Man of String

On Pottery

I’ve just bought two sake cups from a potter in South Korea.

It feels to me worth letting that statement stand by itself a little. Not because I want to show how cool I am, although I must admit that I am rather proud of my purchase, but because the art itself belongs to an ancient tradition and my purchase was made in the most modern way possible, and the very idea that such a confluence is possible does seem to me extremely cool. So let’s start with the modern bit and then work back. The chain of events leading to my fortunate transaction was as follows:

December 18^th 2014, my great friend Michael Croton emailed me with a suggestion that I check out a BBC story on a nightingale and a cellist, dating back to 1924. I won’t go into the back story of this suggestion for now at least, but suffice it to say that I did check out the story from BBC online, and you can too if you like, here. I particularly liked the song “The Tan Yard Side”, so I went on to Youtube and found a recording by Sam Lee and Friends (the same performer as on the BBC story).

I noticed, as I was listening, that the video was hosted by Goldmark Gallery, an art gallery in the UK, and because I am generally in favour of art I decided to click on the Gallery page. I immediately saw a documentary about a South Korean potter called Lee Kang-hyo and decided to watch it.

That particular decision dates back nearly 40 years ago, to a period when I was a regular at my high school’s pottery studio. Mostly I went because I enjoyed the work, but my intention was not entirely pure. I developed a good sized crush on my pottery teacher, a very attractive American woman who encouraged my creative efforts while good naturedly ignoring or at least enduring my schoolboy infatuation. I only stopped doing pottery when a nude that I was trying to sculpt had her bust blown off in the kiln. My crush and the older students found this hilarious (which of course it was), my humiliation was complete, and my pottery career came to a sudden and gloomy end.

Still, watching Lee Kang-hyo was an inspiration. I admired his intentionality, his practice, his quest to live a beautiful life, heck I even admired the way he drank his tea. It made me want to connect with him somehow. So over the next three weeks or so I visited the Goldmark website from time to time, watched videos of other potters, and looked at pieces of his and their work. And in the end I chose two sake cups that I especially liked and could afford.

So here’s the odd thing about pottery. Lee Kang-hyo is one of Korea’s most important living potters, an artist who is represented in major museum collections and by respected galleries worldwide, and I paid less for his cups – even going through one of those galleries - than I would for a painting by a local art student at a street fair. Sure, they’re only 6cm tall, and I don’t mean to disrespect art students, but hopefully you get the point. And it’s nothing to do with ethnicity. Contemporary British and European pottery commands similarly modest prices, even for the larger and more important pieces. But why is that the case? Why is pottery so under-appreciated and undervalued as an art form? I’m sure there are many theories among potters and ceramicists, but I’m going to hazard my own explanation.

I want to suggest that the reason lies in the very heart of pottery, namely the pots. Pots are functional items and are associated with everyday work, work done in the kitchen and work done by women. They are a type of technology, container technology, and it is striking that in all the literature on technology and the history of technology there is not one book, not one, whose primary topic is containers (except “The Box” which is about the phenomenon of the sea container specifically, not about the general category). Lewis Mumford suggested that containers are ignored by historians of technology precisely because of their “female” nature, arising from the womb-as-container concept and from their primary use in domestic situations. And by virtue of being female they are also passive, merely holding their contents, unlike the hammering, drilling and cutting tools that are the prime focus of technology studies. And so it goes; pottery is the production of pots, and pots are about women, and women are undervalued and underrepresented in technology, and undervalued and underrepresented in art except when they’re naked. So whereas I could never hope to acquire even a minor piece by a painter of international standing, I am now, or soon will be, the proud owner of not one but two beautiful pieces of container technology which I can not only admire but also use, most likely in the company of my friend Michael whenever he comes to visit in person, to toast pots of all kind and potters everywhere, and in particular Lee Kang-hyo.

But I digress. This morning I decided to buy “my” sake cups. I emailed Goldmark to make sure they could ship overseas and within 30 minutes or so they replied in the affirmative. A couple of email exchanges later I had found out the total cost, so I went online, made my purchase, received another email thanking me and letting me know that they would send me the LKH catalogue with my cups, went back onto the site and had the undeniable pleasure of seeing “sold” against my two pieces.

Nowadays it seems hardly worth pointing out that such and such a thing would have been impossible even 20 years ago. Life without the internet is so unthinkable to most of us now that we tend to take its powers very much for granted. But in this case I have felt them strongly. It really does seem remarkable to me that a friend in London can alert me in Chicago to a BBC radio program that might interest me, I can listen to it after it has already aired, search for the music that was featured in it, watch a video of the musicians playing said music, visit the UK-based gallery at which they played it, peruse their collection of art, watch a video about a potter in South Korea, take a look at pieces of his work for sale by the Gallery and find two pieces that I’m interested in, ask the Gallery for shipping information and receive an exact quote 5 minutes later, order my pieces, and receive a very nice thank you note from the same person who took my initial emails. His name is Christian, incidentally, and I’m grateful to him for his excellent customer service.

I have achieved my goal. I feel connected to Lee Kang-hyo and I haven’t even got my pieces yet. I’ve watched him work and dance and drink tea and smoke. I know that his wife and daughter are the most important things in his life, the beauty that he was looking for. I know that my sake cups extend that beautiful life into my own. And this connectedness has come in equal parts through the physical medium of the clay and the transmission medium of the internet. I have long imagined, and still expect, a future return to the handmade, the artisanal, the crafted, the unique as a measure of value, perhaps even as the new currency of an age when machines are able to make anything from anything. But I made a mistake in lumping all the new technologies together. It turns out that the internet does not belong in the same camp as the future tools of production; the handmade renaissance is not a revolt against the web but an unexpected product of it. While we assume technology is persistently and doggedly forward looking the internet has actually reached back in time to make old ways of life available to us as well. I never expected that I’d be transported back to post WWI England and the cultural phenomenon of the nightingale and cello, a phenomenon that first trended and then went viral across the country. I never expected that my virtual exploration would end with my connection to an artist on the other side of the world, about the same age as me, engaged in an ancient practice with elemental materials, the clay from which we come and to which we return. I never expected that the web could breathe new life into old traditions and old skills and make them relevant and important again. And maybe this is one of the reasons why it seems so much older than the 21 year old it really is. As we march bravely into the future so the further back and the deeper in the web seems to penetrate. There is a limit of course, but I don’t think we’ve nearly reached it, and in the meantime I’ll be grateful to the silicon for helping me re-appreciate the clay, and to the clay for helping me re-appreciate the silicon, and to both for allowing me to be connected with people near and far, dead and alive, who I admire, respect and love, and from now on I’ll try to take none of these things for granted.

Flow by Design - a new business paradigm (2/2)

In this second of two posts I describe a new business paradigm that is quietly emerging across all our major industries. A small number of pioneer organizations have reinvented the way they manage their resources, encouraging the flow of ideas and information, raw materials and finished goods, employees and customers, even byproducts and waste. As well as introducing the flow by design paradigm, I have attempted to synthesize its underlying design principles and have given examples from various industries to illustrate its broad applicability, its impact and its power of meaningful differentiation.

The Flow Paradigm

Open Road Tolling (ORT) has transformed toll road driving and provides a vastly superior motorist experience compared to a toll booth, especially for commuters. No stopping, no wasting time in rush hour lines, no searching for the exact change, no getting stuck behind “that” driver. Instead, ORT is designed specifically to allow you to continue your journey without interruption, to maintain your flow. And if that’s all it did, it would still be reason enough to love ORT. But not only does it save you time, it’s also cheaper and safer for you. It’s a better solution for the toll operator, being cheaper to manage and to maintain than the toll booths. And because it eliminates stopping and waiting it also increases fuel efficiency and reduces carbon monoxide and other emissions, providing an environmental benefit as well.

A flow, then, is something free to move and set in motion, like a motorist on an ORT toll road, as opposed to something held in a silo, like a motorist at a toll booth. Flow can apply to just about anything, including people, ideas, natural resources, money, products, even waste. It carries with it the idea of being able to maintain steady progress, even across boundaries or borders between domains, modes or territories of any sort. Flow-based solutions, like ORT, make it possible to use, improve or process a resource without having to stop it first, and instead allow it, or even make it easier for it, to maintain its flow. In this way flow-based solutions represent a total upending of traditional silo solutions which, like the toll booth, operate by stopping, immobilizing and batching up resources prior to working on and/or extracting value from them.

The remarkable thing about flow-based solutions is that, regardless of industry or resource application, they nearly always have the same triple whammy effect as ORT, improving the customer experience, reducing operational costs, and improving environmental or community impact, all at the same time. They commonly disrupt industry norms and orthodoxies and share, even if implicitly, a set of design principles that generate and guide this revolutionary business model. These principles can be used by other organizations who wish to design their own flow-based solutions and achieve a similar impact. These principle include

Create flows of information, materials, people and other resources, thereby removing waste and building a capability of immediacy and responsiveness;

 In retail, the Spanish fashion retail chain Zara is built on a continuous flow and feedback model. They produce and distribute in small batches, reducing the design-to-shelf cycle time from an industry average of 6-9 months to 2-4 weeks. They maintain low inventory levels in their stores. Information flows daily from consumers to designers - what they say they’d like to see, what they try on but discard in the dressing room, and what they actually buy – and responsive product flows back to them. And it works. They took over from The Gap as the largest retail fashion store in the world in 2008.

Build connectedness with the communities, markets, industries or ecosystems of which the organization is a part, not independence from them;

In energy and industry, the Danish industrial park of Kalundborg stands alone in its commitment to Industrial Symbiosis, the sharing between organizations of byproducts as resources, including both energy and material, to reduce waste, costs and environmental pollution. Since its initial experiments in 1972 membership has grown to include over 30 byproduct exchange agreements between some of Denmark’s largest organizations. Between them they have reduced yearly CO₂ emission by 240,000 tons, saved 3 million m³ of water through recycling and reuse, and recycled 150,000 tons of gypsum. The park as a whole operates as a flow system, providing inspiration, example and analogy for innovative multi-organizational collaborations of all types.

Remove organizational and ideological “silos”, and favor integration and sharing over isolation and protection;

In public education, High Tech High School rejects most educational norms. It removes the distinctions between school and community, adult and student, academic and technical, privileged and under-privileged, and draws connections between them all through field studies, community service, internships, consultation with industry partners and other outside experts, and exhibitions in professional venues. Some 98% of HTH graduates go on to post-secondary education compared to a national average of approximately 66%. As a result, it ranks as USA’s #1 STEM school (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) by U.S.News,

Design for customer experience and relationships over touch-points and transactions;

In healthcare, Memorial Sloan-Kettering has re-imagined chemotherapy treatment from the bottom up and from the patient’s perspective, starting with the insight that time, especially time spent with family, is their patients’ most precious commodity. At the Brooklyn Infusion Center, waiting times have been eliminated. Patients are free to move around, bring family members with them, and create a soothing or healing environment for themselves. The workflow is so different from the norm that nurses are cross-trained as Reiki massage therapists and can provide guided imagery and other integrative therapies as their patients receive their infusions. All at high safety and quality levels and at a lower cost than the traditional model.

Design, measure, and optimize for the effectiveness and wellbeing of the system as a whole

 In agriculture, a Spanish fish farm has turned the traditional agricultural model on its head. Veta La Palma is a farm that does not isolate its animals from other parts of the ecosystem but allows them to integrate fully. It does not feed its animals but allows them to feed from their ecosystem, as they would in the wild. It doesn’t kill its predators but measures the success of the farm by their wellbeing. It does not pollute or impoverish the environment but actually purifies and enriches it. It has become a bird and wildlife sanctuary, and it provides direct income to about 100 people from the neighboring villages. And, according to Dan Barber, the chef whose story about Veta La Palma has to go down as one of the best TED talks of all time, the fish tastes absolutely delicious!

Summary

Organizations that have implemented flow-based solutions are typically among the most differentiated and the most successful players in their industry or market. And yet they represent a very small part of the whole. As a result there is a massive opportunity for transformation, including everything from how we eliminate waiting in various lines, rooms and phone calls to how we get rid of the silos that stop the flow of ideas, information and knowledge across and beyond the organization, from how we utilize flow based energy sources like the sun, wind and water, to how we support soccer Moms, business people and high-school students alike in their respective flows. Any organization that is looking for transformative and differentiated success should consider designing and implementing flow-based solutions and watch their silos crumble.

If you think that designing for flows can make a positive difference  please help me get the word out and share with your networks via Twitter etc.  And please feel free to leave a comment here or contact me by email and I will be sure to reply. Thanks for reading.

 

Flow by Design - a new business paradigm (1/2)

There is a revolution going on across all our major industries, albeit one that has been hiding in plain view until now. A small number of pioneer organizations have reinvented the way they manage their resources, encouraging the flow of ideas and information, raw materials and finished goods, employees and customers, even byproducts and waste. In doing so, they have demonstrated the viability of a new, more sustainable business paradigm for the future. In this first of two posts I explore the current status quo, the Silo paradigm and in the second one I will describe the emerging model of Flows.

Silos - the dominant paradigm

Everyone agrees that silos in the business world are a bad thing. Every few months another well meaning article urges us to bust, smash, destroy or crash them for the continued wellbeing of our firms. And you’d be hard pushed to find anyone actually admitting to owning or running one. So how is it that they keep cropping up like weeds despite our best intentions? What is it about them that causes them to appear not just in the business world but also in science, where their presence is just as criticized and just as ubiquitous, and in education, and in health care, and just about anywhere else we care to look?

The reason is surprisingly simple. It’s because they work, at least for the silo owner. They’ve been working for a very long time, ever since we built the first physical silos for storing grain some 11,500 years ago. From that time on we have found that the more control we have over resources the more valuable we can make them. Silos give us that control. We use silos to accumulate valuable resources and to release them only when they’re most needed and we can exploit their value most fully. And it doesn’t just apply to grain, missiles, or information. It’s how we manage and increase the value of nearly all kinds of resource, and if we look closely enough we will find silos of one kind or another just about everywhere. We accumulate gold and seeds and other strategic reserves in vaults, water behind dams, money in banks, patients in waiting rooms, students in classrooms, employees in cube farms, pigs and chicken in factory farms, and so on almost endlessly. As John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison have noted of knowledge resources, “our firms are organized and operate to accumulate and defend stocks of knowledge and to extract as much value from them as possible.” HBR Blog “Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flow”, January 27, 2009.

In short, nearly all of our organizations, across all industries, are silos or are made up of them.  The problem with many of our silos is that we tend to forget that they are only parts of systems, not systems themselves, and that optimizing for the success of the silo can compromise the overall success and wellbeing of the system, whether that system is a company, an industry, a community or an ecosystem. Silos can create inequalities between those that own and control resources and those that need them. They can deplete and even exhaust resources that turn out to be finite, and they are often slow, reluctant and even incapable of adapting to changing system conditions and needs.

So, if we really truly want to smash the silos, we’re going to need something much deeper than an impassioned plea. We’re going to need an alternative, a whole new business paradigm in fact, and not just for information silos but for all resource types. It turns out that the paradigm Hagel, Seely Brown and Davidson recommended for knowledge holds true for all other resources as well; one based on Flows. A small number of pioneer organizations have already proven the effectiveness of this paradigm, demonstrating that flow based designs can be better for the customer, better for the company and better for the environment than their silo equivalents and, as a result, represent a new, more sustainable business model for the future.

For more information on Flow by Design, a new business paradigm which promotes flows of resources including people, information, materials, products, energy and waste, please feel free to comment on this post. I will be sure to reply.

The Mother of all Inventions? A Surprise Candidate

If you were asked to come up with a list of the most important inventions of all time, the chances are that you’d include among them agriculture, writing, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, the car, and the airplane. If you’re young enough you might include the iPod and if you’re whimsical enough you might include the flushing toilet. But there’s one invention you almost certainly wouldn’t even think to include on your list, let alone to put it at number one. As far as I can tell it’s never made any published list except rather vaguely as “food storage and processing”.  And that invention is the granary. You see, I want to make the claim that the granary, dating as far back as 11,500 years ago and predating agriculture by a millennium, has had a greater impact on the human race, and thus on the world, than any other invention before or since and therefore deserves the title of “the mother of all inventions”, even more than necessity itself.

 The reason is twofold. Firstly, it was directly responsible for the development of several of the other inventions that all usually make the top ten on the list:

 -       It created the infrastructure and rationale for farming (which, without food storage, is just a more laborious way of putting food on the table than hunting-gathering)

-       It enabled the growth of larger, denser populations. Some of these populations would eventually become cities, widely regarded as the crucibles of creativity and innovation.

-       It made possible the concepts of ownership and trade, by transforming surplus into an asset

-       It drove the development of written language and numbers, as granary owners looked for reliable ways to control and account for their inventories. It is surely no coincidence that Nissaba, the Sumerian goddess of the granary, was also the patron of scribes.

 Secondly, and this is even more important though not as immediately obvious, the granary also fundamentally changed our relationship with nature. For the first time in their history, our ancestors no longer lived hand to mouth, dependent on whatever nature provided to them then and there. Now, they could take out of nature more than enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs and build up reserves in their granaries to feed themselves during times of scarcity or to trade with others. The granaries made the grain more useful to the gatherers than if they had left it on the wild crop stands. This gradually became a new way of thinking about the world, a logic that declared that everything in it – not just grain - is available to us as a potential resource; that the more control we have over a resource the more value we can derive from it; and that the easiest and best way for us to wield that control over any given resource is to control its environment. I call these environments “stores” and this way of thinking about the world “store logic”.

 The granary was our first store, and we have applied the same logic, store logic, to resources and stores of all types ever since then. We have increased the value of animals and plants by controlling their propagation in fields and farms, of ideas and memories and knowledge by controlling theirs in tablets, papyri and paper (and back to tablets!), of raw materials in factories, of finished goods in retail stores, of students in classrooms and schools, of electricity in batteries, of water in dams, of “knowledge workers” in the appropriately named cube farms, and so on.

 Everywhere we look we can see stores and store logic hard at work. Even the remarkable 21^st century achievement of physicist Lene Hau and her team in capturing light in a Bose Einstein Condensate, a highly exotic store, is grounded in the same belief, that if we can control the propagation of a resource, even light itself, we will be able to make more use of it. The original granary builders would be proud.

Fission or Fusion? A Nuclear Prediction

Back in 2010 I made a prediction, based on my theory of Invasive Species, that the pre-IPO Tesla would go on to be a successful business. On Thursday, February 13, 2014 the company’s stock temporarily passed the $200 mark, giving the company a market value of half that of GM. Not bad for a car company that has only made two models.

Buoyed by this success I am now ready to make another prediction, this time based on my theory of Silos (to be described more fully in future posts). So here goes: Fusion, as yet an unproven technology, will take over from Fission, the current technology in all of the world’s active nuclear power plants, as the nuclear energy solution of the future. And here’s why:

Our dominant attitude towards resources, natural or otherwise, is to extract maximum value from them by isolating, accumulating, and protecting them from others, an attitude perhaps best described as silo mentality. Silos are everywhere, and they’re not just protecting grain and ICBMs. Banks, dams, batteries, factories, farms, strategic reserves, zoos, prisons, seed vaults, schools, databases etc., are all types of silo designed to control, and sometimes to process, their precious resources, and always with a view to maximizing their value to us or minimizing their potential harm.

In vitro fertilization is a silo process, aimed at maximizing the reproductive value of the sperm and the egg. These resources are isolated from their natural environments (male and female bodies respectively), recombined within a pristine controlled environment (the “in vitro” fertilization itself) and then replanted in the female body. Despite its difference in nearly every other respect, physicist Lene Hau’s remarkable achievement of trapping light in a Bose Einstein Condensate is also a silo process, where the BEC acts as a highly exotic silo for its resource, the pulse of light, and is itself contained by another silo, in this case a magnetic field.

And, by the same argument, nuclear fusion is a silo process too, but fission is not. We isolate, decouple or split resource elements from each other before containing them, or as part of the process of containing them, but hardly ever within the silo itself. Once in the silo our job is to recombine the resource elements to maximize their value to us, like the sperm and egg. And for that reason alone, because we overwhelmingly adopt silo solutions for resource management problems, whatever the resource, I believe fusion will ultimately be adopted, even though there are still many challenges to overcome.

And I will go even further. Despite the recent news that scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have made a significant step forward in proving the feasibility of fusion, using a gold capsule as the silo, I think the approach taken by the multi-billion-euro ITER facility, currently under construction in Cadarache, France is likely to be more successful. And that is because ITER will use magnetic fields to contain the hot fusion fuel - a concept known as magnetic confinement – which is a more highly evolved silo that creates a more pristine environment than a physical container. It would be truly awesome if they could throw in a Bose Einstein Condensate somewhere as well just to get superfluidity involved. Unfortunately, near absolute zero temperatures and core-of-the-sun temperatures probably don’t get long too well.

So, there you have it. Fusion beats fission and magnetic field fusion beat gold capsule fusion, and ultra cold fusion would be best of all. How d’ya like your eggs, Hon?

 

say good bye to the Universe, hello to the Reverse and Proverse

Q: Where is everything?

A: It’s behind you!

The inflationary model of the universe is widely accepted but only narrowly liked. It provides an answer to a problem but only if you’re willing to accept that it’s OK to break the laws of physics at the beginning of creation because the laws haven’t been made yet. And it doesn’t do much to help explain where everything is, by which I mean the 95% of all matter that has to be somewhere if our understanding of the shape of the universe is correct, or why the universe is growing at an accelerating rate.

Since I have no qualifications of any sort to weigh in on this topic, I feel entirely liberated to do just that. And I would like to propose a new reading of the inflationary model that is much simpler, breaks no laws, and might even be useful in other ways.

My proposal is that the universe is made up of two parts. The first part is the one we inhabit, the part that includes all “normal”, matter and whose arrow of time points forward (from our perspective at least). I’ll call this the Proverse. The second part occupies the same space as the first but its arrow of time is opposite to ours. I’ll call this the Reverse for obvious reasons.

In the first moments of the big bang, the Reverse was created, expanding faster than light and, as a result (according to physical law) travelling “backwards” in time. After some period, some small part of the Reverse, accounting for only 5% of its matter but represented by the heavier bits, cooled and slowed down. When it slowed down to the speed of light, the arrow of time for that small part flipped, creating the Proverse. The rest of the Reverse didn’t stop but rather continued its expansion at a faster speed than the Proverse, taking with it the other 95%, what we in our ignorance call dark matter and dark energy.

The diagram below depicts this model of the Big Bang from time and space perspectives. The time perspective (on the left) shows the Reverse coming into existence first (BBR = Big Bang Reverse), with the Proverse slightly paradoxically emerging second and yet “earlier” (BBP = Big Bang Proverse).

The space perspective (on the right) shows the Proverse appearing to come first (thanks to the Reverse actually coming first but travelling backwards in time), followed by the Reverse. Where the two cones of space intersect marks the point where the standard inflationary model defines the Big Bang (BBP inflationary).

This new model provides a simpler model of the Big Bang. It also does another couple of useful things.

First, it provides an explanation for the apparent weakness of gravity compared to the other forces, which is that gravity in the Proverse is being partially counteracted by the equivalent force in the Reverse.

Second, and related to the first, it suggests a reason for the acceleration of the universe. There is an ongoing struggle between Proverse gravity and Reverse gravity. In the early days of the Proverse its gravitational forces were more dominant, leading towards the creation of stars and galaxies. As time proceeds and massive objects in the Proverse move further away from each other (on average), so their gravitational attraction weakens in comparison to the equivalent force in the Reverse. The Reverse is pulling the Proverse “out” and will continue to do so.

One final thought: if our universe really is composed of two parts defined by their relative position with regard to the speed of light, it may be possible that the particles which move at that speed somehow exist at the intersection of time, sometimes moving forward with the Proverse, sometimes moving back with the Reverse, and probably switching from one to the other regularly in relation to their wavelength. Could this explain puzzles like the famous double-slit experience and spooky interaction at a distance?

Thanks for reading.

 

 

An Innovation Paradox: When More of the Same Makes a Big Difference

This article was originally published in Fast Co. Design on August 4th, 2011

At a time when we are constantly being told to value the new and the different, it may come as a surprise to learn that the standard, the shared and the common can be strong drivers of transformation. In fact, many of the innovations that have changed the world, including railroads, modern manufacturing and interchangeable parts, money, agriculture, containerized shipping, numbers, the internet, even language, only succeed because of standardization.

Organizations that are looking to transform their operations, their customer experience or even their industries can benefit from incorporating as many types of standard, shared and common features into their efforts as possible. These include:

Standard Processes

In 2009, Baptist Health System (BHS) in San Antonio, Texas, became part of an initiative designed by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to reduce costs and increase quality in acute care. A physician-led Clinical Improvement Council for Orthopedic Care at BHS transformed its approach to hip and knee replacement procedures. Where previously each one of the system’s 40 orthopedic surgeons had their own particular way of doing things, the Council developed a single model of care for all five of the hospitals in the system. New standards included everything from pre-operative tests, radiology, operating room instrumentation, supplies and other equipment, to post surgery medication, food and nutrition, physical therapy and physician consults.

Within a few months the results were dramatic; BHS cut its readmission rate in half, and infection rates dropped significantly, providing patients with a measurably improved customer experience. The physicians were able to complete their surgical workload in notably less time than it had previously taken them. Nurses, technicians and other medical staff reported higher job satisfaction because they no longer had to worry about managing 40 different models of care. The procedures cost less, saving the taxpayers hundreds of dollars per procedure. In short, common procedures, as well as a shared goal between physicians and hospital administrators, have demonstrated the potential to drive transformation in the US health care system.

Common Goals

Apple may seem like a strange company to include in a discussion of standards. It is, after all, the company that exhorted us to “Think Different.” But during his tenure as CEO, Steve Jobs instilled a culture inside Apple that had nothing to do with the free spirited and rebellious self-actualization that its TV and billboard ads proposed. Instead, Jobs set high expectations and goals for himself and the entire organization and swiftly got rid of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t play along. And for their part, his employees are known not for their diversity of perspectives but rather for their uniform adherence to and advocacy of the Apple approach to product design and development. They all value deep collaboration (multi-disciplinary teams that have the same goals and work together on different parts of the same problem at the same time) and take individual responsibility for the success of the organization, not the other way round.

From this surprising conformity, Apple achieves an extraordinary level of innovation and productivity that has transformed not one but several different industries, including computers, music, phone and home electronics. Its recent results have been a series of highly innovative consumer products and services that have catapulted the company into the upper echelons of profitability, growth and consumer loyalty. In the last decade, Apple’s stock price has risen from around $10 in 1998 to $350 in 2011, its revenues from around $5.5 billion to $87.5 billion, and the company is currently growing at about 60%.

Common Platforms:

By 1970, Black & Decker’s consumer power tool portfolio was a hotchpotch of 122 different models, which between them had 30 different motors, 60 different motor housings and 104 different armatures. Each of these variants required separate tooling. There were few shared components or processes, leading to high costs in inventory ordering, storage and management as well as in tool production and manufacturing. These costs were passed on in part to the customer. In 1971, driven by a triple threat of offshore manufacturers, inflation and rising costs, and anticipated regulation requiring double insulation to protect consumers against electric shock, the Black & Decker management team and board decided that it needed to rethink its entire approach to the design and development of its power tool portfolio.

A concerted effort by the business over the next three years saw a massive reduction in variants, leading to just one motor, a huge reduction in space, facilities, resources and time needed to manage parts and equipment, faster production cycles and retooling times. Motor production labor costs were cut by 85%, armature costs by 80%, failure rates fell from 6-10% to 1%. New products were introduced to the market in weeks rather than months and prices to the consumer were slashed by as much as 30% while maintaining 50% margins. In what amounted to nothing less than a complete transformation of their operations, Black & Decker became so dominant in sales, price, variety and quality that it forced many of its domestic competitors--including Sunbeam, Porter Cable, Rockwell and even General Electric, among others--out of the consumer power tools market.

Shared Values

Every potential new employee at the online retailer Zappos.com is screened not just for capabilities and experience but also for likely culture fit. As a new hire, they receive five weeks of training, are immersed in the company’s culture and taught the company’s ten core values. Commitment to these values is so important to the company that it offers new recruits $4,000 to leave if they don’t share them. The results are clear. Voluntary staff turnover, in a customer service/call center industry plagued by attrition rates as high as 50% nationally, is estimated by some accounts to be as low as 10% at Zappos.

Meanwhile, the customer service ethos–“Deliver WOW Through Service”--is famously anything but common or standard. Unlike the vast majority of call centers, phone calls are not scripted and they are not timed. In fact, there is some pride in the fact that the record for the longest call (as at July 2011) is 8 hours and 3 minutes. The shared commitment to a common set of values provides a platform from which a highly differentiated service is delivered, transforming what would typically be the most mundane of transactions into a delightful one, and one that itself drives loyalty and rapid growth.

Standard Interfaces

Until the development of standard parts in the early 19^th century, rifles were built individually by hand. Expensive and time consuming to build and to repair, they were also totally incompatible with one another, rendering them useless if they malfunctioned in the field. Interchangeable parts, a powerful form of standardization, changed all that and ushered in the era of mass production,

Nearly 200 years later, a standard interface has further transformed the rifle, allowing a standard weapon to take on multiple functions. The Picatinny (Pic) Rail provides soldiers with a means to attach and detach weapon accessories like optics, lasers, bipods, and other hardware to the M-16A1 assault rifle. Since its introduction in 1995, it has helped to more than double the longevity and functionality of millions of the Armed Forces standard issue weapons. The common interface provided by the rail has reduced the costs and simplified the logistics of equipping and supporting 1.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million reservists, and increased the rate of innovation and growth in the small arms and accessory industries. For example, Aimpoint Inc., a manufacturer and supplier of high performance optics to the US Army and Air Force, has seen a fifteen-fold increase in revenues since 1997, since the rail makes it possible for more soldiers to be deployed with, use and service advanced optics and other accessories in the field. Most importantly, the rail has increased the functionality and efficacy of active-duty front line soldiers, providing them with a tool that can meet a variety of both specialized and general needs.

Standards are Critical Tools of Innovation

Most organizations get it wrong when it comes to thinking about standards and innovation. They think that standards are a necessary evil, important but dull, their significance limited to cost reduction and quality improvement. At the same time they equate being innovative with being different. This is provably wrong on both counts. Focusing on the similar, the shared and the common will provide a stronger platform for scalable transformation then trying to be different ever will.

Memory and Experience

This piece was originally posted in Fast Co. Design, March 8th 2012

They may play tricks on us and may not be always reliable, but our memories dictate which experiences we choose to repeat and which we don’t. Why not then design for memory instead of experience?  

If you had to relive a painful experience for either 60 or 90 seconds, you’d choose the shorter period, right? It seems so obvious that we usually don’t even bother to ask the question. But, remarkably enough, experiments have shown that you’d be overwhelmingly more likely to pick the longer period if, the first time around, you sensed even a slight lessening of the pain in the final moments of the experience. It seems that we tend to remember, and judge, an overall experience based on the intensity of our sensation at its end relative to the peak intensity during it. And, we tend to ignore the duration of the experience. So we’ll rate a mediocre vacation more highly overall if our final experience of it is highly positive. And vice versa. We’ll tend to discount a great holiday almost entirely if it is some way tarnished towards the end.

For those of us who work in service design and innovation for a living, this has profound implications. After all, it is one of our orthodoxies, part of the designer credo, that user experience is paramount. But what if it isn’t? What if user memory is at least as important--if not more so? What if memorable experiences are determined not by the value of the experiences themselves but by the value of the memories they provoke?

Does this mean that we need to rethink our work?

In some cases, I think it might. Take the design of the average retail experience. Typically the least compelling part of that experience for customers is the financial transaction, the point where they actually have to pay for their purchases. In most cases, regardless of whether those purchases are products, like clothes and groceries, or services, like meals and haircuts, the exchange of money tends to happen at the very end of the experience as a whole. So if we are truly most impacted by what happens to us last, it would seem that many of these experiences provide customers with the worst possible memory of them.

Grant Achatz, one of the world’s most creative chefs, is tackling this problem head on at his latest restaurant, Next. Like a theater that puts on a new show every few months, Next presents themed menus that change completely four times a year. The restaurant’s opening theme was “Paris 1906” in which diners relived Escoffier’s legendary cuisine at the Ritz hotel. This was followed by a “Tour of Thailand,” after which came “Childhood”, a trip down memory lane replete with PB&J sandwiches, macaroni and cheese and superhero lunchboxes. Diners book tickets online in advance, as they become available. The tickets cover the cost of the meal – which, like a show, is presented as a whole, not a la carte – including taxes, tip and, optionally, wine pairings. Once the ticket has been bought, there is no bill to be settled at the end of the dinner. This method of payment not only improves Next’s planning and budgeting abilities but also extends the pleasurable aspects of the experience for the diners all the way through to them leaving the restaurant and thus, according to this theory, likely heightens their memories of it. Reading the reviews on Yelp, it becomes clear how willing customers are to embrace these innovations (nearly every single reviewer appears to be a repeat diner at Next) and how evocative their memories of them become.

Meanwhile in retail, Apple has not only replaced the checkout and cashier paradigm in most stores with “on the floor” payment offered by any available staffer, it now provides an option to bypass the human transaction entirely. Its November 2011 release of version 2.0 of the Apple Store app enables shoppers in any of its US retail locations to use EasyPay on their iPhone 4 to pay for Apple accessories electronically. This means that Apple owners can choose whether or not to engage with a store associate at all. Apple’s efforts to improve the final part of the retail experience, by giving their customers payment options that include using their own beloved iPhone, serve to reinforce positive memories and, perhaps, influence future purchasing decisions.

Of course, not every coffee, meal, grocery run or shopping trip needs to be made into an experience. Sometimes, maybe most times, people just need their caffeine fix or a sandwich-to-go or snacks for the kids or some office supplies. But even then a transaction can feel easy and pleasant, in which case they’ll likely return, or difficult and unsatisfactory, in which case they most likely won’t. In higher stakes experiences, whether they have a reputation for being painful, like a visit to the dentist, or pleasurable, like a vacation, we should consider designing them to maximize these rules to transform people’s memories and influence whether they are game to repeat the experience or prefer to find an alternative. Where once this may have been the domain of a User Experience (UX) specialist, now maybe there’s a role for an expert in User Memory (UM) as well.

Milk and Water

As a child, growing up in a small town in south east England, the milkman was one of the most visible supporting players in our community’s life. Once or twice a week he’d show up early in the morning and you could often hear him before you saw him, driving up the road in his electric milkfloat stacked full of crates, as the glass milk bottles jiggled against each other with each slight bump in the road. The bottles were all identical, imperial pint-sized, and unlabelled. The only thing telling them apart was the colour of the foil cap which identified each bottle’s milk fat content.

Our family always ordered silver cap, which was full milk and had an inch or so of cream at the top. Rich, but not as rich as the gold cap milk which was almost sinfully decadent. From time to time, if we didn’t bring the milk in early enough the local birds would perforate the foil cap with their beaks and get at the cream. This irritated my father no end as he liked to invoke the paternal privilege of getting the first pour for his morning coffee.

It turns out that birds are lactose intolerant and that milk will give them diarrhea, but the cream has no lactose in it and so is a tasty energy-rich treat for them, as it was for my father. Even so only two species of birds, the blue tit and the robin, learned to drink the cream at the top of each pint. It seems that the birds first learned this many years ago when milk was delivered without the foil bottle cap. That protective innovation was introduced after World War I but in less than thirty years the trick of perforating the cap had spread across the entire blue tit population. Blue tits flock together for several months and the young birds evidently learn from their elders. Male robins, however, are fiercely territorial and will shoo away others if they get too close. So even though some individual robins did learn the cap perforation trick it never got passed on from bird to bird.

For several decades the milkman was such a prominent feature of communities across the country that a whole genre of jokes grew up around him. More recently he and his electric milk float have gradually, though not totally, faded from view. But I am still struck by the very idea that milk can be delivered to our homes in standard sized bottles, and how that differs so dramatically from water delivery. When I want water I simply turn on a tap and out it pours in an undifferentiated, unmeasured flow. I can leave the tap on for as long as I like. I can water the plants, run a bath, wash the dishes, fill a kettle, and I can use a different amount every time without having to order it in advance.

As I think about this difference some more, it seems to me that nowadays mostly everything that we need to be delivered is done so like milk, in standard sized containers. This is obviously true of products like cereal or baked beans but also true of paper documents via FedEx envelopes, cars via sea containers, and digital content like emails, movies, songs and websites via the packet-switching network known as the internet.

In comparison, our experience of water delivery is actually rather rare and getting rarer. Apart from water itself, the only things that get delivered to us as a flow are electricity, radio and TV. Of these, radio and TV are being increasingly delivered digitally, over the internet, and are therefore now more like milk than water. Meanwhile, the traditional electrical grid concept of central power generation and always-on, use it or lose it electricity is being reinvented from all sides. The days of cheap and effective rechargeable batteries for home and car, linked to small scale power generation facilities like solar panels, potentially and intriguingly providing us with a hybrid water-milk delivery model that may even feed energy back to the grid, are hopefully not too far off. And that leaves us with water, which we inherit rather than make. We know how fortunate and few we are who have this precious flow at our disposal.

So when it comes to stuff that we want distributed, we seem to be leaving the world of water and embracing the world of milk. Technology transforms our experience of flow into episodes and transactions, bottles and crates, boxes and containers, envelopes and packets.

I’ve recently started to have milk delivered to our home again, after a break of at least three decades. It was a decision based on choice – it’s really good milk – rather than on necessity. The delivery mechanism remains more or less untouched, but many of the details of the experience have changed. We no longer pay the milkman directly but order and pay online. The milk bottles here in Chicago are US half gallon rather than imperial pint, and the bottle tops are no longer aluminum but plastic. And we never actually see or hear our milkman in person, though he does send his customers a holiday letter every year along with a photo of his family. No one tells milkman jokes anymore.

Invasive Principles #8: Grow Fast, Spread Fast

Invasive species spread rapidly once they’ve secured their niche.  Zebra mussels have spread the length of the Mississippi in only two decades or so.  The killer bees have spread into large parts of both South and North America within 50 years.  Some species seem to spread almost as soon as they’re arrived, while for others it may take them years or even decades to secure their initial foothold and make whatever adaptive measures they need to ensure their ongoing success.  But in either case, their subsequent expansion is usually very rapid, so much so that it usually appears as if they’ve appeared from nowhere, as if they’re an overnight success.

Their ability to expand quickly is made possible partially because of their adaptations, opportunism and hybridization, but also partially because they are not initially constrained by native counter-adaptations, competitors, predators, parasites and imitators.  Once they’ve established a new, valuable source of resources, however, copycats will follow and start to consume some of those resources.  And so speed is of the essence, to get to those resources before anyone else does.

In the business world, as in entertainment and in nature, overnight successes are usually anything but what that implies.  More often, as the saying goes, “it takes a decade to become an overnight success”.  This is thanks to the lag phase, during which potential invaders have to adapt to secure their niche or prove the potential of their innovations. 

FedEx took years to catch on and nearly went bust more than once before redefining everybody’s delivery expectations and growing to become the world’s largest airline.

Geeksquad had an 8 year lag phase, but once it hybridized with Best Buy it grew from 50 employees with $3M revenues in October 2002 to 12,000 employees and $1B revenues in only 5 years.   Of course, imitators have since followed.  Over the last few years thousands of local, regional and national companies have sprung up to provide similar services.  Hundreds of them have explicitly imitated Geek Squad, trading on the word “geek”.  In business as in nature, imitators follow innovators.

Once Curves found the right combination of customer experience and business model, which included a much smaller footprint than traditional gyms, it quickly spread beyond its original 2 locations to over 10,000 worldwide since its inception in 1994, making it the world’s largest health and fitness franchise.