seth gray » IDEO

You’re Wrong

seth — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:36:49 +0000

When someone is clearly wrong about something, my first reaction is to tell them so. I’ve never really found that to be a great way to get someone to see the Truth, though.

Think about it this way: we make choices based on the information available. We used to know that the Earth was the center of the universe. Until it wasn’t. The speed of light was as fast as anything can go. Until it wasn’t. (Well, maybe).

So, if your customer is always right (even when they’re wrong), what’s a marketer to do? Help them feel validated and understood with some active listening. Ask questions about their assumptions. For this, I love to use IDEO’s Five Whys.

You can’t help shift their perspective until you truly understand it.

Flubber!

seth — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:00:18 +0000

Businesses Should Be More Like Flubber

Yesterday a coworker asked a great question: ”Quick Poll: What do you think is the most valuable productivity goal in terms of employee-to-employer contribution — A) units of profitable new ideas per employee, B) units of work per hour, C) both, or D) something else?”

My answer? None of the above. I’m not sure yet what would be better, though. And here’s why: current corporate structure and measurement is essentially based on Henry Ford’s “they can have any color they want, as long as it’s black” assembly line process innovation, where manual laborers were interchangeable. That still basically works in a physical labor/manufacturing setting. Maybe. But, according to “the Support Economy,” people are now looking for “psychological self-determination.” We want something other than a black Model T now. Also, good chunk of our economy is now built around “knowledge workers,” who are significantly less interchangeable. That framework is self-limiting.

People (employees and consumers) are forced into a box. That box doesn’t recognize or capitalize on the parts of the person outside the box. We need a new paradigm. IDEO calls it looking for “T-Shaped people.” David Armano, from Critical Mass, calls it the “Fuzzy Tail.”

We need something less like a Rubik’s Cube, and more like Flubber. Once we have the structure, then we can measure.

What do you think?

A Simple Question

seth — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:14:49 +0000

On his blog last week, Tim Brown (IDEO bacon-double-big-cheese) tells a story about an insulated coffee mug he received as a gift. Then he asks a ridiculously simple question: “is this a product or an experience?”

It’s a simple question, but it has a profound and fundamental effect on product development and management. Too often, we focus on the initial purchase part of consumer behavior. What would happen if we spent more time on the rest– the experience part? What if, when developing a speech & language assessment, rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time and money on marginal technical improvements, we made it more fun for the kid to take? Easier for the assessor to track the kid’s improvement over time? Found simpler, more emotionally-intelligent ways to tell the parents what’s going on?

Those are big what-ifs, but could they be sustainable competitive advantages? By asking Tim Brown’s simple, fundamental question, could you swim out of your red-ocean strategy and into the calm, azure waters of a blue ocean?