When you’re creating something new you want to make it great. Be it in art, design or in product development the goal is to create something everyone wants to use or look at. Often this spawns from a desire to improve something that already exists. This iterative approach is addressed in Design Thinking, development and really most forms of creation and production today.
In a quest to improve a product, a process, or a way of living, we may solve one problem inefficiently and create a new one.
Driven by need, competition, or interest, the need to iterate is at the heart of improvement, however it often leads to over correcting. In a quest to improve a product, a process, or a way of living, we may solve one problem inefficiently and in doing so create a new one. We build on the inefficient solution when instead rolling back to a previous version before moving forward would make more sense and prevent the creation of an inferior product.
This is a common occurrence not only in modern product development, but across industries, functions and time. Through the ages we’ve seen a number of examples of this effect — from technology to food, and even going to the bathroom.
Please reinforce my food with actual food
Have you ever eaten white bread? It’s pretty tasty, decently cheap, fills you up and can be used in a variety of ways because, well, it’s bread. Wonder Bread is the original iconic white bread from the 1920s, and has evolved bit by bit over time. What made it Wonder-ful was an iconic and ground-breaking development that is now a standard for a world-changing comparison: sliced bread. Wonder Bread popularized pre-sliced bread to the point where it’s now a saying. Overall, the product was cheap, useful, and conveniently packaged not to mentioned well advertised — it was a hit.
So a staple food became cheaper, more convenient and ubiquitous. Great news right? Not entirely. Bread is a great source of complex carbohydrates, but it is also a decent source of other nutrients like extra fiber, protein, and a few B-complex vitamins. These features are removed when you refine and bleach flour to make it white, though are retained with whole grain flour.[1] (In fact you get it even more with home made sour dough — the bread of a purist.) The lack of these features in Wonder Bread became apparent as reports of deficiency-related disease started to pop up around the country not long after its introduction. The manufacturers took this as an opportunity to correct the issue by altering their product; not by re-thinking the production process, but by enriching it.
Why buy normal healthy bread when you can buy unhealthy bread reinforced with nutrients? Why choose boring locally-baked brown bread when cheaply-produced white bread is enriched in 8, or 12 ways? As the marketing proved successful, enrichment has become an accepted feature of many types of food. The argument is that it’s cheaper and easier to add supplements than to produce originally healthy food. So now we have bread enriched with 200% of your protein RDA, and juice, milk, and even water enriched with every vitamin and nutrient you thought you needed. Here the food industry went down a path, realized it has made a mistake, and decided to over-correct.
I have stomach problems…now how do I get rich
Now, what about the most basic human function of all: going to the bathroom. If you’ve watched Shark Tank, or are into poop-related viral marketing videos you may have discovered the Squatty Potty. It’s simple: a stool to make you squat when you’re on the toilet. It deals with discomfort and constipation by putting you in a more natural position when you need to relieve yourself. It’s really fun to watch the video repeatedly (with that weird unicorn and those poor kids), and quite interesting to see a practical (non-medicinal) solution to such a primal and delicate tissue.
However, it’s hailed as a revolutionary idea when in reality it’s just taking what we all really know and creating a product out of it. If you’ve ever had to use the facilities outdoors you’ll realize the squat is the natural position for relieving yourself. We’re potty trained on toilet bowls because it was made the most convenient form to replace the chamber pot in England and then all of Western civilization in the 18th century [2]. Specifically Western civilization because many regions did not convert till much later if at all. In India for example, squat toilets are as common as sitting ones in public places, and are praised for a few reasons. For one you don’t have any skin contact with a dirty toilet (something sitting-toilet users I’m sure would welcome in public restrooms), plus they’re easier to clean. Not to mention the benefit of a natural squat and an “open colon” as Squatty Potty says. Squats are pretty commonly found in Japan, China, sub-Saharan Africa, and even some parts of southern and Eastern Europe, however are still considered less “modern” across the board. So why are we re-fixing a problem that’s been fixed? Convenience? Money? All of the above really, but mostly because convincing people used to the idea of a comfortable bowl to go over a hole in the ground has presumably proven difficult over the years. So instead we over-correct.
Trying to ride the Wave
Communicating and organizing people is hard. It’s even harder if you’re not located with people you’re working with, and need to see what everyone’s working on. You can send files back and forth, but you have the issue of being out of sync and need to deal with version control. What about having everything online? All your communication online, sharing files online, and setting tasks, schedules and an entire meeting area in the same virtual place?
Enter Google Wave. It was a single place where you could communicate — like a closed meeting ecosystem with all of your conversations and tasks with the whole team or individuals. After launch, it got some solid traction and an ardent fan base. You may be thinking: what happened? It sounds great but how come I don’t hear about it today?
Google pulled support for Wave in 2012. One could say the over-compensating of other products was one of the reasons for doing so. People looking for an easy way to link up with co-workers in one space can instant message, have dailies on email or the phone, and share documents on online-based files (Google Docs had already launched by the time Wave did). With Wave, you could solve most of those issues, and never leave one page. With all the features it had it was hailed as an email-killer, a collaboration tool and much more. Though this made it seem capable, it made it difficult to simply explain how it was a step forward.
Wave was the brown bread, the squat-toilet; the early product idea that was abandoned. Google already had focus in Docs, Gmail, Google Talk/Hangouts, and decided to keep running full tilt in those areas. With Google+ and Circles we saw some effort to return to that group-ecosystem but they lost focus over-correcting the original idea with sunk-cost in existing products. However hope is not lost in this idea — because of Slack. Slack can centralize your entire team, and has add-on apps to link everything up! You can send files via Box, links as an IM, and keep everything synchronized with a dispersed team. Over-correcting may have killed Wave, but the idea lives on.
To Over-Correct or to Not?
This idea of over-correcting is everywhere. It’s fascinating that the idea of solving a ‘newly identified’ problem with cool and innovative solutions seems to win out over retooling the original solution. Over correction is evidence of inefficiencies and a path not taken. It’s why we have over-manipulated food, sub-optimal toilets, and no more Google Wave. It stymies optimal product development, and can encourage bad habits.
That being said, iterative development of a useful product is better than stagnation. In fact this practice of over-correction highlights the fact that it’s possible to reinvent and change nearly any process or product as long as there’s a reason to. We are often quick to assume that new is better and that products should be disrupted as improving an old-existing product can be as beneficial. Sure Wonder Bread took old recipe and stripped bread of it’s nutritional value, but it popularized sliced bread and a new way to consume food. Sure squatting isn’t a new idea, but Squatty Potty took it to a new level to help those of us married to our sitting-toilets. Over-correcting isn’t failure, it’s iterating an existing product to fix an existing problem. It’s because of this that we have Slack dealing with co-working, and Squatty Potty disrupting the 250 year established product of the toilet bowl.
[1] http://nutrition.about.com/od/askyournutritionist/f/enriched.htm
[2] http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Throne-of-Sir-John-Harrington/
Thanks to Taylor Culliver and Dilip Rajan for feedback and edits on this post.
Savar works in product management as an Offering Management Associate at IBM
Originally posted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/over-correcting-how-we-iterate-wrong-thing-savar-sareen?trk=pulse_spock-articles
