What The 1,000 Floor Elevator Challenge And Professional Services Have In Common
And how design thinking can help you
A t one time, Google, like many companies, thought of interviewing as a test. The interviewer would throw oddball questions at the applicant and evaluate the applicant’s worthiness based on how they tackled the problem. One of the questions (and maybe Google still uses it today) was how to design an interface for a 1,000 floor elevator.
Remember who you are interviewing at Google and what you are interviewing them for. You would expect to see some interesting and even amazing answers to that question. In fact, the question is so intriguing that designers and others have taken up the crusade to answer it outside the constraints of an interview.
Svilen Kostadinov (his website is here), Idea Architect and Head of Consumer Product Design at Sophos, points out in his article, “The 1,000 Floor Elevator: Why Most Designers Fail Google’s Infamous Interview Design Challenge,” the flawed thinking designers bring to the challenge. They start from unverified presumptions.
Here are two quick examples from Svilen’s article. First, you, like most, jumped to the presumption that the elevator would be used by humans. What if the elevator is for animals? Equipment? Second, you presumed certain uses for the building (e.g., a residences or offices). What if the building is a vertical warehouse?
Svilen (he seems to prefer using just his first name) points out that at the time the question is asked, the applicant really does not have enough information to give an answer. Rather, the better strategy is to ask probing and information gathering questions. Don’t presume because that throws up artificial constraints. Keep the field open and through your questions let your knowledge of the context evolve.
And Now Those In Professional Services
This is where we get to the lawyers, consultants, and others wedged under the heading “professional services.” These fields are packed with Type A, get to the answer before the client finishes the question individuals. Even consultants, trained under the “you have two ears, two eyes, and only one mouth” rule of “listen and watch 80% of the time, restrict your talking to less than 20% of the time” have trouble overcoming the urge to act.
I saw the presumption reflex kick in often when I was a general counsel. Those lawyers who had recently joined the law department from a law firm and those lawyers still in a law firm had the strongest reflexes. In a company, a client would come to the new in-house lawyer asking for a contract, a policy, or some other legal-sounding instrument. The lawyer would jump into action, gathering data for the document and plotting the path to victory.
A lawyer experienced with the in-house client and environment would take a different path. She would ask about the situation giving rise to the request. She would probe the context, the parties involved, the existence of other legal instruments, and the risks. A really good lawyer would ask questions trying to get at the situation from the client’s perspective. By the time she was done, the client and lawyer might have concluded that no legal instrument was needed, a short amendment to an existing document would suffice, and that the client needed something different from what he first requested.
Presume too much as a lawyer and you could find your days filled with needless activities. You would start down one path only to find out as you got halfway to the goal that things had changed. Lawyers in law firms would get particularly frustrated with this turn of events. They had invested time (read as: had billed the client) for work that was of diminished value and needed to re-direct their efforts. Sometimes, there was a communication problem, but just as often I would find the outside lawyer had presumed.
How Tools Like Design Thinking Help
Lawyers loath slowing down the process of solving client problems. That does not mean they will be efficient in solving the problems, just that they want to dig in and get things moving. Many factors play into this urgency, including the belief that legal problems do not get better with age. But there is a cost for jumping into action, and presumption is part of that cost.
Design thinking, a branch of the lean thinking tree, has emerged in recent years as a new approach to tackling problems in businesses, and in law. It starts with gaining an empathetic understanding of the client and his problem and probing ways to solve it through ideation and prototyping. It also has a benefit relevant to the gun-jumping in-house and outside lawyers: it counteracts presumption.
If you pause long enough to explore your client’s view and go through iterations of ideas and prototypes, it is hard not to uncover your presumptions. The same is true, by the way, for your client. Often the lawyer’s client is not the person who will directly interact with the solution. There may be one or more lawyers of intermediaries that sit between the lawyer and the actual user (outside lawyer←in-house lawyer←business manager←user). The design thinking process will help each intermediary strip away his or her presumptions until you get to the core issue that needs resolution. Unsurprisingly, what started off as an elephant may end up looking like a mouse.
Next time you are asked to solve a problem, take a heartbeat and ask what presumptions you are making. You may just find that the slight pause results in your taking an entirely new direction with your problem solving desing.
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About: Ken is a speaker and author on innovation, leadership, and on the future of people, process, and technology. On Medium, he is a “Top 50” author on innovation, leadership, and artificial intelligence. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, and follow him on Facebook.
