Ingredient 11. Do the Opposite

101 Design Ingredients to Solve Big Tech Problems — by Eewei Chen (19 / 125)

👈 Improve vs. Differentiate | TOC | Make It an Adventure 👉

Start swimming in a different direction.

“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”
— Henry David Thoreau, author, poet, and philosopher

The Problem

Companies that continue doing what they’ve always done find it hard to innovate.

The Solution

Get your team to challenge the status quo to create something less predictable.

• Change a belief. Identify one thing that can greatly improve what you do today, even if you don’t think it will work. Deliberately create a problem scenario and come up with as many solutions as possible — for example, if it’s hard to decide what to eat on your own, would it be possible to use an individual’s graph profile, location, and crowdsourced recommendations to suggest new places to go on a mobile device?
• Oppose an opponent. Find a competitor and do things differently. Apple’s focus on creating beautiful software was born from the need to oppose Microsoft’s more feature-rich approach. Even their TV commercials advised, “Think…