A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the saying goes.

It's not fair on camels, which are remarkable animals, but the idea that meeting everyone's requirements leads to a weaker product without a strong vision has a lot of truth to it.

Like a remote control with 50 buttons or a policy so watered-down by different requirements that it has no effect, design by committee can be the death of an initiative. Part of strong product leadership and creating designs that wow is having an opinion, saying no, and not trying to please everybody. Much easier said than done.

To bring it home, the movie Pentagon Wars has an entertaining satirical scene about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (11 mins). The clip shows how the plan for an infantry transport vehicle became "a troop transport that can't carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance. And a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snow-blower but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C." Perhaps most informative is the effect on the motivation and morale of the designers—"Can you make it amphibious?"

Also see: groupthink, the tyranny of small decisions, the Abilene paradox, the bandwagon effect.

Or Jeff Bezos' guidance: Be stubborn on vision. Be flexible on details.

Design by committee

I always considered a checklist, a checklist, so I was interested to learn the distinction between two types of checklists: Read-Do and Do-Confirm.

A Read-Do checklist might be prepared in advance for several potential possibilities. You check off the tasks as you do them, like following a new cooking recipe. They may be geared towards helping people understand what they should be doing and in what order and helping them remember key steps in unusual or unplanned scenarios. So, for example, if a plane develops a particular type of rare fault, such as an engine failure, a Read-Do checklist could be pulled out for that scenario. The pilot and crew can use it to make the most of others' past experiences and failures. Even with training, given the situation's relative rarity, and especially if a serious situation might interfere with normal thinking, a Read-Do checklist helps steer the crew to safe outcomes without relying solely on training and memory. The calm security and simplicity of steps of a checklist can be just what's needed.

A Do-Confirm checklist is more of an aid to memory to make sure nothing gets missed. It's a safety net for normal operation catching lapses in memory. In principle, we know what to do, so we run through those steps from experience and memory and use the Do-Confirm checklist at a designated pause point to ensure we didn't miss anything. The WHO Safe Surgery checklist has helped save 1,000s of lives.

Because a simple checklist can never account for every unexpected occurrence in complex environments—for example, healthcare, aviation, building a skyscraper, or software projects—both checklist types can benefit from items that require a communication step. An item can just be to ensure that all those with the relevant knowledge have discussed things. It's a simple and powerful way to improve outcomes across a wide range of unexpected scenarios.

I learned about the simple power of checklists, the two types, and the resistance to adopting them—from Atul Gawande's, The Checklist Manifesto: How to get Things Right.

Two types of checklists: Read-Do, Do-Confirm

Feedback is how we get better. It's how we find out what we couldn't see ourselves. But there are many reasons why it's more challenging to gather than we might hope.

You might have a design prototype, a book or article draft, a new practice you want your team to adopt, or a project you've been working on. Feedback will make it better, but it's easy to feel anxious.

You might want to avoid having to talk to people. Maybe you're worried about what others think—perhaps they won't like it. Maybe you'll have to start over. Maybe you'll hear what you know deep down. Maybe you might see that others could do it better than you, that it shouldn't be you that's doing it. Maybe you'll find out that you're a failure.

If we care about achieving the best outcome, we can dispel most of these fears with a few moments of reflection—of course, I'm not a failure for trying!—but it doesn't mean they feel any less real at the time. As is often the case, action can be the solution, and gathering feedback is, in my experience, usually energising and confidence-building—now you can see what will make your project fly.

Jane Austen was known to read her novels aloud to her family for both evening entertainment (pre-Netflix) and to help revise and hone her writing.

Remember, the first draft is always perfect.

Don't take things personally or yourself too seriously.

Don't get attached to one option—attach yourself instead to a great outcome.

To avoid sunk costs clouding your judgment, seek feedback before you're too invested.

Share multiple options when you can. It makes it easier for others to give comparative feedback and reduces the chances of taking it personally.

Remember how valuable good feedback has been in the past.

Consider who to gather feedback from. Sometimes complete strangers can help (who cares if they don't like it?), and other times a friendly face can ease you into it.

Remember the spectrum policy to focus on the good in an idea.

Feedback fear

When it comes to innovating, counterintuitively, I think the surest way to produce something new and noteworthy is to start by replicating the work you admire.

If you're making music, first play the music from your favourite artists, then make music like theirs. Only when you've mastered that do you need to go your own way.

If you admire Hemingway, practice writing like him, and your own voice will likely develop by itself.

Before helping develop cubism Picasso was first an accomplished artist.

It's easy to look at the best and think you have to be different. But standing up first makes it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.

What's more, copying is much lower pressure.

I learned this idea while working at Jump Associates

Replicate then innovate

Practise thinking in space and time. An alternative to Powers of 10 that encourages you to look at a situation in space and time. Helpful for getting a new perspective. The easiest way I know is to literally draw the boxes. Start with what you’re dealing with in the centre then start filling the rest out. Another tool from the TRIZ toolkit.

9 Windows

A rapid design approach based on doing the minimum you can to create a testable prototype fast. Testing. Learning. Iterating. Rather than, say, taking longer and trying to design it all right first time.

Express - Test - Cycle

My favourite, and I think most helpful, version of the design process. I was introduced to it in the Needfinding course at Stanford taught by Dev Patnaik and Michael Barry. Based on an original framework from Chuck Owen at IIT. The, somewhat simplistic, user’s manual is to start with real observations of who you’re designing for, take time to analyse what you see and pull out some insights, put forward some principles to guide your design and, returning back to the concrete, develop some solutions. Then iterate. In reality it is never quite as simple as you may imagine.

Enrich your design process

I learned this from On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It has two pages worth the price of the book by themselves. They show the same pages that made it into the book with editing marks all over them. At a glance it made me understand the work and craft that goes into writing and that I can do it to.

It also helps me realise that the way to good is by starting with something that isn't good.

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Category: design process