Flying Pigs - Crash and Burn

Sometimes there are solutions so outrageous that they will only happen 'when pigs fly'! Naturally we call these kinds of solutions 'Flying Pigs!' These are the ones that would normally get laughed out a meeting room, given an outright no by a boss, or even ignored by the creator as impossible. Such a reaction is tragic and thankfully there are people and companies around that encourage doing the impossible, as these solutions are often the most fun to implement, and have a huge impact on the business and sometimes the world! If you're still wondering, think Space X and their self landing re-usable rockets that all the incumbents in the industry outright 'proved' was impossible.

Since we encounter a lot of these on the Black Belt in Thinking and when using the Thinking Processes in general, we have a few ways to deal with them:

1. Crash and Burn Pigs
2. Loop de Loop Pigs
3. Reference Environment Pigs

We're looking at number one on the list in this article:

Have you ever had an idea for a solution that you immediately second guess because you know no-one will even entertain the idea to discuss it? You would be laughed out of any meeting where you suggested it because the impacts of the solution would be too negative to even consider the positive. It would never see the light of day. Essentially it would Crash and Burn...

We label a Flying Pig solution that would compromise an important need or business system goal (such as cashflow, sales, customer satisfaction) as a Crash and Burn Pig.

It's not that the up side isn't great, but the down side is so big that often others won't entertain the idea. But what if you could mitigate the negatives, while protecting the positives of the solution? We can do this by identifying in detail how the solution leads to the negative, we often call this a negative branch as it branches off from the positive effects of the solution. We want to maintain the positive while trimming off the negative branch that sprouts from it. Once you have this cause and effect mapped you can come up with the 'trim' mentioned above, somewhere. This is a new support solution designed to tackle the negative branch specifically. 

Let's look at an example:

'Sales may not interrupt development resources for urgent pre-sales tasks'.

Depending on your company this might not make it past the first discussion because the sales manager will outright refuse and a different solution will be considered. We can see there are clear benefits, but if we also map the path the negative branch takes to get to the negative side effect, it gives us the option to keep the solution by adding our support solution. In this example the negative side effect is

'We lose too many sales opportunities'

with a couple of other steps on this path. The box in red is clearly negative, however, the boxes in yellow are your choice about if you consider them negative or not. While they look bad they are not negative on their own, we consider them that way from what they cause i.e. if customers didn't see the full benefit but still bought the software, seeing the full benefit doesn't matter.

Back to the solution, if we come up with a support solution such as:

'Sales have a couple of scheduled weekly windows to get developer assistance'

we can get the primary benefit of our original solution without being struck with the negative branch. When presented as a complete solution the sales manager is far more likely to actually discuss the idea than just write if off straight away.

The key to applying this is to decouple the solution and identify the negative branch as separate to the primary benefit. This allows you or a team to work on the negative in isolation and create a solution to it so that you can have your cake and eat it too!