Mark Ury just alerted me to a post he did on his blog, springboarding off my notion that “the system is the product”. He makes the point that time is an important factor in how systems come to be:

Time determines the success of systems more than any other factor. This can be maddening for strategists and designers slaving away at product, service, hardware, and software ecosystems.

He argues that systems are not so much designed as evolved. This may be a matter of semantics, but I’d argue that while systems do indeed change over time, and there are unexpected mutations caused by hapenstance and the “environment” (the surrounding customers, competitors, culture…), that does not mean design has no role. We have some control of our own destiny, even with complex systems (though perhaps not as much as we like or think). All is not left up to the divine, as it were, and fortune rewards the prepared mind.

Semantics aside, I definitely agree that time is a key factor in system success. I’ve used the phrase “high panic threshold” when it comes to thinking about complex systems problems - you must resist the temptation to prematurely state that you have defined the problem fully. Doing so means you will likely miss out on a key insight into your customers, your competitors or your business, thus losing potential competitive advantage. You must have a high threshold for ambiguity, patience to wait it out.

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about wicked problems. I’m still percolating on that idea, but moving in a somewhat different direction. Why? Because wicked problems are incomplete when applied to the business world because in their classic definition they lack the notion of competition. Wicked problems emerged out of public policy and planning. In that arena there is not competition in the same way there is in business. So you do not have the time pressures to the same degree, and the fear that someone else is going to crack the problem ahead of you and thus gain an advantage.

Competition: The Go-Fast Force 

Competition is fundamental to business. You might think of it as the “go-faster” force that propels the world of business and individual companies forward. This instills a sense of impatience in companies, particularly when dealing with complex, rather abstract systems. Mark hits it on the head:

Most companies don’t have the patience (or the time) for the system to reveal itself. Public companies are focused on three month cycles. Their CEO’s have three-year tenures. Their middle-management has 50% churn. At the other end, startups have no resources. Two-thirds have the wrong-market strategy. Ninety-percent of them fail in three years.

Systems are so rarely produced because they take time and time is one resource companies don’t have. Most die long before the system is revealed.

This is the market equivalent of natural selection.

In this context, time to market comes to the fore. First mover advantage is key. Decisions are made quickly, partial understanding is the rule.

Emergence: The Go-Slow Force

However, as Mark points out, systems take time to understand, to refine. As the wicked problems definition would have it, you have to start making solutions in order to even understand the problem, and the problem definition emerges slowly over time. In other words, wicked problems resist the classic waterfall process of research > synthesize > define > recommend > act . In fact they turn it on its head: It is only by starting to act that you can illuminate the less obvious aspects of the problem, but its those aspects that deliver the competitive advantage for the very reason that they are non-obvious. If you can crack the wicked problem you gain a competitive advantage just because it is so difficult to understand.

So we have a “go-slow” force that is in polar opposition to the go-fast force of competition. I call this force emergence. Instead of time-to-market, time-to-right is the priority in emergence. Having that high panic threshold really comes in handy here, because this can take several years.

Obviously having large monetary resources helps a lot here, as you can afford to make mistakes (up to a point - shareholders and investors often have low panic thresholds). Having said that, start-ups tend to be good sources of illumination of wicked problems as they are laser focused on differentiation from the big-boy incumbents. Rather than complacently thinking they’ve got the problem well bounded, they actively seek out new aspects of it. The resource-constrained nature of start-ups often makes them more efficient at the rapid, iterative prototyping that is at the heart of using solutions to understand the problem (note that “solution” does not have to mean full-blown product on the market).

The Never-Ending Tension

We’ve all experienced the clashing forces of competition and emergence, the tension between going fast and going slow. For many people it sets the daily context of their work life, myself included. All the tools, processes and frameworks that we bring to bear on design challenges (user research, competitive analysis, trend spotting, market analytics, etc.) are fundamentally about trying to resolve this tension, or at least to make it managable.

I’m participating in a couple of sustainability-related events coming up:

April 1: Design Green Now, in Bellingham, WA. Along with panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Arunas Oslapas and Marc Stoiber, I’ll be giving a short presentation and then we will have discussion and Q&A. It’s happening at the University of Western Washington. More info.

May 15-16:  Sustainable Design Seminar. Fellow frog Sara Louise Todd and I will be running a 2-day seminar for the Design Management Institute on sustainable design. This will be held in San Francisco, at frog design’s new studio which is set to open in the next couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this one as it’s providing us a focal point for synthesizing a lot of the thinking that’s been going on about sustainability at frog. We are working hard to make it full of information that covers familiar issues like materials and process choices, but also tackles more front-end strategic choices.

This seminar will address the fundamental issues of sustainable design and introduce a broad range of frameworks and concepts for tackling the often fundamental changes that are required in how a company approaches design and manufacturing. Drawing from a wide range of sources and case studies as well as frog’s own experience, we will discuss the key issues framing sustainable design, how it can be evangelized and initiated in an organization, and how it impacts on choices of product planning, production partners, brand and marketing. The seminar will combine presentations with hands-on activities and breakout groups, wherever possible using the participants’ own products, organizations, and experiences as sources of challenges and opportunities.

Registration is required for this one, and DMI are expecting that it will fill up (there’s capacity for about 25 participants). We will be doing a repeat performance in October in Denver, CO, also.

More info. 

A public service announcement for Richardsona readers: Avoid 10,000 B.C. like the plague. What an excorable movie. If the Geico cavemena are ticked off at that company’s slogan “So easy even a caveman could do it,” they should be launching a class-action lawsuit against the makers of this monstrosity.

The dialog is awful (even considering they are “cave men”, as one reviewer put it on IMDB, “the dialogue that comes out of the mouths of these people are as wooden as the spears they carry”). The plot turns went beyond fantasy - which at least needs to have some kind of internal logic - to plain ridiculous (the travellers move from Himalaya type mountains to rainforest to Egypt, all on foot and seemingly within a matter of days; the saber tooth tiger doesn’t kill the hero after hero frees said big cat). And while I wasn’t expecting National Geographic historical accuracy, the jaw-droppers came thick and fast (the pyramids are being built in 10,000 BC using domesticated woolly mammoths; tamed horses way before they actually were; all kinds of mix-ups of stone and metal ages).

The special effects are well done, but ultimately for nought as the scenes themselves are dull. The set-piece woolly mammoth hunt and the giant-killer-ostriches-in-the-tall-grass scenes completely lack tension and are terrible copies of their obvious antecedent scenes in Jurassic Park.

The hero’s-journey plot is straight out of Joseph Cambell 101 and is extra-ordinarily ham-fisted compared to even the last three Star Wars movies, which come across as paragons of subtletly by comparison. Come to think of it, the acting, dialog and pacing of those three films are all way better than 10,000 B.C. and that’s saying something as I had a hard time sitting through those.

At least 10,000 B.C. had the sense to limit itself to 90 minutes, but it’s an hour and a half of my life I’d like to get back. Oh, and I’d like to get the twenty bucks back too.

My wife felt that it was a notch above The Avengers (probably agree) and Waterworld (simply because 10,000 B.C. lacked Kevin Costner, but otherwise I thought Waterworld was at least visually more interesting and, heaven forbid, more plausible). So it certainly makes my top 5 of worst big budget movies.

Don’t even bother to pay cable on-demand, wait til you’re suicidally bored on a Saturday afternoon and it comes up on regular TV in a couple of years. Even then, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something better.

And finally, a personal note to director Roland Emmerich: you’ve had some OK movies in the past (Day After Tomorrow, The Patriot) and I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I thought even if the plot was stupid and the characters cardboard cut-outs, at least the spectacle would be good and fun would be had. Wrong on both counts. This is the last movie you’ll get me into.

Given its rather grotty patina I’m not sure if I’d actually want to plug into this, but it’s an interesting concept. This poster of a stereo receiver has a headphone jack sticking out of it that plays a continuous loop of John Legend music, courtesy of Target. Nice way to take advantage of the fact that people have headphones with them anways these days, and are more open to interactive advertising experiments. Still, standing in a subway corridor plugged into the wall with lots of other people brushing by is a little off-putting.

(Spotted in NY subway) 

My wife had to pick up some mannequins for her San Jose State industrial design students this weekend and I went along to help out. I also brought my camera figuring that a store full of mannequins might make for some interesting photos. As expected, it was amusing yet creepy. Many thanks to Judi and her husband, owners of Mannequin Madness for letting me snoop around.

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