| Roger Martin provides a good example of the importance of the Big-picture lens in his book Opposable Mind where he describes how the designers at IDEO recognized that their design brief from Amtrak to redesign their Acela rail cars was inherently limiting. Amtrak’s objective was to provide a rail journey experience that would enable it to complete directly with airlines. IDEO designers identified that the rail car accounted for only a relatively small part of a passenger’s overall experience. They convinced Amtrak that, to achieve its design objectives, the IDEO designers needed to broaden the perspective to encompass the end end-to-end experience from journey planning and ticketing right through to arrival and transit. | |
| One of the constant challenges in project based organizations is to get project teams to undertake post project reviews at the conclusion of each project. The objective of the post project review is to identify and capture any lessons learned that are likely to be helpful to other project teams doing similar projects. The failure to do post project reviews is often simplistically attributed to a lack of discipline and motivation by the project team, especially the project leader. However, deeper examination often indicates that there is a range of Systemic factors that discourage or inhibit doing post project reviews. These can include: progressive break-up of the project team, pressure to quickly move onto another project, lack of demonstrated value for the effort, and inadequate systems to capture and use the lessons and insights. Improvement of post project reviews requires a focus on the entire ‘lessons learned’ system, not just on the individual post project review activities. This example is explored more deeply using the full 9 Lenses here. | |
| In his brief analysis of the turnaround of IBM by Lou Gerstner in the mid 1990s, William Duggan (Strategic Intuition) highlights how Gerstner found the basis for the repositioning of IBM’s strategy and operating model in a relatively remote part of the organization (i.e., near the Boundary).
When Gerstner took the IBM job, most Wall Street analysts expected him to break up the company. But he carried forward the Amdahl model (integrating and supporting IBM and non IBM products) as a way of keeping the company together, this time around as a key to rather than counter to their normal business practice. The idea was in his mind from his first day on the job, and then he found it already working inside IBM, although on a tiny scale:
Enter Dennie Walsh … When I arrived at IBM, Dennie was running a wholly owned IBM subsidiary named the Integrated Systems Services Corporation. ISSC was our services and network operations unit in the United States – a promising but minor part of IBM’s portfolio. In fact, it wasn’t even a stand-alone business in IBM. It was a sub-unit of the sales force. (Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance)
Dennie Walsh explained his unit to Gerstner. Then and there, Gerstner had the flash of insight he needed to save IBM: My mind was afire. Not only was he describing something I wanted when I was a customer … but this idea meshed exactly with our strategy of integration … I left my session with Dennie both thrilled and depressed (a state of confusion I experienced often in my early days in IBM). I was thrilled that I had discovered a base from which we could build … I was depressed to realize … the culture of IBM would fight it.
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| In their book, Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath highlight the benefits of adopting both Details and Empathy lenses. In 2004, Melissa Studzinski joined General Mills as the brand manager for its Hamburger Helper product with the objective of reviving the product that had been in decline for a decade. After initially analyzing copious amounts of sales and market research information without developing any significant insights, Studzinski and her team decided to organize visits to the homes of real customers to observe first-hand how they use the Hamburger Helper product. Studzinski observed details and developed empathy that would have been impossible from the clinical sales data and market research surveys. The resultant simplification of the product line and key pricing and advertising decisions led to a 11 percent increase in sales in the following year. Chip Heath and Dan Heath highlight the empathy developed by Studzinski with the following quote from her:
“Now when I’ve got a decision to make about the brand, I think of the women I met. I wonder what they would do if they were in my shoes. And it’s amazing how helpful it is to think that way.”
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| The Motivations lens probably explains unusual price movements on the Australian Stock Exchange. The Age newspaper reports that researchers have identified dramatic price movements on the Australian Stock Exchange in the last 15 minutes of trading each month, quarter and end of financial year. According to the dominant hypothesis, the reason for these price movements relates to the motivations of “rogue” fund managers. It is likely that the fund managers are boosting their bonuses by driving demand at the end of each bonus-measurement period. As The Age says:
“They are getting money in all the time but instead of buying it every day they save it and buy it at the last minute to drive more demand,” chief executive of the federal government-backed Capital Markets Co-operative Research Centre, Michael Aitken, told The Australian Financial Review.
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| The development of deep frozen food as a commercial product arose out of Clarence Birdseye’s observations of What-works for the indigenous people of the Arctic:
Born in Brooklyn in 1886, (Clarence) Birdseye was a biology major at Amherst College when he quit school to work as a naturalist for the US government. He was posted to the Arctic, where he observed first-hand the ways of the native Americans who lived there. Birdseye saw that the combination of ice, wind and temperature almost instantly froze just-caught fish straight through. More importantly, he found that when the fish were cooked and eaten, they were scarcely different in taste and texture than they would have been if fresh. web.mit.edu
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| Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin when he noticed a Surprising outcome – that mold growing on a discarded petri dish had killed the staphylococci bacteria that was present on the dish. At the time Flemming was actively researching the properties of staphylococci bacteria and had put aside a stack of used petri dishes for cleaning when he returned from his August holiday. After his holiday, Flemming noticed that mold was growing on one of the petri dishes and that the bacteria near the mold had been killed. This led him to infer, and subsequently prove, that the mold contained a chemical capable of killing bacteria that was also safe for human use. If Flemming had not been open to surprises, it is unlikely that he would have observed the penicillin containing mold and understood its significance. | |
| Joshua Cooper Rao in his book, The Age of the Unthinkable, describes how a fine-tuned Weak-signal lens is one the success factors for the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Michael Moritz:
Watching Michael Moritz think through an investment was like watching one of those Evelyn Wood trained speed-readers who could take in an entire page at a time instead of slogging through a book word by word. He devoured more information, sucked up more data about an entrepreneur in an hour than a psychologist might do in a month of private sessions. Moritz’s genius was that he wasn’t cutting companies up as he looked at them but placing them in context. The forces shaping a technology market, consumer demands, changes in software design, shifts in micro-chip pricing, the up-and-down emotions of the founder – he was watching all of these for signs of change (emphasis mine). His point was that you might have a dream of what you wanted to do – index the Web, help people talk as they traveled – but unless you constantly refined that dream, constantly updated it, your chances for success were limited.
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