"I might look successful but I've had many failures. People take failure too seriously. You have to be positive and believe you will find success next time."
Here's another stab at articulating this foundational concept:
Prototype as if you are right but listen and observe as if
you are wrong: this approach develops better solutions faster, and forces you to never settle.
My colleague Bob Sutton has a great set of "15 Things I Believe", which you can find along the left side of his blog. No. 5 is one of my favorites:
Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
I was thinking about Bob's belief today in the context of innovating on a routine basis. What if I built on his belief but modified some of the language? Here's what I came up with:
Try to prototype as if you are right but listen and observe as if you are wrong: it helps you develop more valid ways of doing, and limits our tendency to settle for the merely adequate.
This awesome Director's Commentary focuses on the thinking behind the reworked BMW 7-series. Narrated by BMW design maestro Adrian Van Hooydonk, it's important on two levels.
First, it's amazing to hear an expert take us through the intricacies of making a car look good. Cars can be magnificent works of scuplture, but rarely does success come by accident. As we listen to Van Hooydonk describe the interior and exterior design details, we get a glimpse at the extreme amount of attention to detail required to pull off a product experience as complex and multifaceted as a car. Such is the state of technology and design process at BMW, even a rear tail light has become a sophisticated mechanical-eletronic subsystem, and one designed to the hilt. What a far cry from the incandescent-bulb lit taillamps of my old 1969 1600-2!
Second, once again we see the importance of having a clear point of view to guide design decisions. Listening to Van Hooydonk, it's clear what is important when it comes to the design of a 7-series: power, sport, elegance, strength, authenticity. Staying on brand means designing to those parameters and throwing out everything else. Which sounds a lot like the art of strategy making to me; perhaps the most important aspect of designs informed by a strategic point of view is that the design does come to embody that strategy and as such forms the basis for a completely coherent brand identity. In my experience it's much easier to have effective marketing communications if your offering actually is designed in manner that's congruent with your messaging.
I consider organizations such as Apple, BMW, Zappos, and Pixar to be part of a select few capable of nailing a complete and compelling user experience. They each do so by betting on the talent of their designers and creators. Clear and compelling vision, coupled with quality execution, does in fact win over the long haul.
You heard it here first: I've fallen in to a classic creative trap called "how can I ever be as good as [insert existing thing here]?
A few weeks ago I ripped off a quick post about Travis Pastrana and the future of the world economy. It took me 15 minutes, I'm not sure where it came from, and it was easy, easy, easy to write. Largely because I wasn't worried about who would read it, words just poured out of my fingers. I just wanted to catch the thought and get it down on paper. The thing is, people liked it. People really liked it, and since then I've been spending a lot of time -- too much time -- thinking about what I could write that would be as good as that one, and in the process of doing so I've stopped writing.
What a mistake. I've fallen in to a classic creativity trap. And I should know better.
The reality about bringing cool stuff to life is that you actually have to bring a lot of crappy stuff to life along the way, and sometimes good stuff happens. And sometimes great stuff happens. But spending your time doing nothing in the name of perfection is a sure recipe for failure. In other words, for something great to happen, things first need to happen. If anything, 2009 is a year for all of us to laugh in the face of perfection and embrace sins of commission. The good stuff will come.