All too often, whenever a new initiative, project, even company is started I find myself caught in the situation of arguing about “I believe this…” or “But I think that …”. We write concepts, create presentations & have meetings. We talk and discuss how things should be done. This is interestingly also a very common pattern in all design workshops that I have attended or given in the past. Whenever a group has agreed on an idea they want to pursue for prototyping (actually they think they have an agreement) what follows is: conversations.
Everything is possible in Powerpoint-Land. Make it work in reality.
However, conversations won’t solve those issues. Especially not conversations where it is about what you believe might work. A prototype that is tested beats 1000 concepts/presentations. What you need to get started is the experimenters mindset.
Get into experimenter mode
In workshop situations this is usually a quite easy problem to solve. Be specific with the task (“I want you to build AND TEST a prototype”) and give a tight enough deadline (e.g. 45 minutes for the first round of feedback) so that there is simply not enough time to keep talking forever. It is usually possible to convince people switching to doing, when the project at hand is a fictious one where no real results are expected. However, this dramatically changes as soon as real money and real projects, and especially real careers are attached to the success or failure of a project.
But I need to protect my idea!
In real-world projects, especially in a corporate environment, I have experienced a lot of understanding for the need of early prototypes, or as Anne Lamott stated it in 1994: Start with a shitty first draft. 1 This is dramatically different with aspiring entrepreneurs. Usually what you find is a mindset of protecting ones idea to avoid somebody stealing it. I don’t have too much to say on this, I can only say this: An idea is worth nothing. Honestly, if we launched what was our “precious little idea” 8 years ago we would have gone bankrupt within few months. An idea is worthless, it’s the execution that makes successful businesses. So if you really care about your idea then share it as much as possible and collect feedback in as many ways as possible.
Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that counts.
Start small & monitor results
So we set the stage to give early prototypes a try. But where to start? The single most important advice I have here is: Don’t do it with a project that is at risk anyway. Start small. Ideal projects are internal ones, focused on the employee experience. Start with an experience that is currently bad. In almost all offices you can find issues with the dishwasher, meeting room reservations, lack of company events and so on. A shitty first draft for regular company events can be a list in the hallway to sign up for a picnic on a Friday afternoon. There are oh-so many things that improve lifes at the office and the cool thing about it: The effects are immmediately visible. An important aspect though is: Communicate expectations and monitor the results right from the start. It can be a few interviews with your colleagues that include questions about general well-being at the office, suggestions for improvements and the biggest pain points. Then try to launch a first prototype quickly and see how it works. Is there adoption? Does it have an effect on well-being? From there on you can start bringing this approach of early prototypes and validated learning to other projects. First small, easy ones and eventually bigger, more challenging projects.
Make sure to communicate expectaions and outcomes
An often overlooked item is communication. Before you start, make sure to set the expecations right. Don’t be the “We’ll use Service Design now to make your experience at the company the BEST EVER” person. Be more like “Hey, we want to start a small iniative to improve a few things in our office. We will start low-tech and low budget and hope for some nice results.”. I personally am a fan of setting the expecations rather low, but of course this is also a personality thing and also has downsides. When your first initiative is finished, make sure to communicate the results. And this brings us to the single most important aspect of shitty first drafts.
“Success” in a project can also be to figure out early that it is not going to work out. You didn’t waste a lot of money. You learned that this approach does not work. That’s a great outcome!
Redefine success
This is the hardest and most challening aspect of switching to shitty first drafts as default mode of operations: You will have to redefine success. There is no point in introducing shitty first drafts if you are not willing to take the steps needed after testing your draft. If a project or idea turns out to not work out early, then let it go. Stop the initiative, communicate well about what you learned and why you are going to stop it and make sure to mention how much money you have saved because you stopped it early in the process. Every single day hundreds of millions of Euros (ok this is an assumption) are wasted in projects that are doomed to fail. A shitty first draft, that is put to testing right away can help you to learn early and take educated, low-risk decisions. However, to accomplish this it needs to be an acceptable outcome of a project or initiative if it is stopped because the early results were not promising. Don’t underestimate this step. Especially in corporate environments, where careers are directly attached to the “success” or “failure” of a project, it is a hard and long change process to implement the experimenters mindset.
A real-world example
So how could this work out, you might be wondering. Let me give you a real example from a real company. I am not allowed to mention the name but it’s a quite famous brand in the sport fashion industry. This company was playing around with service design already for a while. At some point an initiative (brought up by the C-Level) was created: “We want to broaden our market and move into the furniture industry.” Concepts for “sporty furniture” were created, presentations and meetings held, calculations done. At one point though, they decided to switch gears. Let’s try it out. A team assembled from different departements got together for a few days in a fab lab 2. After a short ideation session they started actually building furniture. One of the prototypes was a couch with two punchbags in front. Every now and then one of them would light up and you’d have to get up and hit it within 10 seconds or the TV would stop. The prototypes were cheap but they were actually working. They then got a group of people in to test the different prototypes. The feedback was devastating. Nobody got the point. None of the participants was excited about the concept. So they made a bold move: They suggested to stop the entire initiative. It might be a good idea in the future, but now is not the time. Time invested: 3 days, 10 people. Imagine how this project would have come around if they learned about their failure after launching the first furniture to the public market…
Shitty first drafts save you time and money. You won’t loose or give away your ideas. You will get the most important thing: learning.
