Category: Innovation

Tuesday, 9.02pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming

I am not a fan of measuring and tracking things.

I might be at first – it’s interesting building a new system to log data, for example, but eventually the work gets tiresome and it’s easy to stop.

The thing is that is seems like an essential part of success.

The psychiatrist Raj Persaud in his book Motivation says you need three things in order to be successful – goals, resources and monitoring.

I don’t think he explains these in great detail – as to what exactly is meant by these terms.

Goals, for example, are problematic.

Are goals aspirational – things you hope to attain one day – like peace of mind?

Or are they specific and time-bound – like saving enough money for a house deposit in 9 months?

And what’s the difference between a goal and a target?

Let’s assume that you have a goal – however defined – what do you need in order to achieve it?

If you want to make lots of money but have no capital then is that a problem?

If you haven’t got the skills or experience to develop an app is your goal to be the next Microsoft realistic?

And then what exactly are you measuring?

If you’re counting money are you focusing on output rather than activity?

Revenue or profits are not going to go up just because you want them to.

Now the reason this issue is problematic is because you’ll find yourself in this situation again and again.

Every time you do a project you’ll need to figure out what your goal is, what you need to achieve it and how you are going to report on progress.

It’s very easy to do this the wrong way.

The wrong way starts by setting an arbitrary goal.

For example you decide that you’re going to blog daily and set a goal to write 1,000 words per day.

Is setting that goal enough – is the universe now going to move heaven and earth to make that happen?

Or are you going to have to allocate resources – allocate time for writing.

As Mary Heaton Vorse said “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

If you’re also very dedicated then at the end of each writing day log how many words you’ve written and see if you’re on target and, if not, work harder.

That sounds entirely reasonable, doesn’t it?

But that approach which seems on the surface normal and sensible hides many problems.

The first thing is that you can set goals for yourself – that might be ok.

But if you’ve picked a goal that is not based on data – what happens when you keep failing to meet your goal?

Do you give up, work harder or change the goal?

If it’s not a goal you’ve picked – if it’s been assigned to you and, worse, if your income depends on meeting that goal what are you going to do?

This happens quite a lot with salespeople.

They are set an unachievable target which they sign up to because any salary is better than no salary.

Then, they either manage their numbers so they can hit their targets or work their time planning to fail and then leave to do the same thing in another role.

If you don’t find yourself agreeing with any of this you’re not alone – we are conditioned as a society to believe that goals are good and setting aspirational goals – stretch goals – is the way to motivate and improve.

It’s just that all too often the opposite happens.

So, what should you do if you really want to improve?

That starts with understanding what’s going on – by understanding the voice of the process.

Let’s go back to that blog example.

A few years ago I decided to write every day – when I could anyway.

That, I suppose, was a goal or a target.

I tried setting myself wordcount goals – a few hundred words, maybe 500.

But I quickly got bored and stopped counting.

The way I write and publish, however, means that isn’t a problem.

As the sources are all in text files we can use simple UNIX tools to analyse them.

It didn’t take much time at all to count the words in each post and chart them as shown in the picture above.

I’ve been lazy and drawn averages and upper and lower control lines rather than working them out – because you can see what’s going on pretty clearly.

For the first 300 or so posts the average word count was around 500 – with a peak of little over 1,000.

In the next 200 or so days the average is closer to 600, with the exception of an excitable period where the posts seem a little longer – I can’t remember why.

The point is that this data is the voice of my writing process.

It’s not being collected actively but it can easily be created from the process itself.

There’s no logging required.

This shows that I can write between 600 and 800 words in a sitting most of the time.

As measurements go that’s quite useful for understanding how my process works.

The same approach – getting measurements out of activity without manual logging is what makes devices like the Fitbit and Apple Watch a good idea.

And wouldn’t it be nice if you could do your day to day work and all the metrics could fall out of activity without you doing anything – so that you could understand what normal looks like?

Because the point is this – once you know what normal looks like you can work on your system and try to improve it.

And the improvements will show up in your measurements, not because you’re trying to achieve a target but because you’re working on the system.

Your improvements are coming from learning more about the system you’re a part of.

And, to end with another Deming quote: “Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.19pm

Sheffield, UK

I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes. – Jack Ma

What are the questions you should ask yourself when thinking about a new startup?

The reason I ask this is because there is an increasing consensus that the way to help cities and areas is to encourage startups that will create jobs and economic growth.

There’s a lot of money out there waiting for a good idea – but how do you know when you have a good idea?

The same questions can be asked if you want to improve how an existing process works.

So, is there a model that can help – a model that may help question an idea and figure out whether it’s worth doing or better abandoning?

The model above is a start, adapted from systems thinking ideas that have made their way into a number of methods – including the lean startup approach which talks about customer development.

Let’s see how this might work with a thought experiment.

Type in “startup idea” into Google and you find a website with thousands of ideas.

Let’s pick one for a graphical restaurant reservation system and see if the questions help.

The system, in the model, is not the system we are building.

Before we build a system to do something we first need to understand the system we are serving.

So, the system that we should look at first is the restaurant itself.

What is the purpose of a restaurant?

It is, presumably, to fill its tables with customers for the sittings it has available.

Or, in transformation terms, change customers wishing to have a meal together to satisfied customers.

Which then leads you to ask what does customer demand look like?

Is this a top end restaurant that is booked up months in advance?

Or is it the kind of place people tend to wander into?

If you want to develop this app you need to understand the nature of the customer demand.

Which probably means spending some time talking to restaurants, maybe even working there for a while to see how it works.

Now, what sort of data will help you understand this restaurant better?

Is it how long it takes to get a customer a booking from when they call?

That’s probably not useful – once you get through on the phone it’s probably fairly quick.

And you don’t know what you don’t know – like how many calls were dropped because they couldn’t get through.

Maybe the measure is how much time staff spend on the phone instead of serving customers?

Let’s say you could record something like that, then you’d be able to suggest than a website where you could book a table would be a good idea – that would improve the process.

And finally, you could figure out if it’s worth doing.

At a large pizza chain, for example, it is worth doing – which is why they do it now.

You can go online and book a table for a time you want and that’s great.

For a single owner-managed restaurant, not so much.

Now, this idea is back from 2012 – so there are applications that do just this.

What’s weird is that this suggestion is one of the top results…

But, the point is that if you came along with a startup idea for this kind of app you’d do well to think hard about points 2 and 3.

It’s your study of customer demand and the associated process required to serve that demand that will help you understand if there is something you can do.

And this suggests that your customer development activity should perhaps be reframed as action research rather than market research.

In market research you try and find out stuff – using tools like surveys, interviews and so on.

With action research you get into the details – immerse yourself in the actual work in order to understand what’s going on and come up with a theory.

When you see customer development as an opportunity to carry out research at an organisation – research that will help the organisation understand what’s going on in more detail – you may get a chance to get a much deeper insight into what’s going on.

Perhaps the first bit of any investment into a startup should be seen as an investment in research – an investment from which possible improvement ideas are generated and which then make their way into startups that create scale and growth.

In regions and cities and innovation hubs around the world, formalising such an approach may help unlock both productivity improvements and innovation.

But even in your own startup using a systems thinking approach is probably worth doing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 6.38pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil! –Golda Meir

How do you know if you’re doing the right thing right now in work and life?

For example, is your business working as well as it should? Are your staff happy? Are you pleased with your work and responsibilities? Are you losing weight?

And if not, what are you going to do to change the situation?

It’s tempting to think that what’s needed is to work harder, to get others to work harder or work smarter, create better incentives or set up rules and procedures.

So, how do you get started doing that?

It probably looks something like this.

Lets get in a room, set up a flipchart and do some brainstorming.

Let’s get some divergent thinking under way to see all the things out there.

No idea is too silly – let’s capture all of them.

Then, from the list that comes up, we can prioritise, rank, order and create lists of actions. Let’s get the convergent engine going to focus on the things we need to do and set some goals and action plans.

Good. That’s it then. Go off an execute and we’ll review progress in six months.

That’s your typical intervention process – probably being carried out right now by a team somewhere in the world.

But, as I am discovering, there is a problem with this whole process.

And it has to do with the difference between what is, what you think is, and what should be.

The problem with focusing on what you think is going on

When you spend time thinking about what is going on you build a model of what you believe reality looks like.

For example, you might draw process flows, use sticky notes to map how things move along or where the capability sits.

All these tools are a way to capture reality in a model.

What happens when you capture reality exactly?

Well, you’re obviously not going to, because reality is quite detailed, but if you did, your model would be the same as reality, and you might as well look at reality.

Hopefully this makes sense but if not.

Say reality is A.

Say you build a model of reality, B, that is an exact match of reality.

Then, by definition, B = A. You don’t need B, just look at A.

A model of reality is always much less than reality ( B << A ) – it’s a simplification through necessity.

Spend time looking at the actual situation

That’s why if you want to understand what happens in real life don’t interview people – go and look for yourself.

Look around the a factory, follow a piece of work as it travels from hand to hand and see what happens to it.

Don’t worry too much about documenting every step – the document will be out of date very soon anyway.

The point is to spend some time looking at reality for what it is.

What’s important is what should be going on

If you must create a model you need something that helps you understand what should be going on.

It’s a conceptual model – one that you can then compare to reality.

Say this is C, then what you are doing is comparing C to A and asking questions like are we doing the right things here?

How does this work in practice?

If all this seems quite pedantic let’s look at how it might actually work in your business.

Imagine you want to start a B2B startup and are looking for an opportunity – how can you go about doing that?

What model should you have in mind?

As an example, I’ve drawn a model that builds on recent reading I’ve been doing on systems thinking.

It starts by asking who is your customer’s customer?

If you want to offer a B2B service you need to figure out why someone will buy what you have.

It’s not enough to show that you’re going to save them money.

In most cases, the money you save them will flow right out again to their customers in the form of lower prices.

What you’ve got to ask is how what you do helps your customer to add value to their customer.

That’s why things like websites and brochures are seen as obvious things a business needs – they need them to communicate to their customers and explain how they add value in the first place.

Your product that offers cheaper printing has a less compelling offer than a competitor who offers market research and advice on competitive positioning that informs the copy.

So, what does value work look like?

This is the key question – what can you do which will deliver results that makes your customer happy?

Let’s say you want to help a customer with a direct mail campaign.

You could just charge them a 6 figure sum with no promises.

Or you could show them a route to developing, testing and rolling out a campaign that invests progressively in what works, and where their losses are low but the upside is unlimited.

If you do that you’re doing work that has results – value work.

But do you have what it takes to do that work?

Many people believe that the answer is yes and you can figure out how to get the work done when you get the contract.

That’s all very well, but you’re simply setting yourself up for failure if you don’t have the expertise in place.

Then again, maybe you need to develop the expertise and this is an opportunity to do just that.

As an individual or business owner your job really is to get the expertise needed to the point where value work can be done.

And it’s a simple question really – can you make that happen?

Because if not, failure work shows up

Failure work is work that has to be done because something is going wrong somewhere.

If you don’t know how to design a stationery package and take on the work what you create will look off – and the client won’t be happy.

For example, I look back at business cards I designed myself and cringe at how the alignment is wrong – something a professional would never do.

But that’s a small problem.

What if you make a mess of that million pound property portfolio?

That’s a bigger mess and is going to cost you in time, money and angst to sort out.

Finally – what’s happening in reality?

If you look at the four points that make up the model – understand the customer’s customer, define value work, obtain the expertise required and be alert for failure work – you can compare this to what happens in reality in your business.

But of course, we’re looking at a startup example – something that doesn’t exist in real time…

Which is why you can answer these questions best in a business you already understand – which is why it makes sense to look for value within your sphere of competence – something Warren Buffett would advise.

If you’re experienced at farming and land use then an software app is not the best place for you to have a go.

You could learn – but be open to the prospect of paying for that knowledge by making mistakes along the way.

What all this boils down to is that we should probably be clear on exactly what lens, what perspective we’re taking at any one time.

Are we looking at what should be – what our customer’s experience is when they get the benefits of value work?

Or are we looking at what is – what is actually going on and whether we’re doing value work or simply fixing the results of failures.

Because, at the end of all this work, we want to end up in a better place.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Touch your customer, and you’re halfway there. – Estee Lauder

I’ve been thinking about customer acquisition recently.

You know, the process by which you grow your customer list?

Now that’s easy, you might say.

You can follow AIDA – attention, interest, desire and action.

Or perhaps use SPIN selling – describe the situation, talk about the problem, work out the implications and resolve the needs.

But are those processes?

Actually, what is a process when it comes to this sort of thing?

One thing that a couple of sales experts have said to me – a decade or so apart – stick in my mind.

One said that the thing with sales is to always get to the next step.

It’s not about the win, the shower of gold, the big deal.

Instead, it’s one step at a time, just moving forward, getting agreement on the next bit.

If you’re in a hurry or looking for a quick result that can be painful – but that’s what you need to do.

The second said that you’ve got to think about connecting the dots.

What do you need to have to help move the customer along from one dot to the next?

Now those are quite similar ideas, the first looking one step ahead and the second thinking of having everything lined up so you can go through the steps.

And maybe that’s a process that customers can go through but how do you get them in the first place?

So let’s think of that specifically in the context of a service business – something where you have to sell yourself and what you do to a customer.

Now, there are people out there but is there a market?

The difference between a crowd and a market is that you have a chance of doing a transaction in a market, between you, the seller, and a buyer.

So, you should probably ask yourself a few questions about your service.

Of the people out there are there some who need your service?

If so, do they know about it.

And once they know about it, do they want it?

But that’s not really the right entry point.

What you should ask is whether anyone in the market knows about your product.

If they don’t know about it, the other two questions are irrelevant.

So, customer acquisition starts with that contact – the touch that gets them to turn and raise their eyebrows – that quizzical expression that asks who are you and what do you want?

And your customer acquisition strategies are the ways in which you get that contact with someone else – whether it’s face to face, networking, referrals, direct marketing or all the other ways of getting your message out there.

But how do you get someone to actually try out your service?

And the answer, in this day and age, seems to be that you remove all the risk that they might have.

That’s the realm of free trials, money-back-guarantees and pay later if satisfied programmes.

I guess really a customer acquisition strategy has to have two things at the very least.

You need to do things that let you have conversations with people you don’t know well so you can get to know them better.

If you want to have the conversation go well make something they need or better still, something they want.

That gets you halfway there.

And then you’ve got to make it really easy for them to try what you’re selling – at absolutely no risk of loss to them.

That’s the other half.

And perhaps, if you can see that you’re doing those two things, you’re on your way – headed in the right direction.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning. – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is blunt about what happens if you are forced to do work without meaning – in the end you go mad.

But even when you have a choice how do you know that you’re doing meaningful work?

The reason I ask such a question is because of little examples that have come up in recent months.

The most recent was a trip to a well known fast food chain.

When you use their automated order placing machine it gives you a shortcut to a commonly placed order.

When you select that and mistakenly realise that it’s a large rather than regular option the interface has been designed to keep you moving forward.

What I would like to do is cancel the order and start again.

The interface choices aren’t designed to do that – they’re designed to get you to complete the order.

Now I’m sure a very well-qualified person has A/B tested that interface to death – and realised that by a simple optimisation of the words used in the menu choices on what is effectively a landing page they can close more customers who give in and just place the order.

There’s undoubtedly a statistically significant increase in orders through the use of an intentionally confusing screen.

But, is that ethical?

Is that good for the customer?

And is that meaningful work by that designer or programmer?

There are a few other such examples bothering me – including how ethical it is to manipulate people and how open you should be in your dealings with others.

Some people come down very strongly on the side of rights and morals while others are more comfortable with stretching the interpretation of morality and right to suit their pursuit of profit.

And it’s not an easy thing to take a position because logically both positions are justifiable.

Both positions have historically resulted in great good and great evil, after all.

However, if you leave the philosophy to one side and accept that there is no general answer.

What matters is what you want to do – and is there a framework that can help with that?

I found an interesting one, shown in the picture above, in a paper by Lips-Wiersma and Wright.

Their research suggests that meaning doesn’t come from just one place – instead it flows from multiple sources.

Let’s start with the job of just being yourself.

If you aren’t comfortable with who you are, with what you’re doing then you’re not going to be happy.

Many people have experienced the dissatisfaction that comes from being pressured into a high-paying career but hating every day they go to work.

And then there is the job of being with others – your family, work, friends.

Is that going well or could you do better?

When it comes to what you do day after day are you focused on yourself?

Do you climb the corporate ladder, step-by-step, always kissing up and kicking down?

Or is your job to hold the ladder and help others get on – to serve others?

Clearly, if one’s life is situated entirely in any one of the quadrants then unhappiness will generally follow.

The trick, this model suggests, is to find balance.

Balance between finding inner peace and healthy relationships.

Balance between making yourself money and being of service to humanity.

I think if that food chain asked the question at the end of its ordering process “How easy was it to order what you wanted today?” they might drop a few points on the conversion ratio but increase their customer’s happiness a little.

And maybe even make their entire operation a little more meaningful.

Small steps for large organisations – ones they should know they need to take.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.09pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Everything that I’ve learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won’t work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won’t. PC/Windows: You think it won’t work, and it won’t. – Philip Greenspun

I was at the supermarket today picking up a few things and noticing the way technology had infiltrated my life.

I used the self-scan tool at the supermarket, wandering about and scanning purchases as I went and marking them as bought on the grocery list app that we use as a family.

What was interesting about that exercise was that I literally didn’t need to speak to anyone – not even my other half.

Either of us could add items to the shared list, pick them up, notify the other and get on with life.

We now have a shared stock control management system, formed by linking together these pieces of technology.

And that got me thinking about when technology is good and when it’s rubbish.

There’s a concept called additionality which in essence says what extra do you get when you do something new over what you would get anyway if you did things the same way as you’re doing right now.

And I think this is important because we can think an innovation we come up with will result in additionality but it really doesn’t.

It could make things worse, or make such a small difference that it isn’t worth doing.

And a LOT of technology results in exactly those things happening.

Take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, for example.

The one thing you can guarantee when using a CRM is that the amount of time you need to get the job done will increase.

That’s because you now need to log everything you’re doing – make notes and share information. You’re adding to the work involved and what are you getting as a result?

To understand that you need to do four things.

Tuesday, 9.13pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It doesn’t matter. Most things people believe about the world are lies – Olunike Adeliyi in American Gods Season 2, Ep 1: The Beguiling Man

Sometimes you hear a news item and feel a visceral sense of unease – because you know what is seen and what is unseen, but don’t know what could happen as a result.

Take the coverage of a certain politician’s claim that Oldham is a “divided society”, as different races live separately.

The comments get immense coverage – perhaps that’s the point.

Some people dislike them instantly, seeing them simply as overt racism.

Others argue about the substance and accuracy of the statements – and whether the speaker is justified in making them or not.

Either way, emotions run hot.

There are two things that are interesting about the whole concept of divided communities.

The first is that segregation almost seems like a default mode of operation.

The Shelling Model Of Segregation shows how simple rules can result in a segregated society.

Take the animation above, for example.

You have red people and blue people.

Red people are happy when they’re mostly surrounded by red people and blue people are happy when mostly surrounded by blue.

Say you place red and blue people randomly on a grid.

You then play a repeated game with a simple rule.

If a red person has too many blue people around, then they can move to a square nearer red people and vice versa.

What happens if you do that?

Within a few turns you find divided communities as people migrate to be closer to people like them.

What this model says is that it takes effort to integrate – to have people of different types living together.

If a politician points to that division as a problem – that then is a problem of a lack of effort of the system to encourage integration.

Which in turn is the fault of the politicians – not the people that make individual decisions to keep their families in familiar and safe situations.

But which politician cares about the maths of the situation – they’re more interested in the votes of the people that matter.

Their audience.

Which takes us to the second point.

The sketchnote below is from a talk George Monbiot gave in 2014.

The important message is in the bottom right.

Let’s say you think the politician and his supporters are wrong.

How do you convince them of that?

The answer is you don’t.

You follow a three step process:

1. Equip, resource and organise your followers.
2. Win the undecided.
3. Ignore the opposition, don’t appease them.

That’s something a particular breed of vitriolic and xenophobic politician understands well.

They feed on fear and mistrust and speak only to those that believe what they peddle.

You’re not going to change that.

The opposition need to get better at playing the same game.

And one can only hope that more people get to know the truth.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh