Whenever I see snazzy ‘gear’ diagrams like these ones – found in the wild on places like LinkedIn or glossy consultant presentations – two immediate reactions come to mind:
1) Those little green cogs at the bottom left and top right are going to cause everything to grind to a tooth-gnashing halt, and
2) Your transformation is going to fail.
(And don’t get me started on the indicative direction of the meshing cogs)
The video below, courtesy of the Brick Experiment Channel, caught my eye as a nifty example of iterative and accumulative design problem solving. This is not constrained to the tangible world. In systems design, a problem with a basic starting point which is responded to with a simple and effective solution often spawn a series of step-up demands and higher complexity problems over time.
There can be a few reasons for this, such as:
By design – an iterative/incremental approach to problem solving beginning with a ‘minimal viable product’ (MVP) which is tested, released, and then informs subsequent design in a conscious, methodical and step-wise fashion
By evolving requirement – the subsequent problems did not present themselves until the initial problem had been resolved due to evolution of the system itself
By naivety of requirement – the clients of the solution did not realise they had additional problems to solve or believed that the initial problem to be solved was the only one
By low capability awareness – the clients of the solution were not aware that the problem was able to be solved and therefore had not applied resources to solve it
By status quo bias – the clients of the solution were emotionally anchored on the current system, despite inadequacies, and so avoided attempts to solve the problem
Back in the early days of our MBA studies, fellow alum Brendan Moloney asked me to pen an article for his growing organisation, darlo.
An archived PDF copy of the article is found at THIS LINK.
