Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Intro

    James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the best book I’ve read in a while. In it he forwards a compelling thesis:

    If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

    This strikes me as a useful tool in the business design toolbox, where constant collaboration with people with a diversity of opinions and from multiple disciplines raises the quality of work.

    He addresses three kinds of problems:

    • Cognition problems, that have or will have definitive solutions
    • Coordination problems, that require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other
    • Cooperation problems, that involve the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together

    And he identifies four conditions that characterize wise crowds:

    1. diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts)
    2. independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)
    3. decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)
    4. aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into collective decisions)

    The rest of the book is dedicated to telling stories that illustrate and explain the above four conditions. More in future posts…

  • Focusing on business design

    At the Information Architecture Summit there was a strong thread of interest in business and management (my hypothesis for this centers on two trends: the population bell curve places many IAs at an age where they are rapidly moving into management for the first time, and as a discipline IAs have already invented many of the technical skills they need to get that job done). In this environment many were interested in my new-ish company — Management Innovation Group — and appreciated our approach. Our chats started early and ended late and I heard many helpful ideas and skepticism, especially from the wise and thoughtful Jess McMullin. That’s going to fuel many of my future posts here; you’ve been warned.

    The approach has been termed Business Design, though that framing of it isn’t entirely satisfactory. My working definition is The application of design thinking to business strategy and operations. I’ll talk more about what I mean by design thinking in future posts, but for now the best description I know is Jeanne Liedtka’s essay Strategy as Design in the Rotman design issue (.pdf), required reading on the subject.

  • Stanford’s d.school

    “Be a part of the design thinking movement“

  • Strategy + Business mag

    Strategy + Business is a pretty good quarterly. Free registration allows access to the copious archives. Without reading the About page, you might never know it’s published by a consulting firm, Booz Allen.

  • Integrative Thinking

    Roger Martin and the folks at the Rotman School are helping to popularize a model of Integrative Thinking they see in more successful leaders. Summarized, integrative thinkers consistently consider a broader and more diverse set of inputs to be salient to an issue. They work on all those inputs simultaneously — bringing each into focus in turn — rather than consider them in discrete sequences. They perceive indirect casual links among the inputs. And they work creatively to find new solutions, rejecting the tradeoffs that others accept.

  • Slides from Can We Run the Company?

    Here’s the slides from my recent talk, Can We Run the Company? (.pdf). You’ll have to imagine me waving my arms wildly as you read.

    To summarize, if we got into this business to empower people, we can do even more empowering from higher up in the organization. Our skills as designers can be used not just to create artifacts but to help us perform management functions as well. But, even though we’re still using our design skills, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as designers and start thinking of ourselves as leaders.

  • A merger of consumer product innovators

    While some have read the Gillett-Proctor & Gamble merger as leverage against Wal-Mart, James Surowiecki argues it was all about combining innovative like-minds:

    A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted to the consumer.” This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.

  • Richard Farson

    I stumbled across Richard Farson’s site looking for an old HBR article he wrote, and discovered a wealth of excellent thinking, synthesizing ideas on business design, organizational design and designers.

    The article from HBR, The Fault-Tolerant Leader (free here), hits on all the important reasons management needs to accept risk in order to innovate. His articles Management by Design and Designers as Leaders are excellent as well.

  • New Army combat uniform

    The U.S. Army’s new combat uniform is an interesting study in apparel design. Whereas before they needed three different uniform colors for camoflage in different environments, this one does a pretty good job in all cases. It has a reflective material that allows them to identify each other at night through night glasses. And there’s more changes in the fit, pockets, use of velcro, etc.

    Here’s some video.

  • Rotman Business Design Conference

    There doesn’t seem to be many first-person accounts of Rotman’s recent Business Design Conference. Here’s some of the press releases instead:

    Shift Needed in Design World, Says Whitney

    “The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal
    with all sorts of issues on a global scale.”

    The Design of Business, Rather Than Designing for Business, Leads to Greater Innovations Says IDEO President & CEO

    “Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.”

    Intelligent Design is Key to Our Success Says Four Seasons Hotel President

    “…last but not least is our decision to focus all of our energy and expertise on hotel management rather than ownership.”

  • Creating change by creating leaders

    Imagine a consulting organization that not only provided advice, but guided clients through the changes recommended. Imagine further that the client learned and was transformed by being challenged to quickly assume the place of the consultants.

    Imagine how much more effective the consultants’ advice would be in the long term if they emphasized qualities like

    • Self-knowledge
    • Craftsmanship
    • Tenacity
    • Teamwork
    • Leadership
    • The ability to go beyond self-imposed limitations
    • Acceptance of responsibility
    • Self-reliance

    That’s what Outward Bound does. They take you out into the wilderness and show you a plethora of new skills, everything from navigating dangerous white water rapids in a raft to campsite cooking for 30. The next day you’re not only expected to do these things, but to also lead your peers through them. It’s deliberately very hard, and forces people to step up and achieve more than they could before, and become more comfortable as leaders. It seems to me this is a great model for consultants to use when the goal is to create lasting change.

  • The essence of brainstorming

    “The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting. ” — John Cleese

  • Design as a core strategy

    My business partner John Zapolski will be speaking at The Institute of Design Strategy Conference in May. For a preview of his thoughts, check out the interview with him on the conference website, “Design as a Core Strategy“.

    …Companies that are successful exploiting the full potential of design do so because it’s present in all of the decisions the company makes. …these companies aren’t choosing to apply design to their respective business strategies, but have chosen design as the fundamental strategy itself. Design is the philosophical core of the company. Everyone in the company becomes involved in designing, whether that means creating financial plans or selecting casing materials for an industrial product. Design isn’t something that the design department does. It’s a way of operating the company. It’s an ongoing set of choices about how the company is going to exist, to compete, to grow.

  • There’s a juicy internationalization problem

    Hindus in Europe want to take back the swastika because to them it’s a symbol of luck and peace which the Nazis stole. Meanwhile the European Parliment is considering banning the symbol throughout Europe after Prince Harry of Great Britain wore a mock Nazi uniforn to a costume party.

  • Disruption in home audio

    If you’d like to see the process of a disruptive technology take hold before the disruption, look at the home audio industry.

    In the past year or two home audio has taken some interesting turns. Before you basically had two configurations: simpler, inexpensive all-in-one systems or more flexible and expensive separates. Cambridge Soundworks, then Tivoli, erased the difference by bringing us small, high-quality separates mostly by reducing speaker size and increasing speaker efficiency, thereby requiring smaller amplifiers.

    Next we saw stereo-computer communication and integration. There’s stereo components with computers inside (e.g. CD+DVD+MP3 for $39) and “sound cards” have turned into receiver replacements. Naturally there’s the next generation of devices that distribute the signal throughout the home. The big question for the consumer amid this mess is: does my computer become the audio hub, do I bridge the computer and stereo together, or do I buy duplicate functionality and keep the systems separate? Expecting the consumer to be home audio network architect isn’t helping anyone, except those who install custom setups for the wealthy.

    The phase that’s emerging now is the audiophile killers, true audiophile sound in small packages at previously unthinkable prices. This was started by 47 Labs’s Gaincard amplifier that works not via tubes or traditional solid state circuitry but by using a single chip for amplification. Because it so reduced complexity, the DIY contingent created copies called gainclones that achieve the same sound quality at prices you might pay for an average consumer amp. The next, inevitable, step was to mass produce this approach, which is what Sonic Impact did with the Class T amp ($39, and as low as $19 recently at PC Mall). Audiophiles are going ga ga over it.

    The next phase — the distruptive bit — is a when a clueful industrial designer (e.g. Bose, Apple, Griffin, or Taiwan’s BenQ) leverages the chip amp’s low complexity, price and small size to create a $199 stereo system that also solves the audio network architecture problem. The latter, IMHO, means a stereo that is still a stereo (or home theater) that let’s the computer handle the digital audio file part of the equation. This is based on the premise that listening to music/watching television is usually, for most families a different and sometimes simultaneous activity from computing. In this scenario, all the stereo has to do is receive an audio signal over wi-fi and — via a user interface — send some simple signals back to the computer (“Give me the X .mp3 file now”). The computer continues to do everything it does well, with a simple mod to the mp3 player software to broadcast music over wi-fi, as iTunes does today. This results in ease-of-use that crosses the usability chasm, and control over music selections from either the computer or the stereo, something you don’t get with most systems today. All this in a great sounding, small package (chip amp + efficient, small speakers) that will be better than anything home audio can currently offer short of a professionally designed custom system. We could see this by the end of 2005, with competitors playing catch up in 2006.