Innovation is broken. Here’s some reasons why.
The Agile Manifesto is a farce. Let's unpack it.
Really? What is Lean, Agile, SAFe, Design/Build etc. if not processes that we cling to no matter how ineffectual? What are; GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Airtable etc. if not unusable tools with poor experiences meant to manage futile processes and collect tons of artifacts that developers don’t even understand or respect in the first place? Aside from some planning features, epics, stories and backlogs.
2. Working software > over comprehensive documentation
Nowhere will you find more unusable software than from engineer heavy cadences and frameworks and unchecked technicals, accountants, lawyers and finance people (adaptors) in lead roles which should be occupied by innovators. That’s where the majority of unusable software comes from. Software Rescue is big business in the states. It’s derived from unknowing companies who go offshore to pay pennies on the dollar for software development, then get unusable products or code after years of tumult and millions of dollars thrown down a dark agile hole. Then those companies have to bring the project back on-shore and pay skilled American, Eastern European or Columbian engineers who are led by American research and designers to fix it. Again: regarding documentation, what do you think Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Airtable et all, collect if not TONS of documentation?
3. Customer collaboration > over contract negotiation
CIOs, CTOs, engineers and product owners are known for spending ridiculous amounts of time on documentation and SLAs, SOWs, PRDs, BRDs, etc. and then end up doing some ineffectual, totalitarian version of Waterfall and call it Agile. This is so common it has become a joke and the term, 'Wagile' is often used to illustrate the process. The people who know the least about customer's behaviors, motivations and experiences in any organization are the engineers. The only people who know less about customers are the janitors who clean the building at night. That isn't meant to be a zinger, it's just true.
4. Responding to change > over following a plan
The most formulaic, prescriptive, rigid and linear thinking people in any organization are the engineers, with their apathetic, prescriptive, assembly-line labor output and manufacturing cadences. LEAN works for process and manufacturing improvements and Agile works for labor oversight and as a delivery cadence better than they serve any aspect of human experience or human-centered service design concerns. Engineers embrace the Dunning-Kruger effect and Sunk Cost Fallacy daily. They overestimate their value and abilities and assume ‘the lofty roadmap' or MVP must be doable and easy so long as they cling to jargon and broken process frameworks. There’s no art, craft, nuance or science associated. Just paint-by-numbers, repeatable processes (they think are measurable) like a manufacturing model. Often it amounts to little more than rewriting the broken code they wrote, yesterday.
Engineers will double down on bad ideas, poorly executed initiatives until they’ve wasted so much time and money that it’s irrefutable how poorly they've done and the project is sun-seted or abandoned. So long as it’s done fast, it’s ok if it’s garbage. Because in their minds failure is always an option and motion must equate to action-right? Wrong. In retrospectives, they make excuses, point fingers or call it 'innovation' and say, eh, failure happens in innovation. Fail fast, often—always!
Good research and design make validating and developing EASIER. But adaptors like to skip that part a lot or shorten it to the point of being ineffectual.
Engineers keep trying to invent a new religion that puts them in control of a process that is outside their acumen and they should not be managing in the first place. Businesses have spoken and what they are saying is; A good ‘Applied Mathematician’ is a cheap one. Thats why 65% of all companies use overseas engineering or import H1Bs onshore. It isn’t because there’s a lack of engineering talent stateside. That’s a lie that corporations use to facilitate saving money by not paying Americans more for quality work.
Newsflash: Customers don’t buy your code stack. They buy the experience and the job you help them do. Good luck getting talented researchers and designers from the same places you get cheap engineering labor from.
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE THESE FRAMEWORKS and UNCHECKED RELIGIONS?
Every year these numbers come out and they’re always similar for over a decade now: ~95% of all startups fail, ~75% of all internal enterprise digital transformation or product engagements fail. Why? They’re all doing Agile and Lean etc. right? According to the technical forecasts, they should be amazing us all with delight. Wrong, they're doing Innovation and SaaS theater. Guess which ones don’t fail?: The startups, products and engagements led by visionary innovators who manage adaptors, to manifest their vision based in solving problems for humans. Innovators in leadership roles solve problems and understand division of labor based on talent, skillset, and mental models. It's scary because what the majority of all dysfunctional businesses want are adaptors. They want humans to be more like bees, ants or worker drones. Well that excludes innovation and innovators and frankly, the innovators of the greatest advancements in human history. And that is why technicals are excluding Discovery processes in Product First environments more and more as we speak.
Look at the graphic above. Almost all of those reasons for failure stem from, the wrong people are leading this work. Most likely, if you looked in every one of those startups, research, UX, Service Design and design strategy is either not present or isn't respected.
Guess who doesn’t have those same, epic fail rates? AGENCIES. Fjord, Razorfish, NNG, Frog, etc. and organizations who are research/design led and function more like an agency. If they failed at that rate, they’d have no clients, win no awards and have no reputation. Some of those agencies keep clients for 10-15 years. Some of the older agencies keep clients for even longer. You can’t do that if you fail at a 75-95% rate. THEY PROVIDE VALUE and embrace research, creativity and innovation techniques first. They respect talent, craft and science to solve problems for humans. Not just repeatable manufacturing processes and time-boxed output cadences modeled after riveting bolts on Toyotas on assembly lines in Japan.
Read any LEAN book regarding the application and history of the process. They all say the same thing. Toyota started it all and Motorola perfected it and brought it to the United States. It works well for making widgets, phones or cars-MANUFACTURING. Guess where they got that and most everything else they do from, they BORROWED it from innovators like Henry Ford. I'm certain it works great for making cellphones or other mass produced ‘things.’ IT DOES NOT WORK when trying to solve human centered problems and innovating SERVICES in a customer first environment. That requires nuance and creativity through understanding human behaviors with compassion and empathy.
WE'VE LOST OUR WAY
Technology exists to serve humanity. Customers are not your users and employees are not human capital. The technology, apps, websites et all, we create, are just manifestations of the meta process of experience design. We provide solutions as a service and SOMETIMES, it equates to a product/software. SOMETIMES engineers are needed for a specific manifestation of that realization. Agile is what happens when engineers are in control and are feature focused or output obsessed. Assuming that work is all equal and can be time-boxed in an output cadence is exactly the opposite of what good research and design work is about. It's more of a chess match than an assembly line or race. And it's all about building strong teams to get great results.
Having engineers lead product or service design efforts is like having trade workers like; plumbers, electricians, carpenters or sheet rockers leading the architectural design and planning of a home or building. They aren't the innovators, leaders or principals. They’re the workers at the downstream stage of execution and implementation but still require OVERSIGHT from research and design to accomplish anything of real value. Especially if it's in the interaction with, and service of humans.
Would you live in a house built by trade workers and subcontractor laborers? Of course not. All things must be ideated, created, sketched and considered, then refined, tested in incremental iterations and various forms of design fidelity before you handoff and manage the engineers with your output/labor cadences.
Do you know how everything you use and see is designed and then built? Doesn’t matter if its: Cars, shoes, phones, houses, bridges or toys. There are tons of frameworks that are all virtually the same. They all basically mimic versions of the double diamond. So why do we do something so ridiculously broken and fail so often as we do in software? Because C-Suite understands ROI projections (which are usually wishful vapor math and accounting) and that sounds like ’sense’ to them.
There are still so many business leaders who do not understand that a true Customer First mindset means Humans First and that means, checking in with the customer often and holding them in the highest regard, to solve their problems and provide solutions for their jobs-to-be-done. What is this obsession with speed at the expense of quality? What is it you're rushing toward, a poorly crafted MVP wherein you'll never get a second chance to make a bad first impression? MVPs work when you have a Minimal Viable Audience who is vested to provide feedback and feature requests. Full stop. MVPs don't work for every product use-case and I have seen them fail and cost organizations billions in time and resources. In almost all cases of their implementation and the excessive abuse and use of the acronym, it should be replaced with MVPOS for obvious reasons. Yes, I invented that acronym. Please use it. Early and often. What is this new obsession with product incrementalism? Especially when technicals and PMs start baking their unsubstantiated and unvalidated ideas into software and circumventing discovery. That isn't innovation. Product First mentalities work if ALL you are is a product.
When you're a large enterprise with many products and services, various entry points and touch points, for many types of customers, you must be Customer First. You must commit to regular discovery and innovation must get its own budget or you will eventually go out of business. You're just living on borrowed time and waiting to be bumped by a challenger brand that is willing to do that important work rooted in respect and empathy of customer needs.
A CAUTION TO YOUNG DESIGNERS AND RESEARCHERS
If you're applying at a company for any design or research position and see NO design leadership in the C-Suite or at the VP level, turn away immediately. That is all you need to know. Companies who are not Customer First and Human-Centered and Design led, but instead, have a bunch of MBAs, legalists, accountants, technical product, engineers, sales and finance people in the C-suite and VP level, usually make siloed, disparate products and don’t respect customers, researchers or designers. All while proselytizing ‘soup of the day’ acronyms and terms and being nothing more than actors in innovation theater doing BS product incrementalism.
WE'RE ON TO YOU
Companies who continue to claim to foster ‘Customer First’ strategies, fake ESG or DEI efforts and phony culture shows for projecting vanity morals and PR efforts out of fear of being canceled, will not last. The majority of them are business first, engineering second, survival tactics derived from scarcity and fear third, mimic the competition fourth, and their customers and then employees come in somewhere around fifth or sixth place, if not last, in level of importance.
It’s time for a new perspective and paradigm shift. These toxic environments wherein you push the, 'everything is flat and the end goal is sameness', don't work. You're doing this to maintain hegemony and we all know it. Much of this is responsible for the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting and the explosive rise of Solopreneurship. The mass influx of nubes who have no experience are also partially responsible. DESIGN leadership matters. Good Customer First design strategy is not only the answer but integral to your bottom line and ROI.
TRUTH MATTERS.
There is a great degree of research that indicates technical adaptors actually resent innovators and creatives and harbor implicit bias towards them. A scientist/researcher named, Dr. Goncalo has spent a decade studying the underlying factors that motivate and hinder creators.
"Creativity is lauded as vital, and seen as the lifeblood of great entertainment, innovation, progress and forward-thinking ideas. Who doesn’t want to be creative or to hire inventive employees?
But the emerging science of implicit bias has revealed that what people say about creativity isn’t necessarily how they feel about it. Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent study demonstrated, this bias can potentially discourage us from undertaking an innovative project or hiring a creative employee." * From Matt Richter at NYT.
Something I've always found fascinating is adaptors always want to be innovators. Never vice versa. There’s a reason product and technical adaptors disrespect innovators, women, creatives, researchers and designers.
It’s because you fear us. You fear us because we represent change.
Moreover, you fear us because you cannot grasp how Human Centered Design is rooted in empathy and that is rooted in love. If you don’t love your customers and employees, you don’t deserve either, or to be in business.
*Matt Richter on Dr. Jack Goncalo's research:
UX Researcher | ScriptRunner | Adaptavist | Live in the future. Build what's missing.
3moTell us how you *really* feel! :D One nitpick about point 1, though - the Agile Manifesto is not the same thing is the frameworks. You could make a strong argument, based on the rest of the post, that the frameworks aren't really Agile, though. The dysfunction isn't so much in the principles as "We'll gather inputs about customer needs* and then show an artifact and collect user feedback." "And we'll inspect and adapt, right?" "..." "We'll inspect and adapt ...?" "..." There's plenty of great points here, but be careful not to underrespect the valuable role of engineers. Most engineers are great, they're just shit at user research. Also, an MBA taught the "Positioning school" of business theory (Porter et al) will likely be the most passionate advocate of customer insights: by the textbook, it is impossible to formulate a strategy without reliable information about what users need and how competitors are meeting those needs. It's interesting that you finish with a point about change. Alex M H Smith made a post recently about how strategy *is* change. You don't get to reach a new destination by staying where you are. -- *Someone untrained in research asking "if we build this, will you buy it?" is NOT a valid experiment.
Usability and Information Access Branch Chief | CX@DHS | Accessibility means access for EVERYONE
4mosoo manny thoughts.... Can confirm that no agile project is ever really agile... There is always a date that is backed into, and people through the word "agile" around to mean "wea re making this up as we go, we are soo agile!"
Well-designed engineering and well-engineered design.
11moLove this. Especially the insight about how the tools built BY engineers FOR engineers are among the worst tools ever built. My first experience with these things was an indoctrination into Total Quality Management (TQM), and I must admit I was seduced by the credence of its almost mythical history. There was a place and time (post-WWII Japan) when it did make sense, but in the control of manufacturing, not necessarily “innovation.” It could be reasonably argued that TQM is the antithesis. But I loved its reliance on statistics and the fact that those could unearth things that were NOT working. So-called “innovation” was to try something else, which might lead to a bit of genius, especially when it comes from an assembly line worker who is free to think independently. So, when Agile came along years later, I’d seen it before but then disappointed about why the statistics part was gone and how there seemed to be no appreciation (or even opportunity) for ideas from the floor…
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1yThis just made me smile 😃 so much to unpack here, it warrants a breakdown. Great article Thomas W. And thanks to Tom Scott for pointing it out