Category: Best Practices

The Smoke in Need of a Fire-Breathing Dragon

“This sounds like part of an idea. It’s the smoke, and we still need a fire-breathing dragon.”

This statement was exclaimed by one of the students I’m working with in my involvement with MCAD‘s Visualization program.

I was leading the team through a ideation evaluation exercise – culling down their large number of brainstormed concepts down to a smaller, more defined, more viable, more actionable list. Some of the concepts in the more than 70 item list were thrown out immediately. Others we pondered for awhile to determining if something was there we could use later.

Many ideas are just that – smoke in need of a dragon. Smaller ideas that compliment and polish larger more powerful ideas – though they aren’t strong enough to support themselves. Just like the smoke without the fire-breathing dragon.

The stereotypical dot-com example of this is selling pet food online. Selling pet food is the smoke to selling food online which is the smoke to selling anything online. As we’ve seen, to survive and succeed businesses and the workers they employ need big Fire-breathing Dragon ideas. Smoke ideas can only augment and compliment – they can’t sustain.

UPDATE 24 March 2006: J Wynia is on a similar track with Searching for Werewolves

5 Organizational Tips from Academia

This semester I’m one of the coaches in the excellent Visualization program at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. As part of that involvement, I attended their recent new faculty orientation. I’ve culled 5 organizational tips from that meeting.

  1. Have a Warning Sign for Poor Customer Relationships: Each faculty member is asked to contact the Academic Affairs department when any student’s performance falls below a ‘C’. Students are paying for the MCAD experience, and ‘C’ grade is one of the most visible warning signs that something isn’t working. A signal that MCAD needs to try something else with this customer, er student. Does your organization have a warning sign for poor customer relationships? (StoryBlog offers another approach)
  2. Institute a 3rd Question Person: The VP of Academic Affairs introduced himself as the ‘3rd Question Person’ – i.e. if you ask someone a question and they direct you to a second person, and this second person directs you to a third, contact the VP of Academic Affairs. He wants to know both the question, and that it was left unanswered.
  3. Know Your Capacity: Though professors can add as many students to their class as they can personally support, there is a limit to how many students the class itself can support. For example; if there are 20 computers in the computer lab – only 20 students can be in the class without negatively impacting the learning experience. For years, O’Hare Airport wasn’t honest about their capacity – believing they could support >120 take-offs / hour.
  4. Each Organization Needs a Well-Run Off-Stage & an On-Stage:Documentation, research, and internal policies may not be the favorite parts of the job. Though, without them the classtime and student work will not be as successful.
  5. Vendors are not Emergency Response Teams: Include vendors and partner organizations as early as possible, especially when you don’t need there help immediately. A quick phone call or email months ahead of time saying, “We’re thinking of using you for this.” will be better received than a call saying, “We needed you to do this yesterday.” The early communication will provide a higher quality of service.

Want Better Collaboration – Improvise

The earlier collaboration techniques post (Stop Asking Questions) was based a key to successful improvisation. This post digs further into the relationship between improv and collaboration.

Good improvisational comedy teams believe a group of individuals working together can start with nothing and quickly create something engaging, desireable, useful, and valuable. From this perspective, the keys for successful Improv apply to any collaborative effort.

As such, there are 7 keys to successful improvisational collaboration:

  1. Acceptance of a new idea from the standpoint of exploring its possibilities; An attitude of “Yes, and” rather than the destructive “but” .
  2. Attentive listening to all the partners on the team.
  3. Temporary suspension of critical judgment.
  4. An attitude of relaxed openness to new ideas. Exploring the far reaches of “What if ___?”
  5. Reframing situations to explore creative possibilities.
  6. A willingness to take chances, to risk appearing foolish, i.e. Stop Asking Questions.
  7. An understanding that no choice is absolutely right or wrong, though each may turn out to be more or less productive in a given situation.

Thanks to the Applied Improvisational Network.

Only Pigs Can Talk

I’m reviewing an excellent presentation [pdf] on the agile software development landscape when two bullet points on Scrum’s daily meetings stopped me:

  • Chickens and Pigs are invited.
  • Only Pigs can talk.

It took Googling to decipher the metaphor.

Though it goes against my earlier stifling team work post, identifying who’s involved and who’s committed is an excellent way to focus energies and keep the project on task.

Take a look at your projects – are you involved or committed? Where can you be more committed and less involved?

Further in the presentation:

“The error [is] typically 100 times more expensive to correct in the maintenance phase than in the requirements phase.”- Software Engineering Economics.

Reminds me of a story in the automotive design world. Traditionally, automotive designs were modeled in clay. Clay hardens as time passes. So, the longer a decision was put off, the harder – literally – a change is. Just because software doesn’t have a physical manifestation, doesn’t mean it’s not as time-sensitive as clay.

Two final bits of insight from the Extreme Programming camp:

  • If the future is uncertain, don’t code for it today.

  • Do the simplest thing that can possibly work

In other words: Do as Little as Possible.

Do As Little As Possible – Part 2

He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

This exerpt from The Case of the Empty Soap Box at Jon Strandes’ Storyblog is an excellent example of the Do As Little As Possible pattern I metioned earlier.

Some equally engaging stories of simple solutions can be found in the highly recommended Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is and Ideas are Free: How the Idea Revolution is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations.

Try Before You Buy

Even today, with all the Internet offers, shopping is often purchasing a product without first-hand experience with it. Our customer research has proven time and time again that if the product can be handled – it’s more likely to be sold.

Until now, it was nearly impossible for customers to actually try out a product without purchasing it and returning it.

The Washington Post recently published In-Store Testing, an article about Maytag, Best Buy, Whirlpool

As part of a new program, the company is encouraging consumers to test-drive appliances before buying them. Shoppers can throw in a load of laundry, wash dirty dishes and bake their favorite dinners. There’s even a package of cookie dough on hand in case people forget to bring their own

And [Raymond R.] Burke, the Indiana professor [University’s Kelley School of Business] , warns that mock rooms take up valuable retail space in a store. “There are serious costs associated with it,” he said.

Yes, formatting stores and products to support use requires a shift from an inventory-focused mentality to a customer-focused mentality. Products that can’t be seen, touched, and experienced cannot be sold. If you use your products as a way to facilitate a conversation with your customers, they’ll be more committed to you.

…estimates sales in the larger, interactive store are twice those of the older one. The biggest difference, he said, is how many appliances consumers buy. “Instead of buying one range, they buy the range and the refrigerator, and maybe the dishwasher, because they see how it works together,” he said.

Changing the Government

Government agencies are some of the most notorious change resistors. In 1999, the Mint started to change that reputation – receiving a customer satisfaction rating second only to Mercedes Benz.

“In the old days, we shipped fewer than 50% of our orders within eight weeks. Today, if it takes two weeks for customers to receive an order, they complain. When you change expectations, it’s very hard for an organization to relax and slip back into old patterns of behavior.”– Philip N. Diehl, Director of the United States Mint

If the Mint couldn’t survey its customers officially, Diehl himself would do so unofficially. A few weeks after joining the Mint, he embarked on his own personal fact-finding mission. He went to coin conventions, talked with the hobby press, found situations in which he could interact with collectors. He shunned the ceremonial role that the director of the Mint usually played at these functions (collectors would line up to ask for Diehl’s autograph), and did what any smart politician (and change agent) would do: He worked the room.

Continued in Mint Condition from Fast Company

Thanks to Frank Patrick for the tip.

Instructions not Inventory

To create a to-do list reflecting your ultimate goal, we highly recommend taking the advice descibed in Recipes Instead of Lists from Nerdherding for Beginners:

“A recipe will include infrastructure work and ‘planned re-work’ that might otherwise be forgotten the alternative is simpliy a list of ingredients.”

Usability Not Usable? Part 1

Conventional wisdom states that websites and other new products should be evaluated with non-tech savvy participants. With 63% of American adults accessing the Internet regularly, 83% of teens, and 20% of adults actively avoiding the online world we are a nation of tech-savvy or tech-avoidant. Conventional recruiting strategies not longer apply.

Rather than pursue an audience that is actively avoiding technology, we recommend iteratively evaluating new products with the expert customers – the professional amateurs. Professional Amateurs have done the competitve research, they know what works for them, and best of all – they’re passionate and articulate.

Benchmarking and evaluting with a novice customer-base provide a rear-view mirror description of where your competitors were. The key to surpassing the competition in the technically sophisticated landscape described above is listening to the needs of your professional amateurs – those customers engaging with your products on a daily basis. By paying close attention to their needs, opportunities will be obvious. As an added benefit, it will only strengthen your relationship with them.