I drew the following diagram from a description in Marty Neumeier’s book The Designful Company:

In any given endeavour, a business can choose the following approaches:

1. Good and different.
2. Different but not good.
3. Not good and not different.
4. Good but not different.

Neumeier contends that many businesses tend to choose the same over the different – in other words, 3 and 4 from the list and diagram above. They are fearful of doing anything different. There is a perception of safety in doing things the same way, especially if that way comes with easily rationalisable and quantifiable “proof”.

This is the “gradual improvement” approach. We will do what we have always done (which appears to return x% so far). Or we will do what a competitor’s done (which seems to be successful as they have grown y%).

If we do something completely different, we could make massive gains, or losses. The potential for big losses is scarier than the potential for big gains.

In today’s world of chaotic and sudden change, and global access, this sort of rear-view-mirror driven is potentially catastrophic. As we plod cautiously forward while looking in the rear view mirror, someone who dares to drive a better car, with their eyes firmly pointed ahead, can easily leave us in their dust trail.

(I just found this note on my mobile phone. I wrote this about two years ago. Yes one of my phones is actually >2 years old.)

Here are three prods to kick start your business innovation:

What if you had to give away your product for free – and you had to find alternative ways to make a living from your business?

What if your customers disappeared overnight – and you had to leverage what you currently have to quickly enter alternate markets?

What if you had to walk away from your business tomorrow and had to find a totally different way to make a living. What would you do?

This is a follow-up to my recent post about The challenge of selling brainspace, and the general unwillingness for people to pay for the intangibles of ideas, insights, designs planning and perspective.

Here is a very real example, familiar to many of us who have written or responded to a tender (or Request for Proposal/Pitch RFP to Invitation to Quote ITQ)*.

A typical IT project tender is a request for proposal/quotation to design and build some sort of system which is a mixture of hardware, software, systems integration and process integration. Even a straightforward web application (like online sales fulfilment) crosses all these areas. Such systems are by this nature complex, with long term and potentially deep implications for the client.

Surprisingly, the typical borderline-unreasonable requests in such a tender seem to actively work against getting the most appropriate and cost-effective outcome for the client:

• Designs required up front – whether this is strategic or systemic. How can anyone worth their mettle design anything with the sketchy information typical in such proposals? And having not met the client, nor understood the real needs thereof? What will be the end quality or appropriateness of such a design?
• Fixed quote required – with minimal information, no scope, and no design, there is no way a real quote can be generated. So the client typically ends up with a grossly-padded out figure.
• Short timelines – the crowning glory is often a ridiculously short timeline. Imagine being asked to design Amazon.com in two weeks, with minimum information, and without any guarantees of being paid. What is the quality of work that can be expected?
• How often does the project scope change radically after commencement? And at what cost to morale and the bottom line?

As a good friend of mine (you know who you are) would say: “this is so totally f*cked.” This has to be a form of deliberate self-sabotage on the part of the client. There is an incredible waste of resources and effort in this process for all. Just what are the possible psychological factors at work here?

There could be any number of reasons why this is the case:

• The people writing the tenders have an inadequate understanding of the complexities and implications of their projects.
• They are unable or unwilling to see and involve the larger picture.
  They already have a respondent in mind and the tendering process is really only to satisfy policy or legal requirements.
• They are shopping for the cheapest respondent, even though (especially when?) they make a point of saying this is not the case.
• They just want a simplistic solution with a simplistic price so as to make a simplistic decision. Longer term implications can wait, or they can be fixed if and when they arise.
  They are fishing for free ideas from as many sources as possible.

The end result for the client?

• Wasting time going through scopes that are quite different in scope, and in price.
• Forced into working with budgets that may be higher than necessary.
• The numerous assumptions made in the various scopes can unwittingly seed the project with new distractions, questions and variables.
• Forced to make numerous and costly course corrections along the way.
• Forced to fix problems, or be lumbered with limitations, that could have been prevent up-front.

The most practical and reasonable win-win situation here is clearly to start off by paying someone to do some serious stakeholder needs analysis, run brainstorming sessions., and write proper functional specifications before the project goes out to tender. Even for smaller web projects, this step saves a huge amount of grief and money in the long run.

Once the client has a clear scope in place, tender respondents will have a better chance of quoting appropriately for the actual work required, instead of stabbing in the dark. The client will then get a more consistently comparable set of responses.

This process I have described presumably applies to non-IT projects as well (construction, manufacturing, service outsourcing etc), but I have no first hand exposure to these. Please share your experience below.

* I have played a part in a range of permutations of respondents: a consortium of small businesses, a consortium of medium and large businesses, a single small business and a single medium sized-business. Clients have been government bodies, institutions, sporting and arts bodies; in Australia, Singapore and Europe. The success rate has been variable and inconsistent.

The McNuggetini is … “A McDonald’s chocolate milkshake with vanilla vodka, rimmed with BBQ sauce and garnished with a chicken McNugget.” (From This Is Why You Are Fat.)

This reminded me of several conversations I have had recently re building something from existing stuff. Several friends have coincidentally came up with ideas for using the internet to publicise/galvanise action around causes. They wanted to know how to build a website, a newsletter, a discussion forum etc online.

My suggestion was: there is no need to build anything from scratch. Not like in the old days.

There are already so many existing applications on the internet – Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, Wordpress for blogging, Google groups, and Facebook groups. Why build your own when you can leverage these applications AND their exposure?

The focus should be on the cause more than the actual technology and application building. How can you best leverage the existing stuff out there to get people engaged with your cause? Where are those people now?

“Build on”; not reinvent the wheel.

“Passwords that show no imagination or distinctiveness are easy prey for information pirates, a new US study says.”

“people often do the easy thing” like:

• Their first name (or their children’s)
• “1234” or “123456”
• “qwerty” (or “azerty” in Europe)
• Names of TV/film stars and characters
• “password” or “password1”
• “I don’t care” “whatever” “yes” “no”
• “iloveyou” “ihateyou”

Choosing an irresponsible password must be, in this day and age, akin to hiding the front door key under the mat, or leaving it in the lock.

Read the full article on Channel News Asia.

Here’re some tips that caught my attention while reading The Ten Faces of Innovation – Strategies for heightening creativity by Tom Ford with Jonathan Littman, ISBN978-1-84668-031-1.

• When fact finding, don’t ask people to generalise or stereotype a situation. They will idealise the situation or behaviour rather than tell you what really happens. There is no such thing as “typical”.
• To improve something, watch people struggle and stumble with it.
• Talk to young people. Teenagers today = mainstream market tomorrow. Get reverse mentoring.
• Service is about people and teams … you have to “earn the respect and allegiance of the people who make or break a service.”
• Make it easy for clients to envisage using your product. Give away a full-size paper dummy of your big screen TV so customers can see what it looks like on their walls.
• Provide multiple options for clients. Providing a single option can focus the client’s decision on whether they like you or not.
• T-shaped people – lots of breadth (of knowledge and interests), and one depth (of expertise). “The future belongs to T-shaped people.”
• Practice scarcity – “scarcity and tough constraints force you to break new ground because the ‘business as usual’ approach is simply not available.”
• “To create something new you have to take something old away.”
• Cultivate an attitude for wisdom – the knowledge to know when you are on course, and the humility to ask for directions.
• When things go wrong, approach it with humour and uncover the silver lining.
• “[Relay races] are won or lost in the hand offs [of the baton].” How effective are the hand offs between the nodes of your processes?
• Silo walls are stiff barriers against change (ideas), flexibility and agility. This made me think of the corrugation in cardboard.
• “Coach more, direct less.” Don’t second guess your people lest this undermines their confidence and builds dependence on you.
• Opportunities could be found in what has not changed for a long time.
• Mapping customer journeys – “the journey nearly always has more steps than … first imagined.”
• “Real has genuine appeal.”
• When people have enough stuff, they want experiences. “Many Gen Xers and Millennials are less interested in accumulating material possessions than their parents were.”
• “The first step in becoming extraordinary is simple to stop being ordinary.”
• Make it safe for your customers to try something new. Try our Peking duck pizza, if you don’t like it, we’ll give you your usual one free.
• “True stories can have a lot of spin to them. Authentic stories have deep integrity.” And people can tell the difference.
• The “bottom line” mindset stops us hearing stories. Instead of asking “do you like or dislike” ask “tell me when it worked and when it did not.”
• “Asking for a story celebrates and authenticates the experience.”
• “Flexibility is more important for your organization than size of even power.”
• “Innovation is … a way of life.”
• ”Don’t let a title or job description hold you back.”

The book is filled with key learnings from IDEO as well as many illuminating and fun anecdotes. Whether you are charged with making innovation happen at your workplace, or are simply interested in bettering your business practice, this book is well worth reading.

Buy now from Amazon:
The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

Nice tagline – inexcusably crappy execution. Like this recent cockup by the Max Planck Institute.

The obvious fail aside, there are other wonderful lessons nicely demonstrated by this one sign.

No hierarchy of reading – the actual information on this sign (the text and logo) more or less have the same visual weight. They are all jammed in to the top edge of the sign. This makes it impossible to read if you were driving past. The most important piece of information – the name of the store – must be the most prominent.

Too much information – instead of just showing the name in this already-cluttered sign, they made the mistake of showing their full URL including the “www”. Many web addresses now work without the “www” which makes for a shorter URL.

Illegible and generic logo – the use of a chop is clichéd and unoriginal. The ornate nature of the design and the stylised fancy script makes for a logo with absolutely zero identification value.

This also adds useless clutter to the sign. A red square is already a powerful visual presence. This is even more so when set amongst a regular run of type.

Too many almost-related offerings in the first line. This forces people to think too hard, and is a potential barrier to entry. How do you feel about buying cake from a florist? Seriously.

I reckon – either show offerings that are reasonably related, or go the other way and show grossly unrelated ones. So, use “flowers, plants and gift baskets” or “flowers, ”. That way, you don’t make people think too hard, or you make them remember you for the (deliberate) quirkiness.

Perhaps stating benefits would be more useful as a differentiation point: “Yay ~ Love ~ Sorry ~ Condolences”?

However…

At the end of the lesson, this is probably a perfectly good business with happy loyal customers. The bottom line is: If you want to do something, either do it properly, or don’t.

(This sign was spotted, snapped and MMSed with great enthusiasm to me by Tanneke. Thank you!!!)

Wikis are great for creating ad-hoc collaborative and infinitely extensible stores of information and knowledge. Especially when such information is so easily transmitted AND so easily lost in email black holes as pointed out by Robert Rath on his post Wikis Bring Light To The Black Hole of EMail.

Emails are easy to use and conceptually comfortable. I simply type and send. Unfortunately they are also notoriously unorganisable. Even the basic attempt to write succinct subject lines elude many, let alone the ideal of sticking to one subject per email. And I include myself in this.

Enter wikis. As Robert is advocating, if I believe the information I am writing up in an email is potentially useful to more than the recipient, I should be sticking it in a wiki. This is especially true in a team environment where there are huge amounts of hidden knowledge that ought to be shared more overtly and officially.

Interestingly, more often than not, I have noticed a curious resistance to wikis. This seems more prevalent amongst managers and those who are more “control” oriented. These people are fine with traditional databases on one extreme (ie highly structured data), and emails on the other (supremely unstructured). But they seem to have difficulty coping with the in-between that is a wiki. They um and ah and try and find some reason as to explain why they believe a wiki is utterly unsuitable. There seem to be some genuine inability to grasp or be comfortable with the concept of a wiki. And I am not talking about older managers who don’t get it – I have seen this in people younger than me!

Has anyone encountered this when trying to suggest the use of a wiki?
Is this simply another example of “change is hard”?
Or does the idea of a wiki strike at some deep-seated fear in some people?
I wonder how much of the anti-Wikipedia movement is driven by this “fear” of wikis as a concept?

Sometimes, the simplest technique still works the best. Here is a shop window display that used nothing more than a cardboard cut-out.

The lighting (more subtle than what my photography show) is right, the full wall-height graphics forming the background is big enough and all encompassing enough to draw the eye in. The cut-out of the golfer uses perspective provides “movement” – as you walked across the window, there is a real sense of solidity and presence. The photography was done just right, and the print output at the right scale.

Here’s the view from another angle.

Everyone would have heard of the MacBook Air by now right? It is a stunning piece of product design. There’ve been loads of “oohs” and “aahs” over how thin it is.

The designers have used a proven technique to make the unit look thinner than what is actually possible with engineering alone.

In everyday circumstances, we almost never perceive a product from an orthogonal viewpoint – ie perfectly side-on, front-on or top-down. In other words, we always see products from an angle other than normal to the perfectly horizontal or vertical.

This means a taper (or chamfer) can be used to good effect to hide the true thickness of an object. A taper also has the effect of presenting a strong clear edge for our eyes to focus on. I read somewhere that our eyes are drawn to edges.

The MacBook Air design provides an amazingly thin edge. The rest of the product then gently tapers off this edge. The nice curves also help to reinforce the illusion of thinness as there are no obvious edges for the eye to focus on as you look along the curves.

The classic IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad designs have also used this technique with great success. The real thickness is hidden through the careful use of chamfers along the front and sides. As is fitting to the no-nonsense bento-box-inspired design ethos, the Thinkpads had flat, no-nonsense chamfers instead of complex curves.

The designers of the advertising panels in my local shopping centre also use this technique to make the large panels look less bulky. From most normal viewing angles, we see an incredibly thin panel, allowing the content on the screen to shine.

Even architects have used this same technique to create some stunning pieces of work. These examples from Deputy Dog.