Put yourself in the baggage handler’s shoes

The most important thing in design and business in general is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Unless your target base is yourself, you will not see the product/service you have created in the same way as them. Just as importantly, even if you do understand your customer, or user, they will experience your creation in a different way. For example, they will probably have to discover it (you know everything there is to know), buy it (all you need to do is ask) and use it without anyone telling them what to do (you made it, you know how it works). Finally, how can you know that the service you have designed is delivered right?

The answer is this: dogfooding. Use your product! It’s that simple – although it sometimes means going out of your way (and it can be particularly difficult if you aren’t the target audience). And it’s not just about putting yourself in the position of the ultimate customer – you also have to understand the people making and delivering your idea.  The concept is well known from programming, but applies absolutely everywhere. Take Bobby McFerrin, an amazingly talented singer. He has found a way to manipulate his voice so that when he performs he doesn’t need any accompaniement to create multi-layered compositions. For example:

How does he do it? By being brutally honest with himself:

“It took me at least 2 years, 3 years, of going into a room by myself and turning on a tape recorder and singing before I felt comfortable singing in front of other people. I was afraid to sing around anyone. I was intimidated by the sound of my own voice. I would wait until the house was empty and then I would sing. So it took time. It took six years before I did my first solo concert. So it took about six years of singing constantly, doing a lot of practicing. For the first two years I didn’t listen to another singer. Because I wanted to find what my voice sounded like. Knowing myself, I’m very impressionable. It would have been very easy for me to shop around for a singer whose technique I liked, and use that as my base and try and do what they did, but I made the conscious decision not to do that. I just wanted to make sure that I had a strong base of my own, because I could easily flounder by going out and just copping somebody else’s licks. I used to do that as a piano player and I knew that wasn’t going to get me anywhere.” (link)

You can’t improve until you know what you’re doing.

A bit of homework

So take this concept of dogfooding and think about these two stories about the management of two well known companies. Here’s your homework: which of these two companies has bucked the trend of a declining industry, becoming a globally recognised innovator, and which one is the poster child for its tragically collapsing, bailout-needing sector?

AirAsia’s and its CEO, Tony Fernandes – (link)

Mr Fernandes says that he came to the industry with no preconceptions, but found it rigidly compartmentalised and dysfunctional. He wanted AirAsia to reflect his own unstuffy, open and cheerful personality. He is rarely seen without his baseball cap, open-neck shirt and jeans, and he is proud that the firm’s lack of hierarchy (very unusual in Asia) means anyone can rise to do anyone else’s job. AirAsia employs pilots who started out as baggage handlers and stewards; for his part, Mr Fernandes also practises what he preaches. Every month he spends a day as a baggage-handler; every two months, a day as cabin crew; every three months, a day as a check-in clerk. He has even established a “culture department” to “pass the message and hold parties”.

General Motors and its top management-(link)

Not only are managers and executives insulated from learning what goes in their company because they generally talk rather than listen, they are also insulated from experiencing what it is like to buy and own a car.   GM has a perk for managers down to fairly low levels where all are given a GM car to drive – they rotate from one car to another.  I am not sure of the exact details, but answers to the questions I’ve asked over the years  suggest it goes something like this: the lowest level managers have to buy their own cars, the ones at somewhat higher levels get a new car to drive every six months or so but have to do some servicing, the managers who are somewhat higher-up get somewhat fancier cars and are freed from any servicing (gas is even put in the cars of some executives so they don’t have to go to the service station), and the highest level executives get a car and a driver.

In other words, this system effectively insulates people in management – especially those in senior management — from experiencing what it is like to shop for, bargain for, purchase, service, and sell a car. They only get the driving experience. Well, except for the most senior executives, who don’t even get that experience — they watch a person in the front seat drive a big car.  Now, it is true, that the most senior executives do own GM cars for personal use, but it is my understanding that when a car is delivered to a senior executive, special attention is devoted to the car – even during the production process –to make sure the top brass aren’t exposed to a car with any flaws. Wouldn’t that be nice?

So there you have it, a system that seems designed to isolate executives from reality.  They talk instead of listen and are protected from the experience of owning car.   I might be exaggerating some, but not much.

It’s not too hard to guess…

Lloyds TSB – using visualisation to change behaviour

The other day I popped into my local branch of Lloyds TSB and saw this next to the ATM:

Taking a closer look:

A heatmap shows the busiest times for that particular branch, with a bit of analysis above to help people make sense of it and explain, for example, the grey block on wednesday morning (staff training day).

Short interview with the guys who put it up

This is very interesting – a bank visualising its data to change customer behaviour. Rebecca Reeves, the branch manager, was kind enough to answer a few questions about it:

Raphael D’Amico: Thanks for agreeing to explain this display a little bit. So, why did this start?

Rebecca Reeves: We noticed that we had both business and personal account holders coming in the lunchtime rush hour, even though business customers can generally choose to come at any time of the day. The idea behind this was to try to get our business customers to come by when the branch was quieter.

RD: How does it work? 

RR: It uses the transactions done in the branch. We record the data and a team at the head office feeds back these heatmaps.

RD: Is it just this branch?

RR: No, it is done across the country.

RD: Has it worked?

RR: It has actually. We started recording data about a year ago, and put the first heatmap on the wall six months ago. When we analysed the data again quite recently we saw that customer transactions were more spread out across the day.

In particular, it didn’t make that much of a difference to personal customers – they still came mostly at lunchtimes – but business customers did start coming more often at other times.

RD: How did you measure the improvement? Did you measure queue lengths, for example?

RR: Just by sight – the only formal measurement was the transaction data, which tells us the time and type of customer, for example.

RD: Thanks for your time.

Neat, but what could it do better?

This idea is clearly a good one and has worked, but there is as always room for iteration. Here are a few suggestions:

• Make it bigger and move it slightly further from the cashpoint. Putting it next to a cashpoint is a good idea and gives it exposure, but the size and positioning means you have to be close to the wall to see it. This leads to two less than ideal situations:
  1) You look at it while taking cash out, which slows you down and makes people behind you wait.
  2) You take a proper look afterwards, which means you have to stand directly next to and very close to the next person taking money out, which tends to make both you and them uncomfortable. It is almost a social taboo to do this, and probably keeps a a fair few people away.
  A larger, more legible display would solve this.
• Put it near to other queues in the branch, not just the ATM. The queue for the bank teller is longer than the one for the ATM, which would make customers even more receptive to this kind of display.
• Measure how long you are actually taking to serve customers. While the transaction data is a good proxy, Lloyds should spot check exactly how long it takes them to serve each customer (how do they promise four minutes?). This may also allow them to segment their customers better – perhaps there are some transactions that are more time consuming and could be addressed in the heatmap display.
• Show customers the changes. Showing people that this display has already changed behaviour may make it even more effective through social proof.
• Share data. Comparing customer patterns across branches might reveal some good techniques they can learn from each other. I didn’t ask about this, so it could be that the branches already do this – I imagine the data analysis is centralised for this purpose. 

It’s really great to see a large organisation using this kind of technique (particularly a bank, right now!).

Are there other companies feeding the behaviour of their customers back to them?

Tags: atm, bank, heatmap, data+analysis, customer+behaviour, lloyds+tsb

Interview with Kickstart: making the anti-poverty pump

A few weeks ago I wrote about Kickstart, the innovative company which has already helped half a million poor African people to lift themselves out of poverty. By designing products like the SuperMoneyMaker pump and selling them instead of giving them away, they make sure that 80% of them are used to start businesses, which does two thing: 1) it takes the average farmer’s income from $110 dollars to $1100 a year and 2) absolutely flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Wonderful!

After the post the great folks there got in touch and Ken Weimar, Senior Development Officer at Kickstart agreed to answer a few questions. Read on below.

The tools to end poverty.

Raphael D’Amico: What Kickstart brings to poor communities is tools which allow them to help themselves, so the design is all important.  When you and your designers were creating these tools for poor African farmers, what preconceptions (Western or otherwise) got in the way? How did you get into the minds of your future customers?

Ken Weimar: Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome was the very western idea of tools and technology to save time and labor.   Saving labor is good, right?  Well not if that “labor” is someone’s job.  We love to save time because it feels so scarce and precious.   But in the developing world, time and labor are a poor person’s greatest assets—they have them in abundance and they can be quite valuable. That’s why our designs are focused on turning time and labor into cash rather than “saving” them.

R: How did you involve locals in the design process? 

K: This was a team effort and our team is mostly  Kenyan engineers and craftsmen.    As a bunch of guys our first approach was to make the pump as powerful as possible and that meant long treadles.  But we quickly found that women did not like that.  The bigger stride required by the longer pedals is hard to do when you are wearing a skirt.  Plus the longer treadles meant the users backside was elevated to about eye level and women thought it unseemly.   So we reconfigured the treadles, stepping them down to keep the user lower to the ground, and went to work to increase the power with a more efficient valve design.

R: Was there any local design ability?

K: Yes, of course.  There is a tremendous amount of creativity born out of hardship. It is amazing to see how creatively EVERYTHING in Africa is reused.  We have a whole team of locals in our Tech Development department.   Some are trained engineers, others are skilled fabricators. In Africa we have creative craftsmen and tinkerers, and we have trained engineers.  What we are missing are the entrepreneurial inventors who can create the tool or technology that can be widely adopted.

R: What made you pick IDEO as a collaborator?

K: Martin has  known David and Tim for a long time and has a great deal of respect for the work they’ve done in creating the Design School at Stanford.  Any engineer could do the calculations we need, but I think IDEO shares our vision and loves to work around the challenges.  A lot of people would have been stumped by the limitations of the raw materials and processes available to us in East Africa.  IDEO jumped in with us and said, “OK, we know the limitations, let’s work around them.”

R: What were the characteristics of your most successful designers?

K: Tenacity, of course, is a needed in any good designer.  But you said “successful” so let’s interpret that to mean that a design gets widely adopted and used and maybe even changes the way we live.  To be successful then means thinking way beyond the design of the “thing”.  Creating a new machine is the easiest part (and this is plenty hard).  But you have to be able to understand the economics, you need to be thinking about how is my “thing” going to get from my workbench to a factory to a store and ultimately into the hands of a consumer.  And you need to be able to design these systems as you are working on the design of the thing.

R: In 2005 I had the privilege of visiting one the workshops where the MoneyMaker was being made. How many others like it were there, and what made you move production to China?

K: If you saw our factory, you saw one of the most advanced manufacturing plants in Africa.  And I am sure you recall it was pretty primitive.   You want a design challenge?  How about this:  you are trying to create a design that can be mass produced locally, but the raw materials can vary as much as 10% in dimensions from one batch to another.  Manufacturing in China opens so many more options for manufacturing that just don’t exist in Kenya.  We can also ship to anywhere in the world more easily from China.  Like everyone else, we can manufacture more cheaply in China, which means we become more self sufficient.

Of course everyone asks about creating jobs.   Well, we’ve created maybe 50-75  jobs in the manufacturing of our pumps, and over 100,000 jobs through the use of our pumps.  Helps put that decision in perspective.

R: The most impressive thing about Kickstart is the way you’ve flipped the traditional view of aid – instead of seeing the poor as a burden to carry, you’ve realised that they can help themselves, why is why you charge for the MoneyMaker pump and created a supply chain where everyone benefits.

K: Thank you, yes! It is about sustainability.  Everyone uses that term differently and often to mean “when are you going to stop asking me for money”.   It’s a valid question but not the most important.  The most important measure of sustainability is “will the people who are helped, stay helped?”  The next is “can additional people avail themselves of this solution without additional cost to the donor?”  That is the beauty of and the importance of the supply chain.  As long as there is demand, and each player makes a profit, our pumps (or anything distributed this way) will be available to everyone who wants one.

R: How did you develop this approach? Did you try any others before this one?

K: Oh yes indeed.  Nick Moon and Martin worked on every kind of development/aid programme you could imagine.  They were both were idealistic young guys and went to Africa wanting to make things better.  They built schools and ran training programs and built factories and installed huge water systems and not a single one of their projects lasted more than a few years past the end of our involvement.

Perhaps the first lesson they learned what that giveaways don’t work—not because the recipients are ungrateful, but because we tend to give away what we want to give rather than what is actually needed.

R: How did you go about creating this sustainable system? What were the challenges?

K: It wasn’t easy.  We wanted our pumps in Agro-Vet stores that sell other ag inputs.  Makes sense right?  Well not many were interested at first.  These were new and so much more expensive than anything they ever sold.  Our first retailers were butchers and hairdressers.  But the bigger challenge is getting funders to understand what we are trying to do and how building this supply chain means real sustainability.

R: Was there any cultural resistance as you went up against traditional methods?

K: God yes!  There still is!  There may have been some farmers who thought “if I wait around long enough they’ll just give it to me,” but the bigger cultural resistance was (and to a large degree still is) from the traditional aid organizations.    They think we are unfair to make people invest in themselves.  They think we are simplistic for insisting that the cause of poverty, the very definition of poverty, is not having enough money.

There is always the challenge of dealing with silos.  We get grouped with a bunch of different organizations but don’t really fit neatly in these categories.  For instance, we work with farmers and within the AG sector, but for us , Ag is an economic engine for income generation.  We get grouped with the water sector because we make pumps but for us pumps are  a means to an end.  And we get grouped with the new technology for the developing world group, and we have a lot of friends here, but again our technology has the very specific purpose of generating income, where most other technologies are about reducing a burden of some sort.   The upside is that we have a lot of friends in a lot of sectors, and even if we can’t collaborate, it’s exciting and energizing to talk with other social entrepreneurs.

The downside is that we always seem to be about ten degrees off plumb with major funders.  That is the challenge of being the innovator, the first mover, the leading edge…it takes a while for the world to catch up with you!

R: Where do you see Kickstart going next? 

K: We have just scratched the surface on what is possible with our pumps.  There is a worldwide potential for over 40 million pumps and we’ve sold 125,000.  There is a lot of room for growth.  We’ve got some allied technology, like a pretty effective well-drilling technology that we’d love to get out on the market, and I’ve got a few other ideas I’d love to pursue, but for the foreseeable future, KickStart will continue to be about irrigation.

R: Finally, I wonder if there are other situations which are waiting for this kind of turnaround. Crudely speaking, your products act as a catalyst which allow a community to use the same resources they had before to reach a higher standard of living, which would could otherwise only achieve by pumping money and aid from outside. Everybody wins when this happens – the community get better off and the resources which would previously have been diverted to helping them can go to help another. In business you would crudely call this turning a cost center into a revenue center. 

K: We changed our name from ApproTEC (appropriate technology for enterprise creation) to KickStart because KickStart really captures what we are trying to do—to stimulate economic growth.  A lot of people think that these farmers climb up to some plateau and stay there.  In reality, these people continue on this upwards spiral of prosperity—growing their businesses, diversifying, creating jobs and hiring.  So yes, there is a ripple effect.

The ripple effect we talk about though is better governance.  A fundamental problem in Africa is bad governance.  To be fair, think about where the US was 40 or 60 years post independence—we were heading into a horrible civil war that nearly destroyed our country, so we need to keep post-colonial Africa in perspective.  But in these nominal democracies, you can buy a vote for a handful of rice because people are starving.  But when I have enough money to feed my family you can buy my support for dollar.  When I’m not worried about basic survival, I can start demanding things like roads and schools and electricity and you, as a politician had better deliver or get voted out.  That’s how an entrepreneurial middle class brings better governance.  Not the other way around.

R: I’m sure this could be done elsewhere. For example, schools often see controlling kids as a necessity, hence costly investment in attendance tracking software and reporting of discipline. Maybe there is a product out there that would cast this in another light.

Have you seen any other areas ripe for this kind of shift? 

K: Absolutely.  There are so many goods and services that we want to give away for free that could be provided far more sustainably through the marketplace.  We’ve long championed the idea of franchised, for-profit schools in Africa and our friend Jay Kimmelman is doing just that.  Bridge International Academies will provide a higher quality education for less than what parents might pay to send their kids to public schools.

Medical care is another.  In Kenya (and in most of Africa) the “free” public clinics are so underfunded that you have to bribe doctors and nurses to get care.  Or people pay witchdoctors or charlatans for ineffective or dangerous care.  Imagine if that for less what you would pay for a bribe, you could buy decent care and real medicines.   Our friends at SHEF in Kenya had done some of this and work and others are taking the idea to the next level.

I know, some people recoil in horror to think about asking poor people to pay for things like medical care or education.  But without a tax base these will always be dependent on external donor funding and is that really the model we want to continue?  And think for just one moment about how it would feel if everything in your life was provided by some donor—your food, your clothing, your house, your church, your medicine.  Is there anything “empowering” about that? 

R: What lessons from solving poverty would you apply back to the first world?

K: We’ve always said that solving poverty is Africa is so much easier than solving poverty in America or the UK or Europe.   In the developed world, maybe 10% of the population is a permanent underclass.  These are the people with serious mental health and substance abuse issues who need a lot of “wrap around” services to get to a basic functional level.

 In Africa, 80% of the people are poor.    Within that 80% are all of the people who would have been solidly middle class had they been born elsewhere.  More importantly, within that 80% are the people who would have been doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs.  These people still have the same basic intelligence and the same drive and determination.  They just happen to live in a place where there are few opportunities.

No matter where in the world you live, poverty is about money and income (specifically the lack thereof)

Thanks for the great interview and I wish the best of luck to Kickstart getting a pump into the hands of the 40 million farmers and families who need them! 

The answer isn’t always inside you…

…sometimes you just need a really good box of tricks.

IDEO is one of my favourite design companies because they are one of the most consistently innovative. One of the reasons they kick ass is that they understand that people cannot get their best ideas just by thinking hard; they need exposure to outside sources of inspiration. Going even further, they have institutionalised processes to inject randomness into the environment. Here’s a couple:

Method Cards

“IDEO Method Cards is a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.”

Each of the Method Cards has a picture and a design technique which can be applied to whatever challenge is at hand. Facing a block on a project? Just pick one out of the deck and do what it says. An enterprising soul was kind enough to upload a PDF of the whole deck. Check it out (via BoingBoing and Avi Solo), and buy the deck directly from IDEO if you want to use it.

Tech Box

Each IDEO office has a “Tech Box”, a catalogued treasure trove of interesting materials and objects for designers to dip into when looking for the perfect thing with which to execute their concepts.

“Each Tech Box has several drawers holding hundreds of objects, from smart fabrics to elegant mechanisms to clever toys, each of which are tagged and numbered. Designers and engineers can rummage through the compartments, play with the items, and apply materials used by other designers and engineers within the company to their current project. The entire contents of the Tech Box are available on IDEO’s intranet through a searchable website, with each item listing its specifications, including manufacturer and price, and an additional IDEO anecdote with designer and project info if applicable”

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, the best thing can be to browse. This article is rather old but has a good account of this tool in action.

It’s good to have a box.

These tools might seem to be ways of thinking ‘outside the box’, but one of the great lessons of creativity is the importance of restrictions.

Ernie Schenk’s awesome book, The Houdini Solution is all about this. In the words of the author: 

“Like it or not, most of us are stuck with the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And those circumstances have parameters; undeniable limitations which we either can’t change or could change but don’t wish to.”

“Contrary to what you might believe, this is not a bad thing. Limitations are like the banks of a river. Without them, the river becomes instead a formless mass without direction, just sort of spreading out everywhere but going nowhere.” (from his Lens)

You can read one of the chapters here, on his blog, and I’d recommed this thought provoking book if only for the 50 pieces of ‘homework’ in the last chapter, each of which is supposed to help stimulate thought within limitations. One of my favourites:

“There are times when no matter how hard you try to keep the creative process moving forward, you can’t. So don’t. Instead, tell the team that you’re going to solve the problem by going in through the back door.”

“In effect, you’re going to think from the opposite, or reverse, direction. By coming in through the back door, you get to see an alternative angle of attack – how your counterparts in, say, some alternative reality system might come at the problem.”

“Let’s pick a really straightforward objective: ‘How can I become wealthy?’ But when you go in through the back door the problem suddenly becomes this: ‘How can I keep from becoming dirt poor?'”

“What are all the big things that could make you poor? Is there a big customer that, if he were to take his business somewhere else, might cripple your company? Could the market for your product suddenly go south? Is your company financially sound enough to absorb a cataclysmic blow to the economy, such as a major terrorist attack?”

“Interestingly, the solutions you come up with for the back-door problem almost always lead you to solutions for the front-door version.”

Garr Reynolds suggests a few more resources here.

What other processes for stimulating innovation have you seen? 

Philanthropic judo

In Tanzania, five out of every six hectares of potential arable land goes unused through lack of irrigation (sources 1, 2). I met this woman back in 2005 at her farm in Arusha, at the base of Mount of Kilimanjaro, and even though the land around was parched, she was surrounded by greenery.

There is a fascinating story behind this, with design at its very heart.

Teach someone to fish…

Her water was drawn from a groundwell 20 feet deep, efficiently pumped up by her husband using this treadle pump: the Super MoneyMaker.

The pump is the brainchild of Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, the former an engineer and the latter a craftsman and entrepreneur, who together founded Kickstart in 1991 (formerly ApproTEC). Their aim was to create products which allow poor people in the developing world to start successful businesses.

The logic is working; by investing $35 to $100 in a pump, the average farmer can increase his income from $110 to $1,100 a year.

The result?

So far, 80,000 business have been started in Kenya, Tanzania and Mali. That means over 400,000 people lifted out of poverty. Astonishing, and based on a simple insight:

The Number One Need of the Poor is a Way to Make Money

“The Poor are Not Victims”

“To define people by their conditions rather than their qualities is dehumanizing. When you look past the poverty, you see abilities, resources, and desires. The poor are extremely hard-working and entrepreneurial–they must be just to survive. They don’t want or need to be rescued. They want an opportunity to create a better life for their families.”

From the Kickstart website’s lessons learned.

Right on. Often, the best way to help is to realise that the person in trouble has the will and the capacity to help themselves if given the right tools. The Kickstart website is very clear, concise and full of insights (particularly in explaining what they do), so I won’t go into too much detail here. I have nevertheless picked out three clues on how to make a lasting difference:

1 – Make sure everyone can get stuck in

Aid is commonly seen as a one way street, but it can be provided by creating a supply chain in which everyone involved benefits. On top of increasing the farmer’s income tenfold, the Super MoneyMaker pump (and replacement parts) also provides revenue to the factories that make them the distributors who transport them and the local traders who sell them. Everybody wins.

This takes care. When I visited in 2005 we were shown around a factory where half a dozen workers were assembling pumps using comparatively rudimentary equipment. Production has mostly moved to China now that Kickstart have improved the design and employed higher tech materials and techniques, but I am struck by the simplicity of a design which could be manufactured in a workshop like the one below. 
 

Just an aside; in this case the economics pointed towards lower cost, higher tech China, but what other designs could enrich a local economy by letting it produce them?

2 – Sell, don’t give

By making the Super MoneyMaker a commercial product which costs up to a year’s salary, Kickstart provided a strong incentive to use it properly.

There is strong evidence that the price of a product affects how we perceive its quality (apparently, expensive wine tastes better). The purchase also acts as a form of commitment to the idea that the farmer will use this pump.

Kickstart say that “less than one-third of pumps given away are used to create a new enterprise.”

It is not easy to start a successful business. The cost of the pumps selects farmers with the entrepreneurial will to actually use them to lift them and their families out of poverty.

3 – Measure!

According to Kickstart, every buck invested leads to $15 of profits and wages on the ground. How do they know this?

“Every product comes with a one-year guarantee and every buyer fills out a guarantee form when they buy the product. The guarantee reduces the perceived risk of buying the product, and the forms give KickStart a database of all pump owners.”

“From this database, we select a statistically valid sample of recent purchasers. These customers are visited within a month of purchasing the products, before any impacts have been realized, then again at eighteen months, and again three-years after purchase.”

 

They then send teams of two (a man and a woman) to track down these customers. This is difficult as most farmers don’t even have addresses.

I can’t stress enough how crucial these measurements are.

In my last post I mentioned a story from Atul Gawande’s great book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. There is another remarkable story, about measurement. My brief paraphrase:

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. It affects only a fraction of the population but is devastating if untreated, as it screws up the body’s ability to manage chloride; those affected cannot properly digest food and their lungs are slowly made useless by a thick, hardening mucosal sludge. Fifty years ago the average life expectancy for a child with this disease was a paltry 36 months – patients now live into their 40s (and perhaps longer).

The change was catalysed in the 1960s by a young pediatrician from Cleveland, called LeRoy Matthews, who claimed an annual mortality rate ten times lower than his peers. In response, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation commissionned a survey of every patient in the 31 treatment centers active in 1964. This confirmed the difference, and pushed other centers to follow his methods and eventually set up strict, national standards, leading to the dramatic improvement described above.

The monitoring has continued ever since, and in 2006 the field of cystic fibrosis became the first in medicine to fully open up the results of the 100+ centers who treat the disease in the US. Disclosing the top centers has allowed the others to improve yet another notch.

Designing careful measurements of success is one of the most easily overlooked aspects of the design process. It should not be as it forces you to ask the question: what does success look like?

The fundamental tenet of design is iteration, which is impossible unless you measure outcomes.

A bigger thought: problems can be their own solution

Kickstart should be studied for many reasons, but the main one is this: they transformed a system, charitable aid, which is draining and unsustainable for most involved, into one which feeds off itself. They saw the poor not as a black hole of necessity but as an engine for growth.

What other areas could benefit from this counterintuitive approach? Where else are we pouring energy into a system which could fuel itself?

• Instead of seeing kids as antagonists to the teacher’s attempts at engagement, can schools find tools which make them the drivers of their own education?
• How can communities harness the entrepreneurial abilities of their criminals to reduce crime?
• How can we use people’s tendency to waste energy to solve our impending energy crisis?

Sometimes all you need is a great design to allow people to make the difference themselves.

P.S.

We can all help – I didn’t know this until recently, but the MoneyMaker pump was originally designed by IDEO was involved in their original deep lift pump and is helping design the next generation MoneyMaker. Check out this TED talk by David Kelley from back in 2002 for more.

Another point: Kickstart is one of many great businesses in this space. Read about some of the others in the Design for the Other 90% exhibition site.

Designers should also check out Design Can Change, which looks at a few ways graphic designers in particular can make a difference.

Brilliant

Really nice quote within a quote by Ash Bhoopathy (Yakshaving).

“Dave introduced me to this money quote the other day by Yves Behar: “Advertising is the price you pay for being unoriginal”.

“The price in Microsoft’s case, $300 million. fail.”

On a different note, it’s interesting how long Apple’s campaign has been running (via PBMai):

2007:

1996:

 

I’m intrigued by Ash’s project, Bettr@ (currently in private beta), which aims to: “[help] anyone who is motivated to improve themselves get better at the things they are passionate about. This ranges from hobbies that people do in their spare time, to their career, and to classes that people take.”

Web app by web app we are slowly getting closer to computing which augments us, perhaps this can be another piece of the puzzle. I look forward to playing with it.

Talking of packaging

If you haven’t seen this already, it’s a brilliant parody of Microsoft’s graphic design style.

Amazingly, it was produced *by Microsoft itself* to “to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding” (words of Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla, cited by iPodObserver ).

There is hope yet for the big guy.

Stop selling rubbish products

The above = product packaging?

Yes and no.

One of the things that good brand promoters get is that a product must speak with one voice, of which physical packaging is just one part.

However, the voice of many businesses is often so split that it risks drowning itself out with inconsistency and contradiction. It takes just one look at the standard divisions (funny how they are called that) of many large businesses to see how this might happen, with siloed sales, R&D, support, marketing, advertising, distribution and other functions on the standard organisational chart.

The answer to this problem is relatively simple to describe, but of course incredibly difficult to implement.

1) The product (or service) comes first.

Learn everything about your customers and design something exceptional and highly focused on their needs so that they simply cannot live without. I opened with Apple as it is the obvious example, but others abound.

One often cited example is 37 Signals’ Backpack, Basecamp and their other applications, which are intentionally very limited in what they can do, which allows them to do it rather well. The team itself make a very good case for their ways in their book, Getting Real, which is free to read online. It’s good.

Examples abound aroung the home too. For example, some people tired of vacuuming now swear by their Roombas. When it came out in the 80s, women with hair that wouldn’t stay ‘done’ started loving a simple, $20 plastic device called TopsyTail. In 1993, men ditched their bulky foam for King of Shaves Oil (a “few drops!?”) and never looked back. I swear by BlogJet for writing.

Useful applications are not the only area where this matters. A recent example of exceptionally well designed products were EA’s new IPs, Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, which both absolutely nail two very different and new game mechanics (if you must know, gruesome dismemberment for the former and first person free running for the latter). Both have been critical and commercial successes.

More examples to come.

2) Everything (*everything!*) else should guide your users to your product

After all, the only reason they’re not using and loving it is that they don’t know about it, are too busy to try it, tried it but didn’t have long enough to be sold by it, are scared of switching (the endowment effect), tried to buy it but were distracted by something else, etc… If only the knew what it could do for them!

There are a million and one reasons why someone would choose not to use something that would help, entertain, or otherwise positively impact them.

And so, you try to package your product well. The fundamental change, however, is to view the packaging not just as the box at the end, as nice as it may be, but as the layer upon layer of experiences which help the customer to understand why he should use, no, love your product.

Of course, each person is different. A tech savvy gamer may breeze through the advertising layer around Dead Space and immediately grok the gameplay. Another may come not be a gamer, but be convinced by the comic book. Some may come to a blog first, then shop online. Others may see a billboard and drive by their local Walmart. Everyone sees a different set of layers.

What matters is consistency.

And for god’s sake be authentic. Don’t lie, and where possible build honest relationships with the people who can help spread the word. Never start a press release to a techie blogger like this idiot (emphasis mine):

Hi <<First Name>>,

With You Tube and MySpace all the rage – there’s a new breakthrough in advertising that takes advantage of these online videos in a brand new way. Viral marketing has gone high-tech!

I thought you might have interest in a story.

From the very insightful ideasonideas blog (seriously, read it)

All of this is the packaging of your product, and should be treated as such in the way your business is organised.

Here’s some homework.

The path of least resistance

If you can design something genuinely good, everything else you do should be focused on helping potential customers understand why it will help them.

The path of change is frightening.

Your job is to make the experience as inviting as possible. You can’t force people to take what you offer, but you can try to make it as easy as possible.

All you can do is make the the way to your offering the path of least resistance – and hope that people choose to walk it.

Future of online learning (part 1)

In my last post I mentioned a fascinating essay by Stephen Downes: “The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On”. In it, he revisits and updates his 1998 predictions about the future of education, most of which are apply heavily to business, which is already an environment where people have to learn at different paces. Here are five of the most interesting ideas from this long and thoughtful piece.

1. One task to rule them, and in the mashup bind them

“In 1998 I wrote that computer programs of the future will be function based, that they will address specific needs, launching and manipulating task based applications on an as needed basis. For example, I said, the student of the future will not start up an operating system, internet browser, word processor and email program in order to start work on a course. The student will start up the course, which in turn will start up these applications on its own.”

This paragraph is related to one of the big changes caused by the move towards a world where we perform complex tasks using an array of interconnected web applications, each with simpler functionality and hosted on an array of increasingly smart devices, each serving a more specific purpose and connected to each other via the Cloud. UNIX junkies with their tiny command line applications will be overjoyed. Developers of wonderful, hulking, multi-purpose applications (Microsoft and Office, Adobe and Creative Suite, Autodesk and AutoCAD) will find their most casual users chipped away.

The big challenge for designers of these tools is twofold: 1) their applications need to be open, and interoperate properly and, 2) the user experience will somehow need to be consistent enough not to confuse people.

Resources like http://www.programmableweb.com/ and organisations like http://www.dataportability.org/ are helping the industry to make headway on the first point. Thanks largely to Google Maps, the word mashup is now commonplace, and tools like Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly, JackBe, Dapper, Kapow, IBM’s QEDWiki, Proto, BEA AquaLogic and RSSBus.” (more here). This matrix is also pretty cool.

Number two is tougher, as there is more of a grey area between it working and not than when grabbing data from another service. However, it is crucial for designers to keep an eye on the development of standards in interaction design. For the web, frameworks like YUI which allow standard controls to proliferate are useful, although they must still be carefully used. Physical devices are an entirely different issue, and can turn an accepted way of interacting on its head (e.g. iPhone and touch and the Wii with motion sensing).

The main opportunity: get to know your customer and you will be able to meet their specific need better, faster and more cheaply than ever before.

2. Many screens – a.k.a. letting information come to us

“In 1998 I wrote that ‘The PAD will become the dominant tool for online education, combining the function of book, notebook and pen.” The PAD, I said, would be “a lightweight notebook computer with touch screen functions and high speed wireless internet access.” I also said it would cost around three hundred dollars…”

“With slim, lightweight technology, truly useful and portable PADs will be widely available within the next ten years. We have already seen significant improvements in screen technology, including slim touch-sensitive screens. Wireless access and cloud computing make bulky storage devices unnecessary; what local memory is needed will be more than adequately managed using tiny flash memory chips. Improvements in battery life and solar power will mean that these low-wattage portable computers will run for days. They will, as I suggested before, come in all shapes and sizes, from a slim pocket version (much like the iPod touch) to a notepad version..”

“The same technology that makes PAD technology possible will continue to proper improvements in large screen displays (devices I nicknamed WADs (Wide area Displays) ten years ago).

“In the future, it will be common to see these large-area displays hanging on living room and classroom walls. Instead of being the size of small windows, they will be the size of large blackboards. They will be touch sensitive (or if not, connected to a pointer tracking system device similar to the ones being cobbled together for less than $50 by Wii enthusiasts (Lee, 2007)) or included with any of a number of children’s educational webcam games today (such as Camgoo, among many others).”

For too long we have bent over backwards for computers, limited to a (relatively) small screen and a computer taking pride of place on our desk.  In the future, the opposite will be true. We are surrounded by information. In the future, we will use an array of different devices to access it – from iPhone style handhelds for simpler tasks to desk and wall sized interactive touchscreens for the bigger ones:

“…imagine that any environment that contains a flat surface can become a teaching environment, one where your friends’ faces (or your parents’ or your teachers’) can appear life-size on any old wall or on a table surface as you converse with them from the next room or around the world. We have already seen how the availability of mobile telephones has transformed society in less than a generation. (New Media Consortium, 2008) Having much more powerful, much more expressive, communications technology available everywhere will have a similar impact.”

3. If it ain’t fun, forget it

“A great deal has been written in the last few years about educational games or, as they are sometimes called, ‘serious games’. (Eck, 2006) In 1998 I wrote that “educational software of the future will include every feature present in video games today, and more.” Though this hasn’t proven to be strictly true, it is largely true, and probably no more true than in the domain of games and simulations.”

“In 1998, I wrote the following: “To give a student an idea of what the battle of Waterloo was like, for example, it is best to place the student actually in the battle, hearing Napoleon’s orders as they become increasingly desperate, feeling the recoil of one’s own musket, or slogging through the mud looking for a gap in the British cannons.” (Downes, The Future of Online Learning, 1998) Today we can say that the creation of such simulations will not be simply the domain of large production houses, but will rather be more and more the result of massive collections of small contributions from individual players. And that the creation of content – any content – needs to take this phenomenon into account, or be seen as abstract and sterile.“

Giving people a chance to experience a situation they are learning about is an unusually good way of making sure they understand it. The humain brain is playful. As such, give it a complex environment to experience and you can guarantee that it will start pushing, pulling, prodding and generally attempting to find the way it works  – trying to work out the rules.

Imagine trying to teach music by showing someone only the score to Mozart’s Requiem, or art appreciation by describing one of Turner’s sunsets. Ultimately, our subconscious minds are much more attentive than our conscious, which is why we get so much more depth from an experience than from a description.

4. Personalised learning, group evaluation

Another big idea is that of personalised learning environments. Instead of having students chug through a defined syllabus with standardised tests to mark the pace, the educational institution’s responsibility will be to connect them with projects, resources, games and members of the community around that domain. As they get more and more involved:

“…each person will have what may be thought of as a ‘profile’ of their own art, music and other media, which they have created themselves or with friends, along with records of their activities in various games and simulations (we see things like this already with applications like Launchcast) that take place both on and off line.”

What is really interesting is how all this will be tested:

“In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities. (Syverson & Slatin, 2006)These will include not only the results from games and other competitions with other people and with simulators, but also their creative work, their multimedia projects, their interactions with other people in ongoing or ad hoc projects, and the myriad details we consider when we consider whether or not a person is well educated.”

“Though there will continue to be ‘degrees’, these will be based on a mechanism of evaluation and recognition, rather than a lockstep marching through a prepared curriculum. And educational institutions will not have a monopoly on such evaluations (though the more prestigious ones will recognize the value of aggregating and assessing evaluations from other sources).”

“Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community. The recommendation of one person by another as a peer will, in the end, become the standard of educational value, not the grade or degree.”

5. Learning resources will annotate the world

“Online learning stiff suffers from the misperception that it is about having students sit in front of their computer screen for extended periods of time. As a consequence, the idea that online learning might foster independence of place has been missing in much of the discussion of the field. (…) That said, with the recent development of smaller and lighter wireless-enabled devices, we are approaching the era when online learning will also be seen as mobile learning. Students will be freed from the classroom, and freed from the stationary desktop computer. And as I said last time, true place independence will revolutionize education is a much deeper sense than has perhaps been anticipated.”

Much of what goes on about us has a history and a significance that we miss completely, whether it’s the context in which a piece of technology was developed or the story behind a piece of architecture. In a more concrete business context, it might be the profitability of a piece of machinery or the childcare problems of an employee you have a meeting with in 10 minutes, which are affecting his ability to concentrate.

Well designed learning resources have the potential to guide us through the physical world rather than pulling us away. Incidentally, that’s why walking tours of cities can be so interesting – you see these layers peeled back for you.

More to come.

22 different ways to run Cisco

How did Cisco go from one or two big new initiatives a year to 22 in the last one?

Most would call Cisco a bellwether for the technology sector as it is well managed and sells to businesses rather than consumers, which puts its in the front line of Mr Market‘s fluctuations. The company is now in the news for its planned New Year shutdown to help trim €1bn of costs (link). In last month’s earnings call, it announced that it is expecting Q2 2009 revenue to be down 5 to 10 percent on the previous year. Not great.

But Cisco is good at this. In the face of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, it continued to invest heavily in the afflicted economies and obtained a number one market position which it keeps to this day (source: HBR article). As John Chambers reminded listeners in that same call, “Cisco has always navigated [economic slowdowns] very effectively. We did this in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2003, and in each scenario gained both wallet share and in my opinion profit share. As a result we were better positioned coming out of these transitions versus our peers.” (link)

How will it deal this time around?

Collaboration!

Cisco’s TelePresence and other communications technologies make collaboration easier (and have allowed it to slash travel costs by 20%). However, it is the structuring of the organisation that is most interesting.

Cisco appears to have put the onus on employees from across the company’s divisions to form ad-hoc groups to pursue new opportunities, rather than being told what to do from up-on-high. The seniority of these groups depends on the estimated size of the opportunity, but each has enough independence, authority and flexibility to move decisively. In the words of John Chambers:

“At Cisco, our major priorities are managed not by our top five or top 10 executives but instead by cross-functional, collaborative councils and boards. And, in fact, our engineering organization – which is a third of our total employee base – is not run by a single leader but instead by what we call our Development Council, which is made up of the nine senior vice presidents who lead our engineering divisions. This companywide, council-based leadership model has allowed us to move from taking on only one or two cross-functional priorities a year in the past to addressing 22 this year. We think this is what organisations of the future will look like.”

He goes on to explain how boards and councils actually work: “boards and councils are the equivalent of social-networking groups, where groups of people with relevant expertise work together to make and execute key decisions supported by networked Web 2.0 technologies. Councils are established where we believe we have a $10bn opportunity, boards are created for €1bn opportunities, and working groups are formed for more tactical initiatives related to a board or council.”

“Working groups are accountable to boards, boards to councils, and councils to the Operating Committee, which consists of two dozen or so senior leaders at Cisco. Each person on a board, council, or working group has the authority to speak on behalf of their entire organisation, allowing decisions to be made in real time, with all who may be affected in the same room.”

V.S.E.

To push things further, there is a clear process driving these groups and keeping a consistent standard: VSE. These are three steps: 1) vision, 2) strategy and 3) execution.

“The councils and boards propose possible initiatives to the Operating Committee through highly detailed business plans that have to answer three questions: What’s the vision? What’s our strategy for sustainable differentiation? And how are we going to execute the plan over the next 12 to 18 months?”

“Each plan has an owner who makes a commitment to his or her peers and is held to that commitment and measured on his results. In fact, compensation for many of our top executives is based more on their success within the councils they belong to than their individual performance. In this way, management can consider many, many opportunities spanning the capabilities of the company, instead of just viewing them by silo or by function. This allows us to have a constructive discussions, get buy-in and execute rapidly.”

Why is this interesting?

Technology usually comes up when collaboration is discussed, but is often just a tool with little benefit in the wrong hands. Collaboration is hard, and is often implicitly discouraged by the organisation of large companies. The example of Cisco highlights how much (of the right kind of) structure it takes to get ideas flowing freely and has allowed it to run with 22 ideas at the same time. How?

1. Cisco has put together a structure which makes it much easier for ideas to bubble up from its 67,000 employees. Every corner of any business (sales, marketing, R&D, support, etc…) has its own approaches, strengths and weaknesses. Formalising these cross company groups allows the different functions to collaborate and speak with one voice.
2. Breaking down structures speeds up innovation and development, but can make it hard to channel. However, Cisco’s clear mantra of VSE gives each group the same benchmark against which to plan its offering and a clear plan to get it to market. This ensures they speak the same language so they can be heard within the company.

A final quote:

“To me, collaborative management means putting a lot of people who speak a common language to work towards a common goal.”

What other rules make collaboration work, and gets the results in the hands of customers?

Full article here (sadly behind pay wall).