The Power of Re-inventing the Wheel
If you have ever run a design sprint or a fast-paced design project you must have faced the feeling of “obviousness” after a good intensive start:
“Ok, we have done strategic goals, customer insights, and our first draft of a solution. Amazing intensity and team work! High-five! However,… now that I look at it, is our solution actually new at all?”
To make your team more uncomfortable, your client or a domain expert looks at the totally-unrefined-under-construction-intermediate results and says: “Well, we did that already back in 2015…” or “I can’t really see anything innovative in your results, all that is obvious to me.”
Boohoo, it is so obvious :(
In my experience, after a good intensive sprint, the team relatively often ends up with something that feels a bit obvious. As a matter of fact, my alarm bells go off, if I think we have a solution that no one on this planet has never thought of.
However, for some reason people think that if they “re-invent the wheel” it is a bad thing. That is absolutely wrong.
Another similar “party pooper” is to find out that someone has already implemented your idea, e.g., “Well, this company is already doing what we thought would be our solution. We need to start all over again. I’m gonna cry now.”
Wrong again.
Giants’ shoulders
Science works on the principle of “standing on the shoulders of giants”. It means that any scientist should build her/his work on top of the existing body of knowledge. It would be ridiculous to start research “from scratch”.
When a design team presents their work to me with an apologetic and slightly depressed tone of voice: “Well, this is what we got, but the client said it’s obvious / we found it has been already done…”. My stock response is “Fantastic! Let’s celebrate. Someone has done loads of work for you for free!”
If the solution is obvious, then the next step is to dissect the obvious and figure out what is already known, what has been done, what was learned, what are the bottlenecks, what are the challenges, who should you talk to etc etc. If you can find a person who points out all the “obviousness” in your solution, then that person is a freaking goldmine!
If someone out there has already done it, the same applies. Study the solution, start using it, contact their customer support and ask questions, sign-up for their newsletter, search the web for any presentations or talks where they tell how and why they did it the way they did. Reverse engineer all the publicly available knowledge and learn from it. Another goldmine!
The Root Cause is Bad Goals and NIH!
The presumption that a good solution should be “mind-blowingly creative and never-seen-before innovative” is wrong. And this line of thinking is typically a symptom of two fundamental problems.
First, if the strategic goals of the design work (i.e., what is the desired impact and why) are not clear, then there is no beacon to follow. Without a beacon to follow the team assumes that novelty and differentiation are the definitions of success. And therefore, obviousness is poison.
However, if the goal is clear, understandable and measurable, then it makes no difference whether the impact was created in an obvious or non-obvious way. A professional business person is the best antidote in this situation: s/he does not care about obviousness, because the business impact is all that matters. And that’s how it should be.
Second, the team wants be awesome, and if someone outside the team comes up with an idea or a solution, then it was “Not Invented Here” a.k.a. NIH! While this is very human and typical of creative teams, it is not common sense. Just like I wrote about brainstorming last week, this is a problem of social bonding building mental barriers to finding the best solution. Therefore, we tend to get depressed when an outsider has already come up with the same brilliant solution. And that is… for a lack of a better word: just silly. Let’s tip our hats to that outsider, take her idea, and make it even better.
Therefore, the next time, after hard work, you come up with an obvious solution, or you find out that it has already been done, stand up and celebrate. You haven’t failed, you found a giant to climb.
P.S. As a side-note, this “re-intenveting the wheel” is also typically the problem of one-off-events such as hackathons or design workshops. Unless the organisers have done serious preparation work, there is no way a team of fresh people (random hackathon attendees or workshop participants) can immerse domain & background knowledge in one evening or a single weekend.
