Beware the Siren Call of the Wrong Question
“Charles (Eames) said that the first step in designing a lamp (or anything) was NOT to ask how it should look -- but whether it should even be.”
— Sister Corita Kent, Learning by Heart
Leave it to Charles Eames to perfectly articulate the purpose of prototyping: determining whether a thing should even be.
The first question an innovator must answer is not “can I make it?” but rather, “should I make it?” This has become something of a mantra among CEOs I work with, and innovation teams I advise. It isn’t greenwashing. And it’s not semantics. It’s a precious protection against the gravitational pull of the organizational bureaucracy, as well as our own natural instincts.
Because we were housed within Stanford’s School of Engineering for our first ~15 years of existence, instructors at the d.school routinely encounter students obsessed with making really hard stuff. “Can it even be done?” — whispered in dark corners at first — becomes the rallying cry for many early design efforts. But a preoccupation with technical difficulty can neglect a more fundamental consideration: desirability.
The prime directive of an innovator is to solve a real human problem. If you don’t have one yet, that’s fine. Keep a bug list.
But if you do, then focus your early experimentation efforts on the second question above (“should I make it?”). It's much easier to answer the question of “should I...”, than it is to answer the question “can I...” (which can involve much expense in terms of development, time, etc).
Where are you in danger of answering the wrong question first? Almost every leader in every organization I know can easily conjure cautionary tales. Where has the pull of the organization, or the siren call of the technologically challenging, unduly influenced your path forward?
Only after you’ve answered the second in the affirmative that you earn the right to do the hard-but-alluring technical work of the first.
Related: Create Desirability Data
Related: Kill A Pain
Related: Keep A Bug List
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The first question an innovator must answer is not “can I make it?” but rather, “should I?” This has become something of a mantra among CEOs I work with, as a needful protection against the gravitational pull of the organizational bureaucracy.