It begins with a lick (well technically it’s a riff, but…)
The design thinking model has a clear rhythm: diverge-converge-diverge-converge.
Capture lots of user insights, then hone down til you arrive at a problem statement; generate lots of ideas, then narrow in to prototype and test a few aspects of one idea. For some people, divergence feels liberating, and insights and ideas flow like water. For others, divergence feels a little terrifying; I don’t have any ideas! Similarly, for some, convergence feels super productive: make an idea tangible and move it forward quickly. For others it can feel super frustrating: I’m ready to create a vision and strategy and plan, but I can only focus on one small aspect of the solution, and I have to build it out as a janky prototype.
Where I work, the desire to design BIG solutions is strong. And yet we all know that “Big Projects” are more likely to fail than succeed. And the bigger the budget, the more likely they will fail. You know that Big Project: the plan and budget that are two massive stabs in the dark, because there are too many unknowns, but you had to make them up because otherwise you couldn’t start the project. And so the plan and the budget set expectations that almost immediately could not be met, which meant that now your stakeholders are losing confidence, so they put in more oversight and reporting, which stresses everyone out, and……if you’ve ever been on one of these Big Projects, I’m betting the PTSD is kicking in just reading this.
Starting small sidesteps this whole pile of mishigas. When you prototype small solutions for a little piece of a problem, and iterate based on user feedback, you are steering clear of all the risks that Big Projects are prone to. You’re listening to your users; you’re finding out what does and doesn’t work early in the process; you’re setting achievable goals; you’re continuously building on what you’ve learned, you’ve got momentum, and the team is energized — they see and feel tangible progress.
So how might you give someone who has no prototyping and iterating experience confidence in a process they’ve never tried before? My daughter, whenever she encounters something new, gets her head around it by comparing it to things she already knows. So I went looking for an analogy that would help give people the confidence to start small. And I came up with The Rolling Stones.
……A great song started out as two words and some noodling……
Well actually what I came up with is Mick and Keith’s song writing process, which almost always starts with a little riff — just a few notes, maybe a word or two. Here’s Richards talking about how they wrote Jumpin’ Jack Flash: “Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said: ‘what’s that?’ I said: ‘Oh, that’s Jack, that’s Jumping Jack’. I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase ‘Jumping Jack’. Mick said ‘Flash’ and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.”
So that’s it — A great song that started out as two words and some noodling.
And it turns out Sympathy for the Devil is a great example of the power of iteration. Richards said it “started as sort of a folk song with acoustics, and ended up as a kind of mad samba, with me playing bass and overdubbing the guitar later. ” In fact, they went into the studio and recorded 30 takes of the folk song version — and they couldn’t make it work. Then Richards had the idea to change the tempo, and all of a sudden the song turned in a very different direction. The energy shifted. Things were added and things were taken away and something new and amazing was created. I particularly love the fact that it took them 30 takes to get to an iteration that made a meaningful difference.
I tried out the Jumpin’ Jack Flash analogy a few weeks ago on someone my age, and it worked. I need to try it out on someone younger next, because I don’t know what a story about a band of octogenarians might mean to someone whose grandmother is the same age as Keith. But I was glad to see that the message, and the way I told it, landed the way I hoped it would. I hope it can work for you too.
