Unleashing the Power of Boyle's Law

"Never attend a meeting without a prototype"

Known around IDEO as Boyle's Law (no, not that other Boyle's Law), this aphorism can make your work life better. Maybe a lot better.

It’s named for Dennis Boyle, a design engineer who spent his career creating breakthrough products. He has his name on over 50 patents. Remember the Apple Duo Dock, the Softbook Reader, the Palm V? All touched by Dennis.

But first, let’s define a key term: a prototype is anything that takes an idea in your head and makes it easy for another human being to experience. While the word has its roots in physical product development, nowadays it extends to just about any work domain. A prototype could be something you hold in your hand, such as a 3D-printed bracket or a paper mockup of a mobile app. Or it could be something intangible, such as the first draft of movie script or a spreadsheet articulating a new business model. The only thing that matters? That it helps move us toward a solution, no matter how gnarly the challenge.

With your prototype at the ready, here are four ways that Boyle's Law will shift the day-to-day dynamic of your work:

First, it means less time spent in meetings. Since we can't have a meeting without a prototype—something to cross-examine, poke, and prod—we won't get together until we've made enough progress to justify one. No more status update meetings where the only news is that we haven't made any headway. Instead we spend our time crafting new prototypes, rather than talking about why we're not building any.

Second, it boosts the flow of fact-based evidence at work, and as we all know, valid feedback is the breakfast of champions. When we bring something to a meeting, the conversation shifts from our opinions to the factual evidence the prototype desperately wants us to see. Meetings cease being contests of status where opinions are batted back and forth like shuttlecocks. Instead, that prototype sitting on the table or on the wall prompts concrete feedback about its real performance then and there. It's about objective data and listening to reality. And that, as it turns out, is much more actionable than unsubstantiated opinion.

Third, Boyle’s Law depersonalizes failure. If the prototype you brought to the meeting works, great. If it doesn't, that's also good… maybe even better! When my prototype doesn't fly and I depart a meeting with a ton of hard-won feedback, then I've succeeded in moving our work ahead. Though failure sucks, it's the prototype that failed, not me. The real failure would be not bringing a prototype to the meeting. By extension, when my prototype fails I also receive feedback about my own performance. But since any criticism was directed at the prototype rather than me, its depersonalized nature is less likely to be devastating. Instead of feeling so beleaguered that all I can do is cruise Instagram when I get back to my desk, with this easy-to-swallow feedback in hand, I’m ready to start cranking on a next generation prototype. Oh, sweet progress!

And that brings us to the most profound aspect of Boyle's Law: it can transform your office from a pit of drudgery to a wellspring of meaning. Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile has spent years researching how and why people find meaning in their jobs. She's found that the one thing that makes us experience a rich worklife is a sense of day-to-day progress. It's a causal relationship, in fact: making even small steps of progress helps us feel that our work is meaningful. With its emphasis on gathering only when there's something to look at, Boyle's Law forges a work culture where the essence of meetings is about witnessing progress first-hand. They go from being an ultimate energy suck to the place where value is created for your entire culture. This transformation, in a nutshell, is one of the secrets of any healthy culture: we build lots of stuff, so people feel good about making progress, and they build lots more stuff. It’s a self-energizing way of working.

Why not test Boyle’s Law yourself? Start by prototyping it: bring a prototype to your next meeting and make the meeting itself a trial of a better way of working.

And don’t meet until you have one.