A common approach to improving a product –
whether a physical good, a service process, or some combination of the two – is
to begin with the product as it currently is, identify problems that create
customer dissatisfaction, and solve those problems. It is an entirely sensible practice, and one
that is capable of making many small, incremental improvements to a product –
but it utterly annihilates any possibility of making significant and
revolutionary improvements that will create innovative improvements that amaze
customers and leave competitors far behind.
- The as-is/to-be practice makes the assumption that the “as is” state is generally acceptable and needs only minor adjustments, so nothing revolutionary is ever considered
- The same process tends to identify many small problems that are easy to address, so people spring to action to make “quick wins” while the bigger and stickier problems are ignored or unaddressed.
- Where physical products and service procedures are already similar across firms in a given product category, all firms that use the as-is/to-be comparisons see the same problems and derive the same solutions, ensuring that products remain commoditized
Revolutionary improvements require
revolutionary thinking, which is a different process to examining and making
minor adjustments to what is known.
Innovation on this level requires clean-slate thinking, going back to
the very basic assumptions about the problems that customers are facing and the
ways in which products provide solutions.
As an example, consider the process of
learning a foreign language. The
traditional approach to teaching language is incrementally building vocabulary
and syntax: the student learns a number of words and follows models for how
they can be arranged into sentences.
This model has been used in both academic courses and professional
training, and is highly ineffective: it’s hard to learn a foreign language
because it is not taught very well.
For many years, there was not much improvement
in teaching methods, because education providers focused on improving the parts
of their pedagogy without reconsidering the entire system of teaching. That is, those who sought to improve
instruction came up with different sets of vocabulary words, tailoring courses
to business discussions or the common problems of international travellers –
but learning vocabulary was still a matter of rote memorization of the names of
things and actions out of context. Likewise,
it was recognized that classroom education (having to be in a certain place in
a certain time) was inconvenient, so lessons were recorded into books, tapes,
and videos that could be portable and consumed at the learner’s convenience –
but the method of teaching was still the same.
These incremental improvements addressed
specific inconveniences of the learning process, but kept the process the same
– and the process, itself, remained broken.
As such, learning a foreign language remained a difficult and
time-consuming process, and one which most people who had a desire to learn
another language chose to avoid entirely, giving up on achieving their goals.
Solving this problem, and revolutionizing the
language-learning problem, required stepping back from existing practices to
ask the question, “how do people best learn to speak a language?” and to
consider, simply enough, the manner in which a person who moves to a foreign
country learn the language without classroom instruction.
Considered in that manner, it becomes obvious
that people do not memorize lists of words in isolation, but learn words that
they hear in the context of everyday life.
This goes both for vocabulary (how a given thing is called) as well as
syntax (how an action is described in a way that identifies who is performing
it and when). The core problem, which
the system ignored, was the manner of learning, not the content of the lessons.
If I’m not mistaken, the first company to
solve this was Rosetta Stone, whose courses did not consist of memorizing
vocabulary words and conjugations, but instead provided users with the context
of a situation in which words were used and modeled the process of remembering
language in context, comparing different situations, and assimilating language
as part of the communication process.
And it was wildly successful because it solved the real problem.
And again, the real problem had nothing to do
with the performance of parts of the as-is process of teaching, but with the
nature of the process itself. So long
as education designers focused on improving the parts while ignoring they
systemic problem, no significant progress was made. They had to start over from a blank
slate. And because their competitors
remained mired in incrementally improving a broken process, Rosetta Stone
constituted an amazing leap forward.
The same is likely true of a great many
products, to the extent that “new and improved” has become something of a
joke. Whenever a product bears that
label, customers are dubious that the improvement is significant – they often
have to search for what is new and different, and are often disappointed by
what it is. A “new and improved”
detergent may have a different scent, and “Version 11.1” of a software product
adds features that they have no use for anyway.
Customers have become so jaded to this
practice that in order to get their attention, a product has to launch under an
entirely different brand to convince them that it is really different – and
even then, there is the tendency for this fact to become known and for
customers to spread the word that “new brand” is exactly the same as “old
brand” (even if there are some minor differences). Novelty cannot be faked.
Starting over from a clean slate is an
exceedingly difficult process because the certainty of current practices and
the fear that something different will not work out inexorably bring people
back to considering incremental improvements to the as-is process. “Let’s consider a new way to X” is followed
very quickly by “We’ll start by looking at what we do today and considering
ways to improve it.” Because that’s
easy, and because that’s safe.
To go a bit further, I will posit that this is
the reason nothing good is ever created by a committee. When people get together in groups, the fear
of the unknown becomes a constant refrain in the “innovation” process – anyone
with a bold, new vision is corralled back into the herd – and herds are characterized
by a desire for safety and skittishness in the face of the unknown.
But this is a transition to a much different
line of thinking.
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