I’ve been wondering why this change is underway. Obviously humans are ambitious creatures and we love ever-bigger challenges, but there has to be something more. Never has any of our technology, engineering or research abilities been more acute than it is now. Why add another, possibly more meta, trade to add to our mix?

Then I started to wonder if maybe if we as a culture have become more interested in design practices because they help us harness potential across our tool sets. When you design you’re more interested in the interactions of things than the tools that create those interactions. In these moments, a design practice allows our instruments to become more than the sum of their parts.

Design is probably being challenged to solve ever-larger problems because as a culture we’re creating more platforms for creation. In so many areas, the barriers to design and develop have been almost eliminated. Software and prototyping tools have turned four-month jobs into two-week tasks. Other platforms allow us to sell and ship our products without ever physically holding them. All these platforms allow us to create more integrated experiences.

It’s always tempting to make design challenges systemic because design is always questioning the greater context of use. And as you focus on how something’s used you move a containing layer of a system. With all these platforms for creations and service, in theory we should be able tackle these problems differently.

Sort of sounds like a great thing, no? That we might now attack systems problems at the systems level, sort of an iron-on-iron moment. That finally, after all this waiting, we can just unleash this hell-hath-no-fury design awesomeness to finally fix all this brokenness that plagues our daily lives?!

I think about this a lot. The sad cold reality is that if designing human-scale interactions was hard, designing systems is mind-bendingly hard. Systems play out over time, they involve moving organics parts, there’s little control and lots of chaos.  Possibly most sinister of all these challenges is the vertigo that comes from trying to think through systems.

I ran across a brilliant, brilliant talk by Matt Jones from Berg London late last year (the talk is older, that’s just when I discovered it). He had a really inspiring example of this vertigo that’s stuck with me for months. (The example is about 5 minutes in, the whole thing is worth a watch). In the talk, Jones refers to a passage by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson that describes a space elevator. He talks about how the engineering of such a structure defies human proportion – if you’re close enough to interact with it, you can’t understand what it’s doing, and if you were far enough away to see how it works, it would be invisible to you. “We’re in it, but we can’t see it”, Jones astutely puts it.

This is sort of the difficulty of dealing and designing for these systems. We have to use design to make progress against the problem at hand, but the problem has so many moving bits, it’s hard to understand how one interaction influences another. In some ways this very much becomes an exercise in faith. You can’t see how all these things work together, but you know they can and they will if the conditions are right.

So, this is what I’ve been humbled and inspired by lately – gnarly problems with lots of mind-bending vertigo. These problems have always been around, but I think we’ll see more of them as a society because we’re becoming better at understanding how these systems work. (we’re also better at discovering linkages between systems. We’re finding it at ever-larger scales (global economies) and ever-smaller scales (microbes and genetics.)

For me, the exciting thing is that as we as a culture wrap our heads around these problems, we’ll fashion tools to help us cope and create within the vertigo. It’s so perplexing now, but things are moving so fast I wouldn’t be surprised if this post isn’t laughable in 5 years. We live in amazing times.

Selling when people are buying
Traditionally, the only time retail puts anything on sale is after they’re sure the majority of people don’t want it anymore (after the holiday has ended). In 2009, when the financial crisis hit, companies staged pre-holiday sales as a means of self-preservation – everyone was sure sales were going to be soft and retailers were doing anything possible to clear pre-recession inventory levels. That tactic was really all about “the business”, the consumer just happened to benefit (if they felt like buying).

This year, there’s clearly a different strategy at play. This year, if people are in the mood to spend, retailers have a sale for you. And it’s usually online, it usually lasts 3 days, it usually includes free shipping, and it’s usually a percentage of your order. All those things drive more sales volume, which compensate for selling at a discount. The tools and methods are familiar, but the big idea here is that this is approaching is retailing centered on the purchaser. The retailer is having a sale BECAUSE the customer is wants to buy, versus having a sale when the season’s over (and the retailer can’t command full price.)

Release early and often
Based on how the world works today, I’m not sure there are four solid fashion seasons anymore; maybe it feels more like eight. I’m noticing early fall, late fall, early winter, and so on. Retail isn’t different from other experience based businesses- new experiences and new options drive interest and engagement. Very much like the tenant of a new start-up, retailers are taking the core audiences they have and they’re constantly pushing updates, inviting people back and spurring conversation.

Codes as currency
Start-ups use beta codes and early invites all the time, it’s an engagement tool. There’s something ephemeral about a coupon code, and there’s something elite about an early invite. Sure retailers have used online codes for a while, but if you notice they’re using them differently. Most of the time the sales last for a very short period. Retailers are staging multiple sales over shorter periods of time. Each sale pulls a different lever (shipping, specific items, volume discounts.) Through this constant campaign, traditional retail is starting to make good on the promise of being as dynamic as the web will allow it to be. I’m waiting for the next step where retailers break into using one-time use codes that have Easter egg discounts or other crazy interactions. (This will happen at some point, trust me.)

Built on buzz
A sale is a way to generate buzz; no news there. But through the use of codes, and releasing often, it seems like shoppers are visiting online stores from new directions. I haven’t been alerted to any of this online retail 2.0 through the traditional spammy email. Sites like Svpply, Pintrest, and this crazy advent of menswear blogs(?!) are creating new conversation and appreciate for clothing.

Much like a new venture, these retailers aren’t resting on their brand hoping that people will buy. They’ve gotten scrappy, they’ve found influencers, and they’re trying to build buzz in every non-traditional way possible. I’ve seriously witnessed bros trying to help bros make the right decision about which “semi-casual suede boots to buy”…and they’re sharing coupon codes!! I swear I’m living in the twilight zone. (related story here.)

So, we’ll see. I have no doubt I’m late to the fashion party, but I have a feeling some of the things these retailers are trying will probably stick with us. It also feels like maybe online retail is finding a new footing. Maybe these retailers are finally letting the shopping experience be as dynamic and fast-paced as the web wants it to be (as opposed to trying to serve a traditional channel through a digital experience). I hope so – I’m definitely not paying full price or shipping for those brown brogues I’ve been eyeing.

First, Netflix gave me more than I ever imagined when they launched free streaming. (At this point I love Netflix)

Then, Netflix upped their rates, but I was ok with it because they were giving me more of what I wanted. (I didn’t really mind…I was using the service)

Finally, they split the company in two and offered to bill me individually for two services that served the same need. (Now, I’m insulted b/c they expect me to pay to different bills for the same service…I know it’s the same price, but emotionally it feels different.)

There just feel like so many other ways to ease in to this. As the split is announced you could…
- increase the number of DVDs in rotation with the physical service
- expand the titles in the streaming service
- announce a special partnership for the streaming component
- add a pay-per-view component for streaming new-releases (competing with iTunes)
- add deeper content integration with online streaming
- start randomly shipping free microwave popcorn with the physical DVDs
(I know they added video games to the physical DVD mailing, but they’re about 6 years late to that party…and that’s more off-mission than streaming movies IMHO)

…you know just do ANYTHING besides billing my credit card twice for no additional benefit.

The decision just seems so out of character…the company who harnessed device convergence to deliver the future in streaming/anywhere entertainment can’t figure out how to issue one bill for the services it provides? Like that’s going to send it’s internal business into bedlam? I mean even the phone company can manage to bill me for my phone and my DSL.

One of the things Joe wanted most out of this project was to experiment with a lot of extreme digital prototyping; he knew the space well and realized this project would be a great place to try a few new things. He also knew that this prototyping was above and beyond what the team had to accomplish; this would be a stretch.

Knowing himself, Joe knew that if verbally committed and told everyone (including the client) about the prototypes the team intended to build; it would be harder to go back on their word. He knew his team was capable; he was just worried they wouldn’t get around to it. If he ran his mouth, he knew they would have to deliver. And with that, what once was a stretch goal became part of the project, and the team is in the middle of organizing and prioritizing to make it happen. It’s a very cool thing to see.

By making a verbal commitment, Joe had burned his boats. If he were on an expedition that had just found new land, he would have eliminated the possibility of ever going back home. After all, the best was to ensure progress forward is to eliminate the option of going backwards.

I think about many of the great people I’ve had the chance to work with over the years, and on most efforts the very best of them make a point of very publically burning their boats. They commit to designing and building what’s in front of them. The also create a common goal that can engage and solidify a team. The effort may fail, but these people never fail the effort.

These people aren’t looking over their shoulder for the next best opportunity. They aren’t constantly running their mouths about a “pivot”. They’re digging in, and they’re going to figure it out. There are always times when a team will need to reconsider things and alter course, but there’s value in committing and working towards the goal.

So, the next time you’re up against a big scary challenge, do yourself a favor, don’t start looking for the exit. Commit to what’s in front of you; take whatever measure you need to take advantage of your opportunity. Burn your boats, it may be just the motivation you need.

Anyway, everything’s fixed now. Sorry ’bout that.

In the design of the app, the developers must have really thought hard about people’s hesitance to share their location because they designed a timeline into each notification. So, if we were meeting somewhere and I was running late, I could send you a link that would display my location on map and that link would only work for a configurable amount of time, (say 30 minutes). During that time, as I moved around you could see where I was on the map. After 30 minutes, the link goes dead.

I’m pretty excited about this little bit of functionality because I think we’ve entered into a new phase of how we deal with our connected life. We have so much data and so many connections, sometimes the data or the connection would be better if it wasn’t permanent.

What if the systems that carry more temporal data really started to reflect that data’s ephemerality? Twitter is decent example of a designed to decay system, tweets only hang around for a handful of weeks. What if restaurant reviews created a year ago carried less weight than the ones made last week? What if past-date promotional emails just disappeared from my inbox? I have loads of weak Facebook connections that I wouldn’t miss if they just expired? (No offense, but that let’s me focus on the people I have greater connection with).

Right now we live at the end of the digital firehouse, everything just lands in our lap and we have to decide what to do with it. Some of The most meaningful online interactions mirror their real world counterparts. For the moments that matter now but not later, we will begin to have to design for disappearance.

Yesterday I was interviewing with a colleague of mine, Joe. Without realizing it, I think he blurted out a pretty perfect description of the idea of business design. He simply said, “we hack business models.”

I really love that statement because of all the implications of the idea of “hacking”. For me hacking implies that you’re working with an existing system and pushing and pulling on its boundaries to see what will happen. Tools can be crude and fast, but there is an eye to understanding and evolve the larger system. Hacking implies that what you’re doing isn’t a science, but there’s probably a lot of underlying laws ad principles involved. There’s no certification to be a hacker, but not everyone can do it. And to be a good hacker, you have to be pretty curious, confident, and inspired.

As I frame Business Design loosely as a hacking exercise, it also starts to draws some boundaries for what is and what isn’t business design to me. Businesses tweak their model all the time, and not every change is a design. If you increase the price for your goods, that’s not really design. If you change your entire pricing structure to communicate a new type of value, that’s probably business design. Netflix raising rates isn’t business design. Netflix launching a streaming-only pricing option is definitely the result of a lot of hacking and some pretty smart business design.

All this hacking leads me back to the idea of a system. Businesses after all are systems that create/provide value. That’s very academic sounding, but thinking of a business as a system that must remain in balance is sort of the first step to being able to frame and solve problems differently. (And there’s a ton of companies who think of a business as a kit of parts.) These systems have many interrelated parts (and people). As you add or remove some element of the business, a different component will be affected. As you design the customer experience, you have to design the business model that supports it. As you design the business model, you have to think about what sort of experience you can provide.

It’s all about the system; it’s all about balance.

At first, I was glazing over a little bit. The idea of ‘leaders of tomorrow’ is one of those phrases that’s been so co-opted by the business schools and business press of the world, it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. But as the conversation continued, I started to realize just how massive of a challenge she was talking about.

The idea of leadership is a weird animal. It’s mostly internal personality characteristics that manifest themselves in significant ways. Good leaders see the world from a unique perspective, they get things done, they make people feel valuable. It’s easier to reflect that someone is a good leader, rather than project that they will be a good leader.

After a lot of thinking and conversations, I believe that what makes a ‘leader’ has to do with their levels of curiosity, confidence and inspiration. Of course there are lots of other characteristics at play, but those elements seem to be the three traits I see over and over that define people and how they become these strong leaders. There are many talents good leaders learn over time, these three feel a little more innate.

Now the interesting thing about these characteristics is that they don’t have formal outputs, they’re personality components. They drive how we react internally to our external environment. You see evidence if these characteristics through storytelling. These personal stories help explain the energy that moves people between moments, the ‘why’ not the ‘how’ or the ‘what’. For example, you spotted an opportunity somewhere because you are curious about the world you live in, you were able to attack a problem because your had confidence you could solve it, or you designed/built something because you were inspired and were moved to action. Etc, etc.

So, as the conversation continues, I start to realize just how curiosity, confidence, and inspiration work like the physical engine in a car or a virtual engine in a video game. They need inputs to produce outputs, and, depending on their design, they deliver radically different things.

This is the point at which I started to think about how the idea of leadership has changed. People that are twenty years old today grew up with massively different inputs than people who are forty, (and in someways we’re culturally trying to fit them into this classic leadership definition.) These people may lead in the same style, they make some of the same decisions, but the way they find their confidence, inspiration, and curiosity to make those decisions is so different, we can’t even know how it works yet.

Today, anyone curious and inspired enough can have massive amounts of data from completely different industries to consider, they have global networks they can learn from, and possibly most importantly, they can operate in near-real time. Our connected world is probably the greatest force in upending the classical definition of a leader. The problems they will tackle and outcomes they will know will probably be drastically different, but I still think those three characteristics will survive (they’ll just function very differently).

I’m definitely not doing the conversation justice, but You can see how it’s easy to focus on a lot of misleading elements when we try to identify leadership. It’s easy to go for major achievements and heroic moments, but the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ always will tell a deeper tale.

There’s much more to think and write about here…this is sort of a beginning.

What do you think?

In my study sample of 150 businesses that ran Groupon promotions between June 2009 and August 2010, 42% said they would not run a Groupon promotion again. Their main reasons were that a significant proportion of Groupon redeemers are extremely price sensitive, barely spending beyond a discounted product’s face value. Not surprisingly, repeat-purchase rates at full price were also low — just 13% — for these businesses.

It goes without saying that Groupon could definitely design to solve this problem, but it’s going to take a different perspective that they have now.

Most of the social games we’re seeing today are largely about ‘grind and reward’; you have to farm to get a currency (grind) and then you can trade currency for that little special something to show off to your friends (reward). The props are different, but the mechanics are largely the same. The games are really approachable because anyone with enough patience and tenacity can grind out goods, and the experience is satisfying because in some small way, you’re earned for that reward. In a society of complex tasks and relationships its satisfying the same way cleaning your house might be, or working in your yard. From a distance its mockable, but the experience is real. There are millions of people grinding on virtual farms and frontiers even as you read this. The rewards are satisfying too; people pay real money to buy virtual currency to skip grinding out their rewards.

In certain circles, people have a problem with these sorts of games. You see when you have a grinding mechanic in a game and your repeat the same action over and over, it starts to feel like a little bit of an addictive mechanism. Players are sure to go back to their farms everyday to play and earn goods (and the games are designed to promote that). Just like mindlessly dropping tokens in a slot machine, players head back to their farms just after the cyber veggies have ripened to retrieve them and sell them. Zynga is the darling of the startup world because they’ve figured out how to do something no one else has; they’ve got an algorithm that makes people predictable.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to redesign some of these game mechanics. I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to navigate the tension of making the game exciting enough for people to play often, but make it rewarding and diverse enough and get rid of the grinding. I think if the game designers flipped the scarcity model in the game they could unlock something completely new, I’ll explain.

So in Farmville, the scarcity model is based on currency to purchase ‘things’. It takes time to earn this currency and this is where Zynga wins. They’re betting you’ll dump real money in the game so you won’t have to wait to get your reward. I’ve been wondering what it would look like if the game itself was ephemeral. What if every two weeks there was a new and different adventure in Farmville you could play? Like what if every two weeks they added a level? During this adventure, much of the game play could be the same, but you’d be playing because at some point that level will disappear. With the massive adoption of some of these games, you could imagine releasing new levels that would drive the same level of interest as Harry Potter movies. You could imagine developing rich story lines that rival Mad Men. As you push toward a serial model, you create social games that could be truly social events; everyone can celebrate because everyone starts the level at the same time. Now, instead of everyone experiencing Farmville in a sad cyber silo, they can post about the different activities or story lines going on in the level. They will have a reason to connect around content. Then much like Facebook itself, the experience will drive repeat visits, the community will help drive rewards the games can stop treating people like gambling junkies.

Right now social gaming seems to be about taking proven game mechanics and replicate them over many themes to drive growth. But if the beauty of social gaming is an easily deployable platform and a vast audience, why not create stronger communities around the games? Why not give players reasons to connect? Why not have challenges that players have to work together similar to boss fights in massive multiplayer games?

Trust me, this is the way this space will move forward. There is no way your friends mom is going to farm purple cows for the next 5 years. But if social gaming gives her a platform that she can connect with the story the same way she did that last season of Desperate Housewives, lets her connect with her friends about the experience, and walk away with unique badges that help her boast about being part of a community, that is the way forward.