For companies operating in a competitive environment, time is the enemy. But time is missing from conventional formulations of wicked problems.

The usual descriptive factors of a wicked problem look like this (more detail)

1. There is no definitive statement of the problem, in fact there is broad disagreement on it
2. There is no definitive solution, and no “stopping rule” that says when you’re finished/successful
3. The only way to really understand the problem is by creating solutions and trying them out
4. Solutions to wicked problems are not clearly right or wrong
5. The constraints of the problem constantly change

As I have been thinking more about wicked problems and how they apply in strategic business contexts, this missing element of time has become more of a issue. It drives so much of how businesses behave: time is money, and so companies want to move fast to be efficient. But more importantly, they are in a race to find desirable solutions for their customers. This means also racing to understand the boundaries of the wicked problem.

Furthermore, I contend that cracking wicked problems provides companies a major, sustained competitive edge. There are at least a couple of reasons for this:

• Wicked problems are systemic in nature. This makes solutions hard to do and hard to reproduce - Apple has had a 5 year sustained competitive advantage from its cracking of the digital music wicked problem.
• Wicked problems are abstract and hard to see. Often they can only be detected by symptoms that are not obviously connected. So even if you crack them it’s not obvious to your competition right away what you’ve done. This is what Google is doing right now - no-one knows exactly how it will all come together, but it’s clear something is taking shape. Once they are done, it will seem obvious, but for now it is fuzzy.

In all these cases businesses are torn between the need to move rapidly to crack open the wicked problem and capitalize on it, and on the other to move slowly so that they are understanding the problem properly and not jumping to conclusions. This tension creates risk, which in turn heightens the social fragmentation in the organization. Time is therefore the enemy in wicked problems, and we need to update our definition of them to include it.

Last week my wife, Leslie Speer, and I ran a workshop together at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (Ensci, or Les Ateliers at it used to be known) in Paris. The topic we were asked to do it on was West Coast design - how design is done on the west coast of the US. We gave it a theme of “Change is Good”, with sub-themes of optimism, risk, experimentation, human-centered technology, and democratic design. Through a combination of presentations and activities we gave the students a taste of how and why things are done here the way they are, including how to do user research, brainstorming and personas.  There were 14 students who were a mix of bachelor level French students and foreign students from various parts of Europe, mostly spending a year at Ensci as part of the MEDes. (Master of European Design - a joint, nomadic program created by 7  European design schools. Our friend and host for the workshop, Liz Davis, is the Paris leader for the program) .

There were two intensive days of activities, including the students going out in the rain the afternoon of the first day for a spot of “visual anthropology” to find problems with the Metro and Parisian streets. They came back with some great photos and insights that we were able to work with the following day in a synthesis/brainstorming session. This resulted in a casual presentation of their ideas at the end. We got the students introduced to the magic of Post-it notes, and as you can see from the photos they quickly got the hang of them! At the end of the first day we got some pizza and showed Dogtown and Z-Boys, a movie which nicely captured many of the themes we had talked about earlier. Most of them were completely unfamiliar with the history of skateboarding, and they really enjoyed it. 

 The students seemed to enjoy it, and Liz was “dead chuffed” as she would say (being English, like moi). Leslie and I enjoyed running it, though we were exhausted at the end of it - we slept for 16 hours the following night/day.

Madame Davis, our host, as always on the move

And here’s a wonderful prototype in miniature of a Metro station design, made out of Post-it notes!

And lastly a full-scale mock-up of a design for preventing litter caused by freebie newspapers on the Metro: buckets on poles and various other places in the Metro cars that people can put their papers into when finished, encouraging others to read them (less likely if left on floor or seat).

Thanks to Liz for the invite to do it and making it happen, and to the students for letting us use them as ginuea pigs for the experiment! 

A little while back I wrote that my new mantra is “The system is the product”. The context of this was that every product today, even something as simple as a kitchen table, sits within a system of meaning, distribution, retail, service and brand. The system can be as important to the success of the product as the product itself, and can have a massive impact on the customer experience of the product.

I didn’t really expand on it much in the original post, but I actually got a lot of good feedback on it. Peter Merholz was nice enough to pick it up as part of his talk entitled “Stop Designing Products” at the SHiFT conference in Lisbon (download the PDF of his excellent talk here).

One of my first experiences with tackling a big systems problem came a number of years ago when we had a client at frog design who was seeking to develop a car-sharing business with a custom-developed electric car. They had made significant headway on the engineering of the car itself, but other elements with far reaching impacts on the business had been largely ignored so far despite the fact that they were critical path on the schedule: Defining who the customers would likely be, how they might use the service, how things might go wrong with them renting an unfamiliar electric car, how the end-to-end service experience would be (signing up, making reservations, returning the car), how to load-balance the fleet across the city, how to manage maintenance, and so on. These were all much more abstract questions with much less black/white answers than selecting the right battery vendor for the car’s powertrain or how to ensure it passed crash safety standards. The product was getting all the attention at the expense of the enabling system.

Systems are really hard to do well, much harder than individual products. There are several reasons for this:

1. They are abstract and hard to see. Products tend to be tangible (whether physical or digital, you can “get your arms around them” conceptually or literally). This means systems are hard to understand and therefore difficult to work on. The flipside of this is that customers tend to see the system through the interface points, as Dan writes at Adaptive Path: “What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system.”
   
2. Systems are the undervalued connective tissue. As my colleague Luke Williams argues, we are at a point in advanced capitalism where it’s the connections between products that are more important than the products themselves. But the value of this connective tissue is consistently undervalued in our culture. Just as we value specialists over generalists (surgeons are paid a lot more than family practitioners, for example), we tend to like things that are easy to define, not diffuse things that aren’t, even if those diffuse things are vital to the proper functioning of the easily defined things.
3. Systems are often boring. They are not shiny and interactive, and their features tend to enable the things they are tying together, rather than being obvious features of the system itself (in fact if the system is doing its job properly it should largely disappear).
4. Systems cross over organizational boundaries. This is because the customer experience they are enabling crosses over those same boundaries. This makes them an administrative nightmare, and bubbles up all the tensions, insecurities and divergent directions within an organization. Getting systems to work well and come alive often takes a certain dictatorial spirit. There’s a good reason that Apple makes good systems.

We have become very good at managing product development. We now need to get much better at managing systems development.

Couple of items of self-agrandizement:

My wife and I will be teaching a workshop at ENSCI (site in French, in English), a leading industrial design school in Paris, at the beginning of next week. We’ll spend an intensive 2 days with students there teaching them about how design is done on the west coast of the US, which hopefully will be interesting and fun for them. Things like user research, personas, and structured brainstorming are not really taught in France, so it will be interesting to see what their reactions are. I know, tough work, but someone’s got to do it.

Second, frog design has launched a blog, and myself along with about a dozen other frogs will be contributing to it. We’re excited about it, and have been wanting to do it for a while and it’s finally happening. There’s a really interesting mix of people who will be writing on it, so it will be well worth checking out. With luck my posting there won’t affect the blistering pace with which I post here… 

Couldn’t pass this up:

Originally on Boing Boing, referred by Business Innovation Insider