I just saw a great post on Seth’s blog about challenging convention. I really admire how he generates cool insights and puts them simply so they are easy to remember. As I was reading his tips for challenging convention, it occurred to me that there’s a deeper issue below such challenges. He refers to the convention as “it” and I began to wonder about the possibilities of “it”.
One of my favorite movie lines is “there could be anything in there!” (from: A Christmas Story), and this statement is so true here. It really matters in his third point about leverage. If “it” is a simple change to a control knob, your leverage challenge is relatively straightforward and concrete. If “it” is a new paradigm of consumption, your leverage challenge requires a whole different level of challenging. Some types of leverage are more powerful than others, but most importantly you should use the right one for the task at hand.
For example: are you trying to challenge the convention of a controlling music volume (Seth’s example)? By shifting the convention from a physical knob to a digital slider you can focus on the physical parameters of the human/machine interaction. But if a person is not already of the mindset to interact with music via a computer, your users will experience a disconnect. The more effective leverage point would be to focus on the mindset of listening to music via a computer first, then shifting your focus to the digital interaction.
I believe this is what Apple did with the first iPod. The early generation machines still had familiar physcial controls. Now the iPhone has a completely digital touch screen. If they had not first gotten people to listen to music via the iTunes system, I would think the adoption of the touch screen may have struggled.
For more ideas about leverage points, Dana Meadows provides a great spectrum in her article: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Check out the summary on Wikipedia.
Ever notice how just knowing something is real can change your behavior? Like when you look in a mirror and notice a piece of food from lunch stuck in your teeth? Or you’re cruisin’ down the highway only to glance at the speedometer and notice you are going 20 MPH over the speed limit? Most people react suddenly in these cases and make adjustments.
So we asked dozens of people here to draw their version of IDEO. The synthesized result is a formal structure with consistent parts and rules that show a right way and a wrong way to organize, but a fundamentally different premise of control. This approach works from the individual out, much like an atom has a nucleus with electrons orbiting around it, and atoms bond together to create molecules, people at IDEO exist at the center of their org-chart with several orbits full of people surrounding them.
