Removing the Shackles

Andrew McKinna #3 January 2017

I designed this bottle about 10 years ago for a client, and you’ll still see it in supermarkets. It works because it didn’t follow the established rules. It asked a new question. 

The brief was very open. The supermarket wanted a 10L cask style water bottle that could be stacked off location safety. They wanted some form of interlocking feature. The client wanted to make the bottle more easily used by consumers, and more easily disposed of/recyled when empty (ie crushable). Making it lighter would also use less material, and cheaper and faster to make. The bottle had to be picked up off the shelf and carried home by a consumer, and the tap had to be protected in transit. (supermarkets don’t like it when lots of water leaks on the floor!!).

All of the existing designs on the market had been developed from bulk liquid bottles (poison, industrial chemicals, oil and the like). They had been made heavier, with more ribs to make them rigid. The contents was heavy after all, and offered no stacking strength, it was a liquid, so it was quite logical. They were the product of their history, the result of their designers own self imposed boundaries. “Thinking outside the box” is a cliche, but putting artificial boundaries on ourselves is done everywhere, every day. Not because of malice or laziness, or because we don’t ask the question, but we ask the wrong question. 

My favourite story to illustrate this is the story of the zero gravity pen. During the space race of the 1960’s the Americans recognised the need to write in zero gravity, and that conventional pens wouldn’t work in zero gravity. They spent enormous effort and a pile of money developing a pen that worked in zero gravity. The USSR had the same need, and took a pencil. 

The success of the design of the bottle above, was by asking a new question, “How to contain water, which is stackable”, and recognising that water is not compressible. It then just became a matter of designing a bottle that minimised the airspace in the bottle when filled (the squashed handle/tap protector, air is compressible), and designing a shape for the skin to be in tension, instead of compression as the existing designs had. The design is almost half the weight of similar bottles and achieved the brief fully. 

The point of these examples is that we allow ourselves to be dictated to by our history, what we are familiar with and what we’ve done before. Sure it can often be faster or easier, but in the case of the zero gravity pen, it was incalculably more expensive. At the same time you are removing yourself from opportunity, because you are asking the wrong question. 

I see examples of this in business every day.  

Historically, the IT function in a business was part of the finance department, or was in fact the company accountant. The financial demands set the requirements for the system, addressing all of the needs of the finance department, with some view to catching information from other departments, in order to prepare the financial results. Running a business is a financial exercise after all, so it makes complete logic. However this history can then dictate the behaviour of a business for years to follow. 

I am familiar with a business that had such a system. It had been “optimised” for the technology employed by the company according to the supplier, and captured cost in the manufacturing process. This particular company made bespoke products in batches, and the cost was captured on every batch produced. The effect of this method of information capture was that it directed focus on the extremes, the big winners and the big losers of margin. As a result it ignored the majority of products that were “normal” margin, and as a result, the bulk of production had no attention directed at it in order to make it more efficient. It directed the managers gaze in the wrong direction.

I see this same type of behaviour regularly now in the consulting field, particularly the recruiting field, and with companies looking to recruit. In highly technical roles, yes sure, secure people trained in the technology. Bridge engineers need to be able to build bridges, lawyers need to know the law. However broader business skills can be drawn more widely. A sales person needs to know how to sell, account managers need to know how to manage client relationships, Accountants need to know accounting principles. The mistake I see often, or opportunity missed, is recruiters and employers looking for a replacement for the person that just left the job vacant. The reality is that only the person performing that job is expert at that job, and everybody else will have elements of the role to learn. If you need an accountant, will you look for a well rounded broadly experienced one that needs to learn your system, or will you only look at people with experience in the specific system you have installed? 

It is much better to employ a person with the right attitude, and aptitude, and give them the product knowledge. If you recruit a person from within your industry from a competitor, that person will be expert on the competitors product, not the one they are going to engage with, and they will need to learn anew. You are potentially cutting yourself off from a large pool of talent that could be highly effective in the role, simply because you are asking the wrong question. 

The phrase “Design thinking” is now being applied broadly in business, and it sounds very edgy, and disruptive, but is it not just a matter of getting down to what you actually need, and working from there, and not just repeating what you’ve done before ? It may be harder, but what sort of outcome is possible.

Try the five whys (asking why 5 times). Get to the bottom, peel the onion, open up opportunity, or do you want to be the one that "never got fired for buying an IBM".