds. What we realized is that there’s another political axis, and that’s what the project is about. There’s another axis at 90 degrees from the left and right which create a paradigm that is increasingly cumbersome and unproductive. And this new axis is about advanced and positive, rather than retrograde and not.

    I sense the existence of this axis intuitively, but it’s difficult to conceptualize examples of this given the constant left-right framing we do. Days after hearing Mau I read Million-Dollar Murray by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. To summarize/spoil it, some issues in society have a power-law distribution with regard to how they harm us, rather than a normal bell-curve distribution. Gladwell illustrates this with the examples of homelessness, police brutality, and car pollution, all cases where a small percentage account for the overwhelmingly largest costs. In comparing this to our usual political methods for dealing with these problems, he finds real progress is at Mau’s axis, 90 degrees to the left and right…

    Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know better. It’s that we didn’t want to know better. It was easier the old way.

    Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis.

    I have to think, religion aside, that Jesus was trying to tell us this a long time ago in the story of the father that welcomes back his prodigal son with a feast. Our political institutions are like the other brother who feels cheated, but the wise father knows it’s better to solve problems than manage them.

  • Better generalizations: finding true relationships between categories and traits

    Malcolm Gladwell’s Troublemakers extends his Blink thinking to how we generalize. The takeaway is “It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable — or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization.”

    In the article he asks whether pit bulls are dangerous dogs. It turns out they are only dangerous if bred, trained, or raised to be dangerous. A better indication of whether a dog may attack is if the dog displays aggressive behavior and has a negligent owner. Not an earth-shaking conclusion, but one we don’t always take the time to investigate.

  • Books on European Innovation

    A day after my recent musings, the Wall Street Journal looked at three books on European growth…

    Cousins and Strangers is written by the last British governer to Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner. Most of the text seems to mirror the kind of Bush administration bashing that progressives in the US already do, so nothing new there. It could be interesting for Americans to better understand how Europeans view themselves in relation to the U.S.

    In The Next Superpower? Rockwell Schnabel argues that the EU is a serious global economic force, and Americans need to pay heed. No argument there. He worries about overregulation and Europeans’ inability to take risk in order to make progress.

    It’s Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century that looks like the really interesting read for its counter-intuitive stance. The author, Mark Leonard, points out that two billion people now live in Europe’s “zone of influence” and gradually adopt European ways of doing things. This includes the EU’s 80,000 pages of regulations which, while seeming to hobble flexibility on the surface, is also dramatically changing any country that must obey them upon entry to the EU. So whereas the U.S. uses force to achieve regime change in Afghanistan, Leonard argues that the new power will be softer, as with the EU’s peaceful transformation of “all of Polish society.”

  • If an 8-year old can do it…

    Here’s a great story from David Hornik of how his 8-year old son started an Internet business.

    All the things we’ve struggled to make will be tools our kids use to build wonderful new things.

  • The Innovative Europe

    Continuing on the Europe theme, I see a lot of potential for innovation there if the EU, governments, and companies are willing to address the current challenges with a view of the current situation as helpful constraints rather than roadblocks.

    State-based benefits are a competitive advantage     that should be leveraged more. The obvious example is the advantage German car makers have when employees receive public health insurance vs. American car makers allocating more and more money to rising health care costs. Modifying these benefits could encourage a “free agent nation” where talented individuals can freely move from contract to contract. Many people will feel a personal insecurity about this compared to a regular job, but the government can show the way by putting the right policies in place now. America, ironically, is behind on this issue by continuing to tie health, retirement, and other benefits to a particular job (usually at medium or large companies only).

    Europe should embrace immigration     for all the benefits of diversity that America enjoys. It’s not an easy road, but with the example of America’s civil rights movement and South Africa’s apartheid behind us, Europe is not blazing a new trail here. France’s elitism results in rioting, Germany’s prejudice results in conflict, and the Danish media is mistaking blasphemy with freedom of the press. The EU and member nations need to see integration as inevitable and be more sensitive, sophisticated, and progressive about sharing their cultures. Power needs to be shared and will be over time, the question is only whether it’s a difficult process or not.

    Preserving culture vs. benefiting from globalism is a false dichotomy, and the media’s representation of the issue as protestors against free-market purists isn’t helping any. Each region needs to think about preserving what’s important to them and preserve it, while doing what is necessary to remain economically viable. Tuscany is a great example of putting very strict architectural restrictions in place while encouraging tourism. They don’t profit from giant tourist attractions, but they have built one amazing brand that is proving resilient.

    Unions (and worker’s councils) must become a competitive advantage rather than a source of friction. Again, management needs to recognize they share power with unions and leverage that relationship through collaboration to improve their operations. This is not a new road as the Japanese have already shown us the way with relationships of higher respect and processes that value collaboration and constant feedback (e.g. the Toyota Production System).

  • Who’s innovating?

    While pretty much everyone everywhere is freaking out about the future rich country status of China and India (can you say self-fulfilling prophesy?), the ability to innovate is what will keep the rich countries rich. So who’s innovating? According to this EU report, the innovation leaders are

    1. Sweden
    2. Switzerland
    3. Finland
    4. Japan
    5. Germany
    6. United States
    7. Denmark

    …in that order. But of course it’s the most shocking sound bite that has gotten all the attention: “…would trends for the 25 EU Member States remain stable, the gap with the US will not close within the next 50 years.” But focusing on the US generates the wrong metric. I tend to find everyone I know — in the US and Europe — underestimates how the EU influences European prosperity. It’s rarely ever discussed here in the US, but Europe is gradually building the kind of large, diverse trading environment that exists in the United States, trading not only goods but knowledge and expertise. A metric I’d like to see is the amount of innovation before and after EU initiatives, and how trading labor costs for knowledge across borders can bring innovation from the high innovation areas to the low innovation areas.

  • Swallowing stones

    “Some thoughts are like the digestive stones that birds swallow.” — Owen, in a conversation on change.

  • Everything written about innovation is shitty and useless

    Walking home from work tonight I was thinking that most everything written about innovation is useless. It’s generic banter. Fixing companies must be done in the context of their problems by people passionate enough to constantly push against the dead weight of status quo.

    If we learn anything useful from the Tom Peters of this world, it’s the need for passion. Arriving home I read, hot on the heels of Culture eats strategy for breakfast, this beauty from Tom Peters…

    If Drucker and Bennis and Collins and Peters and Co. (charter members of Guru Nation) are/were so damn smart-wise, why is corporate performance so shabby in general? …the “solutions” were not actionable by “real people” under stress….

    Strategy don’t matter for diddly if the “corporate culture” [an anathema word at McKinsey at the time], is disfunctional/mis-aligned.” That is, if the “strategy” ain’t implementable, it’s de facto a shitty-useless strategy.

  • Interaction Design as Language Design?

    Marc Rettig, one of the most thoughtful practioners in the user experience world, will be in New York next month discussing Interaction Design is Language Design…

    …The notion of a “design language” has been with us for years, but if we take the idea seriously, perhaps ideas and frameworks from linguistics can help us design better interfaces. The goal of the topic is to create a grounded practice using the explored principles. The seminar is not meant to be a completed theory, but a work in progress that participants get to explore with Marc during the seminar and after on their own work.

  • Is Angie a design thinker?

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel is making waves at Davos. I like her attitude: “She acknowledged the political necessity to move ‘in small steps.’ She added, ‘In Germany, sometimes things never get going because one doesn’t know how it will work out, and maybe it’s better to do nothing. That’s not my maxim.’“

  • MIG Seminar in Vancouver, March 23

    We’ll be teaching a full-day seminar prior to the IA Summit called Enhancing Your Strategic Influence: Understanding and Responding to Complex Business Problems. I’ll be joined by John Zapolski and Scott Hirsch of MIG, Harry Max (formerly of Dreamworks), and Mark McCormick (Director of Design at Wells Fargo).

    We’ve been designers. And we’ve partnered with companies to work through tricky business issues. Now we want to return to the design community and teach the many skills we’ve learned.

    Here’s the official description:

    While the skill level of the average information architect has increased dramatically over the last several years, many IAs still lack the tools necessary to understand and articulate the broader implications of their work within a complex and dynamic business environment. The most successful information architects are better at recognizing the roots of strategic change and opportunity, assessing the potential impacts on their organization, and determining what to do and who to involve in getting it done.

    This workshop introduces participants to a new way of thinking about cause and effect in complex organizations—within functional groups, across departments, beyond business units, and across industries. Participants come away with a set of tools to identify social, cultural, economic, and technological change, match products to emerging and changing markets, develop strategies to capture market value, and change organizational capabilities to reflect changing market and technological dynamics. Special attention is given to learning how to create and maintain a workplace and culture that facilitate and sustain innovation and change.

    Here are some of the basic questions that we will help participants answer, both in general and in the context of their companies:

    • What is a business model? A value proposition? A business strategy?
    • Given my role, what contribution am I making to my company’s success?
    • How does IA/UX deliver value in my company’s business model and value proposition?
    • How do I determine how to choose my battles wisely: which high-value projects to push and which can stay on the back burner?
    • How do I say “no” to bad projects? What language will be most convincing to my management and stakeholders?
    • How can I get more visibility for IA/UX in my company? How do I build alliances with like-minded stakeholders?
    • How do other functions typically understand business problems, and how does that compare to the IA perspective?

    This session is designed specifically for managers and leaders who seek to use IA as a strategic tool to understand and influence organizational change. While a deep knowledge of advanced IA principles is not necessary for this session, participants should be willing to explore their roles as leaders and change agents within their organizations.

    Types of attendees most likely to find this workshop compelling include:

    • Managers of IA/UX teams
    • Product Managers
    • Entrepreneurs seeking to build a culture that values IA/UX design
    • IA/UX practitioners who report to a non-designer manager
    • Anyone who aspires to enhance their role as an internal change agent