Stever Robbins pens a critical thinking refresher in the new HBS Working Knowledge…
- Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision.
- Identify your assumptions and double-check them.
- Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions.
- Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames.
- Remember the people!
- Think short and long term.
I had a great conversation with Phi-Hong the other day about how despite our having seen the insights and risk management that user research can achieve, some companies seem to do just fine without it, thank you very much. Apple’s product design, the early Google, much of Amazon.com.
While teaching others the product development process, I know there’s a point at which one synthesizes audience desires, trends, content, function, esthetics, price point, revenue model etc. etc. etc. together not in some grand spreadsheet but in our subjective little minds. It’s a hard thing to teach, and not terribly surprising that companies could produce great products by hiring individuals who are very good at this synthesis.
I witnessed this recently watching a CMO reviewing new product concepts. He wasn’t too interested in concepts that were mostly new UI ideas; I think it’s hard to look at a couple screens and see a whole new product, much less a whole new business. Who of us who saw Google in 1999 saw the potential? I know I was skeptical, figuring any algorithm that relied on popularity would devolve into presenting a tabloid. Their modest response seemed to acknowledge that even they knew they were running a big experiment…
I don't think we will turn into a tabloid. But, time will tell.-Larry
Reading through Google’s official history paints a picture of UI+algorithm innovation being tough to identify, based on the highly subjective perspective of whoever they presented it to…
Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. “When it’s fully developed and scalable,” he told them, “let’s talk again.”
…
Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.”
The lesson? Designers need to shop their idea around to different people before giving up. Investors — whether it’s CMOs or venture capitalists — need to occassionally throw money at an idea to try it out in the real world to ultimately know if it’s successful or not.
The architectural planning for Ground Zero in New York serves as a good example of where design thinking could have helped. Paul Goldberger’s recent New Yorker article, “A New Beginning: Should Ground Zero be Used for Housing?” (unfortunately not online) describes the emotional situation four years ago when it failed to occur to anyone that the new World Trade Center plan should focus on housing, not office space. In retrospect, it seems obvious. Manhattan needs more residential space, has an office surplus, and the trend in lower Manhattan is toward residential offerings.
An approach that explicitly goes looking for more and different options might have uncovered the obvious sooner. But it requires diligence to honestly question the available options in the midst of emotional rhetoric. Design thinking is, as the name implies, a particular way of thinking, and so not easy to invoke against the tide of conventional judgment thinking. I think some of the advantages we attribute to design thinking will actually come from the courage and cleverness to evoke design thinking at all.
I’m reading Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Project that has an amazing record of innovation. It reveals the source of the F-117’s stealth technology not as an American invention, but as an idea that was passed from scientist to scientist for a century. The idea centers on calculations describing how a given geometric configuration will reflect electromagnetic radiation (e.g. make a plane invisible to radar). Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first derived the set of formulas, a German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johnnes Sommerfeld refined them, and the Russian radio scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev further developed them. They lay hidden by obscurity, in an untranslated Moscow scientific journal for ten years. Eventually the US Air Force translated it and Lockheed radar specialist Denys Overholser read Ufimtsev’s dense 40-page paper out of pure geek interest, finding the key to stealth technology near the end. It’s ironic that an American used this information, as it was 1975, during the cold war.
There’s a lesson here we all know already, about connecting research and development, about helping academia and industry cooperate in ways that profit both parties. It happens now, but there’s still plenty of universities and companies that could benefit from a relationship.
